Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

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

Recipe Writing

Blogger Quits Day Job, Creates Successful Online Business

by 33 Comments

Jenny McGruther quit her job as an office manager last year to devote herself to her online cooking business, Nourished Kitchen. (Photo by Kevin McGruther)

Do you dream of making enough money from food writing online to quit your day job? Do you want more income as a self-employed writer and educator?

Jennifer McGruther started down a path to lucrative self-employment in 2006, when she switched to a traditional foods diet. She defines this style of eating as “the foods that your ancestors ate prior to the industrial revolution in the 19th Century and the green revolution in the mid-20th Century.” The focus is on raw dairy, cultured and fermented foods, broth, offal, and grains and beans that have been soaked, fermented or sprouted. Protein sources must be grass fed, pastured or wild-caught.

She had trouble finding enough information about traditional foods (Sally Fallon’s Weston A. Price Foundation and her book, Nourishing Traditions, are pioneers). So in 2007, McGruther started a blog as a way to track the recipes she developed.

Based on the amount of interest in her blog and her newsletter (begun in 2009), she launched an online business of teaching people to cook traditional foods. She charges by the month and by the class for her online cooking classes and healthy meal plans. Hundreds of people sign up. Last year, she quit her day job as a Colorado office manager to work full time at her business, Nourished Kitchen.

Today, her newsletter has more than 21,000 subscribers. (Her Facebook fan page has more than 22,000 Likes.) Now she has a full website that sells two kinds of products: meal plans and recipes and video cooking classes, all aimed at an audience interested in pursuing the traditional foods diet.

We spoke recently about how her online business evolved and how it works:

Q. What’s interesting is that your readers are willing to pay for recipes, even though the web — and your blog — offer so many recipes for free.

A. When you develop a relationship with your readers, they are wiling to pay something more. I have solid, well-tested recipes that can be reproduced easily, and people value that.

When I decided to branch into premium content, I had about 2000 newsletter subscribers, and about 80 ended up making purchases. Their feedback was excellent and it gave me the confidence to continue providing premium content in addition to the free content offered on the site.

Q. That’s a good number, as a start. What came next?

A. In February, 2010 I launched free daily emails based on giving up processed food for a month. I increased my newsletter subscriptions by 1500 subscribers and was featured on CNN. That taught me people were interested in getting more involved. They kept emailing me with questions. I realized they didn’t know how to cook unprocessed food.

The daily emails were my pilot program for unveiling cooking classes. I worked with several other bloggers to [Read more…] about Blogger Quits Day Job, Creates Successful Online Business

Selling Recipes Online for $2.49 Each

by 123 Comments

Goldman’s Notting Hill Brownies. (Photo by Ryan Szulc.)

Eight years ago, Marcy Goldman stopped giving recipes away for free on her website, Better Baking.

“Everyone was vacuuming up my recipes and putting them on sites like Allrecipes.com, sometimes changing the headnotes, sometimes not,” she told me in an interview. “It was irksome.”

“Cookbook editors were asking if the recipes for forthcoming books would be original or could they expect to see them on other people’s websites. Plus I felt like my recipes were my children. I felt proprietary about them, both as a chef and a writer.”

So she put her recipes behind a wall, and charged for them. Readers can subscribe to the website “magazine” for 1 to 4 months, for $5 to $20, to access more than 2500 recipes. Or they can [Read more…] about Selling Recipes Online for $2.49 Each

Getting Paid for Recipes, One Year Later

by 105 Comments

Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen (left), says that absolutely, bloggers should charge for recipes. That's Kate McDermott of Art of the Pie in the middle and me on the right. (Photo by Lora Giorgi, Cake Dutchess)

What a difference a year makes. Last year at The International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC), Amy Sherman of Cooking With Amy got a ton of push-back on our recipe-writing panel when she suggested food bloggers should get paid for recipes.

Even I wrote a conflicted piece on giving recipes away for free, which continues to be one of my most-commented upon posts ever.

This year, at IFBC in New Orleans this past weekend, Deborah Perelman of Smitten Kitchen stated, firmly, that bloggers should not give away recipes for free because companies make money from them. There was silence. Hobby bloggers occupied half the room.

And then a woman in the audience, from Wilton, said her company pays for recipes, and that bloggers should always ask for payment. Shauna James Ahern of Gluten-Free Girl, also in the audience, tweeted: “Love hearing @thesmitten, @katemcdermott, and @diannej encouraging women to advocate for themselves when charging for recipes. #IFBCNOLA.”

That’s an improvement over last year, when people talked about giving away recipes for “goodwill” and “connection.” But complicated questions remain about who is asking for these recipes, what you get from giving them away, and what should you charge or not charge in each case. Let’s look at three examples:

  1. Company or corporations: These firms have budgets to pay for work.The rate is anywhere from $250 to $600 per original recipe, according to recipe developers I spoke to when doing research for the IFBC panel. Groceries for testing are never included in the price, and the company will probably own the recipe. Some companies want to pay you in goods. If so, the goods should be worth more than the fee to make it worthwhile.
  2. Cookbook author. If an author wants to put your recipe in her cookbook, charge him or her a nominal fee, unless it’s for a charity you deem worthwhile. But how much, and what if they say they can’t pay? Decide if it’s worth it. An obscure book with a small publishing company might have few readers. On the other hand, it doesn’t cost you much for a recipe already published on your website to appear in a book. And on the other hand, if you believe inclusion would be prestigious, such as in the Food52 cookbook, then you might find it worthwhile from a credibility standpoint.
  3. Company website. If someone offers to post a recipe from your blog for no pay, should you do it? I’d prefer that the answer is no, but I’ve worked with beginning bloggers who have given away content from blogs because it’s good for their credibility and creates incoming links. I don’t like it, but I understand. I just hope it’s a short-term philosophy that bloggers can use as a stepping stone to paid work.

The best approach, the panelists said, is to ask, “What is your budget?” Sometimes after saying no, companies come back with a budget. This moment can be the turning point for many food bloggers, who thought of themselves as hobbyists, and then find that people are willing to pay for their work. And they should. Just because writing recipes is your passion doesn’t mean you should do so for free, outside of your blog.

What is your experience? Has anything changed from last year? Are companies still asking for recipes for free, or is it more common to offer payment now? Are you at the point now where you won’t give away any content for free?

* * *

For more posts about IFBC New Orleans and recipe writing, see:

Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman on What She Learned by Writing a Cookbook

by 66 Comments

Deb Perelman turns in the manuscript for her first cookbook, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, at the end of this month. I caught up with her to ask her how writing a cookbook has been different than writing her blog.

You can meet Perelman at the International Food Blogger Conference in New Orleans August 26-28. She, Kate McDermott of Art of the Pie, and I will be talking about recipe development.

Q. What percentage of recipes will come from the blog?

A. Very few recipes, maybe 10 to 15 percent. I have to put in the greatest hits or it wouldn’t feel like the Smitten Kitchen cookbook.

Q. Where did you get your inspiration for new dishes?

A. I have no shortage of ideas. I have a long list of recipe ideas I’ve been building on for a decade, and I keep them all in Google Docs. I can reach them from any computer, from the phone and from the grocery store.

Besides cookbooks that I know and love, the web is a great tool to research recipes. I gravitate towards recipe sites that have reviews, like the Food Network, Allrecipes and Epicurious. It’s not that I’m looking for new ideas. It’s more like I have my recipe for pancakes, and I wonder if the salt level is too high or how much milk other recipes use.

I get a lot of ideas from restaurants too, where there’s something about the dish I like, like the combination of ingredients.

Blueberry Yogurt Multigrain Pancakes. (Photo by permission of Deb Perelman.)

Q. How is the cookbook different from the blog?

A. There are things I’ve pulled from the cookbook because they were going to be really complicated [Read more…] about Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman on What She Learned by Writing a Cookbook

Blogger Stalks and Copies Another Food Blogger

by 103 Comments

Strawberry Rhubarb Smoothie. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Strohmeyer of Virtually Vegan Mama.

What do you do when another blogger copies your recipes, ideas, and even gets the same freelance gig? That’s the situation food blogger Jennifer Strohmeyer of Virtually Vegan Mama found herself in recently, when another blogger took Strohmeyer’s recipe ideas for her own blog, and even got the same freelancing gig at the same website where Strohmeyer contributes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We’ve had lots of discussions here about adapting recipes. Everyone modifies everyone else’s recipes, it seems. Maybe Strohmeyer was imagining things?

I think not. Let me tell you what happened.

But first, a little background on Strohmeyer. She started her blog in mid-January (full discloser: Strohmeyer is a former client), sending photos to Food Buzz and [Read more…] about Blogger Stalks and Copies Another Food Blogger

Food Blogs Should Inspire and Surprise, says Aran Goyoaga of Cannelle Et Vanille

by 70 Comments

A romantic image typical of the style of Cannelle Et Vanille (Photo used with permission of Aran Goyoaga)

I first discovered Cannelle Et Vanille two years ago, when I methodically went through every single blog listed on the The London Time’s list of “50 of the World’s Best Food Blogs.” Aran Goyoaga’s blog was second on the list, and she had only been blogging for a year.

Her sun-lit, romantic photos of desserts and fruit drew me in, as did the stories about her family, travels, and baking. I learned that Goyoaga had been a pastry chef for a Ritz-Carlton, then started blogging and taught herself photography.

Since that prestigious list catapulted her into the public eye, Goyoaga’s blog has attracted the attention of magazines in Europe and the US, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Goop newsletter, which praised the blog’s gluten-free theme, expert recipes and gorgeous photography. Last fall, seven publishers vied to publish Goyoaga’s upcoming cookbook. Little, Brown & Company will publish the book in fall, 2012.

I caught up with Goyoaga right before BlogHer Food, where she was a guest speaker:

Aran Goyoaga of Canelle Et Vanille (photo by Txomin Goyoago)

Q. You’ve been blogging since 2008, less than three years, and have attained so much success. I’m sure many new bloggers want to know how you did it.

A. At first I want to say it’s for the photography, but before that I had a following because of the recipes. I was a trained professional chef who left her career to take care of her children at home. I was trying to merge professional pastry chef techniques at home. Then I became very interested in photography. We’re all very visual people, and people come to my blog to see how I photograph.

Also my blog has a nostalgic tone to it, because food has always been a connection to my family. I left everyone to come to the US. My grandfather had a bakery and the family gathered there. When I left the Basque country I had an MBA, but nostalgia for food drew me back, and my blog has that tone and sentiment. People like to read about my background, my childhood, and how I relate to food. I have this romantic idea of food — growing your own food and being close to nature. Dad’s side of the family was farmers, so they probably don’t romanticize it.

We all like to feel close to home, we like to be nurtured, we all think about our families and upbringing. Maybe it’s the time we live in, where we want comfort and home-cooked meals.

Q. Do you think it’s an advantage to have worked as a professional pastry chef and graduated from culinary school, when it comes to developing recipes?

A. No. Culinary school gives you a lot of technique, but you don’t necessarily need that to develop recipes. You can learn that from reading a book, watching TV or watching people cook. Culinary school opened a lot of doors and I was able to find work in (restaurant) kitchens. I worked with French and German chefs. I already knew [Read more…] about Food Blogs Should Inspire and Surprise, says Aran Goyoaga of Cannelle Et Vanille

5 Ways to Write Recipes that Sell Without Selling

by

It’s a quandry. You want to entice readers to make your recipes, but you don’t want to just hit them over the head with sales pitches.

Fortunately, there are more subtle ways to attract people to a recipe. Here are five methods cookbook authors use to draw in readers:

1. Make them salivate. Describe the food and how it’s cooked so readers can not only imaging tasting it, but they see it, smell it, hear it, even imagine touching it. Here’s a headnote for South Indian-Style Eggplant Pickle, from Cradle of Flavor by Saveur Editor-in-Chief James Oseland that gets the senses going:

“This south Indian-style pickle is popular in Malaysian kitchens, although the sugar in it is a decidedly Malaysian addition. Similar to caponata, the Sicilian eggplant relish, it’s made of chunks of Japanese eggplants in a lavishly spiced sweet-sour pickling base. Coriander, fennel, cumin, chiles, ginger, and cinnamon all vie for dominance, creating a lush layering of flavors. The eggplants are fried and then put in the pickling base, rather than cooked in it. Japanese eggplants, which are commonly used in Malaysian cuisine, cook quickly, so frying them first give you more control, ensuring that they won’t come out mushy.”

Notice his evocative description, so specific that you can almost taste the eggplant. He assumes you may not know caponata, so he describes it too. Then he tells you how to cook the dish, so you can [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Write Recipes that Sell Without Selling