Writing Archives | Page 10 of 18

Book Deal News: The Once Upon a Chef Cookbook by Jenn Segal

January 20, 2016 by Maria

Here it is, the first announcement day of 2016! This time congratulations are in order to Jenn Segal of Once Upon a Chef, who will be publishing a beautiful cookbook with Chronicle Books. Here’s the official deal listing from Publisher’s Marketplace:

I’m so excited about this book for two reasons (well, actually it’s more like two trillion reasons, but I’ll spare you the exhaustive list):

Reason #1.

Jenn is such a success story and a great inspiration for anyone who’s on the journey of building their platform. Jenn’s big dream was always to write a cookbook. After graduating from college, she went to culinary school at L’Academie de Cuisine and began working in the kitchens of fine dining restaurants like the L’Auberge Chez Francois. But, as she wrote in her proposal:

“Not only was I the only woman in a hot kitchen full of big, sweaty men, but I was also not at all right-sized for the massive equipment that surrounded us. At 5 foot, 2 inches, I had to get lifts on my shoes just to reach the plates. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to cook in a restaurant kitchen, just imagine trying to juggle multiple orders in your head and cooking on four different burners with food in the oven at the same time. Plus flames, sharp knives, hot pans, and an incessant stream of orders. It was terrifying!”

I love this story because it shows how not every food job is the right fit for everyone, no matter how passionate you are about food. I’m 5 foot, 2 inches, too, and I can tell you that the restaurant world is just NOT designed for the slight of stature. But you know where height doesn’t matter? In the writing and blogging world.

So when Jenn gave birth to her son and decided to stay home with him, she hung up her chef’s whites, picked up her apron, and went back to that cookbook dream. The problem was, she needed a platform.

And a platform she built. Over many years—one recipe and one blog post at a time—Jenn built a wonderful, engaged, and highly active community at Once Upon a Chef. She now has over 4 million page views, an email list of over 100,000, and a real connection to the people she’s helping. That right there—a close sense of knowing your readers and being dedicated to serving them—is the real purpose behind platform-building.

Lucky for us, Jenn has graciously agreed to share a few bits of advice about what it was like building the platform that got her the cookbook deal of her dreams:

What one thing worked best for you to grow your audience and increase traffic?

In the beginning, contributing to larger blogs, like HuffPost, Parade and Serious Eats, exposed me to a broader audience and drove lots of traffic to my site. (Reach out to the editors; sometimes it’s not as hard as you think to become a contributor). More recently, I moved away from the typical blog format/design and invested in a custom site redesign, which increased my numbers dramatically.

14 Best Books to Buy for Anyone on Your Christmas List

December 8, 2015 by Maria

Most of us see sitting down with a book as the pinnacle of leisure. We work all day, haul ourselves home, cook some dinner, eat, clean-up, and if we’re very lucky, have a few hours at the end of the day to do whatever we want. And what do most people wish they did? Read a book.

Yes, sometimes we get sucked into Netflix. Sometimes we fall down an Internet blackhole and end up watching two hours of 90s rap videos. (Ahem.) And sometimes there’s so much to-do detritus left from the day (like when will I ever order my save-the-date cards?!) that those last few hours are swallowed up by the busyness of life. But on good days? I read a book.

2 Steps to Grow a More Engaged Audience (Free Printable!)

November 10, 2015 by Maria

I’ve been thinking a lot about food stories lately. They’ve been on my mind for a lot of reasons: Thanksgiving is coming up and I’m hosting for the first time; we celebrated my Yayo’s legacy of paella at the Paella for the World Festival a few weeks ago; I’ve been reading Heritage and binge-watching Mind of a Chef.

All those reasons plus, well, you know, working on cookbook proposals. But even all the proposals I’ve been working on lately that aren’t food-related have made me think about stories.

Stories are the magic behind books. It doesn’t matter if it’s a romance or a diet book—stories are what bring it to life and make it worth reading.

Yet stories are often the most difficult thing to coax out of authors, especially in the nonfiction world I work in. I’m convinced that it’s because storytelling is beaten out of us in school. We’re told to avoid “I,” and that what we have to say isn’t interesting enough, and that writing is just about the accurate conveyance of information.

How Recipe Writing is Changing, and How It’s Influencing Our Cooking

November 3, 2015 by Maria

how to write a recipe

Jarrett and I made a pumpkin pie on Sunday night, even though I have all the finesse of a muppet when it comes to baking. We have pumpkin puree on the ceiling to prove it and everything.

I was nervous about making this recipe, because I could not, for the life of me, figure out how we were supposed to time it so that the filling would be freshly pureed and still warm at the exact moment that the crust would emerge from the oven, also still warm. I don’t blame the recipe—I blame myself.

Just kidding. I totally blame the recipe. I’m not going to say what cookbook it was, because I’ll end up with a pitchfork-wielding mob at my front door. But honestly, it shouldn’t take mental acrobatics and five re-readings to figure out how to time the prep and cooking of different components. This is exactly why I hate baking—every little step or misstep makes me paranoid that we’re headed straight for Doomsville. And even worse, so many recipe writers wipe their hands clean of sad sacks like me, who can’t unravel the mysteries of how to soften butter in the microwave without melting it. (I’ve decided I’m going to commission an entire book on this. Who wants a copy!?)

If you like to cook (and even if you don’t), you’ve probably read dozens of recipes in your lifetime. Hand-scrawled recipes, Googled recipes, carefully copyedited cookbook recipes, no-recipe recipes, lost-and-found recipes, recipes that don’t make any sense but that you’re going to try anyway, so help you god.

So, how should recipes be written? Is there a style guide? An editor-and-agent preferred format? A strict sequence of ingredient-listing and step-taking?

Category: Writing