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Today we are going to be talking about how to generate sure-fire salable ideas for magazine articles. I know that we have talked a lot about in our other webinars, about different ways to break down your pitches or you trips in to pitches. Or different ways to write the perfect pitch and all of those things.

What I found, especially when I was first starting out, is that starting out my pitch thought process with what magazines are looking for, rather than what I have already done, I had a much-much higher success rate. If you read the blog post or the email newsletter about this call, you already heard a story that I am going to tell again during the call, and about why I think that is really great.

But, today what we are going to do is we are going to look, like I said, at why pitching magazines that idea can help us achieve better results. We are going to look at that in the context of what really is the purpose of a pitch in reality because its not really what you think. Also, what the different sections of what your pith should be and how if you start thinking of your article idea from the magazine itself you’ve already written most of your pitch. Before you even have to think of a specific article idea. Then we are going to quickly just look through the structure of the travel magian database. Because I know that is something some of you asked about. We will then will do some live demos on how to reverse engineer ideas to fit magazine sections. So, thanks so much to you guys that are putting magazines over here. We have so many magazines that I cant always remember which ones we have, but any ones that are in here I will at least look up. And if we don have them, I will add then to the list for the writers to add them to the list as well.

Alright so before we get started with looking at the magazines, I want to just talk quickly about what is the real purpose of a pitch. Because its not to g et an assignment. Here is a quite that I love and I use all of the time and if you have been on our other webinars or live workshop, you have probably seen it. But this is from Jordan Heller, who is the Editor in Chief of Hemispheres and also United Rhapsody magazine and Amtrak’s News and National which has replaced the previous Amtrak Arrive as their magazine. Which is a cool opportunity for a national level long form articles as well. He said “I once had a guy call me up; he gave me a one-word pitch. He said, ‘Macau.’ And that’s not really a pitch, is it? It’s not a narrative. It’s just a place.” You know, this is sort of an extreme example. But I love to remind you guys of it because I think we all get really in love with our articles ideas. As we’ve conceived them but those aren’t always publishable for any magazine and especially not this specific magazine you’re pitching. That is why I really want to focus on sort of restructuring your magazine article idea thought process. So that you are really grounding yourself, you’re training your eyes, you’re training your mind and senses to look for ideas that are publishable. We are going to look at three specific ways to do that later.

The main purpose of the pitch is actually not to get the assignment, its to start a conversation. So what this means is that while your pitch letter is pitching a specific idea, and I emphasize A as in one, as in you should never multiple pitch an editor that you have never worked with. That is a pet-peeve of a lot of editors, so it just seems a bit choice oriented one vs multiple. But its just something that across the board magazine editors don’t like to have multiple pitches from people they have already worked with. Because they want to see that you have given them what you think is your best idea for them. Which circles back to what I was going to say right now about the purpose of the pitches is to start a conversation about your ability to write for their magazine. So, sometimes the first article you pitch them- they accept. But the funny thing about that is that can often end up with you writing just one article for the magazine. Because you don’t feel confident that you completely understand the magazine or that you have a great report with the editor or all of these things because you didn’t have to work for it. You didn’t have to do some digging in conversation over email with the editor about what they are looking for and so you don’t have as much of a stick to them. So often what I like is I tell people that the purpose of your pitch is to try and get a ‘no’. Because when an editor says no, if they say no, as in if they respond as opposed to not responding at all. They often tell you why and if they don’t tell you why you can write them back and ask and more then often they will tell you. When they tell you they’re going to give you information that is going to help with your pitch. Ok?

The way that we start this very important conversation about what editors are actually looking for is to show the editor that we have good ideas in the first place. And what we mean by good ideas in this context is ideas that are actually publishable articles, as opposed to ‘Macau’, as opposed to ‘biking in the Rockies’. These are topics not article ideas, ok?

The second thing is to show the editor that you are professional. That is accomplished by following specific pitching formats, as well as by showing that you understand what a good idea is, ok? And the most, most, most important thing is to show the editor that you understand his or her publication. That’s where pitching idea first really comes into play. Because, our idea is inherently grounded in the magazine. So from the get-go our pitch is based from the idea that we know the magazine because we had to check out the magazine in order to write the pitch. You always want to pitch to get a response whether that is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and we do that by showing the editor that we are professionals. That we have good ideas and that we understand the publication. Because then they want to invest the time in helping you get it right, ok?

Now, lets just look super, super quickly and I’ve got a whole webinar on this if you haven’t seen it. Go check out our webinar on “How to craft the perfect pitch.” But, all pitches, all good pitches are composed of three things.

They are composed of an attention grabbing lead/lede. They are composed of a body that explains to the editor just as much as they need to know to ask you for more information. What you’re going to write in the smallest number of words possible (fewest number of words). So if it’s, you know, a one word sentence that is perfect. If it’s a topic, sort of your thesis and then a couple of experiences that you are going to include in the article-that’s great. If you’re going to do a round-up you’re going to say what the round-up is about, why it’s important and couple of places you are going to mention the round up, then the fact that you have visited there, ok? then the last part is the “I’m so great” paragraph which is why you are the one that should be writing this article for this magazine.

When we are writing the lead, this is something that I think a lot of people spend way too much, and I mean I know a lot of people spend way too much time on this. Because they think that they need to be artistic. But the thing is that when you pitch magazine first rather than an idea first, you’re lead can actually write itself from the previous copy in the magazine. So, if you are pitching a specific section of a specific magazine or even a feature, you can just look at the past editions of that same section you’re pitching and how the leads were formatted. Then you know what to wrote! So, if this magazine favors leads, this lead is the first paragraph or couple paragraphs or sentence depending on the length of the article. If this magazine favors leads for their features lets start in medias res, which means in the middle of a scene. That means that you’re going to powerful scene from your travel experience and start your pitch with a lead that is in medias res. If this magazine favors leads for its, like one thousand word profiled apartments, then start with a startling fact about the person or business being profiled and that is how you will start your pitch. So, when you’re pitching idea first and not only is it easier to get ideas but it is also much easier to write your leads, ok?

Now, the middle paragraph like I said should not be everything but the kitchen sink. It should be only the super gist that the editor needs to know in order to assign you the article. But this is also a prime opportunity for us to show the editor that we understand the magazine. So, what this means is if you’re pitching something that has a very specific format, it’s not up in the database but i’m probably going to pull it up and show you a little bit later. I have one of our new writers is working on a new entry for En Route, which is Canada’s magazine. Which I am super excited to share with you. They have a section called ‘High and Low’ in the beginning of their magazine and this takes one destination and looks at how you can do it on a splurge budget or bottom base budget. That is a very specific rubric and they have different activities that they include; they include a hotel. they include dining, they include activities. In the middle of your pitch, if you were to  be pitching that, you would say “And I will include…” and then you will list the things that you know that they include every single time. Because that not only shows that you  know what you’re going to write if you get the assignment but also that you have done homework about how the magazine formats a section.

Now the last part of the pitch s the about you, that “i’m so great” paragraph. This is the kind that, again, people can spend a lot of time dwelling on what is or actually isn’t important. The thing is that this is another thing that the magazine can tell you how to do it. Not every magazine can get away with this all of the time but a lot of magazines have, in the front; in the mast head a section where they feature a couple of the contributors and they have little bios about them. So, look at what the magazine has highlighted in the bios of the contributors that they featured. Those are the kind of biographical details that the magazine deems important. The editors like to know about people. So that tells you the kind of things you should include in your bio to show the editor that you’re the right person to write for their magazine.

Alright, the last thing that makes a great pitch; even though its kind of the first thing, in terms of the editors interaction with your pitch is a great headline. And the great headline should go in the subject line of your email. Again, one of the best ways to make a headline a headline that’s going to make the editor not only open your email, but think that you get their magazine is to write a headline like the magazine has as its headlines. So, you check out for the section that you’re writing. You know, perhaps it’s Delta has a section called “One City 5 Ways,” so perhaps you say “PITCH: One City Five Ways Soul.” That would be the eventual headline of your article, but you know that one is pretty simple because it’s just the name of a section. But there might be ones where, you know, some magazines like to have plays on words; so you make sure that the subject line of your email is a play on words. These are all things that you figure out if you start your pitch with the magazine.

Alright so we are going to dive into the database in a second. Please, please, please, chime in on the questions if you don’t see the database in my next window pop-up, when I swap over. Before we do that I just want to say we are going to look at three different ways to pitch idea first. I want to emphasize that you can use these techniques whether you, and I didn’t put on here ‘after a trip’, but you can use these techniques in advance of your trips to get assignments, which is really what they are great about. You can use it whether you already have an itinerary or whether you, like I already do this because I am partially nomadic and a lot of other nomads can do this as well. You know you’re thinking about going somewhere for a month and you’re sort of the in ‘information gathering’ phase. About what there is to do even in that section. You can use that sort of pitching to figure out ‘do I want to go to this part of the country? Well let me see what’s there and let me see if I can get an assignment. And if I get an assignment then I will go there.” You can also use it if you’re going to be on a press trip and you already have an itinerary. I just applied for one of the press trips for one of the upcoming TBEX conferences and they have this Darude, which is a type of- it’s a subset of a cuisine in Israel that I have had before in a restaurant here in New York. But I haven’t had it in Israel and they have a special cooking and foraging experience. Knowing that that is on the itinerary of this trip, I could pitch editors around that or pitch around another tour I know I am going to be taking or something like that.

The three ways that we are going to look at how to use this sort of reverse magazine-then-idea rather than idea-then-magazine technique is something that I like to call “The airport approach” and then we are going to look at ” The I want to pitch you” method; so this is where we are going to look at the magazines that you guys have said that you want to pitch. And then “loaded gun prep technique.”

The airport approach is the following: often people are going to a destination or have gone to a destination and they say they don’t know what magazines will take that and you know maybe they are thinking about hyper-regional magazines. Like, there are press trips for The New York Times travel show coming up and they’re all very regional destinations in sort of central and upstate New York. Even my first thought when I was writing in to the PR folks about where I was going to place the stories, I was thinking ‘Well New York Magazine, Hudson Valley Magazine?” I was immediately thinking about the regional magazines. But what we often forget is that even the very sort of out-of-the-way seeming places have these tiny, tiny airports that are often served by major airlines. We can go on the websites of the airlines and figure out which airlines fly to this tiny, tiny destination that we want to feature. We can then go pitch the airline magazines of that airline. Because, what happens with editors who have this mandate like airlines only cover a certain subset of destinations in the world. You also have that regional editors like the editor of 5280 which is Denver’s magazine; they do a lot of travel coverage. They have written about a lot of places to death! United has written about New York for every single issue for like seven years or something like this! They would be so excited to have some thing that fits in their mandate of the places that they are able to cover because the airline flies there or fits into the geographical area in which 5280 The Denver magazine is distributed to. But it is new, because they are not leaving their desks that often, especially if its an international magazine. They aren’t regularly flying every single airport served by their magazine. So by giving them these very out of the way things you’re actually doing them a favor.

Now “The I Want to Pitch You Method”: The thing about this is we often say (I think I am even guilty of this when I first started…I was definitely guilty of this when I first started) and I see this is a lot of your pitches. That you say ‘I want to pitch such-and-such magazine’ and then you just take an idea out of your idea file and give it to them without matching to a section. This is not the best way to break into your dream publications, the best way to break into your dream publications is to say ‘ok, my dream publication that I’m dying to write for has this very specific section and I’m just going to pitch that section to death until the editor knows who I am and either gives me an assignment for this section or gives another assignment.’ Literally that is the best way I have ever seen to break into magazines that you’re just dying to get into, is to just keep pitching highly focused ideas to get the editors attention and eventually they will say yes to one of them. Or they will get back to you and explain why they are saying no and then that will help you get a yes in the end.

Now, the other one that I personally love, I call “The Loaded Gun Prep Technique”: we talked about this about the live Pitchapalooza. I see that we’ve got some people on here that are going to be in the January correspondence course Pitchapalooza as well. So, what the loaded gun means is that you sort of carry around, in your pocket on your phone or in your head, a list of certain magazine sections that are very specific. So, I talked about in the live post and the newsletter for this webinar about how I pitched this tea magazine which has a very specific section where they profile four or five tea stores or places where you can have High Tea in a given city or area.

You know once I got that first article I sort of carried this around and when I got to a city where I noticed they had a certain concentration of tea places. I would say ‘ok there’s three are there five? Because, maybe I can put this together and pitch this to the editor.’ So with the loaded gun technique is, it means that you sort of collect a couple very specific sections and you have them with you when you travel. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing it in advance but it can also help when you are making your own itinerary for a trip and you are looking around at what you might want to do. If you have in your head five, ten, fifteen, twenty sections of magazines that are very specific knowing that if you find something that fits them that you can pitch to this magazine and that can also help your trip planning a lot. I know several of you, I am trying to see who is on the call today, well not all of you but a decent portion of you have your own blogs. So you’re probably accustom for looking for things that fit into certain sections on your blog when you are planning trips. This would, for people like that, be a very easy thing to start working into your travel planning.

Alright guys, we are going to try and switch screens here, so bear with me. In the meantime, while I am doing that it says that we should include the nut graph in the pitch. So, for those of your who did’t know this is a question about the structure of the pitch and we do have a while other webinar just about how to write the perfect pitch. What the nut graph is- its essentially like the distilled version of the who-what-where-when-why. Its the called the nut because its kind of the kernel of your story. The nut graph is, the way that I’ve described it, its that middle paragraph. So we do need what is essentially the nut graph in travel articles its a little different. You don’t typically do it so quite as who-what-where-when-why oriented, but like I said you do need to say what you are going to do if its a round-up you need to mention one or two places.

Now you should now all be seeing the database. Before I go in to talking of the three styles that we were talking about before. I am just going to do a quick tour of the database, because I know some of you have asked for this and several of the folks do have database access and would probably love to see more tips about how to use it. There’s a couple of things we are going to implement before we jump for the new pricing in January second that aren’t quite in here yet. But I will just tell you about them now. There are a couple of different ways you can search for articles in the database. So when you first log in this is the screen that you see. We have got two sort of suggested things here. You can search magazines by topic here like I was saying everybody loves airline magazines. You can juts click here and then you’re going to see an opportunity to scroll down and see all of the different airline magazines. Because, I am logged in as my admin access you’re probably going to see a little bit more than you usually would see just on your own.

The other thing you can do is you can search magazines by geographic area. This isn’t necessarily where the magazine is based, this is the kind of things that are covered in the magazine. You might find a magazine that’s international because it’s Be Inspired which is the Brussel’s airway magazine but they do a lot of European coverage, so we will file that under Europe. If you scroll down you will see all the entries starting with the most recent entries and then if you get all the way to the bottom of the page you will see some more options. You can put a specific word in, you could type “profile” and then see all of the magazines that have types of profiles and thats the kind of thing you would do if you were pitching an idea first, right? But that’s not what we are doing today, but this is something that you can do, you can type profile, you can type drinks, and the other thing is that if you are trying to search for things like profile and drinks that are  more general categories you can also click on the tags.

Like, here is a photography magazine we’ve tagged it as it takes photo essays. If you are looking for something topical, here’s something, a magazine that has a section on deer. So we’ve marked deer. Then the other thing is: every different category that we use is also accessible here on the bottom as we’ve got sort of a short version over here on the side. What we’re going to add soon is that every article will go into one so we can start looking. I am going to look at Delta Sky and so every article in the magazine break down talks about the different types of magazines that are available for pitches. Something that I am going to be adding that will be online next week is that all of the different types of articles, and for those of you that were with us last week remember I talked about is the food profiles and business profiles and features and shorts and news briefs and different things like that, those are soon going to be tags. So you can search specifically by “Ok, I have a news brief to pitch and let me see who all is looking for new briefs.” So when you do click into a magazine this is what you see, you’re going to land on the description tab.

For every magazine to start we include the really sort of overview information. Which can help you weed something out immediately. For instance, if this magazine was only yearly but if you have a sort of timely pitch, you don’t want to pitch them because its not going to make sense. But since this one is monthly that means they need a lot of content and that’s great for us. We also have a little bit here about the editorial positioning and this is always great to look at. Because I know sometimes people get really attached with a certain idea and they want to pitch it to a magazine that they have just have been dying to pitch. But its a very, very, adventurous independent traveler sort of concept for a magazine that’s really more about group tours orientated travel experiences. It’s always good to check this to see and we use the magazines own words here because of this to see what the magazine thinks is their brand.

Because if you pitch something that’s not in that, its going to be hard for the editor to say yes to you. Then if its possible to read magazine issues, the full issue online, lets see here. This is one that because its an airline magazine you can find the full issues online, for a lot the consumer magazines like Backpack or a Travel Leisure this is much harder. So we will say that if there is a place where you can see partial issues online and then where you can get full issues online paid. So we always have something here, unless there is a very rare couple number of Indie magazines  that there’s just absolutely no way to get them online, what so ever, because that is their business model.

The other thing that is really important to check when you pitch is to make sure that you’re not off base of these demographics. So, Delta they say that their audience is made up of affluent vacationers and business professionals who are socially active, quality conscious, and ambitious. I have a lot of friends that are like Delta fanatics and I have to say that is really pretty true and they are not the same who fly on American and they are not the same people who fly on United. So, this split between male and female is pretty even but you will see with some of the other magazines that its really not and that can also be really great to know. Not that you’re going to go and pitch a girlfriend get away to Garden and Gun, but you might have something that being whether its shopping oriented or maybe it’s just a cooking experience or something that might be a little less attractive to a magazine editor whose readers are primarily male. This is good just to check and also likewise with the median age and income because you might be pitching something that’s too expensive for the average readers of that publication. I’m going to skip the how to pitch for one second because we are going to come back there.

The contact information here we have the email format for every magazine, I think there’s a very tiny number where we don’t have an email formats for that we are working on. We then have the editors, but we don’t list every single editor, we only list the editors that would actually be useful to pitch an article to.

Alright, now the sort of ‘meat and potatoes’ of the database is this how to pitch section and we include two things here. We include the editorial structure which really kind of tells you the order so that you know that everything in the front of a book is going to be shorter. From the beginning its shortest to longest, right? So I think “one city five ways” is actually several pages and the “wheels up” these are very, very short just a couple hundred words. So, its important to know this order because they always sort of rise in word length over time.

Then we have in the “What to pitch section”, we say approximately how many contributors there are per issue. This is really important for you to know because you need to know how much competition you have in a certain way. Because, you know, I think we all struggle with how much time is spent on our pitches and I am the hugest, hugest aficionado on not spending so much time on your pitches. But, if you’re trying to pitch a magazine that, Delta unfortunately has a lot of contributors, but what if you’re trying to pitch something that only has sections open to freelancers and it’s a huge newsstand magazine.

You’re going to have to put together a very, very, polished, perfect pitch for that magazine as opposed to some thing that is also newsstand magazine but regional and has twenty freelance contributors per issues, right? Because those editors are more desperate for ideas than the ones I mentioned formerly. In the ‘What to pitch section” we break down which sections are available to freelance writers and then which sections are not available to freelance writers. So these ones are written by members of staff, so its not so much applicable to you guys but we have some PR people who use the database and in here we say who the regular contributors for each section that is written by staff are. In case there is a regular contributor who the PR people know how to pitch them, so thats why thats in there guys.

Then we go in to a very, very, specific coverage of how to pitch each section. This is what we are going to focus on for the rest of the call, is looking for magazines that we are going to talk about through this class. So, I talked earlier about One City Five Ways, it showcases one city from the stand point of a sports fan, an adventurist, a foodie, a historian and picks different places to stay, places to eat and activities for morning, afternoon and the evening. So it’s got a lot of stuff. But then if you look it’s very brief so you’re going to have to be very, very, focused in this article. So what this also means is that the word count of the article is informing your pitch so if we send a 700 word pitch for this 700 word article the editor is not going to be very happy. Because they are going to think that you don’t know how to write concisely which is what this jammed packed article absolutely needs. So having the word length spelt out is also a really good metric for yourself to go back and double check that you’re pitch is not out of whack with the type of writing that is necessary for the article at hand. Alright, so I’m going actually just flip the order a little bit and I am going to go first with the magazines that you guys have asked about and then we’re going to go do the airline approach.

While I am going through the magazines that you guys have asked about or has any other magazines that we want to look at let me know. In order to help with the airline approach, now that I have explained it, if you guys have some places that you’ve been that you’re like “hmm what can I pitch? what magazines can I pitch for this very, very, random place” please drop those over in questions while I am going through the magazines, I’ve got some ideas for that. Otherwise I will just use some of my own off the top of my head, but I would love to have some from your guys that we can look at and start to workshop.

I am going to go through the top of the list. Ok, so the first ones, somebody asked for Travel and Leisure, which I know that we just added recently. I’m going to just go through and open these all and cue them all up. We’ve got Travel + Leisure, we’ve got somebody who asked for Departures. Now, Tamera there are actually two different Departures magazines. Are you talking about the American Express one, do you know which one? Do you know that there is two? Let me know in the chat box.

Somebody also asked for International Living, which I know that we have. I hurt my finger so pardon my slow typing you guys. We’ve got the Edible Franchise. Jerry, is there a particular Edible that you’re interested in? So let me know if that would help, otherwise I will just pull up a couple random ones. Sunset, I also know that we have. Are there any more? Kathy, I am pretty sure that we have Yankee. Yeah we’ve talked about that. I will look into this UAE airport. If anybody else has any airports, please chime those in on the side.

I’ve got Sunset, I am going to look for an Edible- Jerry let me know if there is a specific Edible and then Yankee we are going to pull and then we will start doing this.

I think that is a good number for this. So, when you’re pitching magazines, magazines first and then ideas. Like I said, you can either start with a specific magazine that you absolutely want to get into. Or you can either pick the database or you can go to the bookstore and just sort of peruse around through a big pile of magazines and assemble for yourself a loaded gun. So we are going to use the magazines that we’ve got here to do a little bit of both of those approaches and then we are going to circle back to the airport approach. If you’ve got one more magazine and then I am going to stop pulling up magazines. None in particular, Jerry says. Let me just see if we have the Departures and then we will get going. The thing is that you’ll notice that as we go through them there’s, like I said, a large variety of numbers of words of contributors, ok? So, there’s somethings that, looks like its not in here I’ll add it to the list though, because Departures is something that a lot of people are asking questions about and because it only goes to people who have a high level American Express credit card, it’s hard to get so I will work on getting one of those.

You’ll notice that as we go through these that there’s a large difference in the numbers of contributors per magazine and that should definitely inform the quality of your pitch. But also it might inform the quantity of your pitches. So, unless you’re absolutely dying to break into magazines if you see that they don’t really have that many contributors, it might not be worth your time. Because, what I really try to always counsel people to do, and this is a big occurring theme in the Six Figure Travel Writing Road Map, is only go after editors; whether that’s editors content management, editors at a travel company that you’re doing some blog posts for or editors of a travel magazine. To only go after editors that you’re going to do a lot of work with.

This is one of the reasons that I highlighted Jordan Heller earlier. Because, like I said he’s not only the editor of United’s Hemisphere’s Magazine. He’s also the editor of United’s Rhapsody Magazine and the new Amtrak magazine and I think also a couple of other little magazines. He might be editor of Brussels Airways as well. With custom magazines and you also see this a lot of times with trade magazines. Editors typically have several magazines that they are working on, so if you pitch to one magazine you can often end up getting assignments in many other magazines without having to rebuild relationships. So that’s one way of going about maximizing the amount future work you can get from your pitching relationship building. But the other way is just to avoid spending a disproportionate amount of your time pitching magazines that don’t really use a lot of contributors. Ok? alright. So lets sink into Travel and Leisure.

Say we want to want to break into Travel and Leisure, which of course we all do, and I know sort of through some little sources. Although this editor isn’t there anymore, but Amy Farley who used to be at Travel and Leisure and I think now that now is on a  business break or something.  Was always saying how she is kind of desperate for stuff for her front of book; and the thing is that a lot of times, to seasoned freelance writers don’t like to write the front of book articles because you actually end up doing the same amount of work both in terms of research and writing and self editing and also doing edits with the editors for a small piece as you do for a large piece. To long standing freelance writers they are like “well, I would just rather get the assignment for the large piece.” But if you are new to a magazine, what that means, is that there is a lot of opportunities up front and this is one of the reasons that when I am editing the database entries with our writers I really push them to break down all of the different things that you can pitch to the different front of book sections. So what we noticed when we were doing Travel and Leisure is that they have this section Here and Now, which as she says there are about seven five to six hundred word pieces and about three or four of these are written by contributors. These are really like little snippets of different thing and they are kind of all over the place which makes it little hard to pitch but also makes it kind of good in a way because you just kind of never know what they might take. So, they’re really focused on what’s new and whats trending, right? For instance, Hawaii hits the main land. Who has not heard about the Poke Craze, right? I cant tell you every time I turn the corner in New York City there is a new Poke stop, right? So they recently had an article about Hawaii Hits the Mainland about Hawaiian chefs who have moved to the mainland to bring native food, not just the Poke but also things like Spam wasabi and things like that. If you are trying to break into Travel and Leisure this Here and Now section can be a great place for you to fit this sort of little thing that you randomly see on the road or just catch wind of, in fact I completely forget to email myself this last night. But I walked by a place here in New York that is a opportunity to essentially 3-D print yourself. So, they have little, I don’t even know, like mini statues of peoples families. This is clearly for the rich, upper east side, gossip girl set. But you can give them a photo, like a family photo or a painting if you’re that kind of person and they will 3-D print it for you and so that for a super, super luxury magazine could be a great front of book thing about the perfect souvenir  to get while you are in New York City, right?

Sometimes when you’re just walking around and you see something that just seems so new or like you’ve finally seen enough of them that you’re sure its a trend, that can be a great thing to pitch to this front of book section for a magazine like Travel and Leisure. Now otherwise in Travel and Leisure we’ve got Beyond, this is a compilation of stories surrounding a personal experience by the author in a specific destination. I really this example that she used here in “At Home on Hivar” and I am probably butchering that, because I don’t know Croatian. But it’s about the authors perspective on Hivar changed from when he visited as a college student and how it changed and didn’t when he returned years later. These come in two formats: they come 500 words or 1500 words and Travel and Leisure pays as we see down here $2 a word. So, you know, 500 words is pretty great and essays can be hard to place so if you are looking to break in to Travel and Leisure and you have something like this.

You sort of just echo experiences like you were there when you were younger and now you’re back or very, very, well followed for this sort of thing; editors really love them. I don’t know how many people could really say you were there as a college student, I think in Croatia that would work or in Florence, Italy where I used to go to school maybe not so much. Maybe if your parents were in the foreign service or you had a relative that lived on a Caboots in Israel or something like that. Thats probably a great type of thing that you could stick in here. If we were looking for instance, at this magazine and saying ‘ok, how can we pitch it?’ We’ve got these front of book things. We’ve this Beyond essay, this features since we are talking about Travel and Leisure I am just going to say don’t expect to pitch a feature right out the bat and get in with them. All of the big magazines we are about to look at, its probably not the best strategy you want to start somewhere else.

We will look at some magazines that you can pitch features to though. We’ve got Here and Now and Beyond and then there’s this Upgrade section and Worth Flying For, which are quite short but they’re also very easy to fit different thing in. Upgrade we talked about in  the call last week and this is about tips and strategies for traveling or how to travel and they have to be quite general because Travel and Leisure is an international magazine with quite a broad focus. That the kind of thing that if you’re on an airplane and you over hear a couple conversations but the same thing. Maybe its trend of how parents are now actually taking red eye flights because the newborns sleep on red eye flights because the places are quieter or something like that. Then you could say how the new planes are helping your kids sleep at night or something like that.

Worth Flying For is a 200-word, second-person article about must try. This is the kind of thing you can apply in a a lot of different places where you are traveling to. So lets say we are going to TBEX in Israel and we want to pitch Travel and Leisure. What can we do here? Alright, so if you are trying pitch in advance of your trip you can look at Beyond. Do you have a personal connection to the destination? Maybe if you do, maybe if you went on one of the programs to Israel when you were young and now you are going back as a travel writer with a full different view of the destination and also in a very different time for Israel. Especially with the recent events going on right now that could be a great story, especially because of the time peg of what’s going right now with the U.N.

We can also look at Worth Flying For, we can do a little research in advance  about what is the best place in Jerusalem to have humus, right? You can talk about shakshuka, its a very popular Israeli dish. Its a tomato, egg, sort of wood fired grilled dish and why its worth flying for.

Or for Here and Now we can look at what is the 3-D printed souvenir of Jerusalem? Or of Twelve or Hisa? This year is major anniversary year or Israel. So perhaps you could find out what are the festivals they are doing around that or some other events that they are doing that would fit in the Here and Now section. But keep in mind that anytime you are pitching something that’s super timely like a big anniversary, you have to be well ahead of the curve. So since we are in December right now, pick something that’s sort of more generally about Israel’s big anniversary next year when independence is probably a little late. But if you could find, a friend of mine used to be in the Army, she was a tour guide and the place she guided her tours was essentially like the seat of the big independence movement and it was they relocated a lot of settlers and it became a big caboots scenes and so and so forth. That kind of thing you could kind of highlight that historic place. One specific place and the events that they are doing still gets something in for the 2017 anniversary if you’re pitching right now. Alright so that’s Travel and Leisure.

Let’s pop over to International Living. Say you want to get published in International Living. Now, this is a magazine that uses quite a few contributors every month. If I’m not mistaken, 20 contributors every issues. Doesn’t surprise me. I’ve written for them and I have a lot friends who have written for them. So, they have a lot of very specific types of articles that they look for. So they’ve got this International Dates which is around an event that takes place during that month. So, this is the kind of thing where I was talking about where if you were going to TBEX in Israel then you can look at some of the anniversaries coming up and you can pitch something for that. That would be perfect! Also, I’ve mentioned on some other calls how I went to this, I don’t even know the right word to describe it, but this religious festival in Japan that happens every 7 years. Where they ride a tree down a very, very steep hill and you know, I could hold on to that and in seven years from now and on the right month I could pitch that to the International Dates section in International Living. But this The Savvy Travelers Corner is a 300-500 word article on the inside scoop of what to do at a particular location. This is the kind of thing that is perfect for the loaded gun approach, right? So you could now, the International Living, is always looking for the inside scoop of full days worth of activities. So what that means is that you could be doing your freelance assignment in a cafe in London and ask the barista or over hear some people and ask them some questions about what are the best things to do in Central London and jot those down. Go around and get some prices on different tours and take some different pictures of different destinations and there is about 30 minutes of walking around and back ground listening while working on your work- you’ve got a Savvy Traveler’s Corner.

Offshore & Finance these might be appropriate for some of you guys but these are much more oriented towards people who are investing overseas and things like that. So we will skip over that one.

Lifestyle is a great one to look out for. Lifestyles is a 1,000 word section about an individual or couple that is living their retirement lifestyle abroad. This is a great type of loaded gun section. If you just know that there is a magazine that takes this and I’ve seen a couple other different ones like just around while working on in the database lately. Then when you’re sitting around like I said, in a cafe doing your freelance writing work or in the hotel lobby,  this is why you should totally write outside if your hotel room while you are traveling because you get great ideas. I love to write in the hotel lobby in the evening. If you’re sitting in the hotel lobby and you hear this couple talking to their friends who are staying at the hotel but they are there to visit this couple that’s been living in this destination for a long time because they retired there when they were 45 and the husband got out of the military service. That’s when you could just say “hey, excuse me, it sounds like you’ve got a really good story. Do you mind if I interview you for this magazine article?” Get their contact information, pitch the editor. say you’ve already gotten the go-ahead to interview the person and there you go you’ve got an article. So, like I said this is a really really great loaded gun sort of section here.

Real Estate, oh my God, real estate is another really good kind of loaded gun topic area within travel, that I wished more people would take advantage of. I think its now called the International New York Times, has a really great real estate section and can be a really good way to get a New York Times clip. They are always looking for sort of iconic but not necessarily celebrity owned type thing. But, like a castle in Tuscany or a big old farm house in Provence or something like these really, really beautiful houses that are on sale. So, I’m traveling around I am always looking in the windows of the real estate offices everywhere and see if there’s some crazy interesting thing up there. That maybe I can reach out to the person and do an article on that. So here you can see that International Living has one and this is more narrative than what I was saying about a particular property focus. But what that means that if you just so happen to be, like I said, walking around and looking in the shop windows and notice that the prices somewhere are super out of whack. I was in Monticello which is a really super adorable hill town in Italy that’s very, very well known for its wine. The views are beautiful, the place is awash with tourist and we looked at the property prices and they were so low we couldn’t believe it. So, that might be the secret way to get a hill town apartment in Tuscany, there ya go! There’s a story for the Real Estate section of the International Living. So, here’s one real estate section but there’s several other ones that are really great loaded gun article types to hold on to.

Solutions: this is similar to what we were just talking about in Travel and Leisure. But this one is more around the issues that International Living covers which is retiring abroad or generally moving abroad. So this one this one is facing retirees abroad. This would, again, be that type of thing that in the cafe or the bar or the hotel lobby and you hear people be like “oh my God, like have you done your Visa run yet this month?” or something like that. Then you know its a great concept for this solutions here. We are getting a little close to the end of our time so I’m not going to go through all of it but I’m just going to sort of slowly go through here.

Again, they have another one on investments and profits. They have collectables and this is another great one I wanted to high-light. It’s on antiques and collectables from a specific region. Like I noticed that when you are in Japan, you can get an Obi which is the very fanciful tie that the Japanese women put on their Kimonos and its actually really, really long. You can get used Obi’s quite inexpensively as a tourist because Japanese would never buy one. That’s a really great collectable item that you can get. That’s the kind of thing that you might just want to walk around and see a lot of these things and go ‘huh! I didn’t know you could get that thing here’  and then you know that’s the kind of thing you could pitch to this section.

Alright, so we are going to pop on over to Sunset. So, Sunset, for those of you who aren’t familiar is a magazine that focuses on the American West and they actually have several different issues depending on the specific geographical area. So, one of the things that that means is that a couple of their front of book sections, particularly the “A Perfect Day in…” they do a different one each issue for their five sections. So the editors actually need 5 different “A Perfect Days in..” every month. So that’s another really good one to keep in mind. Because, what that means is that no matter what you are in the West you might actually be able to pitch them multiple things for this section every month. So if you live out there or travel out there often, especially if you are based there and do a lot of little random day trips this is a really great loaded gun section to keep in mind. But, if you look you will see that’s its a very, very short, right? It’s 400 words. And, so like what I said, we want to make sure that the length of this section dictates our pitch. We don’t want our pitch to be longer than the length of the section.

Where as Wanderlust is much longer, it’s 2,500 first person. So, this is the kind of thing where if you are in the Western states you just had a really crazy experience that might make a good Wanderlust article.

They’ve also got another great Food and Drink one here. Food and Drink things are some of the best loaded gun articles. I have seen a lot of people asking me lately about drink like cocktail or specific craft distillery oriented things and they are several different, we featured them in our last call, but there are several different magazines like Rogue Report another high end travel magazines like that. That have specific sections about that. So you know, I was just looking up restaurants in the Hudson Valley where our writing retreat center and I was on Hudson valley magazine’s “Best of..” there were a lot of these regional magazines, too. And they have the best Bourbon and I had no idea that the Hudson Valley was even known for Bourbon enough to have the best Bourbon. So, now that’s something I knew to look into where I can place that. That means that if I had a good loaded gun of drinks articles I would know right away “oh. ok! Well this is where they feature, you know, the best craft distilleries in this certain area.” Or this is where they feature a drink you wouldn’t expect to be distilled in this certain area.

Alright, so another thing is that I know that Sunset does work with new writers for their feature articles but the thing to keep in mind is that whenever you have a magazine that is a bit lifestyle and some of the airline magazines are more like lifestyle and some are more travel oriented. Sunset is one of these lifestyle travel hybrid magazines. You’ll see we’ve got some other ones like that in the database. There’s Savannah Garden and Gun. In New York we have New York Magazine and few other ones like that and Hudson Valley that I was talking about is another good example. Minnesota Monthly, 528, ones like that are also great examples. Anytime you’ve got something like that sometimes the features there need to be something that you found on your travels but you expand in a way thats not quite travel orientated.

Sunset has a lot of food coverage. They also have some garden coverage. So for Sunset something that could be a great feature is not just a tour of a particularly fascinating historic garden but you know of a historic garden that is attached to a historic home and you’ve interviewed the people who lived there in the past and now its gone to a non-profit and the people who caretake it you’ve all sort of talked about the evolution of the garden in a more narrative sense from being a family property to a place of learning. And its got both the travel service and that narrative and profile elements in there. So like I said, as you will see their features have won quite the gimmick.

Let’s pop over to Edible magazine that Jerry asked for. But, I couldn’t find the one that you asked about. Because we don’t have a copy of it. But I am just going to show the Manhattan one for now. So, the Edible franchise if you guys aren’t familiar, I think there are like 87 of them now. There’s quite a few and they are really, really good loaded gun articles. Like I was talking about how food and drink are really great things to keep in your back pocket. I really like the Edible magazines for that. In fact, I try and pick them up everywhere I go because of this. Because, there’s ones with really specific sub sections. I think in New York City those ones are from Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan and then there’s one for the Hudson Valley and then there’s one for Central New York, there’s one for Long Island and there might even be a separate one for the Hampton’s. That’s all within a two hour driving range. I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of other states as well. So, they’re great opportunities to build ongoing relationships and they don’t tend to be, even though they are a franchise, they don’t tend to be so related that one editor will edit multiple ones. But sometimes thats the case and you can also use that as an in with another publication. So, in the Edible Manhattan that I’ve go here you’ll  that a lot of things that they will use freelancers for are shorter and one of the things that I’ve noticed in a lot of the different Edible publications is this notable edibles and that’s featuring a distinguished company. One of the great sort of loaded gun pocket articles that you can do for Edibles is to just keep your eye out while you are out on the road for a new company or a very interesting type of company or storied companies that have a very close tie to local food. Whether thats reviving a trend, for instance like there’s a BBQ food truck company in Kansas City that was actually the first food tour company to do BBQ tours in Kansas City even though they were quite late to the food tour market. Or you know, there’s a distillery in Minnesota that tried to get everything within 100 kilometers. but they make Gin which uses tropical, botanicals. And so they’ve done some really interesting out of the box things using citrus shoots or like the very first green leaves of the cypress tree to create that citrus flavor. Very random. So whenever you hear about an interesting food thing that might be a good fit for this section in the Notables. So this is a really great to add to your loaded guns.

I am going to pop over to Yankee quickly for Kathy. Alright, so for Yankee this, if you’re not familiar it, is an independent magazine but its a newsstand magazine. It’s quite well known, its been around for decades. It covers the North Eastern part of the US. So they use quite a few contributors and they use several contributors for the front of book. This is a lot of different sections that are great rubrics and so there they have one that’s only in New England which is a regular column by somebody and the best 5 and local treasure. These are very specific rubrics.

The best 5 is a round up of 5 of the best things to do in New England around a certain theme. So, you know, pumpkin festivals, farm ends. These are the types of things that you might travel and see one thing and I have talked a lot about how editors love baskets of kittens. Which is an assembly of, you know, of three to five different things that are all pretty great on their own. But when you put them together and you add another geographic distribution on top of that, its a no brainer for editors. So this Best 5 are a really great back pocket thing. If you go somewhere that has Pear picking instead of apple picking and you’re like “huh, I wonder if anybody else has it” and you have a couple more that might be a really good best 5.

For travel, so you will see that their travel section is entirely around the first person feature. So this great to know, because, often I think people travel in a specific geographic area and they’re like “oh what can I do with this?” and we’re going to look at the airport technique in a second. This is a great thing to keep in mind.

I know that Yankee magazine is a very North East so if I have to go to a family reunion or my husband has a conference and I’m up there or something like that and I find an experience that can be a great feature article. That’s a good for Yankee Magazine.

We’re going to skip over, for a second, and do airports and if anybody else has an airport let me know. Because, I think the one that Joe gave me might be a little hard. But I am going to look it up. So interestingly, I think that the small airports tend to be a little easier to find the airline. A lot of times a larger airport have a lot of different information going on and they just don’t sort of distinctly link to all of the airlines that fly there. There’s a small airport by me. Stewarts Airport that family just flew into for Thanksgiving and I was shocked that they were able to get a flight from Charlotte directly in there and the area is well, Charlotte is an airline hub. So I guess I shouldn’t be too to surprised. You can go check out Qatar Airways magazine which should be available like the other inflights are online and then look through its specific sections. This is Stewart Airport that I was talking about. Stewart Airport is served by Delta connection and so what that means is Stewart can do Delta or American or Jet Blue all of which have great airline magazines. So that if you were to go back to the Delta magazine that I had before knowing now that you can fly the Delta direct flights to Stewart we can take One City Five Ways. So this seems like it only takes really big cities but what can we do in here that has a smaller city? Lets say I was writing something up in the Catskills where the house was. So its out of the city so that cuts out trending. Lets see what else can we do? We can do 5 Minutes With? not so much. Maybe break away? This is the final subsection written by a contributor. 500 words to getting out of the city and in to nature. Perfect, right? So, since we know that they are already looking for things that are outside of the city and we know that they also fly into Stewart which is the airport up in the Hudson Valley. We can talk about Sailing on the Hudson, we can talk about there’s a bridge, there’s a state park around a bridge that allows you to walk across the Hudson.

These are the kind of things that you can worm in often in the front of book section because those are the places where editors are more likely to sort of take, not really a chance but take something thats a little more specific to pitch geographically. They know that they are safe because they are not going to alienate readers by having 4 or 5 pages about a very tiny, tiny island that is hard to get to for instance.

I’m so delighted to have had the opportunity to hang out with you guys today. Literally, it was like crummy when I started talking to you and now theres a beautiful, beautiful golden sunset. So, you’ve all made my day and thank you so much for coming out!

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This week, we’re going to be talking about how to become part of an editor’s stable. And if you read the email newsletter or the blog post about this week’s call, the thing about being part of an editor’s stable, and I’m going to talk more specifically about what that means, but it’s really the key to having recurring income writing for magazines as a freelance writer.

When I say it’s the key, what I mean is this is the answer to the problems that so many of you have with feeling like you write pitches and you don’t hear back. Or like you write for a magazine once for this much money, and it takes you so long to get the pitch together and the article together, that the rate is horrible for you. Being a regular contributor for an editor is really the answer to a lot of those problems.

Specifically what I want to talk to you about today is what the stable is and why you want to be a part of it. Oops, sorry. I didn’t do the second one. And then we’re going to talk about the different things that you can do to make yourself indispensable to your editor. And then we’re going to talk about times that you should not become part of a stable for a certain editor. So, the warning signs that this editor and this magazine is not a place for you.

We’ve also got the Travel Magazine Database. And I’m going to mention this a little bit later because the whole reason we started the Travel Magazine Database is because editor’s biggest — any editor, no matter what they edit, the biggest complaint of every editor is that they get too many pitches from people who aren’t familiar with their magazine or who don’t understand their publication and are pitching something that could never appear there.

We really started the Travel Magazine Database to help people understand what magazines are looking for from writers. So, I don’t have a journalism degree. I think I get a lot of sort of feedback from people when I’m telling them, “Oh, do this, do that,” but they’re like, “Oh, well, Gabi, that’s easy for you. You’ve been doing this forever,” and I haven’t. I don’t have a journalism degree. My degree is in Italian literature.

Literature is very different than journalism and a whole other language. So, you can learn this stuff. You can learn how to write journalistically. You can learn how to work with magazine editors. It’s not rocket science. And the funny thing is they actually don’t teach this stuff. They don’t teach how to freelance and how to build these relationships in journalism school.

If you feel like you don’t understand how to do all of these things, I have a lot of people in our Pitchapalooza class, for instance, who’ve done journalism classes and also don’t understand how to do these things because they’re just not taught primarily, which is why we teach this stuff. So, I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been a magazine editor, and I’ve been a frequent contributor for quite a few different magazines in different parts of the travel industry.

I’m going to talk to you from my own experience today, but I’m also going to sprinkle in a lot of direct quotes, and also anecdotes from other editors all around the country and around the world, honestly, about what they look for in their own words. So, before we get started, what do I mean by stable? 

So, I got a couple different — some people haven’t heard of it. A list of go-to writers. Catherine, great to see you. That’s a great way of describing it. So, a lot of editors use this term. It’s just kind of the industry term, and I’m not really sure how it came up.

It doesn’t sound super attractive, if you think about it. But an editor’s stable is the writers that they have worked with in the past that they know that they can turn to for, somebody else said this, the reliable list of go-to writers. Exactly. For reliable copy, and copy, if you’re not familiar with that word, means text. So, a lot of people these days ask, “Oh, should I provide photos with my pieces?”

This is an ongoing discussion that’s changing as magazine budgets shrink and more photos are available from online services like Getty. A lot of magazines get their images from Getty. So, if you thought about going into stock photography, that’s a really good way to get your photos in magazines as well. But magazine editors really think of their writers as writers first.

And if you are able to provide images, that’s a perk. And we’ll talk about some other things that you can do like that to help with your editors later on. But one of the really important things for distinguishing yourself as part of the stable is that you are a reliable source of copy. So, what does that mean? It means not just that you are able to turn in a clean copy. That’s another word that editors use a lot, which means that it’s not just it’s grammatically correct or it’s free of errors.

It means that they have to do very little work on it. So, the structure of the article is good. The structure of the sentences are good. The level of detail, the amount of reporting. And I know that every so often, I say things like, “Oh, the amount of reporting,” and people are like, “Well, I don’t know how to do that.” But what reporting really is, and what editors really just need in that way is they need facts.

I was re-listening to some recordings of conference sessions that I’ve been to recently in which editors, either in a panel or individually, talked about what they want from writers. And one of the editors was saying, essentially, it wasn’t don’t make things up, but it was basically if you have written something down in the field, check it. Make sure that that is right. And Tim Leffel said very, honestly…

Listen to your guide, as in don’t be on your phone posting pictures to Instagram, but also know that your guide might not be telling the truth. Not because they’re trying to mislead you, but they just, in their training or somewhere, heard a story that’s an anecdote or a fact that they didn’t check. So, part of being in the stable is being reliable, is turning in a copy that is factually accurate, that is easy to read, and that requires few revisions.

Another part of that is editors knowing that you are there when you need them. And we’re going to talk about some different ways that that works in a couple minutes. But first, for a second, because in order to understand how to become part of an editor’s stable, how to work with them regularly, I need you all to pretend that you’re editors to imagine what it is like to be an editor. And I just realized I didn’t put this quote in.

But someone had asked in the Facebook group for a Pitchapalooza Program recently. “It looks like a magazine bases a lot of its issues on themes. Should I write the editor and ask for an editorial calendar?” And I pulled up a quote from the editor from Coastal Living, which is a pretty major U.S. publication. Regional, but one of the newsstand publications you’d find in most parts of the country.

And she said, “Do not ask me to do things for you. I am an E.R. doctor, and I have seven gunshot wounds, and you are asking me about a cold.” Now, this sounds pretty harsh, right? And somebody who has a blogging background, but has not written for print who attended the session at TBEX left and told me, “Oh, my God. Everything she said made me think, ‘I never want to pitch this woman.’” But the issue is that if you want to write for big magazines, this is what editor’s lives are like.

She’s an E.R. doctor with seven gunshot wounds. Don’t ask her about a cold. And I so, so often in various Facebook groups or in emails that I get see writers who have these enormous — I don’t want to say psychological because that sounds like I’m saying you need a psychiatrist, but enormous kind of emotional issues they have created around a piece or around an interaction with an editor. But an editor is really not thinking about it that hard.

They need them from you, they need something from you, they say it. Sometimes the way they say it doesn’t sound very nice, and you read into it, and so on, and so forth. But literally, every month, especially the big magazine editors, but also small magazine editors who today tend to have to edit more than one magazine. These editors have to achieve perfection over an enormous amount of content, over a book-length amount of content and photos.

And there are so many players, so many pieces involved in that process that they have to interact with. Well, at their office, they aren’t just sitting there either reading their email and fielding pitches or editing your piece. They have to make decisions about issues that are months from now. The issue they’re working on now, issues that have already gone to press perhaps, and now have had some issue come up in which there was a factual error, and now, they have to run around and change all the things of the copy.

They might have a photo that just doesn’t work anymore that was supposed to be on the cover, and they’re scrambling to find a cover photo because the issue needs to go out. They have so many fires that they are trying to put out, and you, as the freelance writer, especially as a freelance writer who doesn’t have a full slate of work, have so much time to read into these emails that they write you. And I’m not just saying that you need to not do that.

I’m saying that as you are interacting with editors, you need to put yourself in their shoes and think about how much stuff they have on their plate, and what you can do to make their lives easier. This is the number one, number one, number one thing that I want you to take away from this topic of how to become part of an editor’s stable. Is that the best possible thing that you can do for any editor is to make their life easier. Now, people who are afraid of pitching tend to think that their pitch is an inconvenience to the editor somehow.

They think the editor won’t have time to read it, or what if they just don’t like it, or why would they read my pitch, I’m a nobody. If you have some other things, chime in. I’ll mention them anonymously. But there’s a lot of different ways that writers think that they are bugging editors by pitching them. But the fact of the matter is why do editors bother to read pitches from writers they’ve never heard of, right? Why would they take that time, if they have all this stuff to do?

Why would they ever bother to do that, if it wasn’t important for them? It is important for them because editor’s lifeblood is ideas. They need those ideas from you, from new people, from new places, because they have been covering this same thing forever. They might have something they would love to do a story on, and just they’ve never found a writer who knows the area, or lives in the area, or has access, or whatever it is.

And you are finally the person that they have been waiting for all this time. Or perhaps they just have a hole that came up. One of their regular writers got in an accident and can’t do a piece for them, and they have this hole, and they need to fill it with something. But that something isn’t just anything. That something needs to be geographically balanced with everything else that’s in that issue and in that section.

And that something needs to be something they haven’t run recently, and that they don’t have on the slate to run the next month. And so, even though it needs to be kind of anything, it needs to fill a lot of specific checkboxes. And so, what you’re sending them might be the answer to exactly what they need that day. And so, this is really important to keep in mind with an editor.

Is that the best way to become part of their stable, to become on their good side, to become somebody whose pitches they accept, or even just read in the first place, is to show them that you understand what they need. Okay? And we’re going to talk more about specifically how to do that in a couple minutes. But sometimes people complain that it’s hard to break in to magazines because the editors are only working with people in the stable or people that they already know.

I hear this a lot. And, in fact, I just kind of — I didn’t end up going to this session, but I just died of laughter because during an editor’s panel at a conference in the Pacific Northwest, the editor of Seattle Magazine, in response to a question about how to pitch her, said, “Well, I’ve basically made it impossible to pitch me. I’ve said on our website, ‘Don’t send me pitches.’ I have a bunch of writers that I work with, so I don’t get too many new pitches anymore, thank God.”

And she was teaching that session on how to pitch an editor. So, my point in saying that is that editors can sound like they are negative about pitches, but that’s because they don’t want pitches that suck, quite honestly. They don’t have a lot of time, and they need to spend that time on the fastest route to getting their magazine published. So, a lot of editors choose to primarily or as much as possible work with writers they already know because it feeds what we talked about in the last slide.

It keeps them on all of their other tasks. They’re not triaging new writers. They’re not making sure that the copy is correct or in line with their style. It just saves them time. But does that mean that you can’t get in? No, it doesn’t. And here’s why. Because every regular contributor to a magazine is one of us, is a writer, who has things that they’re interested in, other tasks on their plate, other things going on in their lives, other ambitions.

Maybe they want to write a book, or they want to write a guide book, or they want to move somewhere else. And so, they don’t stay forever. It’s really rare for a writer to have been writing for the same magazine for like 30 years. And especially not to be doing multiple pieces a month for the same magazine for 30 years because people’s interests change. People’s availability changes. All sorts of things change.

In the vast world of magazines out there, and the couple to dozen or 20 plus sections in each of those magazines that are available to freelancers, there are always sections, always magazines where there are turnover, where there are regular contributors who are on the way out, or need to leave, or should be pushed out. And I’m going to tell you a couple stories about those in a little bit. I just had a couple of things over here.

Oh, someone was saying, “Speaking of editors, did you enjoy it when you were?” That’s a great question, Michelle, actually, and I’ll answer that because I think it’s really pertinent to what we’re talking about here. So, when I was an editor, I was an editor of a wine magazine, and my publisher, so my boss had the opinion that — no, he didn’t have a journalism background, and most publishers don’t. Most publishers understand very little about publishing and much more about sales.

This is very common, and this is often why editors will give you crazy directives that contradict what they told you in the first place. So, my publisher was of the opinion that people who didn’t know wine, who didn’t work in wine, didn’t get it, and shouldn’t be writing for us. And so, we didn’t have very many people who were proper writers writing for us. We had a lot of one-industry people.

What that meant was that every single issue, I was effectively writing/rewriting every single piece in the entire magazine in addition to making decisions on layout, and photoshoots, and going to events, tasting wine, and helping the tasting director write up his wine notes so that he didn’t say acidity 35 times in 50 different wine notes. So, this is a good example of the type of things that editors are dealing with that you have no knowledge about.

You think that you are writing the best piece that you can and worry what the editor thinks about it. But the editor doesn’t even think about that. If your piece comes in, and it’s usable, and they can fix it up on their own, then that’s just like a check off their list. And it sounds harsh, and that’s why some people were like, “Oh, my God. I’m never going to pitch that mean, mean Coastal Living editor.” But this is the reality of the situation for editors.

And the sooner you come to terms with that, the much better off you’re going to be both on your own psychologically in these interactions, as well as being successful in these dealings. So, I just pulled this out of the database. This was a piece, a database article, that just went up this week or very recently. So, I remembered when I was editing this, and I edit again now. So, if you have questions about what it’s like now to edit, I can also chime in on that.

But I remember looking at this piece and just being blown away by the number of frequent contributors that this magazine has. And so, I just wanted to show you because this is really common that the front-of-book sections, which we think of as columns, like somebody has a column in a magazine or in a newspaper. Those are things that are really easy to assign to one person every month because they tend to be very specific.

They tend to have a certain structure. They tend to have a certain focus, and the editor knows that they have to be there every month. So, for an editor to have to find a new person every single month to write those sections is God awfully annoying. And so, it’s a really big relief for them to know that that is going to be taken care of.

This is a really extreme example. I think there’s like 22 odd sections in here, but of things being written by frequent contributors. But I’ve worked with a lot of magazines, and in the trade magazines, this is super common where the front-of-book sections are predominantly written by the same people every month, even if it’s not officially a column that’s out in their name.

I’m going to talk later about how having a specialty, which is really the case here, is one of the best ways to break into the stable. But I just — I’m going to minimize my thing so I can see. But I just want to point out to you here how specific these are. So, this is — so, Gourmet Traveller is a big magazine in Australia, and this is their wine publication, which is separate. And I don’t have it in front of me, but I believe it comes out every other month.

In this — in their front-of-book, and again, if you’re not familiar, front-of-book means the section of the magazine before the feature start that tends to be composed of smaller or page-long, or sometimes even two or four page-long pieces that tend to fall into predetermined categories. So, in the front-of-book of this magazine, you’ll see. And this is also something common. It’s a wine magazine, but they’ve got a craft beer section and a spirit section. Okay?

Many times, magazines will be about one thing, but they’ll have sections in the front-of-book or in the back of the book, which is what comes after the feature, which also has many predetermined sections which are often short and shorter than the features. In those two sections, they might have recurrent section that happen every month that are about something that’s not — that’s like gently related to the magazine, right.

In a lot of airline magazines, there’s a front-of-book or back-of-book section that is a science section. There’s a business section. There’s potentially a politics section. Okay? So, these kinds of sections are the things that editors aren’t necessarily getting pitches about, right. So, this wine magazine might not be getting tons of craft beer pitches. They might not be getting like this Asian perspective.

I don’t even know exactly what that means, but it’s probably not something that they’re getting a consistent amount of pitches every month. Right? So, when you identify something like this that is probably hard for an editor to fill, that’s a great spot, it’s a great candidate for you to become a frequent contributor to help though. So, we’ve talked about how working with frequent contributors save tons of time for editors. What it really does for writers as well.

There’s two main advantages as they’re broken down into a couple different sections for you as being part of the stable. And I just want to say I didn’t even mention here the money. Okay? Because these things both flow into money. So, I never use this phrase, but it’s so true time is money, right. But I like to think of it more like everything is trade-off between time and money. So, for instance, I have a non-profit background.

In non-profits, so much stuff is done by volunteers. I have worked with non-profits where everybody is a volunteer, where they have absolutely no paid staff, but they have a budget in the six figures, and they put up like seven or eight theatre productions every year. In non-profit, it’s all about using time instead of money. Okay? And so, when we look at freelance writing careers, and I talk about this a lot when we do our freelance travel writing master classes, you start by figuring out what is your hourly rate.

But when you look at your freelance writing career, the single most important thing you have control over is how you spend your time. And most people who aren’t earning what they would like to be earning are spending a very small amount of their time on revenue-producing activities. They’re spending time on their own blog, on social media, on researching magazines, maybe on writing pitches, but very little time on actually writing pieces of writing for which they’re getting paid.

Or the flip side is sometimes people are spending a lot of time, too much time, on pieces of work that they’re being paid for, but their income is still too low. And that means the hourly rate is too low. So, when they talk here about how the biggest advantages of being part of the stable are saving marketing time and writing time, this is because having to spend less time on these two activities means you have more time to make money.

And when you’re part of the stable, you might be pitching an editor ideas. Sometimes they’ll be pitching your ideas, but either way, you have that in already. You don’t need to send a hundred pitches to get a couple editors to get back to you, or a few editors, or 20 editors. And then have five, or one, or however many of those eventually turn into a piece, which eventually pays you.

You can have five editors that you work with every month, or pretty much every month, and you know that when you send each of them a list of pitches, something on that list is going to get assigned. So, just think about it. It’s one, two, three, four, five pitch emails that will get you some number of thousand dollars versus a bunch of pitches or a bunch of time on social media that might get you $0, or $20, or $200.

In terms of saving you pitching time, I think the biggest blackholes in terms of time sucks for people in doing their pitching is the following. Or people skip them all together. But learning the magazine style. So, this is when you start reading the magazine, and you’re just reading, and you’re reading it, and you tell yourself that you’re figuring out what the magazine covers, but you’re really just reading it to get a feel for it.

Now, checking what the magazine has covered in the past, this is something that people ask me how far they should check. But you should always do this with your pitches to see if what you’re proposing has already been covered. But the thing is that you also need to check. Not just how they covered Puerto Vallarta in this section on cruise ports. You also need to check how they’ve covered Puerto Vallarta somewhere else in the magazine recently. Have they covered this region?

Have they covered somewhere nearby? Have they covered Mexico too much recently? And so, as you’re doing that triage process of has this idea been done too recently in these different forms, you’re spending a lot of time not reading the magazine for style where you’re actually reading articles. But you’re spending a lot of time sort of doing a cursory skim over recent issues of the magazine, over past table of contents, over the website, and things like that.

That’s a big-time investment. And how much better is it for you to do that, get an assignment, and then the next month you’ve done it recently enough that you can remember if Vienna river cruises, or Danube River cruises rather, were also covered recently because you just spent a bunch of time looking at these things. Now, understanding the magazine sections, this is something that not enough people spend time doing.

And I really recommend that you start doing a little bit every day, if you’re not already doing this. So, if you have the Travel Magazine Database, it’s very easy because from the Travel Magazine Database, we take the magazine, and we break down every single section. And the ones that are open to freelancers, we talk about exactly the word count, if it’s in first-person or second-person, or third-person, what’s been covered in the past, the structure of the articles.

But even if you don’t have that, you can spend a little bit of time every day going around on Zinio or Magzter, which are two-way street magazines online, or your bookstore and the pile of magazines you already have, and looking at the structure of the magazines. So, not the content, but the structure of how it’s put together and why. How many front-of-book sections does it have? Are they part business, part science with only a little bit of travel? Are they primarily longer sections?

Are they primarily written by frequent contributors? Are the features balanced geographically? Are the features balanced in terms of style; that some are interview and some are narrative? By understanding how the magazine is put together, you understand not only where the section that you are trying to pitch at this moment fits into that. But also, what types of ideas you can offer the editor if that pitch doesn’t work, or if that pitch gets accepted, and then they assign you another idea.

Somebody asked what were the names of the magazine sites that I mentioned. And I’m going to send this to all of you. It’s Zinio and Magzter I believe are the two main ones we use for the database when we need to find magazines. But I believe most of those two are paid, but Magzter might be free. So, let’s talk about writing time now. How many of you get an assignment for a new-to-you publication, and spend an amount of time writing that article that you’re kind of embarrassed by?

Like, you know it’s just too long, or that your hourly rate is in the tank, or that you are just spending too much time perfecting it. I was just talking with somebody that I coached the other day about — she says she spends a lot of time just staring at the computer and not doing anything. And I said, “No, no, I doubt that. What are you trying to do when you’re staring at the computer?”

And she says she’s trying to figure out how to start, or she’s trying to figure out what’s the right way to say something, or she’s trying to choose the right word. How many of you find that this happens to you, primarily with places that you’re writing about new versus places that you write for regularly? Great, thanks. So, yeah. So, I think the thing is a lot of us, at this moment, if you don’t already have magazines that you’re part of a stable of, most of what you’re writing for tends to be new-to-you publications.

And then you don’t necessarily pitch them again, right? Let me know over here in the chat box. Do you — yeah, yeah. Stephanie had a great answer. When you write for somebody regularly, it’s automatic, but new assignments give you pause for multiple reasons. I love that answer. So, I’d also like to know. Do you find when you are writing for a publication for the first time if you do get a number of doubts about it, especially if you run into some things in the email exchange of the editor after you turn it in, or something like that?

How often are you pitching a new idea to somebody after you file that first article? We’re going to talk more about this in the next couple slides, but I’d live for you guys, as many of you as can, to chime in about that in the chat box. How often do you pitch again after you file the story for a place? Okay. So, in terms of saving writing time. So, I want to break out the couple different ways that writing for a place regularly helps with that.

And keep chiming in on the side if you pitch again after you’ve written a piece for a place for the first time. So, one of the big ways that you save time is these little things we were talking about of being not sure, right, being not sure what the style is, being not sure what the structure is, being not sure what the editor wants. So, when you are writing for a place for the second time, or the third time, or the fifth time, you have a certain level of confidence that you’ve done it right because the editor gave you another assignment, right.

But you also know because you can look at the piece that you published with them previously and see what changes the editor made. So, you actually not just have this kind of anecdotal approval, but you can actually see what they let in, and what they changed, and what they didn’t let in. And so, you can know very factually what works for them and what doesn’t. And you also know the submission style.

There’s often magazines that have very stringent and specific requirements in terms of how you should be sending information about your sources or fact-checking information. I wrote for a magazine one time, horrible experience. So, don’t ask me which magazine it was. But I wrote for a magazine one time where it was really difficult to get the contriving of the writer’s guidelines, and then I finally got them the day the piece was due, and because it was due that day, I had already drafted it.

And they had like a two-and-a-half-page, like two-column list of words that you can’t use. And it was a food magazine, and so, it was kind of like words that they thought were overused by food writers. But it was crazy because I had to go back and rewrite the whole piece because they were so strict about the word choice. So, knowing the style of the submission from the get-go, and being able to write your piece in that way, because these busy editors aren’t always sending us their submission guidelines right up front.

Usually, we just file a piece, and then they say, “Oh, we need all this fact-checking information. You need to go back and annotate every other line with the link to where we can find this information.” So, knowing that in advance helps you write your piece much faster. But one of the most important things is having a rapport with the editor, so that if you aren’t sure along the way, you feel confident that you can just — oops, sorry — that you can just write them and ask.

Sorry, I was trying to check the chat box. Okay, there we go. So, now that we’ve talked about what the stable is and why you want to be part of it, I want to look at how you become part of it. Now, I have a couple notes here. First of all, this is in all caps, and that’s not a mistake. And on the bottom, I say, “These are in order of importance.” And you’ll notice the one in all caps is Show You Understand the Magazine.

These five things in this slide, these are the basics. These are not the basics just in terms of content, but these are the basics in terms of getting your foot in the door in the first place. So, these are the ways that you get the editor to assign you a pitch. Oh, God. Sorry, guys. That the way that you get an editor to assign you a pitch in the beginning. And I’m just going to go back up to Stephanie’s question.

Earlier, she asked: How do you query an editor when you don’t have enough for the type of guidelines they’re looking for? Surely, a compelling query can catch their eye. And this is the answer. So, the way to get an editor’s attention, first and foremost, is to have a good idea. But you’ll notice have a good idea is actually the third one on here, and that’s because part of the goodness of the idea, the quality of the idea, is how well it fits the magazine.

And when I say part, I really mean that’s one of the major, major parts because if you see that a magazine has a specific section that they haven’t covered the specific place in the past, and that that specific place is similar to, but different in a fresh way than these other places, that is solid. And so, I say, and you may have heard me say, and a lot of editor’s say. A place is not an idea, but if it is a recurring section in a magazine like a sort of city guide or something like that, then the city is the idea.

It’s sort of this weird catch-22, but what makes it an idea is that you are pitching the city for a specific column in the magazine. So, you’re pitching the city as a guide to what is new in Reykjavik, or what is new in Berlin, or what is new in Houston. So, you’re not just pitching Houston. You’re pitching a city guide that is 800 words that’s a roundup with seven sections for Wow Magazine’s City Guide. That’s what you’re pitching.

Showing that you understand the magazine happens through the quality of your ideas. And one of the editor panels that I went to recently that I was re-listening to, the editor from Coastal Living, she said she wants to see the word pitch and your topic in the subject line. And this is the way that I always teach people to write subject lines. As a lowercase-word pitch, so lower case word pitch; and then the title of your article, and then the name of the section that it’s for.

This is a signaling mechanism to editors. It helps them understand right off the bat that you understand the magazine because you are pitching to a specific section, and that’s very attractive to them because I would say at least 95% of the pitches that most editors get don’t pitch a specific section of the magazine. So, you’re immediately catapulting to the top of their what is this list by having that in your subject line.

Now, showing that you are not crazy. This is number two on the basics here. Okay? Because when I say 95% of people aren’t pitching to a specific section of the magazine, I then want to say that probably 60%, yeah, I think that’s about right, of the pitches that most editors get, and I’m talking about globally, all editors, different levels of publications, from the pays $20 to the pays $2,000. At least 60% of the pitches that these editors get, they could never ever use, and they just don’t even understand why the person has sent this.

It’s somebody sending a mountain story to the editor of Coastal Living. It’s somebody sending a beach island story to the editor of Mountain Living. It’s somebody sending a story on Botswana to — let’s see, I was going to say U.S.A. Today, but a story of Botswana to the Denver Post, which only covers regional things in the Rocky Mountains. And that’s the low level of the off-base stuff they get.

They get things from people who are saying, “I’m writing my memoir, and here’s an excerpt of it. That’s a perfect fit for your magazine. Your readers will love it. Please publish it.” And then there’s the people that are really like batshit crazy. My favorite thing is an editor said one time that they had somebody who pitched them something and then called them every day for like two or three years and like every Thursday at 4 o’clock or something to check in on the pitch.

Showing that you’re not crazy. Again, it’s after understanding the magazine because this is something that’s a little harder to show. But showing that you’re not crazy is also one of the most important things that you can do in your pitch. And part of the way to show that is these other sections. So, now, when I say show you have good ideas, I talk about how part of the good idea factor is related to how much you’ve understood the magazine.

But you’ll also need to understand what is an idea. And this is a huge thing that people struggle with that it’s fundamental if you want to write regularly for a magazine. So, how do you understand what’s a good idea? Can I even tell this to you in one sentence? Because we have whole weekend workshops around that. The Pitchapalooza spends a lot of time on this.

It’s one of the biggest things that I spend time teaching, and we do query critiques and coaching. So, the simplest way to know if you have a good idea is to tell it to somebody else in person, live, and see if they want to hear more. That’s the simplest, simplest way. In terms of coming up with a good idea, that’s a whole other story, and we have a lot of webinars on that, and I can talk more about that some other time.

But it’s really fundamental for the editor, before you’re writing, ahead of your writing, to know that you have good ideas. The editor of 5280, which is the Denver City Magazine, was saying, “If you have a good idea, I can help you with the writing, but if you’re just a good writer, but you don’t have anything to write, I can’t help you there.” So, having a good idea goes a long way, but it has to also fit the magazine.

I’ve had some really nice rejection notes from really big newsstand magazine editors before where they said, “I love this idea. I don’t think we can use it right now, but let me know where it ends up. I would love to read it.” So, that’s the kind of thing where even if you didn’t get this part right somehow, you have a good idea. You can still ingratiate yourself with the editor. So, these are all ways you can ingratiate yourself with the editor, but if you want to become part of the stable, you really need to have the whole package.

Now, showing you’re a professional seems like it would go part in part with showing you’re not crazy, but showing you’re a professional goes further. So, showing you’re a professional means using these signaling mechanisms like the subject line that I talked about. And somebody asked me what it is again.

And if you check out on our website, on the blog there’s a post about writing pitches in 15 minutes, and we have a whole sort of fill in the blank thing about how to put together your pitch in that blog post. I can’t get it for you right now because I’d have to X that over the slide screen. But if you look up 15-minute pitch on the Dream of Travel Writing Blog, then you’ll find it, and that has the headline formula.

And it’s also — if you have The Six-Figure Travel Writing Roadmap book, it’s in there as well. The headline formula. So, part of showing you’re a professional is using these signaling mechanisms to show that you understand how journalism and how magazine publishing works. So, one of the signaling mechanisms is to put the word pitch in your subject line, and to put the topic.

Another signaling mechanism is to keep it short and to the point. One of the biggest mistakes that I see from people who — it often happens with people who are used to writing their own blogs or writing for other online outlets where space is not so much of a premium. But they write very, very long pitches that have a lot of information both about the article and about the writer. And print editors are used to everything being very short.

Their emails are short because they don’t have time for long emails. Their word counts in their magazines are short because they don’t — because it costs more to print longer articles. Everything is really short for them. So, part of being a professional is showing that you can get to your point quickly, and that you know what your point is. And this flows into the next one. So, do people want to see your clips?

This depends. It depends on the editor, and it depends exactly what they’re looking for. Resoundingly, never ever, ever just put your portfolio and your pitch. I’ve started seeing this going around, and I think there must be some travel writing courses that are teaching this, but never just say, “If you want to know more about me, here’s the link to my portfolio.”

Don’t do it. And especially don’t say, “And if you want to know more about me, you can read some of my writing on my blog.” Don’t do it because — I can’t see it right now. Sadly, my notes are on another slide. But the editor from Coastal Living said, “If you do that, you’ve missed an opportunity because I won’t go there. I just don’t do it. I’m not being mean, but I just don’t have the time.”

Editors are not going to go to your portfolio and dig around. If they want to see your clips, then you will send them specific articles. And I really liked the way that the Coastal Living editor outlined it. She said — so, this is if people ask you for clips. Don’t put this in your query letter. Okay? “If people ask you for clips, you want to include a narrative clip, a clip that shows a sense of place, and a service clip.” Okay?

I’m going to send this out to all of you. So, these are the three types of clips you should send if someone asks you. Now, the second part of this though is that you should also — if you are sending clips, you should also send clips that are related to the type of article you are pitching. This is very important. Don’t just send them your best clips if they show a style of writing that is not what the magazine needs or what this particular article needs because that doesn’t matter to the editors.

It doesn’t help them decide if they should assign this particular piece of writing to you. Okay. So, let’s get into after the pitch. Once you’ve started working with the editor. How then do you help show that you should become part of the stable? Now, I just want to preface this by saying that it does not take long to become part of the stable. Sorry, I’m chronically dehydrated since I got to Iceland. Just give me one second.

I asked an editor point blank the other day in a workshop: How long does it take for people to become part of your stable? How many assignments, how many months, whatever? And I’d love for you guys to guess how many months he said. Just chime in in the chat box. So, this particular editor was doing a session on essentially how to work well with editors, how to work with them on an ongoing basis, how to become part of the stable, more or less.

He talked about pitching, but he also talked about the ongoing relationship, and he talked about his own frequent contributors, and frequent contributors for other publications, and he also manages more than one publication and has been an editor of a different publication in the past. Oh, hi, Lenora. So, a couple of you got it. So, two to three months was what he said.

I see a lot of five, six months. One person said one month. It can happen, but it’s usually two or three. Two or three articles or two or three months. Okay? So, that is not that long, guys. Somebody asked me the other day: How long does it take you to set up a recurring income as a travel writer? And if you’re doing something on contract like content marketing or getting writing gigs online where they’re going to assign you a certain amount of stuff every month, it can be much faster.

You can put in your — you can set up your whole income in a week, if you bust your butt marketing. With magazines though, you can definitely spend a month pitching a bunch of different places, and then get some assignments, do those assignments, figure out which editors you don’t want to keep working with. And we’re going to talk about that at the end of the webinar as well, which ones you don’t want to keep in your own stable.

And then after two or three months, have a brand-new set of editors that you are working with regularly that you like, and they like you, and you have your work. You have your work planned out for the next year. So, this isn’t something that takes forever to set up. If that’s too long for you, and you need an income more quickly, I recommend going the content marketing route, but this is not the type of thing where you have to wait two or three years.

Sorry, Donna, ask me that question again at the end of the call. Okay? Because it’s not quite relevant to what we’re talking about right now. So, let’s talk about a couple different ways to become part of the stable. So, again, I’ve put these kind of in order. The order isn’t quite as clear as earlier where one is infinitely more important than the next one. So, you can do a combination of all of these different ways of being part of the stable. But some will get you there faster.

Having a specialty the editor desperately needs is one of the things that’s going to get you there faster. So, I’m going to tell you three different stories about this, and they’re all slightly different situations. So, the editor of Northwest Travel and Life, which like Sunset or Coastal Living, is a major regional publication, but primarily in the Northwest. So, you won’t see it on newsstands if you live anywhere else, but it’s kind of the major regional travel publication there.

He was looking for somebody who could cover basically architecture, but something a bit specific. So, it was like someone who is very familiar with the architectural history of the Northwest. So, not just architecture, but of his area and of specific types of buildings. So, this is not going to be something that every writer who pitches him has the reporting where I’ll potentially do this. He wanted somebody who already had a familiarity.

He had spent a while kind of waiting for pitches to come in or grooming one of his writers. That wasn’t working. He went on a website where you can put out a call for writers. He got a lot of people back. He had tried to work with some of them. It didn’t work out. He even went so far as, I think, to post on Craigslist or something that he was looking for a writer who could work in the specialty.

He still couldn’t find anybody. So, part of the story is how all these people didn’t work out. Why did these people not work out? We’ll get to that in one of the next couple slides. But what he ultimately had to do was he had to cruise the table of contents of other magazines and find somebody by poaching them from another magazine that was what he was looking for, and write to that person and ask if they would be interested in writing for his magazine.

If you have an area of specialization — I mentioned this when we were talking earlier about the Gourmet Traveller WINE Magazine. If you have an area of specialization that is hard for the editor to get enough articles in that area, you are golden. The editor might have spent ages looking for this person, and you just have no idea. And you can often use that area of specialization not just for editors who are desperate because they don’t have a writer, but for editors who are desperate because they have a writer who is not working out.

And I think I have a specific quote from this editor in a couple slides. So, I’ll just tell you the short version of this. But the editor who lead the panel on how to work with editors and how to build relationships with editors, one of the magazines that he edits is about boating. And it’s about boating in a specific geographic area. And so, some of the sections are more travel-oriented, and some of the sections of the magazines are more technical. And so, he really needed people with that background.

And he had somebody who had been working with the magazine for a very long time, longer than he had even been there, and this person just started essentially to flake. And he had to say to the guy one day, “You’re just — your heart is just not in this anymore, right?” And he was like, “Yeah, I just am not really interested in doing this anymore.”

And then he had to find somebody quite suddenly, but it turned out that one of his other writers had said, “Oh, by the way, I also have this background. In case you need something for that section. I know so and so is writing it right now.” And so, he was able to turn to this other writer that he had worked with that he didn’t use for this specialty in the past, but who had it, and immediately give that writer that column.

I’ve had a similar situation where I was writing for a couple magazines that were under one editor, and he also had a magazine that was about meetings, about sort of people who plan conferences and things like that. And I had been writing for some other magazines about conferences for some time, and had developed quite a Rolodex, so to say, of contacts, and I knew the industry very well.

And my editor at this other publication had kind of asked me if I’d be interested in, writing for the meeting magazines, but I had a non-compete, so I couldn’t do it. And then somebody who wrote several columns for him was going on maternity leave. And so, he basically said, “Look, I can give you two columns for the next this much time.” And I said, “Okay. Well, like I guess I can do that. How long is it going to be?”

And I got that all figured out. And then what happened was that I had so impressed them slash done better, had more knowledge of the industry in the time I had taken over those columns, that when she came back from maternity leave, they rearranged to give her some other stuff so that I could keep those columns. So, if you just know something very, very well, and again, it can be architecture, it can be technical boating aspects, it can be having the right contacts, you can warm your way in into these things, even if there is already a regular contributor there.

So, this is what I was saying. Even though editors prefer to work with people they already know, you can still get in there, guys. You still can. So, don’t be crazy part two. Now, I just told you about this boating guy, right, who basically had stopped turning in his work, or he had started turning it in later, later, later. So, this is one type of crazy, but this isn’t the crazy that I want to talk to you about. Don’t be crazy after you get the assignment as to supposed to in your pitch letter means don’t start telling the editor your whole life story.

Don’t start telling the editor, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t respond to your email within one hour. My dog is really sick, and then I got a call from the hospital because my grandmother just had surgery-” It is not only not the editor’s business, it is unprofessional, and the editor who is strapped for time will be like, “Why is this person sending me these emails that I need to read to see if there’s actually something important at the end because I have an assignment going on right now? I would rather work with somebody else who isn’t sending me emails like this. Okay?”

I have one person who writes for the database who I think might even be on here right now. There she is. Hi, Vanessa. Who is fantastic. We met in London the other day, and she’s going on I believe it is a long like five-week trip or something to Costa Rica to go scuba diving because she’s a certified scuba instructor as well. And she’s just going to leave all her work. She’s just going to figure out when to do it. I do the same thing.

I’m in Iceland right now for a conference, but I’m doing this call. And I have another writer who will tell me, “Oh, I’m going to be in such and such place between this and this day. I’m going to be in such and such place between this and this day. I’m leaving on this day to go blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “I don’t care. You have your work, and you have assignments, get them done and tell me when you’re going to give them to me. I don’t need to be remembering your travel schedule. I need to know when I’m getting these articles from you and know that they will actually come in on at that time.”

Crazy seems like a bit of a strong word here, but oversharing might be another word. But essentially, don’t be unprofessional is really what it comes back to. Keep the personal out of your interactions with your editors, unless they have very gently opened that door to becoming slightly more friendly. Now, part of this being professional thing is remembering that you are on the same team, and that you have the same goals.

And when you start talking too much about what your personal challenges are, or other deadlines you have, or anything like that, you’re talking about your own goals, and not the shared goals that you have with the editor. And so, these times when an editor emails you an edit, or asks you if you can change something, or any other request like that, that you take as an affront; an affront to the quality of your work, to some agreement that you believe that you had, what have you.

You have lost sight of the mutual goal, which is to put out a clean, interesting article for the editor’s publication and focus on your own personal goal. And this always leads to bad things. Okay? It’s the same way as you if you have a significant other or a spouse, or if you ever have had a significant another in your life, and you’re having a spat about something.

These spats tend to escalate once people defensively retreat into only caring about their own interests. So, when you retreat into caring only about your own interests, what keeps the editor from doing the same thing? What keeps the editor from just saying in the middle of the assignment, “You are too much of a pain to work with. I would rather get somebody reliable in my stable who is just going to say, ‘Yeah,’ and turn this around in two days to do this than continue dealing with you, even though you have a good idea and we agreed that you would do this assignment”?

Don’t put the editor on their back feet, so to say. Don’t make the editor defensive by being that way yourself in your emails, or in your tone, or anything like that. So, related to that — I’m going to switch to the next side and come back. Related to that is say yes. Okay? Now, I’m going to talk about the caveats about those particular types of saying yes. But I popped in some quotes here from an editor panel that I wanted to share with you.

“Nothing should ever be a problem for you that we ask you to do.” Again I’ll talk about caveats about this later, but this is from the editor’s mouth. “The editor is always right, even when they’re not. Don’t tell them you’re too busy, you have another assignment, or don’t have time for them.” Now, I am super the champion of writer’s rights. So, like I said, I will talk about the times that you should put your foot down about this in the back or later in the call, but this is how the world is for editors. Okay?

This is really important to know that if you want to be part of the stable, this is how you need to appear to them. You can go complain to your significant other, or your spouse, or your friends about how crazy this editor is, and so on, and so forth, but in your actual correspondence, if you want to have a relationship with them, this is how you need to appear. I had an editor who, again, like I said, you don’t tell them when you’re going on vacation.

I was actually going to be not on email for a while. And so, I told an editor that I’d literally email like every other day. “Look, I’m gone this time. I’m not going to take assignments. I’m gone.” And he had a whole feature fall through in one of his publications, and he wrote me, and he was like, “Look, I know you’re on vacation. Do you have anything, even something you’ve already written for another magazine that I could just rewrite?”

Literally, this is how desperate he was. He was like, “Do you have anything? Like anything at all?” And I felt bad, and I didn’t just want to give him something horrible. So, I went and hid out somewhere, and I wrote him a piece in a couple days, a whole feature based on something I had already done, but I had to rewrite it. So, that’s the kind of thing that will make an editor love you forever.

And I’m not saying that you should interrupt your five-year anniversary to write a feature for an editor, unless it’s a really, really lucrative and valuable relationship for you. And then it might make sense. But there’s smaller versions of that, right. There’s like, “Can you — do you have photos for this? I know we didn’t ask you for photos, but it turns out we couldn’t find the ones we needed, or we couldn’t get a photographer,” something like that. “Do you have them?” Okay?

These are the kind of things that coming through for an editor, like I said earlier, making the editor’s life easier, is the single biggest thing that you can do because there’s a human psychological tendency that if you help someone, they want to help you. And just getting your work done, just doing the assignment, to an editor doesn’t insight that. That’s not helping them. That’s doing what you have been paid to do. But going above and beyond does.

It does insight the tendency in them. So, related to this though, this is the flip side of going above and beyond that often people miss. I’m curious. How many of you guys, before you file a story or a piece, check, double check that your assignment letter and that your pitch letter actually corresponded with what you ended up writing, what you ended up filing?

You go back and you double check that every single thing you said in your pitch that you were going to include you’ve actually included. Great. I’m so glad to see at least one of you doing that. Oh, good. Good, good, good. Because this is a really easy thing to forget. You might have said in your pitch, “I’m going to mention this, this, and this,” and then as you were researching, you found this other thing that was interesting, or the real story was really this.

So on and so forth. Or you just really liked this story from a particular angle, and that angle just didn’t include this thing. And then you go to turn it in, and the editor is like, “Well, where is blah, blah, blah?” So, write what you were assigned, in part, is did you write what you told the editor you were going to write. But another part of this is are you and the editor both understanding what you said you were going to write the same way. Okay?

This is actually the much tougher part, and the part where a lot of us run into problems. So, I’ve seen a lot of people in different Facebook groups that I’m in say — I just saw a sob story about this today actually. That say things like, “I wrote this piece. I sent it to the editor. They weren’t very happy with it, and they wrote me back with all these questions and all these changes. And I did those, and then I sent it to them, and now, they’ve sent me back even more.”

I know exactly why this happens, and in fact, when I do rewrites of things that are massive rewrites, I always need to go back two or even three times. And that’s why I have a rule with the database that when I’m doing trial assignments, which are paid, but when I’m doing trial assignments with writers, if that first version that comes to me, if I see it and I know that I will have to do another round of edits after that, they’re out because it’s this rabbit hole of edits.

And so, editors don’t do this with you because they’re not interviewing you for long-term assignments in the same way. They just get the assignment from you, and then they decide not to assign you something again. But editors can see when they get something from you if it’s one round of edits away from what they wanted, or if it’s multiple round of edits away from what they wanted.

But you don’t know that because the whole reason it’s that many round of edits away from what they wanted is because you didn’t understand what they wanted. And this is a really, really tough thing to start to get in line with. And so, I highly recommend if you and your past history of writing have had this happen to you where editors come back with what seems to you like an unreasonable number of changes, take a couple minutes later today, or tomorrow, or next week, to look at your pitch letter.

And to look at what they asked you to change, and see what the relationship between those things was because I really bet you that the editor thought they were getting something else from you from your pitch than what you ended up giving them. And what you gave them was in line with your idea of the piece, which may have been formulated before you even picked up this magazine, before you even saw this section of this magazine.

And it may have been your idea of the story, and you just didn’t mold it to that magazine enough, and you just wrote it the way you originally imagined. So, a really clear thing on this, like I included this quote here. “Don’t send a 3,500-word story, especially past deadline, when I’ve commissioned 2,000 words.” This is a big editor pet peeve to write over word count. I’ve also heard people say you should always write 10% over word count so they can cut whatever they want and have it then be in the word count.

I’ve also seen people ask do I get paid based on the word count I’ve turned in. No, you are always paid based on the word count that was assigned. But this is a really big one. Okay? So, sometimes you realize that the story does just need to be longer. Then you need to bring that up to your editor, and especially if the editor has asked you for a bunch of new stuff. I see this happen a lot.

If the editor has asked you for a bunch of changes, then you need to say, “I can’t incorporate this new information and stay at the same word count. Do you want to make the word count longer, or would you like to take something out?” And this gets to my next — hopefully, my next point. I will come back to that. Trust and communication. Literally, everything in the editor-freelancer relationship, whether you are writing for a magazine, or a website, or just doing content marketing, comes back to these two things.

All professional relationships come back to these two things. The first step is to build trust, and the second part is to maintain it with communication. I have found unilaterally that everything freelance relationship that goes bad happens because this is broken, and once the line initially become tenuous, once it becomes frayed, it’s not fixed with communication, and it snaps.

And you could never put does threads back together. So, all of these different little things that I’m talking to you about are all related to this. Okay? They’re all related to building trust, or maintaining trust, and the types of communications that flow into that. So, we’re over time. So, I just want to redo this quote, which is related to what we were talking about before about showing that you have ideas and showing that you can step up.

This is the editor quote that I was telling you about earlier with the guy that flaked on him after 30 years. So, he said, “I definitely have a stable, but I have few people that are difficult to work with and kind of annoying, but the stuff they do is specialized, so I put up with it. Some regular people send in great stuff all the time, and then they send me stuff I’m not super stoked about, but it’s like the free one you give away to keep the relationship going.”

What he means here is I’m not going to dump somebody just because they sent in one story I didn’t like. But he said with the boat guy it became — there was a word missing here. I couldn’t figure out what it was. It became that he was like the Monday after deadline. Then it was a week before the issue went to press. Then it was the Monday of the week that the issue was going to press. Then it was the day before the issue was going to press.

And then he missed a deadline. And that was when he put his foot down. Now, this is really generous that he let this go on for like six weeks. And a lot of times, people come to me freaking out because they missed a deadline by like a day or two, but it’s really important to see here that when you have the trust, you can do that, and it’s ok. But to go back to what we were talking about here, if the trust is already frayed, you can’t get away with that.

You need to keep the trust strong with communication. And in this case, the communication was that the guy had been writing for the magazine for 30 years. So, there was a history there. Okay? So, let’s talk about times when you are thinking that this just sounds so too easy, and you think that you’ve done all these things right, and it’s just not happening.

Like I said about going back and checking your pitch against the thing that the editors came back to you about, if you are having trouble with all of these different things that I’ve mentioned will help you to build a relationship. It probably means that you have conceived them differently than the editor. And that’s why there’s a gap. Because it really is just that simple. I hear editors say all of these pieces of advice time and time again, and if everyone was doing them, they wouldn’t have to keep saying them.

But the thing is that the people aren’t, like I said earlier in response to Donna’s question about can you really still pitch those editors if they’re so attached to their stables. People in stables stop doing all of these things that we talked about. I told you about the boating guy, right. Or you’re just better than the person in the stable, and the editor realizes that, and they replace the person.

It’s all about building the trust and maintaining it with communication. And as people who were already in the stable break those various things, you have a way in. Or like the gentleman who needed the architecture person, there might be a hole in the stable that the editor is really trying to fill. And as long as you can check these boxes, as long as you can be reliable and say, “Yes,” and step in when needed, you can be there.

I told her I was going to talk about sometimes when you do not want to be part of the stable. And when I talk about the timeline of building up your own stable of editors, I’ve talked about how you send a bunch of pitches, you do the first round of assignments, and then you figure out who you want to keep working with. Okay? Because you don’t want to make your own stable with any editor that will have you.

And not just because it sucks, or they pay low, or whatever, but because it’s infections. The bad feelings that you feel about an editor who’s mistreating you will seep into your other relationships. They’ll draw away your desire to work, or your desire to pitch, or your interest, and it’ll have a negative impact on everything else. So, if you have one assignment, or even if it’s your eighth assignment, or fifteenth assignment with an editor.

If you have an assignment that really puts you off, that really makes you feel like that trust is broken, and that the communication is not fixing it and is not keeping it up, then that means that that editor does not have a place in your stable. So, I’m just going to go through this quickly cause I know we’re over time. So, one of the ways is they have a crazy contract. Condé Nast is famous for having a contract where they buy all book and movie rights to your ideas, and you aren’t allowed to work with any competitive magazines for the next year.

That’s crazy. Don’t do it, in my opinion. If you really want the clip, you can do it, but in my opinion, a crazy contract does not make a long-term relationship. Similarly, and this is me. You can choose to go the other way. But publications that pay on publication. So, that means they don’t pay you until the issue with your article on it comes out, and you have no control over when that is because it might come out in a different issue than they’ve mentioned in your contract or in your assignment letter.

You basically have no idea when you’re getting paid. I don’t deal with that. I don’t think you should either. There’s plenty of publications that pay on acceptance, and the ones that pay on publication know it sucks for writers. I have heard this from the editors. They know that they are doing a disservice to their writers. So, don’t put up with it. Only write for places that pay on acceptance, especially for people on your stable.

If you want to write periodically for people who pay on publication, fine. But in terms of your stable, you want to know what day that check is coming, especially if you’re waiting for it every month. Now, if you have filed a story, and we talked about how busy editors are, they aren’t necessarily going to write you the next day and say, “Oh, this is great,” or the next day and say, “Oh, here. I have a couple questions.” It might be two weeks, it might be two months, it might be four months, and you have no idea.

But if you feel like it’s been a long time, and the date of publication that you discussed is coming up, and you haven’t heard from them, and you write them, and they don’t write you back. They just say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. I’ll get back to you when I can,” that’s a red flag. That means that that editor does not belong in your stable because they just don’t care about their writers. Okay? And the reason I say that you’ve written them and you followed up, this is important because sometimes things happen.

Sometimes there’s fires that need to be put out. Okay? Or sometimes it’s just not on their schedule to be editing that piece right now. So, if in your initial story with an editor you find yourself in one of these situations, don’t add them to your stable. Likewise, if with your first assignment you find it really painstaking to be paid by the publication, and I don’t just mean like in terms of the timeline. I mean the time when they’re supposed to pay comes up, and you write the editor, and you write the editor, and you write the editor.

And on the third writing they get back to you and say, “Oh, I don’t know. Accounting has it. You’ll have to ask them.” That’s not something you want to be dealing with every month. So, that’s not somebody you want to continue to be writing for. So, it goes too far outside of the scope. So, what the scope means, if you don’t know, the turn scope. Scope is kind of the breath, the outline, the parameters of the agreement. So, if you have agreed that you will write a piece that is 1,500-words, and you write it.

And then the editor says, “Oh, can you also do a sidebar on this? Oh, can you also do a sidebar? Oh, can you also do photos?” And they just assume that you’re doing all of that for the original rate, that is outside of the scope. If you haven’t discussed photos in your initial discussions when the editor said the price range, and then they come back and ask you for photos, then you say, “What is the fee for these?”

And if they say, “Oh, there’s no fee. All of the writers have to provide photos with their pieces, then you essentially say, “Screw you,” and you provide the photos for that time, and then you don’t write for them again. If they say, “Oh, this is not…” then you say, “Okay, great. Thanks.” And you decide if you want to work within that rate. Okay? But don’t let them just presume that they can ask you — no, sorry, that they can expect you to do something else they didn’t ask you about before without asking you if it’s okay.

If the editor says, “Oh, our photos fell through. Do you have photos we could use this time?” That’s different. That’s doing the editor a favor, and that can help you later on. Now, if they change what they want after you turn it in not because you didn’t understand the assignment, but because of something like a crazy publisher or an editor above them that they can’t control, that’s not something that you want to deal with every month.

Those are the times that you don’t want to work with the editor. But why if I didn’t mentioned something on that list, and you just feel like you have no idea what’s going on with an editor, with the assignment with your general interactions with the magazine? Like you just — when you’re confronted with that publication or those emails, you just kind of feel a little lost, and scared, and out of your depth.

That also means that you shouldn’t add them to your stable. People should only be in your stable who are easy for you to work with and make you happy. You enjoy the interactions that you have with the editor and the pieces that you’re doing. Not just because it’s nice or it’s fun, but because that breeds longevity, that breeds happiness with what you’re doing, which brings better work. Okay?

Those are really the criteria for you to decide if somebody should be in your stable as opposed to for the editor to decide if they should put you in their writer’s stable.

If you’ve got any questions, you can hit me up at questions@dreamoftravelwriting.com. And I’m so pleased to have seen all of you guys this week. It’s really nice to be back seeing you live, and interacting with you, and having questions.

On the topic of questions, I know there were a couple that came up that I missed during the session. So, feel free to drop those back in the chat box, and I’ll get to them now. Thanks so much, you guys. So, Donna asked: When you’re writing a pitch, should you say I would like to propose a, name piece for a magazine, or should you say article?

I think the question is should you say piece or article, and that’s totally interchangeable, but in terms of — I think this is the line that I use at the close of the magazine because I would never start a pitch saying, “I would like to propose.” I would always start a pitch with the lead of the article itself. So, something interesting; an interesting fact, or an anecdote, or a scene. The second paragraph, I do say, “I’d like to propose a thing.”

This might be the second paragraph. So, I typically would say the name of the section. So, let’s say like a piece for the — I’m trying to think of — for connections that’s like the intro of the front-of-book in Hemispheres. I would say like, “I’d like to propose a 500-word piece on the food scene in Adelaide, Australia for connections.” I wouldn’t say the name of the magazine in that middle paragraph there. I hope that answered your question.

Carrie. Do you have a structure layout sample I could look at and use as a guideline? Structure of what, Carrie? Is this for the pitch? For a travel destination article. No, I don’t, but I — in Pitchapalooza right now we’ve got some people doing some really nice article breakdowns. If you want a structure layout sample, I would say go to like AFAR. Their features are usually pretty clear in terms of layout.

I would say go to AFAR and take a couple of their features, and break them up into quote, background, history destination info, something like that, and do a couple of those, and you’ll see the structure emerge because it tends to be pretty standard for features. If you want to know something more like a magazine section, those it depends entirely on the magazine and the section itself.

That’s why I don’t just say, “Hey, everybody. Here’s how to write a travel destination article,” because it’s different for every magazine, and you should really hone yourself to the structure of that particular magazine uses. But for general destination features, AFAR is very kind of literary.

A lot of people that write for them teach writing on a literary level like for NYU and things like that. So, that’s a good one to look at to learn feature structure, I would say.  Okay. I think I got all the questions, or if so the people who have asked them, and they had left and not reposted them. So, thanks so much, you guys. I’ll catch you all later.

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Very exciting week this week. I’m calling you from the side of the highway between TBEX in Huntsville, Alabama and a workshop we’re doing in Atlanta. And we’re going to talk about how to build serious business partnerships at conferences.

So, this webinar idea came out of some emails I got, and some emails I didn’t get, and some conversations I had at a string of travel conferences that I’ve been at in the last week. So, I’ve been at three before now, and now, I’m at TBEX, and I’ve been at some writing conferences, some blogging conferences, some that are just for women, some that are in the U.S., some that are in Europe.

It’s been a very wide variety. And while obviously there are cultural differences and adherence in all of these different locations and different types of travel media, there’s certain things that are the same. And there’s a lot of opportunities that I feel a lot of folks are missing out on. So, that’s what we’re going to look at today. How to make sure you are best taking advantage of the opportunities that you have set yourself up for when you have spent this money to go to these conferences in the first place.

All right. So, specifically what I want to talk about is what are the different travel conferences that you can go to and what you can get out of them because this is a question that I really get a lot. Sometimes people say, “Should I go to TBEX, or what’s the best conference to go to if I want to be learning how to write better or how to pitch better?” And so, I’m going to talk about the spectrum there.

After that, we’re going to talk about the before part. So, some of you have probably just come from the Women in Travel Summit. Some of you are on your way to TBEX, which starts tonight. So, people might be in different places. Or it might be that you had gone to a travel conference last year, and you haven’t really followed up too much, and you’re wondering what you should do about that. Is it too late? Can you still reach out for those opportunities?

And so, we’re going to talk about how to prep, and then we’re going to talk about the follow-up formula. So, I’m not going to give you a specific template for this because it needs to be quite personal, and we’re going to talk about that as well. So, let’s get going.

So, When I talk about conferences today, I’m not talking about very small sort of intimate writing things. I’m talking more about large events and also expos we’re going to look at because those are big things that I know a lot of you guys are missing out on. And some folks are wondering if they should be going to these. Oh, Naomi, how interesting that you’re going to the Adventure of Travel Show.

But I myself, it’s kind of a joke with another friend of mine who goes to a lot of conferences, who goes to more. But in addition to going to a lot of conferences for travel writing, I go to a lot of conferences for small business and for freelancing.

But I also cover conferences for magazines. So, I’ve spent the last couple years writing for magazines for people who plan meetings and conferences. So, I’ve also spent a lot of time writing about the best practices for people who are looking to create conferences and make sure that you have those opportunities. So, I have a lot of insights both from the high level as well as from on the ground. So, before we dive into the specific conferences to look at, how to prepare for them, and how to follow up on them.

Why should you be going to these in the first place? Because I definitely know that while I’m obviously meeting people at conferences, when we are searching out for people to invite to different events that we’re doing around the country, there’s a lot of people who don’t know about a conference that might be in their backyard starting that very weekend.

If you aren’t already making space in your budget and time in your schedule to be attending these kind of events, why should you look at doing it? So, I really think there’s four main reasons, and these can also help you evaluate whether a conference is the right opportunity for you personally because I think often we’re in the position where we might go to a conference because it’s near us, or as travel writers, because it’s in a place where we want to go, and we want to go on the FAM trips, right.

That’s a great reason to go to a travel conference; because you want to go on the FAM trips. And there’s just a lot, and I’m going to show you on another slide how many of them there are because you might only know a few. But there’s a lot of these conferences. So, how do you decide which ones are worth it for you? I think there’s four main reasons to go, and you need to make sure that any conference that you’re looking at investing in is going to check at least two, if not three, or preferably all four of these boxes for you.

The first one is connection. Whether you are working already full-time as a freelance travel writer, as I know some of you are, or you are looking at making that jump, connection is one of the big, big reasons to go to these conferences. In fact, my husband always asks me because I always complain about TBEX, and how I don’t really like the sessions, and things like this, or how it was very poorly organized. And he says to me, “Why do you keep going?”

And I say, “It’s because all of my travel friends are there. I know that I will go and I will see everybody in one go.” And he’s an academic, and he has several conferences that he goes to every year, whether he has a paper in it or not, because those are the places where he is going to see all of his colleagues every year. And so, this is really important. Being part of a community, we can do it online, right.

In fact, somebody at the TBEX Speaker’s Party last night was joking, “We shouldn’t have people’s names on their badges. We should just have which Facebook groups they’re in because that’s really how you know them.” And the thing is, though, that those connections that you make online are cemented in person. There’s this maxim that people don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people. And that’s very true.

But the other thing is that making connections with people can allow you to leap — oops, sorry — to leapfrog — oh, no, where’d we go — to leapfrog a lot of steps in terms of setting up partnerships. Whether that is with other bloggers, or with brands and destinations that you would like to be blogging for, and writing for, and doing social media for. So, the power of that in-person connection is huge.

I say unquantifiable, but the meetings industry, the associations for meeting planners, have put a lot of effort into quantifying this in light of the fact that after the financial crash, the government was penalizing finance companies for all sorts of expenditures, and one of them was on travel for things like incentive trips. And an incentive trip, if you don’t know what this is, it’s a really quirky thing.

It’s when people who work in sales for a big company exceed their goals. Their price that they get, like their reward, is that they get to go on these really awesome trips to really fantastic places around the world, or in the Caribbean with their family, and there’s shopping, and there’s casino nights, and there’s all these things. And so, on the one hand, you can look at going to travel conferences as a place to network, and that the connection is for a networking reason.

On the other hand, it’s also important to spend time, like these finance companies that I just mentioned, enjoying yourself with your peers. This is really important, and this is where the best connections are made. It’s not just because you’re at a networking event, but it’s because you’re on a trip with somebody before the conference, and you guys are enjoying a tour together, or a meal, or something like that.

This connection, what kind of benefit does it have for you, right? People think of networking and, “Oh, I have to network,” but what do you actually get out of it? Because this is the really important part, not just in deciding which conferences to go to, but also who to reach out to while you were there, and how to follow up with them. The types of connections that you should be making are a couple-fold. You want to be looking at three different types of people.

You want to look at people who are above you, but not too far above you. You want to look at people who are on the same level as you. And you want to be looking at people who might be a couple steps behind you. So, these are the three types of people that you want to be looking at connecting with when you’re at conferences. So, when I say people who are above you, but not too far above you, here’s the reason for that.

Is that you can go to a conference and go to a talk by a big person, and maybe say hi to them afterwards, and maybe follow up with them on email, but the chance of having a lasting connection with somebody who’s quite a few steps ahead of you in their own travel writing business is much slimmer, unless you’ve really had time to make — spent hours, and hours, and hours with them. And that’s often hard to do because these conferences are very busy.

But the thing is if somebody is just a little bit ahead of you, and you guys connect over something, like you both went to school in Italy, it’s a lot easier to build a strong relationship there. Or that person is going to mentor you, and send you leads on business opportunities, and connect you to people that they know. People who are on the same level as you, this is what I was saying about you might be in a lot of Facebook groups.

But having a beer with those people and sitting down and getting to know them makes you become the person that they refer when they can’t go on a trip, and the person organizing the FAM asks them, “Is there somebody else that you know that we can invite?” So, even if you know a lot of peers in a loose tie sort of way online, getting to know them in person is what makes you become a go-to person.

Whether it’s when someone asks them for a recommendation, or if they’re looking at doing something, like they’re looking at setting up a blog or group that will work together with destinations to go on FAMs. Now, what about people below you? I think this is one that people often miss. So, even if you think that you are relatively new to travel writing or to blogging, it’s really important to cultivate relationships with people who are a little bit earlier in their trajectory than you are, and to help them along.

And the reason for that is two-fold. First of all, it’s really great for them, of course, to give them information, but the other thing is that teaching is a great way to cement what you know. And also, to help you feel confident about what you know and where you are in your journey. So, helping answer questions, or if somebody — if you’re both waiting to speak to a speaker after a talk, chat somebody up.

See if there’s somebody that you can introduce them to, to help them leapfrog much faster along in their journey. So, possibility. Now, this is a really interesting one. When I was doing our freelance travel writing master class in New York this week, one of the attendees really aptly said that she had come because she wanted to see the possibilities of what she could be doing with her travel writing career and income specifically that she didn’t already know about.

And I thought that was so great because I think that people often go to travel events whether it’s a conference like TBEX or an expo in particularly like World Travel Market and ITB. And we’re going to talk about those. And they leave with this concept of, “Oh, my God. I had no idea how much was out there. How many opportunities there are. How many destinations I want to visit. How many places I hadn’t thought that I could be writing for.”

In my opinion, one of the best reasons, and one of the things that will make you move forward the fastest about going to travel conferences is to imbue yourself with a sense of possibility of where you can take your career. Because that’s often going to be the thing that pushes you to leave the job you already have, or if you do a lot of different types of freelancing, like if you also freelance in the medical field, or do science writing, or technical writing.

This can be the thing that shows you that all these years, you thought, “Well, I’m going to keep doing technical writing because there’s just not that much travel writing that I could be doing,” that shows you that there really is, and that your skills are transferable. Now, education. This is an interesting one, and I think it was April earlier had said which are the best conferences for travel writing.

And this is quite interesting because a lot of the conferences that folk go to aren’t actually about travel writing. There’s very few that are. And I’ll tell you which ones are good for that. But the thing is that the education component of a lot of these events is something that you need to make for yourself. In some cases, the education comes from networking with other people.

But in other cases, especially expo events like World Travel Market and ITB, there are so many different things going on. There’s press releases. There’s thousands of booths that you can go to. And there are education sessions, but they’re easy to miss. So, this is one of the reasons why I said these are four reasons to go to conferences, but you’re not always going to go for all of them because education is very important.

And it can be a really great way for you to do what would’ve taken you six or eight weeks to learn in two days, but not every event offers it. And so, if education is a priority for you, you have to be really picky about which events you’re going to because, like I said, they don’t all cater to that. But going to a conference is really one of the best ways to really fast track your learning about travel writing, about travel writing business. Now, a cold hard opportunity.

This is an interesting one because I think a lot of people don’t go to conferences specifically with this in mind. They might think, “Oh, well, I’ll go to some speed dating appointments, and hopefully, something will come of it.” But they don’t think, “I have a spot in my client portfolio that I need to fill with a travel company that I’m going to be blogging for at least four times a month, or at least eight times a month.”

And going into an event specifically looking for an opportunity like that and specifically evaluating which events to go to based on whether or not those opportunities will exist. And this right here is the one that I would say, above all of these other ones, you need to have as at least one of the things that drive you to go to conferences because a lot of people go just for this. They go just for connection. And like I was saying, that’s great.

It can help you with business partnerships, and it’s also an important reward for your hard work. But the thing is, if you aren’t actually doing paid work, you don’t get to do the connecting just for awarding purposes yet. So, what I recommend is that if you are fresh, if you are new to travel writing, if you haven’t gone to any events yet, look for ones that are going to help you with education and possibility, and hopefully, also opportunities.

If you’ve been doing it for a while, don’t worry about this one. Don’t worry so much about this one. But look for the opportunities that have the best connection to people that you already know from online that you can meet in person, as well as new people you can meet, and the best opportunities. So, let’s look at the different conferences. There’s really three different kinds. And I mentioned expos, and I’m going to show you what I mean on the next page.

I have a big, long list of all of them. But expos are essentially events that are not for travel media as a goal. Travel media are there to cover the event and to get exposure for the destinations. But expos are primarily for buyers and sellers. And so, what does that mean? People who buy and sell travel might be people who are travel agents, people who do group bus tours, people who do bookings for companies. All sorts of people who are buying travel in large amounts.

And then the sellers would be hotels, they would be tour operators, they would be airlines, all sorts of people. So, when you go to an expo, it’s a crazy experience, and there’s tons of stuff going on. But the real meat of it, the real heart of it, is one to one meetings between these buyers and sellers that I just explained getting their business done, getting their rates, getting their sales, getting their packages put together for the rest of the year.

For us, that stuff doesn’t matter, but it’s important to remember that that is really the goal of these events. That is what they are set up for, and those are the type of goals they are targeting. And if you want to go as media, you need to understand that to get a free pass, you need to be somehow functioning in that setting. So, what that means is if you want to go — like I said, the two big ones are World Travel Market, which is in London in the Fall, and ITB Berlin, which is in Berlin in March.

If you want to go to one of those two things, you need to be showing that you are going to be covering the things that you learned there. Not that you are just going to do business for yourself because then they are going to want you to buy your own ticket. So, this is important to remember about expos. However, the flip side to that is that expos are the single best way to get that possibility download that I mentioned before to see the sheer number of tourism boards, of travel companies, of travel tech startups, of things that are out there that need your writing.

If you have never been to one of these, I highly, highly, highly recommend it. There are also some smaller ones around regionally. There’s one that’s on luxury, and again, I’ll show you more of these in the next page. The second type of event is, like I mentioned, ones that don’t have so much education, but are very networking-oriented that are for writers specifically. And these often have press trips attached that are before and/or after the event.

Those tend to be ones that are attached to travel writing associations, but there are also ones for travel bloggers. So, TBEX, for instance, is a good example of that. Now, the next bucket here, and this is probably the smallest bucket, is education-oriented events. And these are going to be the types of things where you can go and get like a master’s in travel blogging or travel writing over the course of the weekend.

Not officially, but essentially. So, this is pulled from my book “The Six-Figure Travel Writing Roadmap”. This is a huge list of all of the different — and, in fact, there’s probably some that aren’t even on here, but all of the major events that would benefit travel writers in some way, shape, or form. So, some of these, like I said, are going to be association events. And there are some on here that are expos. I mentioned ITB and World Travel Market. And then there’s also the International Luxury Travel Market.

So, some of the good ones for education purposes, specifically about travel writing, the top two that I would recommend are one is not on here because I just found out about it this year, but it’s one that I just came back from.

It’s called Travel and Words, and it’s typically in the Pacific Northwest. But the other one is the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. Now, this one I don’t always recommend to everybody because the event itself is pricey, and the hotels there are pricey, and it’s not in the most interesting location. And there’s also not trips associated with it.

It’s not necessarily going to be the right choice for all of you. But another one that’s similar in terms of focusing on travel education that’s not on here, like I said, because it’s new, is Travel and Words, and I’m going to put this over here so you can see it. And this is my new favorite recommendation if you are looking for a conference about how to be a travel writer. They have panels of editors that are telling you how to pitch them, what to pitch them.

They’ve got freelance writers from all different parts of their career who are telling you different types of magazines you want to be writing for and how to write for them, who are telling you how to set up your business, all sorts of things. So, that’s really great for how to be a travel writer. Another place where you could pitch people is Travel Classics. It’s kind of an interesting event. It’s a very small group but there’s a lot of big editors.

But I’ve heard from people that the editors will let you pitch them there, but then they don’t actually necessarily follow up on the pitches. So, this is also going to be another one that’s quite expensive, and I’m not necessarily sure if it’s right for the price tag. But pretty much all the other ones on here as media, you’re able to go at a very reduced, if not free, rate.

For instance, the Eye on Travel Conference, which is going to be about sort of advances in travel, New York TravFest is another one where you can go as media if you’re going to be covering the event. And somebody on this side had mentioned that they went to that. That has all sorts of panels about all sorts of things. It has responsible travel. It has disable travel. It’s very both trend and panel-oriented.

It can be a really great place to learn. World Travel Market, as I mentioned, is the one that’s in the Fall in London. And then there’s a lot of ones in blogging. So, there’s Traverse, which I just went to, which for the education component, was really, really great. There’s the TBEX conferences, which now have some new conference instructors, and they’re really working hard on their education.

The different association conferences that I mentioned which are good for FAM trips and for networking, but not necessarily so much for education, would be the Society of American Travel Writers. There’s the North American Travel Journalists Association. Another one that I don’t have on here is the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association Conference, and there’s some in other places as well.

If you specialize in a specific area, like if you’d like to work with more tourism boards, DMAI is the association for tourism boards in America — and actually North America, I think. And so, at their annual convention, there’s going to be a lot of tourism boards that you can network with. And if you’re interested in doing different types of marketing, content marketing, for businesses, it’s important to not just go to the conferences that are for travel writers.

But go to the conferences that are for the clients that you want to be working for. So, if you want to be working for tourism boards, like I said, DMAI is a good place to go. If you want to be writing for travel tech companies, which pay well and always need content, Eye for Travel is a great place to go. If you want to be writing for luxury travel companies like tour operators, Luxury Travel Market is a great place to go.

I’ve got a question on this side from somebody who is attending an entrepreneur tech conference and has a media invitation. So, if you’re going to these differently focused conferences which are about a slice of travel, or that are more towards the business side, everything I’m going to say in this call completely still holds true. The most important thing is just to ensure before you get there that it’s the right conference for you and who you want to meet when you’re there.

Let’s get into that. So, how do you prep and then work on the ground to make sure that you are getting the most out of these experiences? I think there’s really five main steps. So, the first one is to decide what is your goal. And this always surprises me when I’m at conferences and people tell me that they don’t really know why they’re there. Have any of you guys ever felt like this or heard somebody say this?

Drop it over here in the chat box. But I’ve heard this not just from attendees, but I’ve heard this actually from sponsors, and it cracks me up. I’ve been at a couple trade shows and also at TBEX, and gone to the speed networking, which if you don’t know what speed networking is. This is where in some conferences, and it’s becoming more prevalent, they have an opportunity for sponsors and attendees to have very short, sometimes longer, but they’re usually between five and ten-minutes appointments.

And during these appointments, it’s a little bit of a shit show, pardon my language. But the whole idea is that you’re pitching each other. And this comes from, like I was saying about a lot of the original travel trade shows have things for buyers and sellers. And there, they go, and they’re prepared, and they’re ready to do business, and they know what to do. But in a lot of these travel conferences, sponsors are there.

They haven’t quite prepared for the speed networking. And so, you kind of sit down and they either tell you all about what they’re doing with no idea how that actually works for you. Or they say, “Well, tell me about you.” So, if you want me to talk specifically more about how to ace speed networking, drop that in the questions box, and I’ll get to that later because I don’t want to talk about that specifically because it’s something that not all conferences have.

But one of the important things, whether you’re doing speed networking or not, is to set a goal of what you want to do there, and make sure that you know who is going to be at the event that will help you meet your goal. Okay? So, if you have the opportunity to do speed networking or other sort of appointment setting in advance, you can email those people and try to set up an appointment. Or you can go into the speed networking app instead of an appointment.

But otherwise, it’s up to you to figure out who is going to be there. So, how do you do this? So, let’s say, if anybody has a conference they’re going to and a goal, drop it to the side, and I’ll workshop that as well, but I’m just going to make one up for now. So, let’s say you’ve gone to Travel and Words, which is this conference that I was just at. They have a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of destinations there that are from the Pacific Northwest.

Perhaps you’ve gone to that event knowing that you would like to plant a great big trip around that area, and that you want to set up as many sponsored stays as possible between a certain set of dates around a particular type of travel that interests you. And let’s call it like craft, food, wine, and beer. Okay? Great area for that. So, you have gone to that conference with that goal in mind that you’re not there just to meet people.

You are there to meet people who can help you with story ideas and with sponsored travel for this trip that you would like to do in the Fall of this year. Okay? So, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at everybody that’s — on step two — you’re going to look at everybody who’s sponsoring the event and see which of those sponsors best fit your agenda. How do they fit in terms of geography? If you have four weeks, you can really spend all sorts of time and rural Washington and Oregon and make it over to Idaho.

But if you only have one week, you need to do things that are much closer together. So, you’re going to create a hit list, I like to call it a hit list, of the people that are your high priority networking targets for the event. And so, in this case, it would be the sponsors or along a certain route that you can accomplish in one week for your trip. And then you’re going to plant the seeds.

Like I said, if there’s a speed networking component attached to the conference that you’re going to be attending, then planting the seeds is really simple, right. You just set up a speed networking appointment. No. Planting the seeds goes much, much deeper than just reaching out to somebody and asking if you can meet with them at the event. So, here is what I recommend.

Whether you want to be meeting destinations, tourism boards, if you want to be meeting companies, or if you want to be meeting other big bloggers, or if you want to be meeting other people who are on the same level as you. Whatever type of person fits into your goal, to plant the seeds about two weeks a month out from the event, start following them on social. Start liking what they’re doing, start commenting on their websites or on their photos.

That is planting the seeds because setting up a meeting has not endeared the person to you. It hasn’t given them multiple sort of flashes of your name in order to recognize you and associate you with something. And it’s not necessarily going to be enough for them to go look you up and figure out how you can work together. But if you maintain yourself as a little bug in their ear for a little while leading up to the conference, then by the time you get there, they’re like, “Oh, yeah.”

And even if they never ever saw you online before a week ago, now, as far has their concerned, you’re like online friends, and they’re super excited to see you. Now, I have keep your eye on the prize here, and this is really for when you get to the event. So, I find especially if you’re going to a very large event. So, for instance, the World Travel Market or ITB, which are these large expos that I was talking about.

If you’re going to a very large event, it’s very, very easy to get swept up in all of the stuff that’s going on. If you go to an expo, there’s going to be hundreds or thousands of exquisitely created booths. Sometimes there’s three stories of booths, and there’s parties, and there’s first-class airplane seats to sit in. And there’s people giving you away all sorts of quite nice swag and things like that.

It’s very easy to forget who was on your hit list. And the fact that if you don’t have a meeting set with them, you need to be bumping into them. Or that you need to be also finding people who aren’t on your hit list because you didn’t know in advance that they were going to be there, but they funnel into your goal. So, one of the most important reasons to set a goal for yourself before you actually land on the ground is so that you don’t get distracted by shiny, or edible, or drinkable objects that are fantastic because the thing is, like I said — and I don’t want to go back to the earlier side.

But like I said when I said there’s four reasons to go to conferences, the one that needs to be associated with each conference you go to is cold hard opportunities. And the reason for that is that you need to have a return on investment for these things that you are going to. And the reason for that is that it’s way, way, way too easy — and I see this happen a lot in our master classes. It’s just way too easy to spend a lot of time networking, a lot of time talking to people about kind of opportunities, and never close them.

If you are going to conferences without knowing what type of opportunity you are looking for without deciding in advance what type of person you need to be talking about for that opportunity, you’re going to have a grand time attending these things and just find that you have more friends and less money. But not necessarily a path to do something with those connections. So, as you’re there, and you’re keeping the eye on the prize, or your eye on the prize, which is your prize, in fact, it’s also important not to put too much pressure on those interactions.

Okay? I see sometimes people who are trying to close a deal on the ground with somebody that they met five minutes ago. Or even somebody that they perhaps have been following online before, but they haven’t quite gotten the person’s attention enough, and then they go up to the person at the conference and just expect that now they’re best friends. It’s very, very important to take the temperature of the people that you are trying to get in touch with and not necessarily — when I say take the temperature, I don’t mean like if they seem busy, to assume that they’re interested.

But I mean to see how far they are in the pipeline of having a partnership of some kind with you, of having whether it’s a friendship that’s a referral friendship, or if it’s a brand that you want to be writing for, or if it’s destination that you want to have to take you on a trip. But it’s really important to keep in mind that everyone is completely strapped for time at these events. Inaudible

It’s not that I’m saying that people are going to be wasted drunk, but between all of these different factors that are happening, it can be really hard to remember, even if you had a really great conversation, that you may have promised something, or you may have had a plan for something. And then now you as a person who went there hoping to work together on this, and that person has essentially forgot. And that leads to very, very, very awkward, and uncomfortable, and typically negative conversations.

When I say don’t put too much pressure on these meetings, what I mean is that focus on the connecting aspect. You definitely do want to be making sure that you are meeting people who are related to your goals, and that you are making sure that you spent time with them on the ground. But don’t spend too much time discussing business. This is the weird thing, right. I’m talking about setting business goals and making sure that you go to conferences with a business goal in mind and not go to ones that don’t fit your business goals.

But at the same time, you need to go there and essentially discuss business as little as possible, like 5% of the time. And here’s the weird reason for that. It’s like I said, people do business with people. So, they will remember so much better that you guys talked for half an hour about your different study abroad experiences in Italy, and that you recommended all of these places for them to go with their kids the next time that they’re in Italy, and that you gave them the name of the restaurant, and that you told them the story about the owner.

They will remember that so much more than this Instagram class that you were talking to them about doing together. Okay? So, when we don’t put pressure on the first meeting, what that means is that there’s a lot of pressure on our follow up. And this is the area where I see a lot of people start to fall off. So, I want to talk about that. But I’ve got a couple questions here on the side. Okay.

We’ve got “I’d like to make a public Twitter list and add people to that, so they get a notification that you’re doing that. It also makes it easier for me to keep up with the right people by just looking at this list.” Now, I like this tip, and I get added to these Twitter lists a lot, and I see them, but the thing that I find interesting about the Twitter list is that when I see that somebody has added me to a Twitter list, and I go to it in my notifications.

Like, I go to the Twitter list, and you see who else is on the Twitter list, but it doesn’t necessarily endear you to that person as much as if the person has been thoughtfully commenting on your post, or liking them regularly, or things like that. So, while having a Twitter list is useful for you to follow people, I don’t find being on the receiving end of that that it’s quite as ingratiating as some of these other things that you can do.

And, by the way, speaking of ingratiating, if you want to be really, really, really ingratiating, find an article that somebody has written not on their blog, but like an actual article. And even if it’s old — sorry, it just started raining. Tell me if you have trouble hearing me. But email them — everybody has their email on their website or a contact form — and tell them that you read this article and you really like it. You would not believe how infrequently that happens.

And I’ve always noticed I just do it because I like to do it, but I always notice that when I do that, people are just like floored. Like, people don’t get that that often. So, if somebody writes for BBC, or USA Today Road Warrior’s Blog, or something like that, find out. That is the best way for them to remember you. Okay, a couple more questions. “I’m not a big fan of Facebook. Is that your preferred method for social media?” I am also not a big fan of Facebook, Michelle, and sometimes people Facebook message me, and I probably see it like three months later.

I think some people are really into Facebook. Some people these days are really into Instagram. I notice that a lot of people, instead of direct messaging to find people at conferences over Twitter, now people are often doing it through Instagram. So, it’s really different for everybody. And how do you find that because on most people’s blogs, they’ll have all of their different social handles listed. I think this is just kind of a tossup.

And you can go and seen how active they are, but the thing is that people schedule things, so that’s not still the best metric. But if they have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all up there, I would see perhaps what they’re posting real-time things on, and that’s probably their preferred method. But it’s different. Like, I really only use Twitter. And some people these days are just really big on Instagram.

My friend Kirwin, who I think is also playing hooky from TBEX right now to be on the call, I believe is pretty good on Facebook. Kirwin, chime in if that’s not true. But a lot of people are on most networks. Especially anybody who’s a blogger, you really have to be checking in on all of them. So, I think it matters a little bit less what’s the preferred method rather than the one that they’re most likely to be looking at. I know that there was one more question earlier. Okay.

Someone wanted some more information about speed networking. So, this speed networking stuff is, like I said, an offshoot of something that’s a buyer program that has been in a lot of these travel conferences for a long time.

But in the media side, it’s never to have these one-on-one media appointments. And so, as I mentioned, often it’s not very clear to all parties involved what is supposed to happen. And I actually have something on the follow up that’s kind of related to this. But you don’t want to be in these meetings a Silicon Valley startup who is looking for VC funding and spews the elevator pitch at everybody they possibly can, and here’s why.

The key to acing speed dating is to forget for a moment what your goal is and concentrate as hard has possible until you know the answer on what the other person’s goal is. Because you might have a really fantastic pitch prepared and some really interesting stuff going on, but if they are there for a completely different purpose that doesn’t mesh with that, you’re just going to be operating in different planes.

So, what I like to do is I sit down, and no matter what they say first, I always pivot it. And like if they ask me a question, I say, “Well, before I answer that, I would love to know what brought you guys here and why you’re meeting with people and what are you are looking to find out.” Because this allows you to change what you’re saying to fit that. And I’ve had this lead to some really interesting stuff.

I’ve had some people who are actually at TBEX because they are looking for people to write for their blog, and as I mentioned in the newsletter and the blog post leading up to this call, this is very, very common now. And nobody is talking about that. All these bloggers come up, and they just think that the company is there either to do affiliate sales or to like put them on a free trip. But they’re actually looking for writers.

They typically, for the last like ten people who’ve been coming to speed dating with them sit there and listen to people’s pitch, and then sort of write down whether they like the person or not, but don’t really know whether that person can write from them. So, in other cases, you’ll find people who aren’t able to set up trips, and they’re only there to give information about their destination.

This is also really important because if you sit down, and you are there to set up your trip, and you’re like, “So, I’m coming these days, and like what can I do during that time and everything?” But they aren’t able to set that up for you, they’re going to tell you all sorts of things to do, and you might think that they’re going to help you with them, but they’re actually not. So, my number, number one tip for speed dating is to start by figuring out what they want, and then change whatever you’re going to say around that to make the most of unifying their goal with your background.

Okay. So, like I said, I knew I had a slide about the speed dating. So, my other pet peeve. I told you my favorite tip, but my pet peeve about speed dating, and I have been on both sides of this now, having sponsored a few conferences. My pet peeve about speed dating is people who are paper pushers. Now, what do I mean by this? So, people who are paper pushers sit down at your table, and they open like their folder, and this happens on both sides.

Destinations and companies do it, and writers do it as well. And they open like their folder, their press trip, whatever, their press kit, and they just start telling you all these things that are on the paper. Two things are happening here. First of all, what am I going to do with that paper? Like, honestly, we have file — what do you call them — file cabinets at home where I put all these papers that I get at these events, and they just sit there, and I never look at them again.

No matter how much I liked you, the information should be digital. And a lot of exhibitors are starting to understand this, but I don’t find as many bloggers do it. So, don’t use paper. So, what do I mean by that? First of all, you want to send them things after the fact, but second of all, on your phone, if you have like a big Samsung Galaxy or on your iPad, if you have it, have a little mini slide show. Like everything that would be in these papers you want to show, but have it on the screen.

And then here’s what I do. So, I find out, like I said, what they’re interested in. I move it to the correct slide. I give them my iPad, and I say, “Okay, here. Great. This is what you need to know about me.” I give it to them, and they can scan it in like 30 seconds. And then while they’re doing that, I get my business cards, I give them my business card, and they get their business cards. Now, they have some appropriate background on me.

I know what they’re looking for, and now we can start to talk because the second problem with being a paper pusher is that I find that people are just giving me a guided tour of these lecture materials about them, and there is no connection happening. And when you only have a very scarce, scant, and very precious number of minutes to make these connections, you can’t be doing that.

So, the magic happens, the business happens, the closing happens, on the follow up, not at the event, like I said before. So — oops, sorry. In terms of follow up, I have five tips here, and then I’m going to give you a little formula, but like I said, the formula is a little flexible because it needs to be quite personalized. So, the biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest most important thing about following up is that it should be about you as little as humanely possible.

You should only be mentioned in the context of the relationship that you had with the person at the event. And otherwise, it should be about them. And I think that this is hard. And I think sometimes we sit down, and we write these emails with what we want to tell them, and then if you don’t already do this, you should always look at your emails and make sure the first word of every paragraph isn’t the same. But you sit down and you look at it, and every paragraph starts with I.

I wanted, like I’m doing, I just, I something. They’re all I sentences, and this is not a good way to ingratiate yourself to somebody. And you might think, “Well, I had a great connection with this person. Why do I have to write them this very cold email-type email of ingratiating myself to them?” Because now they’re home. Because you’re not with them anymore, and because people have psychological triggers. And when there’s an email all about them, it simply makes them much happier.

It’s really just that easy. So, I can’t even remember who it was from, and this is quite telling that even though I basically collect this information, I can’t even tell you who sent me this email. But somebody sent me an email after a conference recently, and it was literally just about where they’re going on their around the world trip, and these are their handles, and I should follow them, and this and another thing. I had no idea why I was getting that email.

You never want someone to not know why they are getting your email. So, that’s the next point. Don’t let your email lack a reason for reaching out. And a next step, someone should never ever, ever have your email and be wondering why they got it first of all. Okay? That’s a big bad. But the second thing is even if you make it clear why you’re sending them that email, like I said, it shouldn’t be about you.

It should be about them, and it should also have a next step because saying, “Oh, I just wanted to let you know blah, blah, blah, blah,” is the end of a conversation. And if you want this email to be the beginning of a conversation, the beginning of a great, beautiful conversation that leads to money for all of you. So, what that means is that you need to have some sort of plan, some sort of steps, and just like I recommend with pitching, I recommend closing your pitch email by saying, “Would you be interested in blah, blah, blah article?”

Make sure that you end your follow up conference emails with a question, and make it an easy question. So, that question could be, “Would you like to talk more about this?” That question could be, “Could I send you some more information about this?” That question could be, “Can we set up a time for me to interview for this podcast?” All sorts of things.

But the reason you want to end with a question, especially if there’s a somewhat significant amount of information in your email, is to keep them from sort of falling into reading mode, and then just flipping to the next email. You want to get them to respond, and the best way to do that is to outline your plan so they know what they’re signing up for, and give them a very easy question so that they can just say, “Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks. Let me know what time works for you. Okay?”

Number three, don’t clutter your follow up with too many requests or pieces of information, especially not about what you’re doing. Okay? So, like I said, these emails of, “Here are all the things that are going on with me, and I am doing this book, and doing that thing, and this other thing, and this other thing, and this other thing, and this other thing, and this other thing,” are very common. I’ve gotten them from other conferences before as well.

But besides being all about you, one of the most important issues with those is that you force people into this read-only mode, even if they’re interested. Where they’re not interacting, they’re not really considering how this applies to you, they are taking in information. And you want these follow ups to continue the conversation that you spent time and effort and invested in starting at the event. So, just like you wanted to go to the conference in the first place with a very clear goal in mind, you want — especially your first follow up email.

You don’t have to be as strict about this in the future ones. But you want your first follow up email to be short and to one point, just one point. So, like I said, it could be that you are asking if you can send them more information about something you discussed at the conference. It could be you’re asking if you could set up a time for a follow up as the opportunity to discuss 27 other different things that you think you should work on with this person. Take small steps.

And there’s an important reason for this as well. And I’m going to just go forward to the last slide. So, this is because there is psychological power in asking for things. And this works two ways. There’s power in asking for things and somebody doing a small thing, and now, you create a cycle of yes’s. Okay? But there’s also a power in doing things for somebody else. Okay?

Just the same as if you asked somebody to set up an interview for your podcast, you are going to feel that you like them and you want to do something else for them, it works the other way. So, I highly recommend that you close your follow up email by offering that person something because there’s a lot of studies that show that when somebody helps you, you feel indebted to them. But it also works both ways. When you help somebody, you also care about what happens to them.

Just as much as you’re sending these emails and you’re asking people to do things for you, or work on partnerships with you, or if you can blog for them, and all sorts of things like that, you also need to make sure it’s a two-way street because you don’t want to get into the situation where you feel like, “Oh, I wrote these people, and I followed up with them a couple times, and I haven’t heard back, and they’re horrible people.” You want to remember that great connection that you had.

And one of the ways to do it is to keep the conversation and the connection upbeat at all times. So, some people do this at the end of every single email they ever send, and they’re brilliant, brilliant people who have a lot of connective capability, but it’s most important on the first email. So, you want to offer them something. And on the next slide about how to put together an email, I’m going to talk about what that can be. But let’s just go back to the fourth don’t for a second. Don’t forget to remind them how you met.

This is actually what should go at the top of your email, and we’re going to look at it again when I do the slide about the formula. But they might remember your face and not your name. They might remember your blog and not your name. It is so easy for that black and white email to come that has no relationship whatsoever to this great interaction that you had over drinks in this little topless bar in the steps of The Old City of Girona when it was the first time that you saw The Old City of Girona in the whole conference.

And everybody was just so excited to be in this beautiful place. Your black and white email has nothing to do with that. And it’s so easy if you just start writing this email and referencing how you want to work together for them to forget who you are, and how you met, and that they like you. So, this is the number, number one thing that you want to put in your email. So, here is how you should put it together.

Start by talking about how you met. And this is important. If it was a bit mundane, if you kind of just met at a cocktail bar, or at a cocktail party rather, it’s a conference, find a way to make it interesting. And hopefully, you made it interesting at the time. Hopefully, you found a way to bring up something that you had in common. Like I said, this should typically be something social, not something business-oriented.

Like that you both studied in the same country, you traveled the same country, or you went to the same college, or you know the same person, or you visited the same town, or you’re from the same town, something like that. That sticks much better than something business-oriented. But if you didn’t do that when you were there, you can find a great way to do it in your email as well. So, the way to do this would be to tie in something else.

Maybe you met them at this party at the conference, and there wasn’t anything particularly significant about your meeting, but you could mention something else about the party that was interesting. You could mention an observation. You can say like, “Wasn’t that Big Bird character that they had walking around taking selfies with everyone just hilarious?”

But make that intro to your email when you’re reminding them that you guys met. Make it interesting, make it positive. And this is important because when somebody is opening a cold email, the beginning of the email has the most important of all function of getting them to keep reading. So, it’s very common for these emails to start with, “Hi, so and so introduced me to you at such and such conference. It was great to meet you.”

I’m bored. A lot of people will just keep reading, but hopefully, the people that you’re trying to make these big partnerships and deals with, and write for, and work on programs together, hopefully, they’re big people who have busy inboxes. And to stand out in them, and particularly to make them excited to say yes to the question you’re going to ask at the end of your email, you want to start off on a positive note.

Now, once you’ve done that, you want to get right to the point, and you want to tell them why you’re writing, and what are the next steps about that one thing that you want to do with them. Again, don’t put everything that’s going on in your life. Don’t put every plan that you want to do with this person or this business. Just that one thing that we’re going to focus on in this follow up email.

No more information. Nothing about where you’re traveling to next. Nothing about where to follow you. And then add some value for them. So, this can be an introduction. So, let’s say — okay. So, there’s somebody here from a destination, it’s a pretty big city, I met them at the Women in Travel Summit. They are looking at starting a very interesting, specific blog that’s about meeting planning actually.

And they need somebody with a background both in leisure travel and with connections to meeting planners. Okay? So, what I might do after the Women in Travel Summit is email them, and remind them that we met, and about this funny thing that we had discussed. And then say, “I’m writing to follow up on that conversation that we had about this blog that you’re interested in starting about interesting information for meeting planners.”

Okay? “I would love to talk to you at TBEX, where we’re both going to be now, about that, and I’m sending you this e-networking request so that we can meet.” Now, the extra information I would give is — here’s a couple examples of the type of blog post that I think that you guys should be looking at doing for you to check out. And then at the end, I would say, “Do you have time for us to meet at TBEX? Thanks.” And that’s it, and that would be the whole email.

Okay, a question over here. “Regarding the next step, what if some of the connections you made aren’t people you want to work with immediately, but you still want to follow up on?” Thank you so much. That’s a great question. So, this is really important because these connections, I found that — we were just talking last night how many TBEXs some of us had been to, and I found that it can take like three or four years of repeat seeing people at conferences before you’re like super close just from seeing them at conferences with no in between follow up whatsoever.

If there’s somebody that you might want to do something with later, or even just that you have a really great connection with, you want to still do this, and the next step should be something like hopping on the phone, inviting them to a webinar that some other person is doing that is really interesting that they might like. And then talking about how it went afterwards, telling them that you’re going to another conference, and would they like you to send them some tips.

The next step can be social. The next step can be helping them develop their business. The next step doesn’t necessarily have to be, “Let’s set up a phone call to discuss that blog that you’re looking at starting.”

If you have any questions, let me know at questions@dreamoftravelwriting.com. And I have just a couple other questions over here that I want to answer quickly. So, one that came in over email that I thought was really interesting, and I don’t think she’s on the call, so I want to make sure I get to it, is that she said that she was at World Travel Market in London and realized that most brands where travel companies approached her were interested in figuring out whether or not she had a strong blog.

But no one mentioned anything about writing on their own blog. So, this is a really interesting one because like I said in the earlier — in the newsletter and the blog preceding this, this is new. That people are realizing that when they go to these blogging conferences, they should be looking for bloggers right for them. And a lot of people still don’t know how to do it, and don’t really know what questions to ask, and things like this.

As I mentioned when we were talking about speed networking, this also applies just when you’re walking around to different exhibitors and having a chat. You need to ask them what they’re there for. And I also — if I’m looking for blogging work, I tend to ask them what sort of content they have on their own site, and who produces it, and what’s the strategic plan for that, and if they have any needs coming up. So, that’s one thing that you can do.

Another question was, “If you have a very specific expertise, for instance, like you are in Greece, and that’s basically the area that you write about, do you just engage with companies from that area? Or when you go to a show…” And this is especially for trade shows. “Do you talk to people from other areas of the world, or other types of travel that you’re not necessarily knowledgeable about?” I really like to use these shows to find new areas that I might be interested in breaking into.

And the thing is that often you can break into those areas because that person has a writing need that you can fill. So, I definitely recommend walking around and seeing who else is there. For instance, somebody who is here at TBEX was at the TBEX in Israel about a month back, and he lives in the Midwest, and he wasn’t necessarily thinking, “I’m going to do a big Israel content project,” so much as he went because he was speaking at TBEX, and now, he was like two or three Israel content projects that he’s working on.

And he had no plans for that. He had no idea that they had the money to support the type of projects that he did or anything like that. So, this goes back to what I said earlier about possibility. One of the best reasons to go to these events is to explore what else is out there. And you might find yourself pivoting to something that really interests you that you didn’t even know interested you before.

So, if there’s not any other questions, I’m going to sign off and skedaddle over to my master class. And I will see some of you at the TBEX party later tonight.