Ep 249: Why Human Stories Are Winning in a World of AI Content with Travel Writer Lindy Alexander

SHOWNOTES

“I had no idea that even existed. I didn’t even know that you could do that. What a dream job!”

When Lindy Alexander first discovered that travel writers could be flown around the world to write about their experiences, it opened a door she never knew existed. But her journey into travel writing didn’t begin with exotic destinations. It started much closer to home, with a curiosity about writing, a willingness to learn, and a determination to create a flexible career that fit around family life. In this episode, Lindy shares what it really takes to break into travel writing, why human stories matter more than ever in the age of AI, and what she learned from launching her own podcast.

Lindy Alexander is an award-winning freelance writer, travel writer, educator, and founder of The Travel Writer Accelerator. After spending a decade as a social worker and completing a PhD, she transitioned into freelance writing and built a successful career writing for major publications while helping aspiring travel writers get published. Through her courses, coaching, newsletter, and podcast, she helps writers develop the skills and confidence needed to land regular commissions.

We Also Talked About

• How Lindy transitioned from social work into a full-time freelance writing career.
• Why travel writing is about much more than exotic destinations.
• The surprising opportunities that emerged for travel writers during the pandemic.
• Why human experiences are becoming more valuable as AI-generated content increases.
• The thinking behind launching her new podcast, Inside Travel Writing.
• The benefits of creating short, practical podcast episodes.
• How podcasting helps build trust and authority with an audience.
• The role AI can play in research, editing, and idea generation—and where it falls short.
• Why reading the publications you want to write for is still one of the most important success factors.
• What editors are really looking for when evaluating story pitches.
• The difference between a great experience and a great story.
• How The Travel Writer Accelerator helps writers get their first commissions and build long-term careers.

If you’ve ever wondered whether freelance writing or travel writing could become part of your business or income strategy, this episode is packed with practical insights and encouragement. Listen now and discover how small steps, consistent effort, and strong storytelling can open unexpected opportunities.

Get regular access to tips, techniques and advice from experts about growing your business: https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Lindy’s Website – https://www.lindyalexander.net/
• The Freelancer’s Year – https://thefreelancersyear.com/
• Inside Travel Writing Podcast – https://thefreelancersyear.com/podcast/
• Travel Writer Accelerator – https://thefreelancersyear.com/
• Instagram – Lindy Alexander Writer – https://www.instagram.com/lindyalexanderwriter/
• Instagram – The Freelancer’s Year – https://www.instagram.com/thefreelancersyear/

Publications Mentioned

• BBC Travel – https://www.bbc.com/travel
• National Geographic Travel – https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/
• Condé Nast Traveler – https://www.cntraveler.com/

Lindy mentions that writers who have completed her travel writing training have gone on to secure publication opportunities with outlets including BBC Travel, National Geographic Travel, and Condé Nast Traveler.

Tools Mentioned

• Claude – https://claude.ai
• ChatGPT – https://chatgpt.com
• Airtable – https://www.airtable.com

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

[00:00:00] 

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I am your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I have a guest who has been inspiring me for a while. Now, most of you know, if you’ve been listening for a while, you will know that I bought a website and a list a while ago, and it’s the Freelance Writers Online. And as I went through that process of helping to revamp the website, I was doing it in collaboration with somebody else, it reignited my love of writing, because I used to write when my kids were little and get paid for it, which was nice.

And I heard Lindy speaking on another podcast, and I just thought, wow, I would love to have her on my podcast. She was on my podcast. If you want to go and have a listen, it’s episode 199, and in that episode she shares her journey of how she got to be a writer and then [00:01:00] travel writer. And recently because I’m on her newsletter list, she mentioned that she was starting her own podcast. And I just thought, oh, it’s time to have her back because it’s been almost exactly, it will have been almost exactly 50 podcast episodes since she’s been on. And I just thought it might be quite useful to have her on talking about what it’s like to actually start a podcast these days. So Lindy, thank you so much for saying you’d come back on, and welcome to the podcast.

Lindy Alexander: Thank you, Trudy. I feel like such a baby. I think I’m up to episode seven, so when I think about you and your hundreds of episodes, I feel like I have a lot to learn from you too. 

Trudy Rankin: Well, it is a bit of a journey. It is a bit of a journey, but it is fun, and if you make yourself the promise that you’re going to stick with it for a certain amount of time, I think lots of people find that they’ve actually fallen in love with the whole thing.

So yeah, it’s going to be interesting to sort of hear how things are going. But before we get into that, maybe just for people who [00:02:00] haven’t heard the first episode, maybe just talk a little bit about who you are, how you got to do what you’re doing now, and then we can get into some of the nitty-gritty questions.

Lindy Alexander: Yeah, sure. So a quick condensed history is that I was a social worker for 10 years, and really for a long time and as part of being a social worker, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I loved it. Did a PhD in social work, and then as I got to the end of my PhD in social work, I thought, “I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.”

And I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, but I had always considered myself to be a writer, but had never done any writing courses, had no desire to write a novel or be an author, but just loved the act of writing. And so I did a short course in feature writing as I was finishing my PhD, as I was pregnant with my first child, because no one had any expectations of me, and I kept it [00:03:00] quiet.

By the time I finished the course, I had an article published, I had $400 in my pocket, and I had had this huge realization of, people are going to pay me to write, and it blew my mind, and it opened up this whole avenue for me. And in 2016, 2017, I went full time as a freelance writer, left social work behind, and the rest is really history, and I have been a freelance writer ever since then.

Trudy Rankin: I think it’s a really interesting progression that a lot of people go through, that whole changing careers, but it’s never planned necessarily. It’s sort of serendipitous and that happens to a lot of people, mostly women. It doesn’t tend to happen so much to guys, but it does tend to happen more with women.

And obviously there’s going to be people who go, “Well, that doesn’t fit me,” either way. But it is… it tends to be a very common occurrence. And I’m interested, so you started [00:04:00] out as a freelance writer, and you had articles published. What made you decide to get into the travel writing side of things?

Lindy Alexander: Well, I think it’s the dream, right? I remember seeing friends of mine who were writing for magazines and newspapers, feature articles, and one of them had posted a picture of this incredible villa in Mexico and had said how she had been hosted. And I had never heard that word before, what that meant to be hosted.

So I asked her, and she said, “It means that this hotel brand has paid for my flights, everything, my accommodation, my food, my entire stay, so that I can have this experience and write about it. And it is not me writing about how wonderful it is. I have full editorial control over my experience and how I portray it, but they are paying for me to have this experience and for me to write about it.”[00:05:00] 

And again, that’s another moment where I thought, “I had no idea that even existed. I didn’t even know that you could do that. Like, what a dream job.” And so I started looking into it and thought, “You know, the way that I’m going to get into this is not by going on some exotic trip,” because I had two small children.

“I’m going to write about where I live, and I’m going to leverage my local knowledge to break into travel writing that way,” and that’s exactly what I did. And from there, it’s led me to travel all over the world, have all these incredible experiences that I would never otherwise have. And I think as a mother, as someone who had a lot of home duties, work duties, travel writing was this beautiful nexus of creativity, getting to see the world, and independence that I hadn’t had probably since my 20s. 

Trudy Rankin: And it’s, that is the dream.

I’m fascinated that you use that [00:06:00] word, the dream, because I reckon a lot of people sort of secretly dream about being able to travel more, have that independence, be able to have much more control and say over the things that you do or that you write about. And I think that’s fascinating. Do you think that the world of travel writing has changed over the last few years?

Especially given the, now that we’ve got AI and all that. 

Lindy Alexander: Yeah. I mean, I think it changed dramatically in 2020 when the pandemic happened, obviously. And I actually was busier than I had ever been during the pandemic because while I wasn’t writing feature-based articles, there was such a hunger for information.

What is this country doing? What are the quarantining rules? And yes, it wasn’t the most thrilling work to be doing, but travel writing just shifted into service-based articles. And then the world opened up again in what? [00:07:00] Let’s say 2022. And I started getting offers of trips because all these destinations wanted to draw all these travelers back to their destinations.

So I’ve seen that shift happen. Obviously, everything that’s happening in the Middle East at the moment has had implications for sure. And I think, yes, the advent of AI. But I would say I actually think travel writing is, and it’s not immune to AI, but I feel like we are protected because travel writing at its core is about human experiences.

So what I am seeing from the writers I’m working with is that there is a hunger from publications around human-led travel experiences. And I don’t think we could have necessarily anticipated that. But that is what I’m seeing, that there is actually growth in travel writing where other parts of writing are shrinking.

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting. And that’s a really good point about the human experience side of [00:08:00] things because that’s, from what I’m seeing and the work that I’m doing, that’s the part that’s just still taking off. It’s almost like it’s not ring-fence but there’s a bulwark built around that.

And you still can’t replicate that in any way, shape or form with AI. It’s just not possible. 

Lindy Alexander: No. I was working with a writer who went to Nepal with her dad and worked with me because she wanted to write a personal narrative about that. AI can’t do that. I’ve worked with another writer who was talking about therapy dogs in hotels and in airports.

AI can’t do that. It can imagine and it can pull together these disparate bits of information, but it can never give you that full sensory experience. So I do think in a funny way everything that travel writing has been through, I feel like we’re actually in a really strong position 

Trudy Rankin: And I think that’s a really, really good point.

So I’m curious then, so you’ve been doing travel writing for a while now and I’m curious [00:09:00] as to the, just that whole, that drive, if you like, to start a podcast. Talk us through the thinking process and the why. Why a podcast and why now? 

Lindy Alexander: Oh, it’s such a good question. So I think as a business owner, so yes, I am still travel writing, still writing articles for magazines and newspapers, but then part of my business is also that I run online courses.

And I’m a fairly introverted person, and I have a weekly email newsletter that goes out, but I’m not someone that loves to be on Instagram or do Instagram Lives. I love podcasts. It’s my favorite way to listen and absorb information and be inspired and have my curiosity stoked. So I’ve been thinking about a podcast for, I want to say a year.

But there are always reasons why I shouldn’t do it or couldn’t do it, and talk to people about, do I have a podcast where I [00:10:00] interview people, or do I just make it my own podcast where I’m sharing things? And I think eventually what I came down to is it’s like an audio version of my blog. I blogged for four years religiously every week, and I was very open, very transparent, gave all my information away.

And in a way, I’ve really taken that to my podcast too. And I’ve had so many people reach out to me and say how helpful it’s been. And look, maybe, Trudy, I’m shooting myself in the foot because maybe I’m giving away too much information, but I almost… My philosophy is one of generosity, and I don’t think it’s possible to help people too much when they are trying to break into an industry or land regular travel writing commissions.

I think it’s just another touchpoint for them to get information, but also get to know me. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. It’s a hugely powerful way of building authority just that [00:11:00] trustworthiness. People recognize that your voice, not just your actual voice, but your tone of voice, your writing style, your talking style.

And there’s it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like building a thousand different threads that connect you to people. And so when the crunch point time comes and people are going, “I have this problem, I need help right now,” who are they going to think of?

It’s going to be all of those built-in threads that are going to lead them back to you. I just think it’s a really strong thing that people don’t think about enough. And so I agree with you, just that whole giving away, helping people. It’s not like giving away… You can give away too much.

When you get to the place where you’re giving away so much that you’re starting to feel resentful, that’s too much. But when you’re giving away stuff that’s really, really helpful for people, and you can see their growth, and it’s on a path that’s helpful to them, and you know that eventually, there’s a good chance that there’s something you can help them with that you can’t actually give away for free, I think it works.

It just works. Reciprocity is a really great part of being a small [00:12:00] business owner. I think it’s really good. So, you said that you took a while to figure out what kind of format your episodes would take. What was the factor that sort of swung it towards the way you’ve taken it?

Because I’ve listened to a few episodes and, yeah, just talk us through that decision process. 

Lindy Alexander: Yeah. I mean, I love listening to podcasts where there are two people talking, so an interview or a conversation. But I also know myself, and even though from the outside I appear very organized, I’m not a huge planner.

And I think for me to do a weekly podcast where I was interviewing someone, setting up times to talk to them, emails back and forth, that wouldn’t play to my strengths. If I just have to organize myself, I can do that. So I think that was a huge part of it. And when I started to make a list of all the conversations I wanted to have with people directly, I was like, “There is enough here [00:13:00] for me just to have solo episodes of me talking through things.”

And that really drove me, I think. The other thing was that I wanted to keep my episodes short, ideally under 20 minutes, so people could dip in, dip out, get a couple of really great bits of information that they could take and run with and enact in their freelance writing business, and then get on with their day.

And it’s been really interesting because a lot of the feedback has been from people saying, “I love how short this is. I love how practical it is, and I love how short it is.” 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. And it’s interesting because both types of doing things, the podcast, the solo shows or the interviews, both of them work.

It just depends on the purpose, who your audience is, and what you want the result to be at the end of it. 

Lindy Alexander: So- I think I’ve been listening, or actually, you know, I’ve been reflecting on how I make purchasing decisions in the online space, whether I decide to work with a [00:14:00] coach or enroll in a course.

And often what I’ll do if I discover someone, however way, I will then go and binge their content, whether that’s on YouTube, on Instagram, on a podcast. And I really realized, because I’m not updating my blog that often anymore, that there was nowhere for people to binge me on a platform where I had control.

They could go and listen to me on different people’s podcasts, but I wanted to have an opportunity where people, if they wanted to go and sit down and listen to five back-to-back episodes, they could do that. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. And of course the reality is, you know, you’ve got… If you spent four years writing blog posts and you know you’re going to do, at least do the equivalent of that many years doing your podcast, you’ve got enormous opportunities to explore different things, different ways of doing things, different styles and you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t.

And I’ve seen so many people [00:15:00] go from one way to the other way. It doesn’t matter which direction. They’ll start out one way, and they’ll flip another way within a year or two, or even after five years or more. So there’s just wide open scope. So podcasts are really interesting ways of communicating with an audience.

I’m curious, and I know it’s early days, so, it’s just more about what are you thinking about doing. Are you actually putting your podcasts up on YouTube? As part of- 

Lindy Alexander: I’m not, and I know it’s not best practice. But do you know what holds me back is that, I mean, you can see me now, and if people are watching on YouTube they can see me.

Like, I’ve just got back from the gym and my hair’s wet. And I think for me, often I feel like this level of I’m not ready to do that yet. So it’s definitely in the back of my mind. But you know what I thought, Trudy? I thought if I feel like I have to get this on YouTube as well and be camera ready, then I am going to put this off even [00:16:00] more.

So I’m just going to start, it’s just going to be audio, with the view that I know that’s not the wisest thing at the moment. 

Trudy Rankin: Actually, well actually, no, I think you are doing the wisest thing at the moment. I think you could do one more little thing that might-

Lindy Alexander: Oh, tell me …

Trudy Rankin: That might move you forward a little bit.

But if you let things stop you so that you never start, that is the silly way of doing things. So by deciding to go ahead and get started, that is the most important thing. No, the reason I was asking is because YouTube has got the ability to just play your audio. You don’t have to show…

So with my podcast it goes up in two formats. The first one goes up automatically as an audio file when my podcast episodes go live on my hosting platform, which is, it’s a crowd called Omni, which, it’s not a commonly known one, but it works fairly well. Uses an RSS feed to actually just automatically take that thing and put it on YouTube.

Uses the show notes and then I go [00:17:00] in later and I just replace the thumbnail just so that it’s more obvious what it is. And then later in, I’ll go and add the actual video of the episode where I… because I interview people mostly. That’s what I do. And so you don’t have to start with the live video.

You can start with just the audio file, and you’re building your algorithm and you’re building your asset base while you’re doing it. So if it’s… what platform are you using to host your… 

Lindy Alexander: I use Hello Audio. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Well, it’s worth checking to see whether you can get them to automatically just pop it up there, because with YouTube, all you have to do is just register your thing as being a podcast and then it just, it actually was really easy.

It didn’t take me very much time at all. It was actually very pain-free just getting it all set up. 

Lindy Alexander: Oh, I had no idea. But do people, are people watching audio-only videos on YouTube? 

Trudy Rankin: Well, here’s the thing. Here’s the thing that surprised me. When I first got started and I [00:18:00] started doing that whole process, the answer was no, nobody was listening to the audio ones.

But later as my YouTube collection of videos and things grew and I started doing more videos, actually, yes, people do. They just go and listen to the audio, and it’s partly because YouTube has advanced in terms of maturity and how it promotes things. Some people don’t want to watch a video.

They just want to be able to put something on in the background and listen and because YouTube is the new TV and the new radio, it, you know, just having your episode up there to listen to if people are subscribed to it, yeah it’s a smart way of doing it. 

Lindy Alexander: Ah, thank you. I had no idea. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so yeah, not everybody does know that that’s possible, and you can…

And then the next natural step to take when you’re ready is to then actually start to turn it into videos. And once again, you still can make them faceless if you want to. You don’t [00:19:00] have to make them you talking. You can just make them, you can hear yourself talking, but your video might actually be really useful images that are there flowing across the screen while you’re talking.

It’s totally up to you. You can do it so many different ways. It’s wide open just to whatever works for you. 

Lindy Alexander: Oh, I love that. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. I’m, I’ve just written myself a little note to look into that. 

Trudy Rankin: No, no, that’s okay. That’s okay. It’s really worth thinking about.

I wanted to just talk just a little bit about something that we’ve already touched on just a bit, and that’s the fact that we live in a world of AI now. And I’m curious can you just maybe share with our listeners a little bit about how you use AI, and what’s your opinion about how you use it in general, or how people could use it or maybe are using it, good or bad?

Lindy Alexander: Yeah, great question. So I use it in two ways. One is a really pragmatic way because I’m not very tech savvy. So often I will run into issues [00:20:00] and will, on my website or trying to get bits of software to talk to each other, trying to work out Airtable formulas, and I will go to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it.

And it’s pretty good. Sometimes I’ve found myself, like we all have, in the endless loop where it offers suggestions that don’t go anywhere and then kind of berates you for doing what they’ve suggested. I have been there. And then in terms of my writing, I don’t use it for any creative part. I do use it for looking at headlines and subject lines for emails, and actually I’ve got an episode on my podcast coming out about this, that how important it is to nail your email subject line when you’re pitching editors.

And sometimes I will run my email subject line through GPT or Claude. I also have used it a bit for editing. But I [00:21:00] will say the other day I had written an article and put it into Claude and said, “Can you fact-check, as if you are a top-level subeditor, can you fact-check this article and make sure that it’s all correct?”

And it was like… and it gave me a really great list of, “This is wrong. What about this? This happened in 1965, not 1967 like you’ve said,” blah, blah, blah, and gave me references. But I then, I always give my articles to my husband to proofread for me, and he said to me, “You know, this festival that you’ve talked about, it’s not in May. It’s in March.” And I said, “No, but we’ve always gone in May.” And he said, “I know, but this year was the first year that it was in March, not May.” And neither Claude, and then I put it into ChatGPT and asked it the same thing, and neither of them picked up on that. So, you know, I know everyone says you’ve got to check, you’ve got to be careful, but I do, I am incredibly skeptical about it.

But I do, but I will use it [00:22:00] to give me a first pass of like if I’m struggling with headlines, but never for the creative stuff. And I must say, as someone who looks at a lot of pictures and writing from writers, I can tell immediately if someone is using AI, and it’s not just the em dashes. Like, there are very subtle parts that ChatGPT or Claude have, like almost like tics that they have that they use, and it can sound really great, but then it actually doesn’t necessarily make sense or follow through.

And I just think if you’re pitching an editor, especially a new-to-you editor for the first time, if you are relying on AI, it’s not a good look. 

Trudy Rankin: Oh, that’s really interesting. And it’s good to know, because one of the tools that I’ve actually built for myself, not that I’ve really had a chance to use it much, but I did build it and tested it out and it looked pretty good, was basically going out there and [00:23:00] researching all of the publications that are out there on who published stuff on this sort of a thing come back and tell me, you know, what it is they’re looking for, what they’ve been doing in the past little while and stuff. And you go through and you check it, and the research is pretty good.

You know, it is pretty spot on. And then you can tell it to go, “Okay, now put together a pitch email,” based off of rules that are pretty standard rules. And yeah, sometimes it works and sometimes it just doesn’t. So I have a question for you.

Lindy Alexander: Mm-hmm. 

Trudy Rankin: And that is, one of the toughest things for people who are trying to get into the world of writing or pitching articles and things like that, if it’s their first time or if it’s a first time to them editor, how do you actually go about getting to know that editor well enough to be able to beat the AI standard of, writing pitch emails?

Lindy Alexander: Yeah. I think that’s such a good question. Do you know what I will say, Trudy, that I think this has changed in the last three [00:24:00] or four years, is that I am seeing writers want to write for publications that they do not read. They want to write for top-tier publications, and they do not read them.

They do not subscribe to them. They’re these legacy media brands that we would all recognize if I said, but they don’t read them. And that is the biggest hurdle to ever getting a pitch accepted, is that if you are not familiar with the types of stories, the way that the stories are written, even in your headline, the editor will know whether you understand their readership or not.

And I know it seems so basic, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” but I am seeing this huge shift away from people actually doing that work and reading and subscribing to publications. 

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. Interesting. Yes, because it… Back in the day when my kids were small, I would buy the [00:25:00] magazines. This is way before, this is before the internet.

It tells you how old I am. I would buy the magazines, I would peruse them. You know, I’d go through them, just pull them apart looking for clues about what I could say about how I could write something that would fit with their stuff. And yeah, I hear what you’re saying because even for myself, I don’t read magazines as much anymore.

I’ll read online newsletters. I’ll read a few various things, but that’s interesting. So actually, that makes me wonder from the other direction, how do online publications manage to overcome that hurdle in terms of finding people who actually want to read their stuff so that they can hire writers?

Lindy Alexander: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of them are doing a great job on social media. So some of the travel publications that I write for will be posting on social media four or five times a day with all links back, and they will have newsletters as well that link back to their publications. So I think, you know, you were asking, [00:26:00] well, how does a new person then even get into the industry?

I think that is the first thing. Like, if you’re not reading the publications that you want to write for that’s your first step. And then I will say it can feel like it’s a closed industry, but if you have an incredible idea, an incredible hook, and an angle, an editor will commission you. It really is that simple.

And I do think your best work has to be at the front of your career. You have to put time into coming up with a really great angle that editors want to commission. And I’m working with a writer inside my program, The Travel Writer Accelerator, at the moment, and she’s a very strong writer but has never written professionally, but has been thinking about travel writing, and has been sending off pitches I think for six months, but without any success.

And she joined the program a month ago and emailed me on Friday to say, “I’ve just had my first acceptance,” which is so thrilling for her to… [00:27:00] She was starting to get responses from editors, which she’d never had before, and now to have this commission, it’s absolutely possible. But you have to have that great idea too.

Trudy Rankin: Oh, and sometimes that great idea, sometimes what might seem like a great idea to me doesn’t sound like a great idea to you or the editor or whatever. So how do you increase the chances that somebody’s going to think that your idea is a great idea? 

Lindy Alexander: Oh, that’s such a good question.

Because there’s a difference between having a great experience and really enjoying something, like I’m thinking about travel writing particularly, but then it actually being a story. And I think often what happens is people are like, “Well, this was a great experience,” but is there a story there? And for me, there’s a sense of like, is there something unexpected?

Is there some tension? Is there some contrast? There has to be light and shade in a story. Otherwise it’s just a nice experience you had, and editors are not commissioning [00:28:00] that. There has to be something that people are like, “Ah, I didn’t know that.” 

Trudy Rankin: Which means, by definition, that you need to be thinking about your world and the things in it and all of the stuff that goes around with it, and you just can’t just skim off the surface.

That’s really interesting, because that’s another thing that I think AI is not necessarily helping with, and it’s… If we’re relying too much on what it’s telling us or what it’s saying about things without us actually going out there and experiencing life, we’re just going to get blah.

Lindy Alexander: Yeah.

It’s very generic. It’s very generic. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s interesting. You mentioned your Travel Writing Accelerator. Do you want to just talk just a little bit more about that? 

Lindy Alexander: Yeah, so I started TWA about a year ago, and I had been playing around with this format or this idea that people were struggling to get their pitches commissioned, particularly travel writing pitches commissioned.

So I did a [00:29:00] 12-week program, almost like a sprint for people who wanted to come in and just get it done, and it was so great and people had incredible results. But at the end of that time, they were still feeling like they needed more time, because this is an industry that does take time. You come up with ideas, you send it to an editor, you’re waiting.

They maybe get back to you, they maybe don’t. You want to re-pitch that idea. So with TWA, the focus is really around travel writing, landing regular travel writing commissions with the idea that eventually you will become one of the editor’s go-to travel writers. And I am definitely that for a multiple number of publications.

And so within the program itself, there’s lots of touch points, and I’ve designed it so you don’t have to do all the things. Even if you do just one of the things, you are likely to get results. So there’s pitch critiques, there’s one-on-one coaching with me, there’s group calls. We have pitch call-outs from editors.

It’s this [00:30:00] whole ecosystem of understanding how travel writing works, but then also getting the feedback that editors are never going to give you because they’re just too busy.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s really, really helpful because it can, like you said, it can feel like a closed system, environment, whatever.

You can bash your head against the door and it’s not going to open. But having somebody who’s in the system telling you what you need to do and all the little gotchas can be super, super helpful. So, I know that my experience and probably your experience as well matches a lot of other people’s experiences and that is, is that we got into writing when we were much younger.

Our kids were little. Especially for people whose kids are small, if you have kids or for whatever reason you don’t have a lot of time. You don’t have a lot of capacity to go out there and get a full-time job. You need something that’s going to be able to help you earn some money, and then that’s going to give you the flexibility [00:31:00] to live your life.

So if somebody was actually thinking about writing, which is an age-old go-to for, “Okay, well maybe I could sell my writing,” you know, hundreds of years this has been happening. Why would somebody potentially want to start with travel writing? 

Lindy Alexander: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I think there’s a misnomer that travel writing is only about going to exotic locations.

It’s only about doing the hot air balloons in Turkey or your safari in Kenya, when actually even if you are a time-poor person who’s working 9:00 to 5:00, you can start with writing about your local environment, where you live. Or maybe you go to the same caravan park each and every year, and you know that little gem on the south coast of New South Wales intimately, and no one else knows about the best coffee shop or whatever it is.

You can start writing about that, and it fits into your life. And like Susan, who I was working [00:32:00] with her personal essay about Nepal, she is a UX copywriter. Travel writing is not going to be her main thing, but for her, she had this experience with her dad that she wanted to immortalize almost, and she wanted to write about it.

And I think that’s the thing about travel writing, is that you get to be reflective, and you get to relive the experience once you’ve had it by writing about it again. And then when it’s published, you get to relive it yet again. 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s really, really cool because I have to say, at least for myself and I know for a lot of other people, it’s that joy of being able to go back and see it in print, whether it’s online or offline, and just know what went into it and just that pride in the piece of work that’s been done.

I think that’s really cool. I’m glad you said that about the, being willing to think about things a bit wider than just exotic travels because it’s what’s in your backyard that can be of the most interest to people, either [00:33:00] because it’s gives them an experience that they couldn’t ever get any other way or because it’s something that they’re familiar with as well and they’d feel kind of at home there.

So if people were interested in either finding out more about your accelerator program, Travel Writing Accelerator program, or just getting in touch with you or just following what you do, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Lindy Alexander: Well, they can listen to my podcast, which is Inside Travel Writing, and my website is The Freelancer’s Year.

And so I have a 90-minute Break Into Travel Writing training where a lot of people start. It’s really accessible, gives you a whole lay of the land. And you know what? Even from that small training, people have broken into BBC Travel, National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler. So that’s a really great starting point.

But yeah, come find me on Instagram. I’ve got two Instagram accounts. One is lindyalexanderwriter and the other is thefreelancersyear. So come say hi. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay. And I will put those links in the show [00:34:00] notes so people can easily get through to there. And Lindy, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Lindy Alexander: Thanks, Trudy. I’m so happy to be back.