Travel Writing for Mobile Apps

Workshop: Travel Writing for Mobile Apps

Overview: This weekly workshop meets online via Skype over the course of four weeks, teaching participants how to: pitch winning ideas; select an app developer best suited to your ideas and goals; work with a content management system; write effectively for the mobile platform; understand and harness multimedia; execute the keys to success; and market the app. If the online platform demands concision in writing (and it does), then travel writing for mobile apps can be considered akin to haiku. In other words, vivid imagery paired with concision are prized skills.

Each participant will have the opportunity to begin to create his or her own app using the Sutro Media authoring tool and see the fruits of his or her labor through Sutro’s real-time testing tool.

Course size: This course is limited to eight participants.

Prerequisites: None, but it is strongly recommended that participants have completed the MatadorU travel writing course.

Facilitators: Kim Grant of Sutro Media

Upcoming dates: September 25-October 16 (each Sunday between this time frame, from 5-6 PM Eastern US time).

Cost: $220 US

About the Instructor

Kim Grant is Acquisitions Editor for Sutro Media, where she’s brought over 400 authors and 625 apps on board since late 2009. Kim has also been the travel Acquisitions Editor at Countryman Press, where she shepherded about 150 titles through to completion and significantly expanded Explorer’s Guide, Great Destinations and Backroads & Byways titles. Kim currently writes the popular “Boston Essential Guide” iPhone app, as well as the print Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard & Nantucket: An Explorer’s Guide (in its 9th edition and the best-selling guide to the region) and Hawaii: An Explorer’s Guide. One of her most rewarding gigs was photographing and writing the Backroads New England deck for Chronicle Books. Over the years, Kim’s written about 45 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, The Countryman Press, Frommer’s, Fodors, Insight, Discovery, Berlitz, Rodale and Harvard Common Press. She’s also actively shot photo assignments and stock for travel magazines and other travel outlets from National Geographic Traveler to Travel & Leisure. She is represented by Lonely Planet Images.

About Sutro
Sutro Media, with over 300 published apps and another 325 in the pipeline, has attracted the world’s largest collection of indie travel writers by offering them a home on their exciting and versatile mobile platform. Sutro is a new kind of app publishing company – one that bridges the gap between traditional print media and new media outlets, and one that makes it easier and more fun to explore the world using mobile devices. Sutro vets, invites and partners with experts in their fields to share what they know with the world. They’re the kind of people you’d call or email when you need advice or a travel lifeline. And since Sutro doesn’t homogenize or pasteurize their author-experts, they’re able to fully capture any given location with the best approach for that location.

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