Don’t limit your efforts for a travel-article sale by targeting only travel magazines. Christian magazines, frugal-living magazines, regionals, lifestyles, newspapers, seniors magazines, general magazines and even pet magazines (if your pet article is travel related) and more all purchase travel articles.
FAMILY FUN, a family and parenting magazine, has several travel columns. Christian magazines often combine information about interesting places with missions and/or ministry opportunities. Business magazines have short articles pertaining to travel--business trips, airports that provide things to do between flights, etc. Regional or lifestyle magazines--MIDWEST LIVING and SOUTHERN LIVING, for example--look for short pieces on scenic drives, city profiles, road trips, destinations, etc. EVERYDAY WITH RACHAEL RAY, a food and lifestyle magazine, usually has up to ten pages of travel-related articles. Even frugal-living newsletters purchase travel pieces. I sold a short article on how to save money on the purchase of a rental car and another on how to save money when taking a road trip to THE DOLLAR STRETCHER. And, of course, there are the writing magazines or journals. Once you have a little travel-writing savvy under your belt, tell others how you do it by writing how-to-write articles or marketing strategies articles for such print magazines as THE WRITER or onlines or newsletters as WRITERS/WEEKLY or FUNDS FOR WRITERS.
Travel articles embody more than the 2,000-3,000 word feature articles on destinations and the like; they also include 50-150 word quick-hit pieces on the latest travel trends--gear, gadgets, etc.--and other short 250-500 word pieces on everything from dining and nightlife to health and transportation as long as it’s travel related. Travel markets other than the traditional travel markets are ubiquitous and virtually endless.
Travel articles often straddle one or more market boundaries. That is why so many different types of magazines are able to use travel pieces. For example, a story about people with disabilities or medical conditions using air transportation would be both health and travel related. A story about elite travel status could find a home in a business magazine AND a travel magazine. I am currently working on a short 250-word write-up for ARTHRITIS TODAY on a home-grown strategy I came up with for carrying injection needles aboard an airplane, an article prompted by a trip with my granddaughter who has juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and must administer shots to herself. This same article would also make a good fit in a travel magazine.
You can often glean the travel information for your alternative-magazine markets from information you used in a larger more in-depth travel article you wrote for a bona fide travel magazine. I recently wrote a more-than-2,000-word logistics article on a major city for TRAVEL SMART, for example. From that one article I was able to cull a 600-word how-to for a writing magazine, a 1,000-word article for yet another writing magazine and a 700-word how-to for a frugal living newsletter. And I’m not finished. I also plan a short piece on recycled whiskey barrels for an environmental magazine, an idea that came to me when I included a distillery tour as part of my lengthy logistics article. As I’d already researched and reported on these spin-offs in my original article, recycling them to other non-travel markets was fairly simple.
