What I’m going to talk about today is not just how to use the Travel Magazine Database. I’m going to talk about some pitching best practices and really why we created the database in the first place, so that you understand how it exists to help you pitch. So, if you don’t already have database access, either because you haven’t set up your trial or you haven’t purchased it yet, don’t worry, I’m going to show it to you and walk through it.
If you’re not interested in purchasing the database, and you just want to know how to make your pitches better, we’re also going to be talking about that. So, that’s great. But if you don’t have it yet, you’ll certainly be able to follow along. So, today, we’re going to talk about how to use the Travel Magazine Database to power up your pitches. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about why we created it, but really, the Travel Magazine Database is something that sometimes I send people invites for a free trial, and they’re like, “What are you selling?”
I think it’s really funny because we fund this. We spend quite a lot of money paying our writers their desired rates to write these entries for us. And so, at the moment, it’s really something that we do kind of almost as charity for the community. And so, it really is about you guys. And if there’s stuff that you’re confused about or that you want to see in there, let us know, and we will always try to make that happen. So, today, specifically, we’re going to talk about where are the magazines hiding.
One of the ways that a lot of people already use the database is just to find new magazines, but there’s a lot more that you can do with it, but we’re going to start with that. And then we’re going to talk about how in your pitches to make sure you’re getting a very solid match. So, I often hear from people who pitch a lot, who have perhaps been writing for a long time, but have a very low not just response rate, but particularly acceptance rate.
This is not something that I’ve ever struggled with. And so, when people started asking me to coach them in travel writing, I was really intrigued when I heard people were getting low response rates. And then when I started looking at people’s pitches, I understood a lot of people aren’t pitching something that the magazine could use. So, we’re going to talk about that in the setting of the database and also generally.
Then because anytime I talk about pitching, people ask me if I can show them a pitch, or show them a pitch format, so I’ve got my typical slides that some of you may have seen before about the three sections of the pitch in the headline that I’ll also go through quickly. And then we’ll dive more deeply into the database. So, you might hear I’m kind of losing my voice right now. If you’re having trouble hearing me at all, do let me know, and I’ll try to project a little bit more. Okay.
This webinar is brought to you by Dream of Travel Writing, and in addition to the Travel Magazine Database that we’re going to look at today, we do a lot of other stuff. So, we’ve got a lot of workshops. In fact, I’m going to be seeing some of you soon in a couple different cities. And we also have purchased a writing retreat in the Catskills where we have really nice, intimate weekend events where people can make some really big strides in their understanding of the field and their output.
Particularly around this topic, I, as mentioned, never found pitching to be a challenging thing, and when I started to understand what people were told about how to do travel writing, it dawned on me why so many people are having issues. Because a lot of the people who are teaching you how to do travel writing maybe haven’t been editors, or they’re only telling you their point of view and not what other editors like.
When I talk about pitching, I literally just flew in, and I got back to my apartment an hour ago from a conference in Oregon, which I was at specifically because there were so many editors there. And it was so funny because all the people at this conference were like, “You came here all the way from New York?” And I was like, “Actually, I came from Milwaukee because I was at Women and Travel Summit.”
But yeah, and they didn’t realize how special it was to have seven, eight editors of recognizable magazines and regional magazines talking about what they like. And so, I’m just always gathering in aggregate what editors are looking for. And not just basing this on my experience as an editor, which I have been. And also, I’m always, always talking to writers. I was just having a really interesting email conversation with a gentleman in London today that I’m going to reference later in the call as well.
Everything I’m telling you about how to use the database and why we’ve created it really comes from what editors want, what successful people are doing, and what people need. So, why do we need a travel magazine database? Why did is even get started? In the conference that I was at over the weekend, somebody mentioned in a session on the business of freelance writing something called the Wooden Horse Publishing Database. Some of you might be familiar with this. It used to be around for a while.
When I started writing, I would get a day pass. You could get a day pass to this site. I would get a day pass, and I would go in, and I would just look for every magazine that I might be interesting in pitching. And it was kind of weird the way they presented the information. They had some things that it didn’t really make sense why they were there. And some things that were hard to use. And then they had a mix of the editorial guidelines that were online.
Also, some stuff that they had gotten from the editors. So, it was a little bit confusing, but it was tons of information, and it was great. And that really turned me, when I first started writing, onto a lot of different types of magazines. And even before that database went defunct, which it now is, I wanted to do this for travel specifically because there’s so many magazines around the world that you don’t have access to in your own market, but that you could be writing for.
When we first started the database, we specifically focused on magazines like this. Magazines that are printed in Asia but in English, or very regional magazines with a specific niche topic area that there’s just no way you could get if you don’t live there. So, the reason that I have found you need to start every pitch, every magazine idea, with the magazine itself is that this is how you get the absolute highest possible response rate.
When you have an idea that you have generated in the wild on your own that you tried to then force into the shape of a magazine, what often happens — and I was really delighted to hear an editor call out this exact instance at the conference last weekend — what often happens is that you pitch them a story, they say, “Yeah, sure,” but you have the story in your head how you have envisioned it. Perhaps if you have a blog, it might be how you would write it on your own blog.
Or if you’ve written for another publication frequently, how you would write it for that publication. And you don’t really dial into the magazine itself. It’s tone, it’s format, it’s word count, it’s layout, and then when you file your story, the editor is not happy. And then that makes you not happy because they’ll ask you to rewrite the entire thing.
I’ve seen people in various writing groups I’m in. People always ask when I mention Facebook groups — I’m in a lot of more general journalism Facebook groups, which probably wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for you guys that are more about human interest writing and things like that. But I see several people in writing groups that I’m in with these sob stories, but over, and over, and over again that they wrote this story for this editor, and he had all these things to say about it.
They worked really hard in the rewrite, and they sent it back, and now, they haven’t heard from him yet. And the thing is that thought this is an uncommon situation, it’s completely avoidable. And so, one of the best ways to avoid it entirely is to have your idea come from the magazine. So, rather than having an idea that you would like to find a home for, you familiarize yourself with magazines or the database, and use that to spark ideas. So, what I mean by that is that you might have a topic.
For instance, I saw some interesting ones come in my email that I’m hopefully going to have time to weave in later. But I want to just call out a really neat one, as long as I can find it, that that I believe Naomi sent. So, she has a trip in Canada coming up, and there’s a campfire dinner with traditional cooking techniques taught by a First Nations chef. And guests then have a chance to dine on these dishes. That’s cool, right? It’s a cool concept.
I just had — if you read the blog post or the e-mail newsletter, preceding this webinar, I had one earlier today that I thought was really cool just based on watching the Star Wars movie on the flight today in the background while I was working, which was that aside from Petra in Jordan, which more and more people know about and go to now. There’s a lot of other sites by that same ancient civilization that are equally, if not even more, spectacular for photography and just to visit.
The idea that I had was like the alternative Petra, right, but so, that’s not an article idea. That’s the granule. That’s the topic. That’s the seed. And so, when you take that and then say, “Let me go find a magazine that’s going to cover alternatives to Petra or First Nations dining.” You often draw a blank. And so, what I prefer to do is to travel and pick things up. Or to pick up ideas like I obviously haven’t visited yet this place that’s like Petra because I just found out about it today.
To have things that you might like to write about, and then to be looking through what magazines are looking for in the database, and see the section that’s the perfect fit for that idea and go, “Oh, this is where that idea should go,” rather than trying to dig through the internet or the database just searching for that thing. It can be hard because the whole idea is that you want to write something that a magazine hasn’t covered before.
How would you find the right magazine for it, if the magazine for it wouldn’t have covered it before? So, we’re going to talk more about that in a little bit. So, where are all these magazines that are the perfect fit for these ideas hiding? I often have people tell me that they just can’t find a home for a story, and then I’ll list seven off the top of my head. And it’s because I know a lot of sections of a lot of magazines both from teaching and from editing the database.
I’ve noticed that there’s a couple different areas that people tend to not be familiar with that are really great sources of this information. So, we’ve covered this in the past in the webinar Magazine Landscape, and I’m just going to go through these next slides a bit quickly, so that we have time to get really into the database. But I just want to say a few areas that as you’re looking around in the database, once you get your trial set up or with your access, you should look out for.
These are ones in particular that I’ve tried to collect, or that we’re working on collecting. We add a new entry to the database every day, and every month I have kind of something I’m working on. Right now, we’re working on getting a lot of the main regional magazines in there. So, I have some writers who are working on independent magazines and other things. But then I have two or three of our writers just working — oops, sorry — just working on the Los Angeles Magazine, and the North Carolina Magazine, and the Charlotte Magazine, things like that.
This though is a category that we really have a lot of. These are the magazines that are not airline magazines per se, but they are magazines that are printed and very highly distributed in lounges, and sometimes those lounges aren’t just the commercial airline lounges. Sometimes they’re the lounges at private airports for people who have their own planes. And you wouldn’t believe how many of those there are.
The thing is that these can be a really great source of work because they’re often found in areas — you might think, “Oh, I have an idea for an in-flight magazine. Oh, but this airline doesn’t fly there.” But these magazines will be in every airline, or these magazines will cover every destination. So, I really like these more sort of general luxury magazines for that. But if you have an idea that’s not luxury, obviously it’s not going to work for one of these magazines, but these tend to be incredibly global.
As long as you have a very fascinating idea that hasn’t been overdone, it can probably fit in one of these. Association magazines. So, you’re probably familiar with some association magazines without realizing it. The AAA Magazines are actually association magazines. So, what an association magazine is, is a subset of custom magazines. If you’re not familiar with custom magazines, those are magazines that are printed by a company or an organization for its members or its customers.
An airline magazine is a type of custom magazine because it is printed at the expense of the airlines. Well, they do make quite a bit of money on the ads these days. But it’s printed at the expense of the airlines to provide to its customers. They’re not paying for the publication. Likewise, AAA, they just send out their magazines. AARP is another association. They just send their magazines to members.
These can also be an often-overlooked source of really good geographic diversity. So, I often hear people tell me they have an idea that’s related to driving, or related to a day trip, or something like that. And I say, “Oh, you did look at the AAA Magazine?” and they said, “Oh, well, I look at such and such, but I didn’t see a good section.” Or they don’t seem to use that many freelancers. And I said, “Well, do you know there’s like 23 of them?”
There really are, and they’re all different, and some of them have longer stories. And they don’t all do just their region. In particular, Via and Journey, which are two of the more literary of the AAA magazines. They do stuff from all over the world as well. So, English language magazines in non-native English language markets. I touched on this a little bit earlier, and I’ve got specifically some Asian ones here, but there’s also some really great European ones. We had trouble finding them in South America.
I had somebody down there scouting for us, and it was really hard to find English language magazines. But particularly in Asia and also in Europe, we just added a really interesting new one. And I can pull it up later if anybody is interested in this, if this is your market. But there is a family publication out of France which actually prints in English that has a really nice travel magazine, and it’s a beautifully laid out publication.
They also have some other sections besides the travel section that can be a good fit for some articles that you might have. And also, you guys, as I’m going through before we get to the actual database, just drop, even if you don’t have specific question, what kind of stuff you would like to see while I’m in there. So, if you’d like me to look really in-depth at specific entries, or cruise through and show you the whole variety of what we have, let me know so that I can tailor that part of the talk. Thanks.
I talked a little bit about custom magazines when we were talking about the association magazines, right. But this is another area that we’ve really been working on adding because custom magazines, like I said, you don’t get them, unless you are a customer of that business, whatever that business is. So, I’m very proud to say that I think we now have every airline magazine that would ever be worth writing for.
There are some that we don’t have that are for like very small African airlines or things like that, but we’ve — I think now, they’re either up or they’re in the queue. We have every single airline magazine and exactly which sections you would want to pitch in there. But there’s also other ones. There’s car magazines. There’s cruise magazines, and there’s hotel magazines.
We have some of each of these, but these are the type of things where these magazines aren’t going anywhere because they don’t rely on ad sales or newsstand sales. They are essentially a form of content marketing, right. Like the hotel or the car company is putting it out as an added perk for its customers. And, in fact, particularly on the hotel front, I keep hearing more and more new magazines being created for hotels.
Marriott, for instance, has a different magazine. And not just something that’s printed once a year, but something that’s printed monthly or quarterly in a lot of its different markets. So, they have one. Destino is the Miami one, I believe. But they just started a new one for just one property that I saw. They’ve got a new contract that they’re picking up with one of the big content custom magazine publishers.
Just because you found one magazine for a hotel, that doesn’t mean that you can’t also write for some other very similar stories for other magazines for the same hotel that are in other geographic areas. So, we’ve talked about the different magazines. So, how do we know when we have an idea that it is a good match to a specific magazine? Because remember I was talking before that this is one of the big failure points when people are telling me that they’re having trouble with their pitches, or they’re having trouble getting responses to their pitches.
People tend to not think that the problem is with the pitch. Some people think that they have a hard time pitching, but other people are very confident in their pitch, but the problem is actually the idea. It might not necessarily be the writing. This is really the biggest issue that keeps people from getting more responses from editors. And I really love to hear from people who have come to our events and things like that. I’ll be — it’ll be the weekend or something and somebody will write me, and they’ll say, “Hey the Delta Sky editor just got back to me.”
When you do this correctly, big editors get back to you on the first go around. And that’s something I really want to stress because I thought when I started that I had to just write for magazines where the whole magazine I knew their topic really well. And then, I’ve mentioned this before, but I had a bicycling accident one year, and I lost all my clients, and I had to start from scratch, and I was just pitching anything.
I was pitching big magazines because I wanted to get a lot of money quickly. And I couldn’t believe how nice they were and how quickly they got back to me. But it was because I didn’t just say, “Hey, I’m going to go to this dinner with First Nations chefs and learn how to cook original First Nations British Colombian food.” I said, “You have a roundup section in Everyday with Rachael Ray on food. Would you be interested in opportunities to experience various types of Native American cooking all over the U.S. and Canada with your family?”
Here’s a couple examples. So, that’s the way that you get responses from editors, is by having that really tight match. But the thing is that we can’t do that match in our head. You can’t just go on a trip and know what that match is. You need to be familiar with magazines. And before you ask me, because people always say this, how familiar do I need to be with the magazine. You don’t need to read a bunch of back issues. You don’t even need to read one back issue.
You really only need to be familiar enough with the certain section that you’re pitching to know that the idea is a fit. So, this is actually a really nice sort of weight off your shoulders to know that you really don’t need to be reading the entire magazine, and you don’t need to be reading several issues. You just need to read several versions, or even just skim several versions of the column of the specific type of article that you are pitching. Okay.
I’m going to go quickly through the pitch formula, so that as we talk in a minute about what sections of the pitch different things will go into from the database, you know what I’m talking about. So, I always say that the perfect pitch formula has three paragraphs, and I have another slide in the back which is on the headline because that’s something that people always ask about. So, I often refer to them as P1, P2, P3.
P1 is going to be the intro. It’s going to be the part where you are trying to hook the editor’s attention. So, when I say the intro, I don’t mean introduction like you’re at a party and you’re introducing a friend to another friend. It means to lead them somewhere, and that is — I made this up, but I like to think that that is why people call it the lead. And journalists also spell it L-E-D-E. I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s the British spelling, but correct me on that if we have British people on the call.
The purpose of the lead is to get the editor’s attention enough for them to hear more about your idea. So, that should be written and should showcase your writing style, but not in a bombastic, adjective-filled sense of place sort of description that goes on for three pages like a novel. Okay? That’s not the purpose of this. It’s really important to remember that the purpose is to catch the editor’s attention. And so, sometimes that only needs to be a time peg. Sometimes that only needs to be a statistic.
The lead really varies with what the article is. And so, as we are looking at things in the database, especially if there’s something you’re interested in, ask me how I would do the lead on that pitch, and I’ll pull out a couple and say that as well. So, the second part of the pitch is where you’re going to talk about what you will write about in the piece. So, I like to describe it as in the beginning in the P1 in the lead you’re writing like you would write in your article, and then you stop.
You get them sort of following you down this path, and then you say, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, but there’s a price of entry to hear this story.” So, that’s what you need to remember; is that the middle paragraph, the part when you’re outlining your story, isn’t telling the story. It’s describing the story. This is a really important distinction. So, you’re not going to tell them the whole story in your pitch.
This is really, really important, but it’s also about the language you use. So, the language in the middle paragraph is going to be more general, more vague, more direct, less descriptive. It’s not going to be the same thing that you would be using in your article, as is the case with the lead. I often take the lead that I wrote in a pitch, and I just dump that directly in the article because I spent a lot of time on it, and it’s great, and it’s ready to go. The third paragraph, and this isn’t something that the Travel Magazine Database really touches on.
We’re not going to talk about this too much today. The third paragraph is where you talk about why you are the person to write this story. And that has two parts. It has why you are a writer who should be trusted with a story that you might not turn in. And then the editor will have a hole in their publication. That’s really one of the big purposes of this. People think it’s telling the editor all this information about them, but you really only need to tell them enough to prove to them that you are trustworthy and professional.
Then the second part of that is why you are the one to write this specific article. So, those are the two parts of the eyes ISG, which stands for I’m so great paragraph. And I borrow that from another really lovely writer. So, there’s a lot of different types of leads you can use. And, like I said, I just wanted to go through the structure of the pitch quickly. But, like I mentioned, as we’re going through the database, if you have a question of a specific article, you can be like, “Hey, what kind of lead would you recommend on that article.”
We’re going to talk quite a bit more in depth when we get in the database about how you can use that to really write this second paragraph for you. And I don’t have it pulled up yet, but I’m going to pull up an example that I use a lot from Air Canada, which is a very prickly structure of an article, which is the kind of thing that if you didn’t know about that in advance, if you didn’t have a copy of the magazine or see it in the database, you could easily run afoul in your pitch.
Like I said, the P3, the one that’s about you, we’re not going to touch on that too, too much. But one other thing that I wanted to talk about quickly is the headline because people often wonder what the subject of their pitch should be. And, again, for those of you that are just joining us, I’m just literally an hour ago fresh back from a conference with a bunch of editors, including the editor of Sunset Magazine, and Seattle Magazine, and Northwest Travel and Life, where I attended a bunch of panels and sessions with editors.
I’m really speaking right from the — not I’m calling editors horses, but right from the horse’s mouth, so to say here. They really, in the pitch, want to know quickly and concisely what your email is about, what you’re pitching them. And they also want to know that it’s not from a PR person. So, it’s really important to write pitch, and don’t write it in all caps actually because that looks like a PR person.
I just did it here because it’s a quote from our book from a form. But you want to write the word pitch, and then you want to put the headline of your story. And I’ll show you in the database how to find those really quickly. And then section or department that the story you’re pitching is for. So, for instance, you might want to say, “This is a pitch: Tea experience in — or taking tea in Healdsburg for tea experiences for TeaTime Magazine,” or something like that.
We’ll look again more at those when we get into the database. So, let’s go. All right. And I’m going to swap over, and let me know if I lose you. There we go. And it just happens that the magazine that I was mentioning earlier, which was the French family magazine is this one Milk right here, if anybody was wondering what that was. So, I’m going to dive into a particular entry in a minute that I know is really needy.
First I just want to show you how to get into the database, how to initially navigate it, find your way around, find some magazines that you might be interested in looking at. So, let me get back to the logged out setting without actually logging out. So, when you first come to the database, you’re going to see the public landing page, but I can’t seem to get there. Okay. So, when you first come to the database — no. Okay.
You’re going to see a page that says very, very clearly log in here. And it’s going to have a demo video. It’s going to have an opportunity to get free breakdowns to preview the database if you don’t already have a trial. And right smack in the middle in bold it’s going to say log in here, but it also says on the side log in in here. So, you can log in from either of those two places, and then it’s going to take you to a little pop up like this, and then you log in.
Then it should take you right back to that screen that we were just on. And if it doesn’t take you back to that screen that you were just on, and it takes you to this backend, then all you have to do is go up here and click on visit site. So, sometimes if you put in the wrong password, or if you don’t hit remember to activate the cookies because it’s a subscription site and you need the cookies, then you’ll end up in this back part.
Then all you need to do is click visit site, and then it’ll take you to the front page. So, when you’re in the front page of the logged in area, then you’re going to see a couple of different ways to search the database. I see a couple of people saying that they — “How do we get in the database if we need to right now?” And they emailed ten minutes before we started. So, if you email just 10 minutes before the call, and you aren’t set up, I know that Jen is working on that right now.
I also had my Airbnb that I’m supposed to sleep at in London tomorrow cancel on me very suddenly. So, she’s also working on that as well, but I’m just going to text her and tell her to take a look in there, and hopefully, she can get you sorted out. So, for those of you who are here, who are logged in, or for those who are going to check this out later, this is really where we start. So, there’s a couple of different ways to search the database.
If you’re new either from the database or magazine writing, I really recommend that you just do a little poking around because the whole database is sorted timewise from here. And you’ll notice that I have two of the same for each magazine. When you log in, you won’t see two. So, one of these is a full entry, and I believe all of you have full access if you’ve paid or those of you who have a trial are setting up a full access.
There’s also a limited version for people who just want to see the titles or the editor names. So, you will see this, and then instead of this limited version, you’ll see something that says you don’t have access at this level. Okay? But as you scroll down, you’re just going to see chronologically the entries by day. So, this is not necessarily the best way to familiarize yourself with the database, but once you’ve been in it for a while, it’s a very good way to see what’s new.
Existing users will often just pop in, and they only want to see the new ones because they’ve already spent a lot of time looking around, and they know what’s there. So, if you’re coming for the first time, there’s a couple of different places you can start. You can click here and search if there’s a specific magazine that you’re interested in to see if we have it. If you have a trip coming up, you can look by geographic area.
I really push the writers on this, and we try to police it, but it should show you the geographic areas, the full geographic areas, that the magazine covers. So, you won’t — by clicking on the U.K., which is also one that you can click on, but it’s not here, or by clicking on the U.S. You won’t only see magazines that are published there. You’ll see magazines that are published elsewhere, but that also cover that geographic area.
Then you can also look at the topic areas, and we have a whole bunch more that are all the way at the bottom of the page. So, there’s a lot of categories that you can search for. So, this is really just the starting point, and I’m going to show you in a second why we have categories and tags as the searching mechanism. But I just want to also point out we have a full magazine list, and it’s not updated every single day. It’s usually updated every few weeks.
This can also give you a sense from a high level the different magazines we have and help if you’re looking for something and you’re having trouble finding it either by category or by tag search. Okay? So, with the categories and tags, you’re going to be looking — I just want to answer this quickly. If you have — if you’re still trying to get a trial set up, the email address is questions@dreamoftravelwriting.com So, I’m hitting send to all, so that should’ve gone to all of you.
The reason that we have, as I was saying, two different types of organization systems are that if you are looking to find all of the wine magazines we have, or all of the beer spirits magazines, right, like this Decanter here. We want you to be able to see those at a glance and familiarize yourself with them. But what if you have a very specific story idea in mind, and you want to find out what works for that story? So, tags are going to be much more granular in terms of the coverage areas.
One of the things that we’re doing with tags as well is that you can click on profiles of people or features, and you’ll only see magazines that have features that are open to freelance writers. You won’t see every single magazine that has features because they all do. So, when you click over here on the features tag, you’re going to see, of course, again in time order, all of the places where you can publish feature articles, right.
A lot of times people come to me, and they say, “Oh, well, I have an idea for a feature, but I’m a new writer. I can never get a feature published.” But the thing is there’s a lot of smaller magazines, and I’ve stopped here on this TransWorld Snowboarding. There’s a lot of smaller, whether that’s in terms of the region or the topic area, magazines that really do need your features, even if you are a new writer. And, for instance, this conference that I was just at, there were two editors that said some really interesting anecdotes about this that I wanted to share with you.
One editor had been writing for a magazine that was in the northeast. This was about 20 years ago. He came with his editorial assistant. And once his editor realized that he was a pretty good writer, his editor, the editor in chief, said, “I’m going to give you the credit card and the car, and I want you to go up and down the coast and find stories.” And he thought that wasn’t a very good use of his time.
What he did was he actually went to all of the people that had pitched him stories once and never pitched him again and chatted them up for an hour in their home, and took notes, and afterwards, said, “Hey, I know you thought that we were just getting to know each other, but as I was listening to you, I actually heard this, this, and this story. Why don’t you pitch them to me?” And then he taught the writers how to pitch because he wasn’t getting enough pitches.
Another really great example is the editor of Northwest Travel and Life had a column that he wanted to assign. He asked all of his regular writers. He even put a call on one of the websites that publishes calls from editors looking for stories. He tried to poach people. None of them worked out. He had to go look at a bunch of other magazines that focus on architecture and home and design, and poach a writer to write this column for him because he just wasn’t getting the pitches that he needed.
If you feel like you are not good enough, or your ideas aren’t good enough, or what have you, to be pitching an editor, you just never know when an editor is looking for somebody exactly like you, and you might actually be making that editor’s life much harder by not pitching them. So, I’m just going to open. I have over here already a couple sort of specific magazines that we’re going to look at. But in terms of the tags, like I said, everyone on here in this features tag here is looking for features.
You can look for roundups. You can look for interviews. You can look for profiles. So, this is really one of the big ways that I recommend using the database, if you’re a user and you’re having trouble finding what you’re looking for to start using it. Is to start searching by type of article because what often happens, like I said, when we were in the PowerPoint, is that you have an article in mind, but you’re only looking at the magazines that are incredibly matched topically, geographically everything, 100% matched for the whole magazine to that story.
But the places that you should actually be pitching are the ones who’ve never covered that before. So, let’s look at a couple of these here. So, this is Italia! Magazine. It’s actually produced in the U.K., and so, that naturally gives it a different vent. If this is a magazine about Italy that was published in the U.S., the types of things they would cover would not be essentially 100% off the beaten path, which is more of the case with this magazine.
We always present a couple different covers, so you can get a sense of the style of the magazine really quickly just from looking at it, right. So, here we’ve got Liguria, Puglia, and Lazio. So, these are all three different regions in Italy, but look, it’s hidden treasures. Why not soak up this southern hotspot? So, this is a place people aren’t going. This is from the Cinque Terre to the Riviera. So, this is all of the different cities along the coast that you might think about going to.
This tells you that this magazine is really guide-oriented. They really want to give you all the information that you would need to make your own decision about the trip. They really want to position themselves as a service publication, and also as a very encyclopedic publication about Italy. So, when you first go to an entry, you’re going to land on this description tab. And the description tab tells you a couple particular things that I want to point out.
For one, it tells you the percentage of travel content. And I find this really useful because often people think that the only travel stories that they can pitch are the ones in the section called travel. But there might actually be a lot of other sections that include food, or profiles, or things like that that you can also be picking up from your trip. And then another important thing here is this read online.
What this means is we only are going to list this here if you go to this link and you can get an entire full issue that will allow you to read every single article. So, in this case, you can’t do that for free. You can only view this whole magazine by paying. A lot of magazines, there are sort of secret places where you can view them for free online, or at least one issue, if not every single issue. There’s only really a handful where our writers haven’t been able to find a place for you to view the whole issue online.
This is really important because what happens when you find a story you want to pitch, right. I told you earlier in the call you need to go read previous iterations of this section that you are looking at pitching. So, the database isn’t going to do that for you. You’re going to need to go into the magazine, and read those sections, and familiarize yourself with them, especially if you get the assignment because you really want to look much more closely at the wording that they use, the length of the sentences, the specific format.
You should definitely check before you pitch to make sure that what you’re pitching is not totally off base with the type of thing that they do in that section. So, another way that you might be off base that we address here on the demographics tab is, like I said, this is a U.K. publication on Italy. So, these are people who have probably gone to Italy 2, 5, 20, 50 times. They want something different. They want something new.
They don’t just want Rome, Florence, Venice. They’re probably going to go there, but they’re not going to spend their whole time there. They’re looking for something different. And so, this section of the database shows you really the more granular information about the audience that can really inform your pitches. And so, if you think that you don’t really know what to do with the magazine’s demographics, I really recommend you spend some time reading these because often this can be what inspires you, right.
For instance, they say here, “Additionally, 90% of readers express a desire to either learn or improve their Italian.” So, what if you had just heard from a friend about a really cool Italian language immersion program by the beach in Otranto? There you go. There’s a pitch idea. And then what you need to do is you need to take that topic, that idea, and find the section for it. So, this is really the meat of the database; is this how to pitch tab here. And it has a couple different sections.
Just on the surface there’s the editorial structure, and then there’s the what to pitch, which is of varying lengths depending on how much is open to freelancers in that particular magazine. We also talk about if there are opportunities on line, and if we know if they’re paid or not. And then we also talk about what the magazine pays, if we can find out, or a way that you can estimate that.
I want to go back up. Just so that you guys know, because you’re all writers on this call, there’s a section in here that you don’t really need to worry about, and I don’t want it to confuse you. So, at the beginning of the what to pitch, we talked about how many freelancers are used in each issue. And we talk about which sections are written by freelancers. But then we talk about which sections are written by members of the editorial staff, and then we often talk specifically about who writes different ones.
This isn’t for you guys. This is for PR people and for tourism boards who want to be pitching directly to the staff of the magazine. So, you guys don’t worry about this section here. So, again, to go back, we have two main things here. We have editorial structure and what to pitch. So, what the editorial structure does is it shows you how the magazine is pieced together, what is the flow, how does it begin, which sections are shorter, what do they lead into, which ones are the features, right.
This particular magazine actually has three different types of front-of-book sections. And if anybody doesn’t know what front-of-book means, it’s exactly what it sounds. It’s the front of the book. In the magazine industry they call it the book. So, after the front of the book section are the features, and then the back of the book because they’re at the back. And different magazines have a different distribution between these things.
For instance, this one that we’re looking at has a lot of front-of-book sections. That’s pretty common. You’ll see that with a lot of the airline magazines; that they have a lot of stuff up front. But then also, like this magazine, they’re going to have a good number of things in the back because the airline magazines all have their information about the airline, about the company. They have some articles about that. They often have interviews with staff members. And this magazine is similar.
It’s got quite a few things that are going on in the back. And these back-of-book ones are very frequently freelance. In this case, they’re not, but this is another type of area were you’re going to find a very specific column format. It’s easy to pitch quite frequently. So, let’s dive into some of the things down here. This is where you’re going to see exactly what the magazine is looking for. And when I say exactly, I don’t just mean there’s a section called Holliday’s. It’s about this long. Let me pitch them a story about a holiday that I took. No.
This helps you to make sure you have a really, really good match by giving you not just detailed information about what has been covered in the past, which we have in here, but also about the reporting, about the types of information that goes into the story. So, this is written by one of our newer writers, and she goes really, really deep into this, and I love this. So, I’m just going to read you a little bit from here. Actually, I’m going to read you this one. So, for 48 hours — it’s a first-person story.
We always tell you if the story is first-person, third-person, or second-person. Second-person, I’m actually seeing an increasing amount of. So, we tell you if the story is first, second, or third-person, and then she says, “So, it offers you a snapshot of local hotspots, restaurants, sites, and excursions that the writer encounters along his travels over the course of 48 hours. 48-hour stories are really common. And I think those of us that write for the web, we do them really a lot.
It’s very easy to say, “Oh, I can do a 48-hour story, right. But then how is it different for this specific magazine? So, in this magazine, the style is narrative. This is important to consider, right. It’s not going to be a round up. It’s not going to be an impersonal third-person, “You can” — or second-person, “You can do this at this hour. This is the place where everybody goes for breakfast. You want to go here.” It’s first-person.
It’s, “In order to find the best croissant in Rome, I first set out for this place in the market and then I went to this place in the pantheon. And this is what I found.” So, that’s narrative. Okay? And that’s conversational. And, as it says here, it incorporates step-by-step recounts of the scenario and what readers should expect. Now, here it says the text is always accompanied by images. And in the case of a magazine like this where, as we saw, they don’t have a huge budget.
These are probably going to be stories that you have taken yourself, which means that if you pitched this section, and you didn’t have images, it would probably be very hard for the editor to assign it to you. And, in fact, by putting together some images that you have in a Dropbox folder and including that link. So, notice I didn’t say attachments. I said putting together images in a Dropbox folder and linking to it into your pitch. That can often really help, especially with these smaller magazines.
The editor makes the decision to assign you that article. Now, she also says that there’s multiple sidebars here which highlight what to eat and where to stay. This is really, really important, guys. I think especially if we’re used to writing for the web, we forget about sidebars. Sidebars are ubiquitous in print. They not only occur frequently, but they often occur frequently in one article. This is a good example where she says there’s multiple sidebars.
If you’ve ever looked at a feature, particularly a road trip feature, I find a lot of times they’ll be in each page of a six to eight-page story. There’ll be a sidebar on there somewhere. And sometimes it’s a sidebar in the format of a travel guide book where the sidebar is a pull out about the history of a place, or it’s a pull out with a little interview, or it’s a pull out where they have quotes from the three interesting people from a place saying their favorite things to do.
There’s a lot of different types of sidebars. And this is a huge value add that you can put in your pictures that shows an editor not only that you understand their publication, if it’s a case like this where there are already sidebars, but that you understand journalism, and that you understand print writing. And if you feel like you’re not confident, you don’t really know what is a sidebar, pick up some magazines and leaf through them. And that, like I said, is one of the nice things about the databases; that we’ve already found for you where to read all these magazines, right.
This one is paid, but there’s tons and tons that are free. So, if you just want to find out what magazines that are published in the U.K., that are published in the U.S., magazines on sailing, magazines on cooking, magazines on living abroad, magazines for people who have moved to Europe. All these types of magazines, if you want to see the style with which to communicate to their readers, all you have to do is find a couple of those magazines, and then click that read online version and start to leaf through a few of them.
Like I was saying, I just want to finish up with 48 hours that we were talking about. So, there’s sidebars, we talk about images, and then we tell you some examples of what have been covered in the past. Now, this is something that I really always push our writers on when I’m the one editing the articles. I’ll look at it, and I’ll say, “Cinque Terre, Florence, Tuscia — I don’t even know what Tuscia is — San Gimignano, Milan. So, Milan is big. Florence is big.
The Cinque Terre, a lot of people know. So, if she had just written these three things, I would think they only do big destinations, but because these are the ones that are in here, I’m like, “Huh, okay.” That tells me a lot about what I could pitch here. It’s not just the places that everybody knows. So, when I see — when I’m editing these, I always push them to tell you what the past stories are. Tell you enough that you know what to pitch the publication.
I got a couple of questions over here. How do you put a sidebar in your article or pitch? Do you just say you can supply sidebar info? Great question, Donna, and thank you for moving into the next part of my little demo here. So, I want to talk about how you take this, and we use this 48 hours when we’re talking about how do you take this and turn it into a pitch. Okay? So, say you had gone to Italy.
Say — I’m trying to think of a trip that I’ve done recently. Okay. Say you had gone to Italy, and you had stayed in a town that was in Tuscany, but in a different part of Tuscany than what a lot of people visit. And the town itself is really historic, but there’s not necessarily a lot to do there, but it’s well-positioned to a lot of other things. So, you might think, “Huh, this would make a cool 48-hour thing because I can talk about also going to Montepulciano, and Cortona, and several other well-known areas all in one little 48-hour itinerary.”
Then you would say, “Okay. How do I know if the city is a fit for this section, if it’s too big, if it’s too small?” You would look here, and say, “Okay. San Gimignano is a hill town in Florence — or in, sorry — in Tuscany.” So, they’ll do that kind of thing. Okay, great. So, my destination is a fit. All right. You start there. And then you say, “Okay. What do I want to include in my story? How do I want to set up the lead for my pitch?”
I would probably actually use as the lead essentially what I had just mentioned to you guys, which is that I found this town which is perfectly located 30 minutes from all of these major attractions, and itself is an ideal place to say. If you have been to Italy multiple times, and you just want to have an amazing view, and fantastic food, and be surrounded by Italians, and not pay a lot of money for it.
That might be my lead. And then in queue two when I’m talking about what the article will be, I would say, “I’d like to pitch you a 48 hours piece in which I will talk not only about what to see.” Luciano is the name of the city that I’m talking about. “Not only where to eat and what to see in Luciano, but how to experience the best of this part of southern Tuscany in 48 hours.” And then I’m going to mention a couple different things to do. So, I mentioned to you guys just now Montepulciano and Cortona.
Then I might say, “One perfect place to stop nearby for the sunset is Cortona, where under the Tuscan Sun, both the movie and the book, were set, which is” — I don’t know how many meters high, but I would find the number, and I would say, “which is 3,000 meters above sea level. And at the base of the mountains, which lead — or on the edge of the mountains, which lead into Umbria and provides a sweeping view at sunset of all of Tuscany all the way out to the sea. And you can also experience the exuberant hospitality at [El Boccaccio 00:49:09], which is a medieval restaurant where the owner is constantly handing out slices of his homemade [inaudible 00:49:15], especially to foreign guests.”
That’s one, Cortona, and I’m going to mention a little bit about Cortona. And then I would say, “Also nearby and appropriate to visit during the day,” so I talked about an evening thing, so now, I’m going to talk about a different time of day because it’s 48 hours, “is Montepulciano, which is known for its wineries. And just near the parking lot in Montepulciano you can find many wine rooms and distributors specifically linked to local wineries, so that you can find out which you like the best before you head out to the wineries themselves.”
“These are the type of things that I would like to cover in this article, and I can also include sidebars on where to stay in Luciano in the city center or outside. Where to eat not only Luciano, but in these other destinations. And another sidebar specifically on how to get there depending on what airport you fly into.” So, I’ve proposed a couple of different sidebars, and this is very common. Okay? So, you are going to look at what sidebars they have in the story for sure.
That’s the first, first place to start. So, if a story always has a sidebar, that’s a certain thing, and that certain thing will typically be this kind of service information. Where to eat, where to stay, how to get there. And you need to be mentioning in your pitch that you will do that sidebar because it shows the editor that you understand what that article looks like. But then if you’re working on a perhaps — let me find a feature in here.
If you’re working on a feature, and they don’t have the same sidebars every time because they’re covering different things in each issue and each feature, then you’re going to come up with your own sidebars. So, how do you do that? So, let’s look at some of the features in here. The cover story is a more holistic view of the destination. Other features discussed everything from one writer’s experience doing yoga in Tuscany to another writer’s quest to meet the cheese and wine makers of [La Taina 00:51:13].
In this case, let’s take this one, right, the cheese and wine makers. I might say, “I’m pitching you a narrative feature on my quest to find the best cheese and wine pairing, and [La Taina 00:51:26], I’ll tell a little more about that. And as a sidebar, I’d like to propose a sidebar listing the top award-winning cheese makers, or the top family-owned cheese makers, or the top fifth-generation family-owned cheese makers. And another sidebar on how to taste wine the Italian way with step-by-step instructions on how you should be tasting when you visit these wineries.”
That’s the kind of more creative sidebars that you can also come up with. They’re often linked to features. Okay. We’ve got another question here. Do you always pitch an article after you went to the location/experienced the activity, or do you sometimes pitch before a trip or experience? Thank you. Great question. And I’m going to use that to slide over to — I had mentioned before that I wanted to show you guys a very specific section that they have in Air Canada’s magazine enRoute.
That’s perfect for this because it’s the kind of thing that you could pitch after or you could pitch before, but I’m going to use it to show you how you can pitch before. And I really like to use this database both ways to use it — to get ideas from trips I’ve already taken, but also, like I mentioned at the beginning of the call, if some of you weren’t here, in the blog post and also in the newsletter that went out in connection to this. I had an idea today just sitting on the airplane, and I haven’t gone to that place yet.
But I — before going there, I would look around, and I would see where I could potentially pitch it, and how I could shape that idea. So, that when I do go to the place, even if I don’t have an assignment yet, I’m gathering the right research. Okay. So, I want to show you this really specific section that Air Canada has. So, this is crazy. This section is 350 words, and it has three different themes in a city, and you give two types of options for each theme.
When you see on the page, it’s so, so busy, and I can’t believe it’s only 350 words, but let’s look at some examples. So, they have excursions, food, and souvenirs in Galway. They have fika, which is coffee, Middle Eastern food and smorgasbord in Malmo Sweden, and wine, cycling, and Chinese food in Adelaide, Australia. So, this is really important, right, because you might think, “So, Galway, for instance, is Ireland’s — it’s on the western coast. It’s just got this adorable architecture. It’s so twee, and pastel, and also historic,” but it’s known, really, as the food capital of Ireland.
They’ve got one here on food and one on souvenirs. Like, this is a quirky one. For Adelaide also, right, they’ve got Chinese food. For Sweden, they’ve got Middle Eastern food. So, it’s important to note looking at these that there’s some that you might expect. In each of these there’s two that you might expect, right, and then there’s one that’s kind of a wildcard that’s interesting.
If you pitch them three wildcards, or you pitch them three they would expect, it’s probably not going to be an immediate yes, or an immediate no. “We’ve already covered that place, or we’re covering it soon.” So, by following these very specific formats that we highlight, not only in terms of that this article has to have three different themes and you have to give expensive and budget options for each, but by looking at what types of things they’ve used in the past, that allows you to write a pitch that really resonates with an editor.
The type of pitch that makes the editor think you’ve read their mind. So, if I was going to pitch this in advance of a trip, to go to back to the question — let me think of a place I’m going. So, I’m going to Japan soon. So, what I would do is I would look at this, and I would say, “Galway, not Dublin. Malmo, not Stockholm. Adelaide, not Melbourne.” So, these are kind of second-tier cities. So, I’m not going to pitch them Tokyo for my trip, right. I’m going to pitch them Matsumoto. Or I’m not going to pitch Kyoto.
I’m going to pitch something else in the south. I might pitch them this lovely city near Mount Fuji, but I’m not going to pitch them the main, main destination, even though this is an airline magazine. This is really important. We often assume, particularly with airline magazines, “Okay. Well, I need to pitch them a city that the airline flies to,” but that’s not always the case. I really, really doubt that Air Canada flies directly to Galway from anywhere, even from Coastal Canada.
I bet that this is something that you can get to with a partner of theirs perhaps, but maybe not. And, for instance, I had spoken a while back with the editor of Porthole Cruise Magazine, which comes from the PPI Group, and that’s available on here along with some other cruise magazines. All of the cruise magazines come from the same company. And the repurpose your articles, you can do more work for the same editor. It’s a really great place to get in.
I was asking the editor one day. I said, “Hey, Philip, what” — he asked me for pitches, and I said, “Well, like what kind of things do you want? Do you they have to be right in the port? Do they have to be excursions?” He said, “Really, like, it doesn’t have to be right in the port. It doesn’t have to be something you can do while you’re on a cruise. It can be something you do before the cruise, or after the cruise.” So, don’t limit yourself to things that are right near the ship.
I thought that was so great. And when you look through the magazine, it really does reflect that. So, we often assume, whether it’s an airline magazine, or a car magazine, or anything specific like that, that we have to hue very closely to that brand, but they actually often prefer to have things that have a slightly more wider focus because that, to their customers, to the people who are reading the magazine, doesn’t just feel like a sales pitch. All right.
Are there any other questions because we’re kind of getting to the end of our time. So, I just want to make sure that I’m showing you guys what you want to see. So, if you have anything else you want to see in the database, this is the time. Throw it in the chat box. Okay. Another question. “Do magazines ever give an assignment, or accept a pitch beforehand, or give a per diem, for instance, for the fees? Does that make sense?” he asks. “Is it perhaps a reason to pitch it beforehand, or not generally?”
Some magazines do give per diems or expenses. I mean, they don’t typically pay you the money in advance, but they tell you how much you can spend. And then you go out, and you do your trip, and you spend it, and you come back with your receipts, and they pay it to you. But the magazines that pay for travel, it’s not even that I want to say that there are few and far between, which they definitely are, but they’re typically not going to do that with a writer that they haven’t worked with yet.
If you’re pitching a magazine for the first time, I really recommend when you’re pitching a magazine for the first time to try to get in with them with a trip that you’ve already taken that you really know that you’re going to be able to get the story because you don’t want to have one or two situations. You don’t want to pitch an editor you’ve never worked with, have them love the idea and get back to you and say, “Oh, I love this. Can you have it to me by blah blah blah?” And you say, “Well, I’m not going on the trip by then.”
They say, “Oh, darn, because I have an issue around this topic that I can include it in. But if you can’t get it by then, then I can’t run it.” You don’t want to have that happen. And what you also don’t want to have happen is that you pitch an idea, and then you go on the trip, and you realize the thing you wanted to cover closed, or it’s not really like that. I went last summer to Detroit, and we kind of went in search of the new Detroit. I keep hearing how Detroit is having its revival.
There’s all these artists moving in. All these neighborhoods are changing and gentrifying, and I really didn’t find that to be the case. So, if I had pitched a story on that in advance, I would have had to kind of fabricate things a little bit, and I personally don’t like doing that to my readers. Okay, one more question. If there’s — if you’ve never written an article for a magazine, is that a reason to not pitch or to go for it? Will they ask for examples?
I assume this question means if you’ve never been published before at all, not if you’ve never written an article for this specific magazine. You should most definitely not be held back if you have no clips. In fact, please, please, please, I say this all the time, and I’m going to say it again today, do not think do not pursue, do not act upon this concept that you need to write for some blogs, your blog, or other blogs, that you need to get some clips, somewhere easy that pay you nothing or $10 before you pitch real magazines.
That is why we started the database; because I want new writers to know, and I don’t necessarily mean new writers, new to writing or new to travel writing, but new to magazine publishing, to know there are tons of magazines out there that are legitimate print magazines that will also pay you a small amount, but it will be less small than those websites and give you a proper, beautifully laid out clip for you to use. Granted, you’ll have to wait a little longer for it, but there’s just as many magazines that are desperate for pitches as there are websites that are — I mean, not as many, but there’s plenty.
There’s plenty enough for all of us; magazines that really need pitches and that are happy to work with new writers. So, if you have other questions, drop them. I’m just going to cruise back and talk to you about some other different types of things we have in here and how to use the database. So, a couple of other new entries that we have that I just wanted to cruise through. So, this is Decanter. So, this is a wine magazine. There’s only like five dedicated wine magazines, but I want to look at this for a couple reasons.
Often a magazine that has a very specific focus has quite technical kind of — and I don’t necessarily mean technical as in technology, but has very specific — you need knowledge types of articles. So, here, we have a vintage report, regional report, and producer profile. Now, producer profile is one that I bet every single one of you that has been traveling in some capacity for some time has something for this. Okay? It covers one wine producer in detail.
Have you gone to a winery where the owner was kooky, where the owner was fascinating, where the owner was fifth generation, or where the owner was anything? Okay? You can pitch that to this producer profile. And so, this is the kind of thing — I’m getting all incensed now because I am just so excited about this. This is what I love about the database. I don’t even know these things. The writers dig them up.
They find these sections that I didn’t even know that magazines were looking for ideas like this. There are multiple magazines that want profiles of Canadian expats living abroad anywhere. So, when you’re on a trip and you run into somebody from Vancouver who has decamped to the Dominican Republic, you can pitch an article about them. There’s just an innumerable variety of articles that you can pitch.
Even if you’re not necessarily interested in writing about wine, I recommend leafing through, so to say, some of these entries because you might realize, like I said, that you have ideas lying around in the back of your head from trips that you have been on that you didn’t realize you could do for a magazine. And this, I’ve had a couple of questions about this, so I just wanted to circle back to this. I was having an email conversation today with a guy who was telling me something that I hear often, which is that it’s just not possible to earn six figures as a travel writer at the rates that people pay today.
I asked him a couple other questions because he was saying some things that were weird. He said with press trips, he’s like, you have to go — if newspapers pay £500, this was a British guy. If newspapers pay £500 pounds a story, you’d have to go on 200 press trips to earn $100,000. And I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You sound like you’re not pitching more than one idea per trip, which is not good. There’s other ways to do it.”
And he said, “No I do sometimes. One time, I got five national stories out of one trip.” And in my head, “I’m thinking you should be getting 25, and they shouldn’t all be national.” Because what you do is you take the wine that you went to, and you pitch the producer profile. You take a city that you were in that’s a cruise port, and you pitch it to Cruise International for their city guide. Oops, sorry. So, when you remember one you pick up you pick the vegetarian restaurant chef, and you get in touch with them after your trip.
You can do these things after your trip, even if you didn’t get the information on the ground, and you ask them if they’d be interested in sharing some recipes for Flex Table and Yoga Journal. You pick the destination that you went to, and you turn it into a Hi-Lo while at the same time you’re writing a feature for the Independent on your trip in a narrative version. The database is what lets you take that trip and find little, tiny, really quirky places to chop it up into.
Like I was saying, we have both the topics that are listed here, and then when you scroll down to the bottom of page, you’ll see more. And on every entry, you’ll see different categories and you’ll see different tags. And as you just float around, you’ll find really interesting — I’m just going to click on a particular subset for a minute. You’ll find really interesting magazine sections that you didn’t know could exist, that you didn’t know editors were looking for.
We have — any time you see a cool cover like this, it’s probably an independent magazine. They’re really amazing. They don’t always pay, but they’re beautiful, beautiful clips. So, if you have some features that you’ve been sitting on, but you don’t know what to do with, click on the independent tag and search through some of the indie magazines because a lot of these indie magazines are just — especially if you also shoot photos.
They are really, really excited to have these dispatches that we all pick up on these press strips from all around the world. So, for instance, what if you write about food, right. There are food travel magazines in many different countries. There’s three or four in Asia that I know about as well that even if you’ve written an article for a U.S. publication, and/or U.K. publication, and/or Italian or French publication, you can then go in here and check out Australian Gourmet Traveler and find things in here the pitch, right.
They’ve got things, obviously, that are Australian because that’s their audience, but then they have their own travel section where they have big, juicy food-focused features. And then they have a city hit list, which is a mini guide to a city, and it doesn’t just cover the food. So, if you go on a hotel-oriented FAM trip, and you need a way to mention the hotel, but you also want to talk about the food, here’s a great example. Okay. I want to wrap up, so I’m just going to take one more question.
Again, if you have any, drop them in there. Okay. How recent does content need to be to be pitched assuming that you triple check that it’s all still open? You could have gone 10 years ago. If you’re triple checking that everything is still opening, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re making phone calls and updating your information, it really doesn’t matter when you went, as long as you’re sure that that stuff is still going on. Okay. So, thank you all for joining me today.
And I’m so excited to have gotten to dig around in the database with you. And I really — I could just spend hours, and I often do when I’m looking up things to teach. So, I hope that you will also find that you feel the same way about it once you start using it. And I just want to quickly skim through to tell you what we’re going to be talking about in coming weeks. So, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about trade magazines because they pay really well. They’re a really great place to write for because rather than pitching the editor, the editor pitches you.
Once you become a regular writer for a trade magazine, they just assign you articles every month. It’s just that simple. So, I really want to get more of you writing for trade magazines. And it’s also a really great way to learn more about the industry, and also to become in with Convention and Visitors Bureaus, which helps you get other work, which helps you get invited on trips that you can use for editorial for consumer magazines or for other custom magazines. So, we’re going to spend a couple of weeks talking about trade magazines.
Next week, I’m going to give you the overview. I’m going to kind of acclimatize you to them. I’m going to talk about what types of different trade magazines there are, what articles they are looking for, and how they’re different than consumer. So, that’s going to be next week. And then the following week, we’re going to talk about how to write a letter of introduction because, as I said, you don’t pitch to these magazines. You build a relationship, and then they pitch you. So, it’s a little wonky.
We’re going to talk about how to navigate that process. And, as I mentioned earlier, we’ve got some master classes coming up, and I look forward to seeing some of you soon. In fact, I’ll see some of you on the call either in London very, very soon on Friday, or in New York next week. Or also, we’ve just added one in Atlanta at the request of some of the lovely ladies at the Women in Travel Summit. So, if you’re in any of these cities and you’re not already planning to attend, or you haven’t seen the link, just shoot us an email at questions@dreamoftravelwriting.com.
We’ll get you all sorted. Thanks so much for joining me to talk about my little baby pet project. And I hope that you can see how — why we created it. Like, why it really, really will make a difference, a huge difference, not only in your ability to pitch, to put together a pitch, to write a pitch, to get a response to that pitch, but also to find — to grow your income by finding more places to pitch and more ways to reuse the research that you’ve already done on your trips.
If you’ve got any more questions, I’ll stick around here for a couple of minutes, but otherwise, thank you guys, and have a great rest of your weekend. It’s gloomy where I am, but somebody wrote me earlier she can’t attend the webinar because she’s on vacation in Hilton Head. So, I hope some of you are somewhere warm and sunny. And I’ll catch you next week.