Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

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

diannejacob

Epicurious EIC Recommends You Do It Yourself

by

Editor-in-Chief Tanya Steel was in town recently to promote Epicurious.com, home of 30,000 recipes, at the farmer’s market at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza. I thought I’d stop in to get her thoughts about today’s food writing scene.

Over spearmint tisane (for me) and coffee (for her) from Blue Bottle, she said she tries to keep her ear to the ground, stay ahead of trends, and innovate. To do so she scans 10 to 12 blogs and aggregate sites from around the country every day, including The Food Section, Cold Mud, and newspaper food section blogs. Her staff scours social networking sites.

It must be working. Her latest accomplishment, the free Epicurious app, available for the iPhone, iPad, Droid and other mobile devices, has more than 2.5 million copies in circulation, making it a leading app.

When asked how today’s food writer could get ahead, she [Read more…] about Epicurious EIC Recommends You Do It Yourself

An Evolution of Five Book Covers

by

As you might know by now (because I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops), Will Write for Food, 2nd edition, is out with a new cover. I thought you might like a behind-the-scenes look at how the cover selection process works and how I ended up with my current cover.

Here’s the original cover of Will Write for Food. This cover came in an email from the publisher (Marlowe & Co.). I loved it immediately and danced around the room. People told me how lucky I was to have a great cover on the first pass. It’s an old-school journalism kind of image, and back in 2005, I was an old-school journalism type of gal. I bought matching jewelry, a bracelet of typewriter keys. My agent gave me a necklace with a “D” typewriter key to celebrate the book’s release.

Fast forward to 2010 and the revision of Will Write for Food. The new publisher (Da Capo Press) said they wanted to freshen up the old cover. Even though I loved the old one, I had to recognize that it needed an update for the new generation of people who want to [Read more…] about An Evolution of Five Book Covers

Chronicle Books To Roll Out Cookbook-based Apps

by

Lorena Jones became publishing director of Chronicle Books last fall, and she’s focusing on the newest part of her  job: developing dynamic digital content for mobile applications, enhanced e-boooks, and iPads.

The former publisher of Ten Speed, Jones worked at Ten Speed for 15 years. Now she’s going digital and embracing the learning curve.

“Five of us here are trying to learn all this stuff at warp speed,” she said. “We work super collaboratively.” Jones has done about a dozen deals since January, including six iPhone apps and 3 iPad apps. She calls the products “suites.”

She’s developing her talent pool, working with both established Chronicle authors and new writers excited about digital media. “I think of it like the Matrix. I think about what authors know in a [Read more…] about Chronicle Books To Roll Out Cookbook-based Apps

The Writing Process: Are you an Introvert or Extravert?

by 22 Comments

Just got off the phone today with the group of bloggers I’ll be on a panel with at the upcoming BlogHer annual conference in New York. And what a group it is: funny, thoughtful women, all prolific writers. I’ll be the moderator of the session, called How to Use Your Blogging to Make You a Better Writer. Here’s the line-up:

  • Humor writer Mary McCarthy of Pajamas and Coffee, who posts about such things as testing a duck-shaped dildo
  • Suzanne Reissman of Cuss and Other Rants, a New York public policy wonk by day and writer of various rants on her blog
  • Jennifer McGuiggan of The Word Cellar, who ‘s working on her MFA and blogs about the writing process.

After the session on August 7, I’ll be signing books, so if you happen to be at the conference, please stop by and say hi.

Elisa Camahort, one of the co-founders of BlogHer, was on the call and brought up how the writing process can vary  based on whether you’re an introvert or extravert. When she [Read more…] about The Writing Process: Are you an Introvert or Extravert?

Anatomy of A Book Revision

by

I thought you might like to know how a book revision works, and in doing so I’ll discuss how I approached a large writing project and how I interview.

It seems that hard and fast rules about what constitutes a book revision don’t exist. Usually it’s because the author or the publisher feels the information needs updating. And that’s how it happened.

Last year I decided to update Will Write for Food, mostly because of advances in blogging and social media. I couldn’t go back to the editor I worked with and discuss it, because a new publishing company (Perseus) acquired the original publisher of my book (Avalon). So I met with my new editor at Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus.

A girl needs to be prepared, so I brought her a list of what I thought I could enlarge upon from the first edition.  I wanted a big new chapter on food blogging. I wanted to incorporate information from bloggers in other chapters such as freelance writing and how to get started. I had co-written a cookbook in 2008 and wanted to say more about the process of writing and production, photography and collaboration. Self-publishing had changed, particularly when it came to e-books and print-on-demand. And freelance writing had changed, some of it drying up. There had to be a positive way to approach that.

She said a revision had to be 25 percent larger than the original book. That meant adding 20,000 words, about 80 pages of 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper, double spaced. We spoke in pages, though: 50 pages on blogging, 7 more pages on freelancing, 9 more pages on cookbooks. Fortunately, our meeting [Read more…] about Anatomy of A Book Revision

Feel the Fear and Write Anyway

by

After a class on book proposals I taught recently at The Writing Salon, I solicited feedback from the students. One accomplished author of many books, hard at work on a memoir, took me to task for my negativity.

“My major problem was having to deal with the relentless discouragement,” she wrote. “I realize that you wanted us to have a realistic view of the market.  But it’s difficult for me to write if I become too down about the prospects of publication.  You mentioned that 97% of manuscripts are rejected.  That someone who spent two years writing a perfect proposal was still turned down, etc.”

Ted Weinstein

Yep. It’s true. And it not only came from me, but from Ted Weinstein, the literary agent who came one night to hear the students’  pitches. He began his talk by saying that he usually dissuades people from writing a book, because it’s too hard.

But here’s the thing. You’re going to hear that it’s hard to publish a book these days, that your platform isn’t big enough, that your proposal needs more work. It sounds scarey. That’s okay. The bottom line is that you believe your project is worthwhile, that you have something to say that has to come out.

Otherwise, you might falter, and I think that’s what’s happening to this student. It happened to me, too.  Last year I spent 6 months working on a book proposal for a biography, with two sample chapters. I showed it my agent, who said it was not good enough to interest a publisher. Two days later, I started this blog and put the project away. Later I showed the proposal to Ted, who also wasn’t positive about it. Still, the story nags at me, waiting to come out. I daydream about how to revise it. The next version will be the third. Writing still scares the crap out of me, when it’s something I care about. But that’s often the way it is.

Colum McCann

At the end of an excellent novel I finished recently, Let the Great World Spin, author Colum McCann talks about this fear in an interview. “Vonnegut said that we have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down,” he explained. “I think that’s what happened with this book. I saw a big cliff and I took off.”

And earlier, he said this, “…stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.”

That’s from an accomplished author who felt the fear and wrote anyway, winning a National Book Award. His message  is to keep going. I’m going to take him up on it.

Here it Is: The New Edition of Will Write for Food

by 36 Comments

Last year, based on the success of the film Julie & Julia, my agent persuaded my publisher that Will Write for Food needed an update. “EVERYONE who has seen the movie wants to write a food blog,” she said, “and Dianne has already been received as an expert on the subject.”

Published in in 2005, the first edition of Will Write for Food needed an update, as it did not say much about food blogs. Back when I wrote it in 2004, the print world ignored bloggers as unproven and unedited. And I had a background in print.

How things have changed in five short years. Now food bloggers are the darlings of the food writing world, and some blogs have higher readerships than national food magazines. Some bloggers have higher incomes than the executive editors of those magazines too. And then there are the blog-to-book deals, the opportunities to write for print, and all kinds of other doors that opened as bloggers blasted into international consciousness by embracing easy blogging software and appearing online immediately. Now, every print publication and most general websites have begun blogs as a way of staying relevant.

A year ago I launched this blog as a way to research my new version of Will Write for Food and to build a platform for its sales. I couldn’t say so because I didn’t want sales of the existing version of my book to come to a halt, so all this time I’ve been waiting to make this announcement.

Meanwhile,  it’s been fun learning how to blog, build an audience, figure out what resonates with readers, and become part of an enormous online community. Along the way, I interviewed the most successful food bloggers, writing a 17,000-word chapter on  food blogging (about 70 pages double spaced) that will answer your questions, inspire you, and provide resources and insider information.

In addition to the new chapter on blogging, the new edition of Will Write for Food incorporates tips on using social media as a freelancer and a blogger; updated info on book publishing, whether traditional or self-publishing; and updated info on the newer, more competitive freelancing market. There’s a foreword by the multi-talented David Lebovitz, a successful food blogger, author and freelance writer and one of the first to champion my book (and note comment from Cooking With Amy, way back then too). You’ll also find insider information based on 75 interviews with the most successful authors, writers, editors, agents (and bloggers) in our business, plus a bibliography of more than 200 books, and a resource guide of magazines and websites that take freelance writing.

I hope you’ll check it out. The new edition is 25 percent bigger, clocking in at around 100,000 words, and the price of $15.95/$20 Canada has not changed. I’ve grown to appreciate the new cover, a departure from the oh-so-journalistic typewriter keys.

My new edition should be in stores by the end of this month, or pre-order it online or at your local independent bookstore. And as soon as it’s out, I’ll be running around the US and Western Canada to appear at conferences and bookstores to promote it, so I hope you’ll come by and say hello.