Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

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

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Keeping up the posts — What's your strategy?

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images 18-55-03A while back I read a piece in the New York Times called “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest.” It said that according to a survey by Technorati last year, only 7.5 million of the 133 million blogs it tracks were updated in the past 120 days. That means 95 percent are not active with any regularity.

Whoa. I’m trying for two posts per week. It’s only been a month since I started this thing, and I am still surprised by how long it takes me to write and publish an entry. Even if it’s short, it takes several hours. What I’ve learned so far is not to start a new post on deadline day, but to have some  ideas and maybe a preliminary draft in the hopper. (Of course, when I’m advising clients about starting a blog, I tell them to come up with a list of 10 topics before they begin. Easier to dish it out, apparently.)

Looking for inspiration, I asked some food bloggers about creativity and productivity. I started with Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen:

Q. Do you have an editorial calendar to determine blog posts?images 11-22-09
A. Absolutely. Mondays and Tuesdays are my highest traffic days, so I usually post Sunday night or Monday morning, depending how good the TV shows are on Sunday nights. I also find time to post Wednesday or Thursday. Twice to three times a week is my norm.

Q. How far in advance do you write drafts?
A. I don’t write drafts, unless they are recipes that I’m working on. Blogging is a spontaneous medium. I write exactly how I feel in the moment and I’d just feel strange if I was writing for tomorrow.

Q. How do you keep the inspiration flowing?
A. By having fantastic support group and friends like Elise (Simply Recipes), Diane (White on Rice Couple), and Bee ( Rasamalaysia). We’re always throwing ideas back and forth, listening to each other rant and rave, and teaching each other things. We’re a team. That’s important. Plus there’s a whole ‘nother side of blogging that isn’t talked about much: the “job” of blogging. My full time job is my blog, which is very different than 99% of others. The technical and monetization side of blogging certainly keeps me on my toes. Between those three areas, I get all the variety and excitement I need for the week.

Anytime I need inspiration or feel like I need a kick in the pants, I usually start a new branch or project. My newest one is Good Bite.

Q. How many hours per week do you spend on your blog?
A. You don’t want to know.

images-1 11-22-57Then I asked another veteran, Amy of Cooking with Amy, for advice. She said she’s almost always composing posts in her head. “By the time I sit down to write it generally goes pretty quickly. I also no longer beat myself up if I only get one or two posts out a week. I try to write something then save it as a draft and return to it later to edit it.” Sarah at Lettuce Eat Kale said she keeps an editorial calendar and planannehamersky_09032_0482s a month ahead. She posts three times per week. “The best advice I got,” she said, “Is post when you can, keep it fun. If it feels like a chore or burden or added stress, then step back and think about what your goals are. So far, I look forward to writing my posts.”

Now I feel more encouraged. It’s always satisfying to reach out an talk with people who know more about this than me. I also found a terrific article on ProBlogger, “Seven Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing. ” And I’d like to learn more.

What about you? If you’re a blogger, how do you keep the posts coming? Do you plan out an editorial calendar? Block out time in your datebook? Write lots of drafts and store them until ready? Please share your strategies with me. I’m the new kid on the block.

Sony promotes food bloggers on J&J site

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imagesTalk about great publicity. Sony Pictures is promoting food bloggers with links to a whole bunch of them  on its official movie website homepage for Julie & Julia.

The navigation isn’t obvious, so let me tell you how it works. Click on the white egg in the right-hand corner, and a long list of food bloggers will go by to the left. Just click on the blog name you’d like to see.

Pretty impressive, except I’m wondering why they threw in a link to Epicurious’s Epi-Log. The earliest post on that blog was a breathy report of the New York premiere focusing on name dropping and what people ate. The Sony site also provides a link to Great Grub, “a forum where you can connect with people who share your passion for food.” If that’s what Sony wanted, why not steer people to with Chow.com or Serious Eats?

Thanks to Sarah at Lettuce Eat Kale for sending the link.

Julie & Julia: Enough with the whining

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julia1David Leite told me I should not rant on this blog. Then he emailed me a 1400-word rant about food writers who are bitter about the success of food blogger Julie Powell and the coming movie based on her book, and of course I got worked up.

Powell wrote Julie & Julia, about a year of cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The upcoming movie, Julie & Julia, is based on Julie’s book and My Life in France, a memoir of Julia Child written by her nephew.

There’s a lot of sour grapes from traditional food writers about how food bloggers are being taken seriously, and hand-wringing about how Julia Child wouldn’t be taken seriously today. As the movie release date approaches this weekend,  the carping increases. David pointed me to Virginia Willis’ blog post and comments as an example.

Here’s the drift of the comments going around and my response. Thanks to David for inspiring me.

1. Julia Child could not get a cookbook published today because she doesn’t have a platform. Rubbish. Publishers still publish books from authors with small platforms. They are also still taken by excellent writing.  If Child was around today, she’d probably start a a blog to help her with her platform. Maybe she’d have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, because she was always accessible to the adoring public, including us food writers. When she died just about everyone I knew had a story about the time they met her.

images2. Julia Child wouldn’t get a TV show today because she’s an accomplished cook. I agree. That wouldn’t be the main reason she’d get the job. But she was also a supreme entertainer, and — hello! That’s what television is all about. The Food Network makes no secret of it. Maybe the fact that she was a Cordon Bleu-trained chef would come third in her list of qualities, after excellent content.

Perhaps the old guard of food writers sees themselves in this victim version of Julia Child, the skilled chef whose talents are not appreciated. But Child would never be a victim. She’d be more like Judith Jones, her editor, who started a blog to promote her new book. These seasoned food writers also dismiss a newcomer like Julie Powell, which leads me to the third comment making the rounds…

3. Julie Powell has no right to be so successful because she’s a) “not a serious (read: formally trained) cook,” b) only a blogger, and c) the Julie/Julia Project was a publicity stunt.

Let’s look at these charges individually. Regarding a), Of course she wasn’t a serious cook. She was learning how to cook by cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking for a year.

Re b), She might have only been a blogger but her idea and writing were good enough to be serialized on Salon.com and led to a 6-figure book advance. And the editor didn’t care that she was not professionally trained.

And re c),  I don’t think she ever dreamed that her idea would lead to a book and a movie. We’re a celebrity culture, she was young and attractive, she had a great idea, and once Amanda Hesser wrote about her in the New York Times in 2003, the calls from literary agents and the whole circus began.

Julia2Ironically, Mastering the Art of French Cooking will now sell all over again to younger audiences inspired by the movie. I was a little shocked to see that Knopf put Merryl Streep on the cover. Talk about art imitating life. So Julia Child can sell a book today, even if she looks like Merryl Streep. Julie Powell’s book relaunched this month as well, with a new cover showing scenes from the movie.

I’m going to watch the movie with a bunch of gal pals and enjoy myself. I’ve adored screenwriter Nora Ephron since the 1970s, when she became the first woman to have a column in Esquire magazine, then considered nirvana for serious non-fiction writers. And even though I’ve been a print writer for more than three decades, I’m not bitter. It’s a new world in publishing. I’m just trying to keep up.

P.S. If you need any more proof of the decreasing power of print journalism, here’s an account of Sony’s first-class treatment of food bloggers prior to the movie opening. So far her post has generated 90 comments, none snarky. Thanks to David Lebovitz for the tip. And here’s the Matt Bites  interview with all three stars.

Five Lists of the Best Food Blogs

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Whenever I speak with clients who want to start a food blog, I email them a list to poke through for inspiration. I’ve been over them five or six times, not to mention clicking on other blog links listed on the bloggers’ home pages. Lists like this save me a lot of research time, trying to figure out which blogs work and why, but then I get lost in the blogs for hours. It’s a nice problem to have.

Here are a few more lists to review, all based on awards:

1. imagesAt the Weblog (Bloggies) awards, winner of Best Food Blog for 2009 is Cake Wrecks. It’s not the usual food blog, but photos of cakes that have gone “horribly, hilariously wrong.” I laughed so hard my husband rushed into my office to see what was so funny. It’s not just the photos. Her captions are wicked. Runners up for the 2009 Bloggie award are:

  • The Pioneer Woman Cooks. Last year’s winner, about an LA woman who married a cattle rancher.
  • Bakerella. A cake decorator and baker who loves her baking accessories.
  • Chocolate & Zucchini. If you haven’t read it by now, you’re living in a cave. Great content since 2003.
  • Smitten Kitchen. A regular of the Bloggie awards, who also won runner up for Best Design and Best Photos.

2. The website Apartment Therapy gives awards for food blogs.

3. I’d love to mention the Well-Fed Network’s 2009 Food Blog award winners, but the website is down. Here’s the list of nominees, courtesy of Serious Eats.

4. Saveur magazine has a Facebook page called “Sites We Love.”

The Verdict: Great Food Blogs Come Down to 4 Things

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imagesThanks to all who weighed in on my last post, both here and on Facebook, about what makes a food blog worthwhile. I’ve read through your comments, and will now attempt now to boil them down into four main elements. Based on my own opinion and the comments, a great blog has:

1. A strong personality. We want food bloggers who are fun, intelligent, opinionated, creative, make us think, and make us learn. No matter what they’re writing about, we want them to be passionate and well informed.

2. Great recipes. We readers want to be inspired by creative, innovative recipes that are also technically excellent. We want something new and different, not what we have in cookbooks at home.

3. Good storytelling skills. A great food blogger knows how to write a tempting title, a lead that draws us in, and uses techniques like self-effacing humor to great effect. With high-quality writing, reporting and research comes the feeling that we’re right there with them, cooking, eating, tasting and discovering.

4. Excellent photos. There’s no way around it. We want to be seduced by the images.

So there you have it. If you’re a blogger, does your writing and photos meet this criteria? If you’re a blog reader, maybe you think I’ve left something out. Let me know.

Here's What I Ate Today. Does Anyone Care?

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Like you, I’m obsessed with food. My favorite kind of day is when I  meet a friend over a meal, we talk about food,  visit a cool food market or street, I cook something that tastes great, and maybe later, I read about food. But most of the time, my days are not that exciting. Does a normal day around food, in and of itself, constitute a good blog?

Usually, no. The topic is too broad. It’s based on chronology, as in “here’s what I did with food today.” It does not qualify as a theme or a focus. And that is why so many food blogs fail. I just don’t care enough about where you went for lunch, or what you made for dinner.

imagesI’ve been thinking about what makes me want to read a food blog. The first blogger I read with any regularity was Grist’s Tom Philpott, because  I enjoy and appreciate his well-researched take on food politics. (In this link he skewered the notion that eating farm-raised salmon in a chain restaurant is defensible just because it tastes good.)  He rarely writes about himself or his life, and I always learn something. He’s more like a traditional newspaper columnist, and maybe that’s why I started with him. I felt comfortable.

imagesNow, to contradict myself, I love checking in with David Lebovitz, who writes about his day. Yes, in the hands of a skilled writer and photographer, the most ordinary events can become worthwhile. First, there’s the anticipation of a gorgeous photo. Today’s post about sardine pate leads with, instead of an obvious photo of pate on a slice of baguette,  a more mysterious snap of a flipper sticking out of a stainless steel bowl in hues of cobalt. Next, he writes as though he’s my best friend: intimate, funny, charming and sweet. He covers food in Paris, a focus that’s more exotic than daily life in the US.  Lastly, I always learn something about cooking or baking techniques. So even though it’s a guilty pleasure, I get lots out of his posts.

Tell me if I’m off base here. Maybe you’re a food blogger who thinks it’s perfectly fine to have “food” as the focus of your blog. Or  if you  read general food blogs, which are the most worthwhile and why?

Finding an Agent for Your Book

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In my last post, I wrote about book proposals and why they fail. But hey, maybe you just wrote a good one for a cookbook, memoir, reference book, travel guide, etc. And you’re ready to send it to a literary agent or editor at a publishing house. Where do you get the right list of names?

One of the best way to find agents is by referral, or by looking in the acknowledgments of books by authors you like. Also look in the Food & Lifestyle and Cookbook categories in  Agent Search.

A blog by the editors of Writer’s Digest magazine, on the Guide to Literary Agents website, holds many keys to successful querying. Guest bloggers tell success stories of how they got their agents and the blog profiles agents too. The editors post real query letters that have led publishers to buy books, then post commentary about what worked and why. Thanks to Jane Underwood at the Writing Salon for passing on this terrific resource.