Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

Useful Tips, Interviews, and Stories to Inspire Food Writers and Bloggers

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5 Tips for an Irresistible Query Letter

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A writer asked if she could pay me to write her query letter. The answer was no. She needs to present her own writing to an editor or agent, not mine.

Query letters are an art form, but once you know the rules, you can succeed. Here are five tips:

1. Only send a query when you’ve written a full proposal. Yes of course, it’s easier to write a one-page letter. But if agents or editors like your book idea, they’ll ask for the full proposal. Then where will you be?

2. Get a referral. Literary agents like word-of-mouth recommendations. If you can say immediately that a friend or client recommended them, they will perk up and keep reading. Get referrals from other writers, writing teachers and booksellers. Work your groups, including IACP, Baker’s Dozen, and Slow Food, to find a connection.

3. Say why you’re approaching them. No one likes a form letter, so do your homework. Tell superstar agent Esther Newberg, for example, you chose her because you adore Ina Garten’s cookbooks (Good luck with that! ). Tell literary agent Stacey Glick your book on salt-preserving would be a good fit because the firm represented The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, a book that’s similar in spirit.

4. Make it short and sweet, and don’t forget the food. Get in and get out in three paragraphs. Grab their attention in the lead paragraph (hook), describe the book in the second paragraph (mini-synopsis), describe yourself and why you’re qualified to write the book in the third paragraph (biography). Most of all, since you’re writing a food book, make the reader salivate. You wouldn’t believe how often people forget to write about the food.

5. Sell, sell, sell, but be realistic. A query letter is no time to say how you’ve always wanted to write this book, or to deliver your condensed life story. Read book jackets to get a sense of the appropriate language. And do not — ever– say your book will be a bestseller or that you plan to appear on Oprah.

Have you struggled with a query letter or do you have a question? While I can’t write yours for you, write to me here and I’ll do my best to answer.

What Makes a Recipe Headnote So Good You Want to Rush into the Kitchen?

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My last bookstore talk for 2010, at A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland, CA. Two stellar headnotes were all I needed to try out new recipes for the crowd. (Photo by Owen Rubin.)

For my last 2010 local bookstore talk based on the new edition of Will Write for Food, I worried that no one would show. I had already done two signings in San Francisco (one at Omnivore and another at Book Passage). So I made up a flyer and handed it out at my aerobics class with a note: There will be cake.

Sure enough, about a dozen fellow classmates and their friends showed up, plus friends, neighbors, former students, my sister-in-law and a local blogger I hadn’t met yet. Funny how just the word “cake” produces results.

I was up late two nights before, baking two enormous cakes I had been wanting to try. Why would I choose recipes I had never made before for this event? Because I trusted the authors and their headnotes. I loved their [Read more…] about What Makes a Recipe Headnote So Good You Want to Rush into the Kitchen?

3 Thanksgiving Cookbook Authors Dish on Their Craft

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It’s an exciting time of year to be the author of a Thanksgiving cookbook. I spoke to three veterans about what kind of media they do to boost book sales, what they like about being an expert, and what they’ll be serving on Turkey Day. They are:
1. How far ahead do you plan your writing and promotional events for Thanksgiving?
 

Diane Morgan

Diane: Magazines come the earliest with articles typically due by the middle of May. I am often asked to write stories in the early spring for the coming year’s publication. Newspapers are typically thinking about Thanksgiving stories in July, though pitching in June isn’t unheard of.

For my own website, I plan my blog featured recipes with coordinating video in August. This year, I was a judge on the Food Network Thanksgiving Challenge. That request came early last March. Interviews for Turkey Day stories happen in September or October. Radio interviews come right after Halloween. I was just on Martha Stewart Living radio talking about easy holiday appetizers.

Kristine: During my long tenure as food editor at Bon Appetit magazine, we started working on our Thanksgiving issue about six months before it was published. I created the recipes for my Thanksgiving book a year before publication. I did a book signing and demo at Williams-Sonoma at the end of October. With my blog, I work a week or two ahead, so I am planning and creating in the season when [Read more…] about 3 Thanksgiving Cookbook Authors Dish on Their Craft

Bad Timing on Book Covers, in More Ways Than One

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Meat cookbooks are all the rage this holiday season. As I perused the latest cookbooks in the Kitchen Arts & Letters newsletter, I saw Falling Off the Bone; Primal Cuts; The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing and Sausage Making; and Cured.

Also included two books with almost identical cover themes. Yep, art directors at Ten Speed (Meat) and Stewart, Tabori & Chang (Good Meat) had the same idea: Raw T-bone steaks. While Good Meat is about sourcing and enjoying sustainable meat  (hence the “Good” in the title), they still look similar, coming out within a month of each other.

 

I called Kitchen Arts & Letters to discuss more, but got a busy signal. So I called Omnivore Books, where I left a voicemail that owner Celia Sacks returned promptly (KA&L, take note). She said the covers reminded her of the hugely successful [Read more…] about Bad Timing on Book Covers, in More Ways Than One

The Worst Food Writing Words

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The most overused word in the food writer's lexicon.

While chatting with Brooke Burton of Food Woolf, she mentioned that L.A. Weekly gave her a list of words freelancing food writers are not to use. She reeled off a few from memory:

  • farm fresh
  • sustainable
  • local
  • yummy.

If I wanted to see a good list, she suggested, I could read these blog posts: Top Ten Foodie Words We Hate: Starting with Foodie, and a follow-up generated by the response to the first article, Part 2. Written by Amy Scattergood, L.A. Weekly’s food blog editor, the list of 20 words mixes fad terms like “iconic” and “mixologist” with bland, boring terms like “offering.”

Brilliant! Somehow I missed this list. I like it because it branches out  from the usual vague adjectives I’m always going on about: delicious. wonderful, and tasty. I’ll add a few more:

  • authentic: a hotly contested word, because no matter where you travel, there is never just one version of Spaghetti Bolognese or Pad Thai.
  • orbs: When tired of saying “grapes,” do not substitute “orbs.” No one talks that way.
  • toothsome: Not sure what this means. Chewy? If so, use a word we all understand.

Now it’s your turn. Which words make you cringe or see red? Do you disagree with Scattergood’s or my choices?

Food Writer Settles $4 Million Lawsuit

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It started with a limo ride to an event he was covering...

You have to laugh. The whole idea that any food writer might have $4 million dollars…well, you know.

But the lawsuit wasn’t very funny at all to John Mitzewich, except at first, when he thought it was a joke, like the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George steal a limo.

Mitzewich writes for About.com as the American Food expert. The New York Times owns About.com, a fact that gives Mitzewich excellent press credentials.

A few years ago, Mitzewich accepted an invite to  attend Toast to the Coast, a food and wine event in Atlantic City. He took a red-eye to Philadelphia, where a limo driver was  supposed to pick him up and drive him to the event. Except when he arrived, he couldn’t find a guy in a uniform holding up a card with his name on it. Instead, Mitzewich found was a guy holding up a card with the name of the managing editor of Wine Enthusiast.

John Mitzewich

Mitzewich knew that he was the only invitee flying into Philadelphia. Everyone else, including the Wine Enthusiast editor, was flying into New York. So he took the limo, and off they went. Mitzewich wrote a nice story about the event, and everyone seemed happy.

Mitzewich, also a video blogger on You Tube and on his own blog, Food Wishes, filmed the limo driver and the limo with a good-natured voiceover, and put the video on his blog. (Don’t look for it because it’s no longer there.)

Soon afterwards, Mitzewich received a letter from the limo company, alleging he stole the limo and asking him to pay $385 for the ride, plus $4 million for defamation of character, interference with the limo contract, and invasion of privacy. He took down the video.

Two years later, after hiring an attorney, Mitzewich settled. He had told the limo company, over and over, that he did nothing wrong, and they weren’t ever going to get a dime. And they didn’t. So here’s what they agreed to: Mitzewich will run an ad for the limo company on his blog for six months. So far, the limo company has not sent the materials.

Anthony Bourdain's Valentine to Cooks and Food

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You know that secret smile you carry around after reading a good book? Especially one that makes you laugh and ponder the food world we love so much? I just finished Anthony Bourdain’s memoir, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food, and I’ll be smiling all day.

He’s toned down the macho swagger I staggered through 10 years ago in Kitchen Confidential, but he’s still writing about his man-filled, foul-mouthed food world. Expect brutal honesty about what constitutes exciting restaurant food, why we should cook and what, no-holds-barred opinions on selected food writers and chefs, and dirt on restaurant reviewers who suck. In this self-deprecating, thoughtful memoir, Bourdain also looks back at his life and how he got to be so lucky to be a best-selling author, dad, and world traveller with a TV show.

You can’t help but laugh out loud, and often. After consuming an elaborate tasting menu at Per Se in New York by the chef he respects most, Thomas Keller, he writes:

“But look across the seat at the woman with you. Do you really think she’s breathlessly anticipating getting back to your apartment to ride you like the Pony Express? Or do you think it far more likely that (like you) she’s counting the seconds till she can [Read more…] about Anthony Bourdain's Valentine to Cooks and Food