Growing as a travel writer | Networking invite | Pitch call
Tips from Sian Meades-Williams on growing your business.
One of the reasons why Lottie and I work so well together is that both approach everything we do with an understanding of how it will ultimately meet our longer-term aspirations. That makes us sound incredibly dull. I promise we’re not; we just don’t like wasting time and energy on activities that aren’t going to serve a purpose.
When you run your own business (and yes, we mean you, freelancer), it’s hard not to feel time-poor. I’m the Queen of to-do lists, and yet I don’t remember a single time since I started travel writing when I’ve ever reached the bottom of a list. There’s always more to do, whether it’s sending another pitch, following up one that’s been ignored or dealing with the logistics and back-and-forths of an upcoming press trip.
But in the minutiae of the day-to-day, it’s very easy to get bogged down and forget to be strategic when it comes to the types of commissions you’re taking on or the work you’re doing for future you to ensure that there will be more commissions (and money!) when the current ones have been sent off to your editor.
This month, as we enter Q1 of the new tax year, we’re encouraging you to take a deep breath and spend a day or two evaluating your travel writing business. Because it is a business and every decision you take, every commission you land and every investment you make into yourself are helping you to build a more successful, and sustainable, career. There’s no one else around to offer you CPD or ensure you’re on the right track, which is why it’s so essential to give yourself time to take stock, evaluate your progress and restrategize for the future.
To help you do this, this month we’re diving into growing your business. In this newsletter, we’re talking to the master of all things freelancing, the fabulous Sian Meades-Williams, while Lottie and I will also offer up a glimpse into the workings of our own businesses. For the rest of the month:
12th April: We hear from new(ish) journalists about how they took their careers from strength to absolute strength during the pandemic
19th April: Lottie dives into how to be strategic in investing in your business
26th April: We examine what exactly progression means as a freelancer and how we can define it for our individual careers
But first up: grab a brew and free up half an hour to start thinking about your business goals.
Sian Meades-Williams
Sian is a PPA award-winning writer, editor, and newsletter expert. She’s the editor of the weekly media industry email Freelance Writing Jobs and co-editor of the award-winning lifestyle newsletter Tigers Are Better Looking. She also writes features for major publications, including The New York Times, The Independent and The Guardian and is the author of the new freelancing Bible, The Pyjama Myth: the Freelance Writer's Survival Guide.
How can freelancers go about setting business goals for their travel writing career?
I think it's a case of being really honest about what we want. It's so easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing — podcasts, books, awards, cover stories — when I start letting this impact my goals, I get a bit lost. So I focus on the things that I'm really excited about. The work that makes me happy to be at my desk, even when it's challenging. Your career is never going to look like anyone else's and that's why it's exciting.
Pick one that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling and run with it. We don't need to announce this goal to anyone, we can keep it secret for as long as we like. I think it's really helpful to make this goal actionable by you and no one else. So think about crafting brilliant pitches, rather than getting cover stories. The commissions will follow because you're doing the work, but you're in control of where your energy is going.
What key things should we all be doing to work towards these goals every day/week/month/year?
It's so easy to get carried away when we're setting out goals and I think it's often to our detriment. I used to create dozens of goals for the year, and all it did was split my focus and take me away from the things that I really wanted to be doing. It took me a long time to realise that I concentrate on very small tasks when I'm a bit scared of the big ones. If you've ever done tax admin instead of writing the book pitch you've been dreaming of, this tactic will be very familiar to you. It feels productive, but it's not getting us where we want to be.
Now I strip everything back and I focus on what means the most to me — at the moment, that's my novel, which actually takes me away from freelancing and short-form writing. When I narrowed my focus, the scary task became much easier. It's also really important to remember that although time-based goals are great, not everything in your career has to be completed by your 30th birthday (the media industry will be forever obsessed by women reaching 30) or December 31st just because of some arbitrary target you set yourself in the past.
How much time should we dedicate to business development each month?
I think it's really important to be flexible with business development and goal setting. Absolutely nothing is set in stone and our aspirations should change and move throughout our lives rather than being something we just tick off a list. Not everything has to be a priority at all once! Sometimes you'll be sick, sometimes you'll have a nightmare press trip and difficult clients, and sometimes (always) you want a nap instead of rewriting your website. We need to be kind to ourselves and enjoy the work we do. Hustle culture is so exhausting. When we push so hard at the next goal and the next and the next, we're missing out on the actual joy of writing.
Can you recommend any savvy investments freelancers can make into their business (whether these are physical objects or more notional things)?
Buy my book, The Pyjama Myth: the Freelance Writer's Survival Guide, and subscribe to my newsletter Freelance Writing Jobs. The book will help you define success on your own terms, the newsletter will help you get brilliant commissions.
Steph Dyson
Steph started her career by winning Rough Guide’s Passport to Write travel writing competition in 2015, which gave her a foot in the travel media door and her first few online commissions. Since then, as a freelance writer she’s worked on over a dozen guidebooks and been published by publications around the world, including CNN, Time Out and The South China Morning Post. Her website, Worldly Adventurer, reaches over one million readers each year.
Career highlights:
First paid article published by Rough Guides in 2015
Worked on first guidebook, the Rough Guide to Peru, in 2017
First sole-authored guidebook, Moon Chile, published in July 2020
What are your ultimate goals for your career as a travel writer?
My goals have always been to make as much money as possible doing as little work as possible. That sounds terrible, but after spending five years busting a gut in challenging classrooms across the UK, my aim now is to have a far more balanced life where I can travel as much as I want. It’s one of the reasons that I keep my feet in both journalism and running my own travel website. The latter typically earns me passive income, which means I know my bills and expenses are covered for the month and then I can top up my income with travel journalism or travel SEO content strategy services.
When it comes to travel journalism, my ultimate goal is to land consistent work in a couple of goal publications (hello National Geographic!) and write meaningful pieces that encourage conscious travel that has a net positive impact. I’m really proud of my recent pieces for CNN and The South China Morning Post as these are definitely the style I want to emulate going forward.
What key things have you done to grow your business and work towards these goals in the past few years?
I’ve become much better at tracking income and financial goals. Because I earn money from so many different sources (travel journalism, SEO, copywriting, affiliates, ads and travel planning services), it can be hard to keep track of where money’s coming from, so QuickBooks has been an invaluable tool.
I’ve also made a conscious effort to grow my profile as a writer. This has seen me becoming a lot more active on Twitter, as well as doing my best to attend in-person events (admittedly there haven’t been as many as I would have liked recently!), although I’ve certainly drilled down into only attending those where I get value. As I live outside of London, it’s just not viable to attend every media event, so I’ve become much more choosy about those that I do go to.
A couple of years ago, I also tried the 100 Rejections challenge. This is where you aim for 100 rejections to your pitches in a year, with the idea that being commissioned is a numbers game, and the more pitches you send, the more likely you are to have some of them land. It took away a lot of the anxiety surrounding pitching and was also just very helpful at keeping me on track with pitches and follow-ups. If you want to give it a go, there’s a useful spreadsheet for recording your attempts here.
How much time do you dedicate per month to business development?
Not enough! I’ve been terrible this year with goal setting, as I normally set aside a whole day at the start of each year to plan out my main goals and then review them weekly/monthly/quarterly. Because of a deluge of work from February onwards, I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants far more than I would like.
Ideally, I would spend an hour every week reflecting on my goals and what still needs to be done to meet them, whether that’s pitching a certain publication, attending a specific event or going on the hunt for stories that match my interests.
What types of things have you invested in for career development or plan to invest in in the future?
I love reading business books. A lot of them are fluffy, thought-driven nonsense, but other ones have been extremely helpful for getting me into the correct mindset for planning and goal setting; I really do think that without an idea of where you’re going, you’re never going to get anywhere. This is particularly an issue as a freelancer, where the concept of career progression is a rather nebulous and difficult concept to define.
I’ve been really enjoying You’re The Business by Anna Codrea-Rado, which is packed full of concrete recommendations around finance, marketing and establishing a future-proof business. I’m also about to dive into Sian’s new book, which I’m sure has a similarly nuts-and-bolts approach.
I also read widely as I think that’s the only way to improve my own writing. I’ve always got some fiction on the go and will dip into travel literature when I’m preparing for a new trip. I’m an absolute John Gimlette fangirl and I’ve also been working through this thread of outstanding travel writing courtesy of Jen Rose Smith (whose own writing is always a must-read, too). This piece from the list made me laugh and almost vomit in quick succession.
I’ve also been contemplating a travel photography course to polish up my pictures (although we do have some fantastic archives here about enhancing your photography game and Nori Jemil’s The Travel Photographer’s Way is also highly recommended). Finding out that you can get $1,500 expenses if you’re shooting a story as well as writing it (see Tweet of the Week below) has pushed this to the top of my to-do list!
Lottie Gross
Lottie started her career at Rough Guides in 2013, managing the publisher's digital content and social media strategy. She worked her way up to Web Editor, then left to join Love Inc. She has been a freelancer since the summer of 2018 and written for various major titles, including The Telegraph, The Times, the i and Independent.
Career highlights:
First paid article published in Nat Geo Traveller in 2012
Ran roughguides.com for almost four years
Launched loveEXPLORING.com in 2017
First book deal secured in March 2021 (buy it!)
What are your ultimate goals for your career as a travel writer?
Embarrassingly, I don't have set goals for my business or career, really. I left my full-time job at Love Inc and set one single goal: to feel joy every day. I was burned out by my last role and needed to be able to choose to do the things I love and say no to those I don't. I've been doing that, and making decent money along the way, since 2018 and my only ongoing ambition right now is to keep at it. I have financial goals, of course — to keep paying my mortgage, to pay off my many debts (hello, Student Loans Company), to keep earning more — but really my goals are always short term and led by whatever I feel is best or right for me in a given moment. It’s perhaps not the best or most sustainable way to run my business, but it’s worked for me so far. I’d like to feel a little more focused, though.
What key things have you done to grow your business and work towards these goals in the past few years?
Networking is the biggest part of my career growth story — if it weren’t for my occasionally obnoxious opinions on Twitter or my use of Instagram stories, I’m certain I’d not have got as far as I have today (I was, after all, commissioned to write an op ed in 2020 off the back of a very rude tweet I sent to Grant Shapps). But networking IRL is also a big part of how I’ve reached this level of success. Pre-pandemic, I was at an event almost every other night, talking to PRs, fellow freelancers and staff writers. I’d happily meet a PR for coffee when working in central London to talk about their clients, and I joined the BGTW for networking opportunities early on in my career, too.
This newsletter has probably been the biggest contributor to my career growth over the last few years, though. Not only does it provide a small pot of regular income, but it's also a profile-building exercise and has definitely led to me getting more work.
How much time do you dedicate per month to business development?
Definitely not enough. Perhaps an hour at most. It's not something I do regularly, but I'm hoping Sian's new book on freelancing will help me be a bit more structured with my planning and development.
I did, however, recently embark on a pitching workshop day with a fellow freelancer — something we’ve done a couple of times and found supremely valuable. Paid subscribers will hear more about that in the third edition of this month’s newsletter series (sign up here to ensure you don’t miss out).
What types of things have you invested in for career development or plan to invest in in the future?
My upcoming guidebook was a huge investment of time and money, but has been a worthwhile venture (even though it hasn't yet paid off financially). I've carved myself a niche — which has seen editors from national newspapers come to me when they want content on dog-friendly travel — and I've proven that I can do longer-term, larger projects as well as the short lead-time features writing I usually take on.
I’m hoping to do more books in the future that will contribute to firming up that niche, and I’ve just engaged the services of an agent to help with that.
Calls for pitches
Erin Quinlan at Cosmopolitan is paying $2 per word (!) for stories for their summer issue themed on travel. Thread about what they're looking for here.
Allie Young at National Geographic US's travel desk is looking for pitches. Read her thread outlining exactly what she’s after.
Networking event invite
Do you want to spend a fun couple of days in Manchester connecting with some of the biggest global travel brands and exploring the city? We have managed to secure 10 spaces at Media Getaway, the new event from Travel Connection Group, taking place from May 23-25. You will stay at the Hyatt Regency Manchester, be able to arrange meetings with the attending companies and explore the city with Marketing Manchester. Book your place today. Click here for more information or contact Howard Salinger to book your place.
Tweet of the week
Who to follow
Queen of helping freelancers make sense of their career and author of the must-read weekly jobs newsletter, Freelance Writing Jobs, Sian Meades-Williams is both a brilliant guide to making this freelancing lark work and an absolutely fantastic human. She also co-authors the dreamy lifestyle newsletter Tigers Are Better Looking if you’re after some gorgeous recipe inspiration or want to find out what curiosities she and Laura Brown have unearthed this week.
Industry must-reads
The brilliant Shafik Meghji’s first book, Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia, was published last month and is currently sitting on Steph’s bedside table. It promises to be a spectacular exploration of a country that once stood on the world’s stage and has since been forgotten.
Chris Haslam dives into how the airline industry is moving en masse towards charging an arm and a leg for seat selection and checked baggage in this piece for The Times.
For some industry analysis, read this interview with Jet2s CEO, Steve Heapy, about how the company survived the pandemic and what impact he thinks the fuel crisis will have on upcoming consumer holidays.
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This is a belter of a newsletter. Thanks for pulling so much great advice together - and sharing it! 🙌