diannejacob

8 Best Practices for Food and Travel Writing

May 11, 2021 by diannejacob 2 Comments

When I started out doing food and travel writing, I had a freelance journalist’s dream job. I lived in Europe, and wrote a weekly food column for an American newspaper abroad. I was completely free to choose the topic and recipes.

My column started out at 500 words. But a few months later, it expanded. First it was 1,000 words, then 2,000, counting the recipes, too. No longer just a column, it filled an entire page in the newspaper every Thursday.

During the 7 years I worked for that paper, I wrote 350 stories about food—European, American, and Asian. All of them included one or more recipes. Since I covered a range of [Read more…] about 8 Best Practices for Food and Travel Writing

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation in Food Writing

April 27, 2021 by diannejacob 19 Comments

A guest post by Nandita Godbole

Recipe writers and content creators frequently struggle to understand cultural appropriation. To some, cultural appropriation challenges the old ways of doing things. Others wonder why food writers lose their jobs over it. They question why it is important. Is it?

Here’s my understanding of cultural appropriation and how to avoid it as a food writer:

1. First of all, what is cultural appropriation?

Wikipedia describes cultural appropriation as “The adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity.” For me, it also means [Read more…] about How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation in Food Writing

Win a New Edition of Will Write for Food!

April 13, 2021 by diannejacob

I’m excited to announce that the fourth edition of Will Write for Food: Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs, and More is available for pre-order. It will publish on May 25, 2021.

And you should definitely win a copy from me. Just leave a comment below.

Can you believe that I’ve written four editions of this book? Sometimes I want to pinch myself. Especially since they have [Read more…] about Win a New Edition of Will Write for Food!

7 Tips for Making a Cookbook — and Keeping Your Sanity

March 30, 2021 by diannejacob 6 Comments

By Jennifer Kurdyla and Abbey Rodriguez

Do you dream of turning your blog (or collection of index cards) into a cookbook? Or maybe you already have a publishing deal in place? Regardless, so much goes into making a cookbook that you won’t see in the finished product. But like recipes themselves, there are ways to make the process easier.

The two of us spent 2020 creating Root & Nourish, our new cookbook focused on herbalism for women’s health. The pandemic threw us some major curveballs, but even in normal times, making a cookbook reveals lots of gaps in preparation, knowledge, and experience. [Read more…] about 7 Tips for Making a Cookbook — and Keeping Your Sanity

Tons of Tips to Improve Your Food Styling

March 16, 2021 by diannejacob 4 Comments

By Pascale Beale

Food photography and styling is all about seduction. When someone looks at your image, you want them to think, “That looks so good, I want to eat that, now!” So, before taking a photo, think about two key elements that will improve your food styling:

Which medium is the image for? This will dictate the shape, style and composition. Instagram works best with square shots, which would impact your styling choices, for example.
What story is the shot telling us? Your choice of background, props and plating style will help to tell that story. A shot of a dish cooked outdoors requires a different set of props and styling than a photo of a dessert.

Once you establish the key elements, here’s how to improve your food styling for blogs, social media and cookbooks:

1. Pick one: natural or artificial light.

Good lighting is the most fundamental part of food photography. It literally shapes the food. You can have the most beautifully plated food, but if the light is wrong, the dish will look flat and unappetizing. Shoot with either natural (my preferred choice) or artificial light. You cannot use both.

image that shows how to improve food styling

I shot this salad (used as the cover of my cookbook, Salade II) with indirect natural light, which accented the different textures of the white elements — cheese, platter, and servers — in the dish.

As acclaimed food photographer Eva Kosmas Floras says:

“Never mix two different color temperatures in the same photograph (i.e., artificial + natural light). You will end up with blue or orange parts of the image, or both, and it will have a very strange effect on the final photograph.

“If shooting in natural light, (it) has different color temperatures [Read more…] about Tons of Tips to Improve Your Food Styling

Q&A: John Birdsall on Writing a Profile of James Beard

March 2, 2021 by diannejacob 4 Comments

Recently I had the pleasure of reading The Man Who Ate Too Much, by John Birdsall, a two-time James Beard Award-winning author and a writer I’ve admired since his early days as a critic. John combined scholarly research with the skills of a novelist to create this nuanced portrait of the famous cookbook author and personality. I wanted to find out about his process and methods of writing a profile about James Beard, especially since profiles are rare in the food world. Here is our interview:

Q. Why did you want to write a profile of James Beard?

A. When I was a chef, back in the late 1980s, I cooked at a restaurant in San Francisco with a focus on regional American cooking. I became familiar with Beard’s 1972 masterpiece, James Beard’s American Cookery. That book has a particular language—the recipes, the sketches, the way it’s designed. It intrigued me.

Later, in 2013, I wrote an essay for Lucky Peach magazine titled “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” about the influence on American cooking of three closeted cookbook authors of the mid- to late-20th century: Richard Olney, Craig Claiborne, and Beard. That piece had a big impact—I won a James Beard Award for it, and many readers, chefs and others, reached out.

Beard lingered in my imagination for a few years. He seemed the most interesting of the three, someone who [Read more…] about Q&A: John Birdsall on Writing a Profile of James Beard

5 Ways to Maximize Cookbook Sales

February 16, 2021 by diannejacob 3 Comments

Some news: I recently became an affiliate of Jason’s online cookbook publishing course for bloggers, content creators, and chefs. If you decide to take his course (which I recommend — his content compliments mine), enter the code WWFF for 30 percent off! I will earn a small commission. Now, here’s his guest post about how to maximize cookbook sales.

A guest post by Jason Logsdon

Your cookbook just came out. Congratulations! But your work isn’t done yet, you still need to sell it! These keys to maximize cookbook sales have helped me move more than 60,000 copies of the 15 books I’ve written and published.

Many of the sales were for my self published books, where the challenge of marketing and promotion was all on my shoulders.

Here are my five keys to maximize cookbook sales:

1. Mention your book everywhere.

To sell lots of copies of your book, you need public exposure. And whether that exposure is a blog, podcast, tv show, social media accounts, or speaking engagements, you must constantly mention your book.

Authors tend to fall in the trap of assuming that [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Maximize Cookbook Sales