Travel Writing Tips:
A Letter to Myself, Back in Time

By Roy Stevenson

It’s 2019.  I’m writing to you more than one decade from the date you began your career as a freelance travel writer.  Don’t be shocked!  I’m here to help.

The main point of this letter is to tell you what you could have done better on your travel writing journey.  Yes, you did some good stuff.  I’ve included that at the end of this letter just to keep it balanced. 

Here’s my advice for the things you could have done better.  If you had done these things differently, you would have saved yourself time and grief.  And if I seem like a harsh critic, well, if I can’t give you feedback, who can?

You didn’t have a writer’s website for your first two years of travel writing.  What’s the deal with that?

Once you got your act together and got a website up, you noticed a surge in interest from magazine editors.  More importantly, it saved you tons of time sending links and PDFs to editors.  One link to your website was all they needed.

There were even editors who found you through the articles posted on your writer’s website.  They gave you paying assignments!  But only when you became visible online with a professional writer’s website.

In your early years you worked with a couple of editors who were less than professional.  You gave them the benefit of the doubt and trusted them, and then you got stiffed.  It cost you time and money.  And unprincipled editors take their toll emotionally, too. 

Why did you wait so long to purchase a high quality camera?   It took no time at all to understand most editors depend on your photos.  Yet you resisted, because you worried about the technology.  

Then one day in your fifth year (!) you were standing on the deck of a ship looking around you.  Everyone was shooting with a DSLR.  Teenagers, retirees, and everyone in between had a better camera than you had.  That little point-and-shoot seemed pretty pathetic that day, didn’t it? 

Remember sending your photos as email attachments, way back when? That didn’t work out so well, did it? Your emails kept bouncing back because of the large file sizes.  What a pain!

Then for a while you mailed out all those photo CDs to magazine editors?  That didn’t work out so well, either.  That meant creating the CD, packaging it for shipment, trips the post office and the postage. It cost you a lot of time and money!

Dropbox didn’t work so well, either.  It was unwieldy to use, easy to screw up, and tough on editors. 

It took you two long years to figure out the press trips game.  Talk about a slow learner!  You funded your travels with your own money and it held you back in so many ways!

Dude, DMOs are paid to help arrange travel for writers who have assignments.  Hotels, meals, transportation, guides, complimentary entry to tourist attractions, interviews with people you need to meet - they’re there to help make your visit productive.  It’s their job! 

And as a travel writer you can legitimately request assistance with your travel.  These comps save you money and time.  The DMOs set up your itinerary and you just show up and follow the game plan.  And you travel better - staying in better hotels, eating in better restaurants and having a better experience.

You weren't consistently pitching high-paying glossies at the start.  Maybe it was lack of confidence.  But you should have been pitching them early on.  It would have boosted your confidence and you could have made more money.

It turns out that your story ideas were solid and your writing skills good enough to get your stories published in top-shelf magazines, when you finally focused on pitching them.

Why did it so long to break into luxury travel writing?  Oh, that’s right.  It was your wife who decided to research high-end resorts instead of the budget hotels you suggested.  That’s what finally launched you into this genre.

If you had focused more on luxury travel stories and luxury magazines in your first few years, you could have been scoring those plush luxury fam tours way earlier instead of staying in budget hotels. 

You resisted the awesome power of the social media for a long time.  You didn’t start using Facebook until December 2014!   

The problem was you had it in your head that it wouldn’t bring in many writing assignments, and that’s true.  And you were distracted by all those lame social media posts.  But you didn’t have to buy into that!  It's easy to do quality posts.

You were so busy pitching articles and writing them that you forgot there was anything else - like a network out there to help you grow and develop.

You could have been networking with other writers, meeting magazine editors, and learning more tricks of the trade, a lot earlier.

Attending local and regional conferences early on would have improved your learning curve.  (You learned about DMOs at a regional conference.)  And you should have been attending national travel writer’s conferences and other special events, trying new ones each year.

• You understood the importance of selling and marketing quickly. As you discovered, selling and marketing your travel stories is the lifeblood of freelance travel writing.
• You realized that marketing was just as important—and probably more important than—your writing skills.  It’s all about selling.  So despite your mistakes, you thrived anyway.
• And you had the sense to write in multiple genres. It helped you get published more frequently and faster because you had a broad range of interests.  This opened up many more markets for your writing. 
  

You’re regarded as one of the most prolific and diverse travel writers in North America.  It wasn’t your goal but it’s a nice achievement.  Who knew that would happen? 

All the best,
Roy

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