Bjork Ostrom: As you know are listening to the Food Blocker Pro Podcast, but maybe you didn’t know that We actually have a membership for food creators and food publishers like yourself. We’ve actually had this option for 10 years. We talk about it occasionally on the podcast, but recently we had this realization of like, we need to let people know that we have a membership because sometimes people don’t know that exists. And there’s a lot of really incredible resources within a Food Blogger Pro membership. We have a community forum where we have FBP, Food Blogger Pro industry experts, a lot of people who you probably recognize from this podcast. We have a deals and discounts exclusive to members page where you can get access to discounts and some of the most popular tools for creators, A bunch of different courses on photography and video and SEO. And then we do these live Q&As with experts.

Like recently we did one on SEO and republishing. We talked to Eddie from Raptive and he has years of experience in the world of publishing, and he talks about why the process of republishing is so important. I also do these coaching calls with Food Blogger Pro members that we record and then we make available to everybody to watch and to learn and to listen. And these are one-on-one calls with other publishers or business owners to talk through the strategy for growing their business. And the cool thing about these live q and as these coaching calls is we actually wrap those up into a podcast that’s exclusive for members. So maybe you listen to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and you’re like, I wish there was more episodes that you could listen to and learn from. Well, you get access to additional content, additional podcasts if you join Food Blogger Pro. So if you want to check it out, you can go to food blogger pro.com and click the join now button and you get access to everything when you sign up the back catalog of all the live q and as, all the coaching calls, all the courses, all the deals and discounts and immediate access to the community forum. So again, if you want to check that out, go to food blogger pro.com and we would love for you to not just be a podcast listener, but also to be a member.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Raeanne Sarazen. She is the author of the book, the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, mastering Recipe Development, writing, testing, nutrition Analysis, and Food Styling. This book is over 400 pages filled with everything you need to know to develop and write a really good recipe. Rand argues that the quality of the recipe is what differentiates really successful food creators from the rest of the pack. And she says that just because somebody can cook it doesn’t mean they can write a recipe. In this interview, she walks listeners through the recipe development process and shares her tips for writing a user-friendly recipe and discusses the importance of recipe testing. Bjork and Raeanne also share their thoughts on artificially generated recipes and how food creators can use AI when developing recipes and writing content. The whole interview really is about how to differentiate yourself as a recipe creator, and it’s a good reminder that the fundamentals of recipe development are really, really critical to what we do as food creators. As a reminder, if you enjoy this episode, please share it with your followers on social media or email. We really appreciate it, and without further ado, I let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Rayann, welcome to the podcast.

Raeanne Sarazen: Thank you Bjork for having me here today. I’m super excited.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s high fidelity, I can tell you’re in the Midwest. There’s no internet delay here in Chicago. We’re in the Twin Cities. This is going to be a great conversation. We’re going to be talking all about recipes makes sense for the world that we are in and that we talk about, but also recipes as they relate to digital platforms. We’re going to be talking about AI, but before we get into that, what is your background? We’re going to be talking about the book that you published, which is, it’s called the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, and it really is complete, it’s hundreds of pages about recipes and for people who create content, like anybody who listens to this, they need to read books like this. It’s kind of their textbook on how to approach recipes. But how did you get to the point where you could write hundreds of pages about recipes,

Raeanne Sarazen: Like over 400 pages on one single topic? Yeah. Okay. So I’m Raeanne Sarazen, and I know sometimes my name is a little difficult to pronounce, so I said it again,

You and I both. And so I am a registered dietitian nutritionist and classically trained chef. And I’ve worked in the food industry in a variety of different roles in capacities for over 25 years. So I have worked in hospitals as a clinical dietician. I’ve worked in restaurant kitchens as a cook. I have worked in food publishing as a food writer editor and test kitchen professional and in different capacities and food companies, nonprofits and healthcare organizations as a culinary nutrition consultant. And the thing that has been a common denominator throughout all these different roles has been the use of recipes in recipe content. And so that is sort of how my background came to be that made me of interest by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, who’s the publisher to be the author of this book.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So one of the things I like thinking about in the world of digital media is that a lot of what we’re doing is creating a digital version of the thing that we’ve always done. An example is on a website, they talk about this idea is the content above the fold, and it’s like, well, what does above the fold mean? Well, it actually is talking about when you had a newspaper and you’d fold it and then you would put it on the newspaper stand. It was really important for things to be above the fold because that’s what people would see when they walk by in our world right now, they talk about a recipe card and what is a recipe card? Well, a recipe card is the digital version of the literal card that you’d give somebody if you wrote down a recipe. I’m curious to hear your reflections on 25 years of being involved with recipes and the importance of recipes, sharing recipes like documenting recipes. Well, what are the things that you see as the through line that have continued through those 25 years? And then we’re going to talk about things that are maybe different today than they would’ve been 20, 25 years ago.

Raeanne Sarazen: So I guess the through line that I would see is that there’s somebody always out there creating really good recipe content. And a long time ago, which you can say 25, 30 years ago, there were gatekeepers and those gatekeepers kept only a certain type of person writing. And that could have been back then food writers test, kitchen professionals, cookbook authors, home economists. They were the ones that were creating mostly good content, I would say, but not always. And so I think today the difference is is that anybody can write a recipe, but I think it still holds true that you have to ask yourself is what is produced today always good, and do they have what used to be done, which is copy editors and several lines of people editing. So yeah, I guess the through line is I do think there’s really good recipe content today, but I think it’s because there is a lot of focus and importance to that creator on what the actual recipe, what it really is doing for their audience.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have these people who have great recipes 20, 25 years ago that might’ve been my grandma or Lindsay’s grandma, really loved cooking. And we have some of those recipes that are still such great recipes, but they wouldn’t have necessarily been a publisher of recipes unless they knew somebody who is one of these gatekeepers, cookbook publisher, something like that where they’d be able to then say, Hey, you have a bank of enough of this that we think that we can invest in you. In that scenario, there’s also then going to be a team that reviews the recipe that does testing of the recipes. One of the good things is with the internet, anybody can share a thing. And so now you’re able to get access to some of these recipes that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to get access to 25 years ago. But with that reduced friction in publication, there’s also the reality of I could publish a recipe and that’s not going to be good because I’m not going to be able to produce a recipe like my wife Lindsay would. And so as friction is reduced, output is increased, and then now the user maybe has to do a little bit more filtering of those recipes. Is that the downside of it? Or on the flip side, what are some of the negatives of the change in the ability for anybody to publish a recipe?

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, I guess this is what I would like to be super clear on. I think that just because somebody can cook doesn’t mean that they can write a recipe. And I think what is super clear on that is I’ve worked with a lot of incredibly well-known chefs, super talented creative people who can create something in the kitchen, but that’s cooking or development. And then there’s the actual translation of what their creation is onto the page. And that’s the recipe. And I think that even if our grandmothers, which my grandmother owned a restaurant in Ottumwa, Iowa, and she was a fabulous cook, and I spent so much time trying to document and work with my brother who’s a filmmaker, to translate and watch her and put it onto the page to keep it for future generations. It’s sort of documenting your food heritage. But I think that what differentiates really good people and their content, I think is their recipes because there is the entertainment which you could tell me all about, and I get that, and there is the creative part. But to write a really good recipe, that recipe has to be written well, there’s the importance of testing the recipe, which no recipe could be written. Well, if it’s not tested, that’s very clear to me on the recipes. I see. And yeah, I would say that I think content was not always perfect back then or today, but it’s the importance of understanding that cooking is different than writing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think of, we have friends who live in Indianapolis just recently interviewed them. I’m not sure when the episode’s coming out, their site’s called a Couple Cooks. But one of the things we often talk about on the podcast is sometimes people will look to do a career change and their career change will be into, Hey, I want to produce content online. I want to figure out how to either grow a social following or grow a website. In our world, it’s within the realm of food. And one of the things we always talk about is, Hey, look at what you were doing, even if it seems completely unrelated, and how can that benefit you? And I think of Alex and Sonia because they were worked within both of them. It was the same company. They were technical writers, and so it’s not recipe documentation, but they understand and understood as they transitioned into this career how to write documentation around steps really well. And my guess is I haven’t ever really talked to them specifically about it, but my guess is that probably served them well to have gone through the process of a decade or however long it was of writing instructional information for people that get, I don’t know what some product, and then have to understand how to use it to then apply that to the world of recipes and to give people really clear instructions to follow. So let’s say somebody is really skilled at cooking, and that’s kind of the artistry of it. It feels like it’s a little bit left brain, right brain. Whereas then you kind of take some of that abstract, almost like in music, you can have people who can play music really well, they can jazz or blues. But then if you would be like, alright, now we’re going to put that, we’re going to document that, they’d be like, well, don’t, that’s not what I do. That would

Sound terrible. And it’s not exactly the same, but I would imagine that to be true in the world of food a little bit as well. So if you are somebody who has that kind of right brain, you like to cook, you like the process of coming up with a new recipe, how do you get that into a form that then is actually really helpful? So somebody in the music world could look at it and be like, Hey, I understand what this is. Do you think people should try and be that? Should they try and do that or does it make more sense to bring somebody in who is good at that and let that person do it?

Raeanne Sarazen: That’s exactly what I was just going to say. I think what has changed in the food industry and food publishing is that there used to be segmented roles. You were a developer, you were a tester, you were a writer, editor, copy editor, you were the graphic design, you were the photographer or videographer. I think today it’s sort of taking note of what you do well and where you should hire out for where you’re not as good. And also using a book like mine as a resource, especially when you’re starting out, because it’s really hard to be able to afford to hire out people, and at least you can educate yourself. Even in terms of the writing of the recipe where it’s true, a lot of creative people can’t translate and document to technical clear, succinct writing. They’ll take something like making a pie dough that’s three paragraphs long and I can edit it down to one paragraph that’s more clear and helpful to the end user. But I’d say you hire somebody to do it for you or you sort of learn and read some of the common things that you yourself need to know on how to write clearly. For an example, the cardinal rule of writing the recipe ingredients and the order that they’re used in writing the directions in that same order of how they’re used in the ingredient list, it seems so clear. But again, that’s something that I’ll get a recipe where they’re out of order, they’re missing ingredients. The use of divided ingredients is super unclear. The use of a description, like a modifier in the ingredient list where it would be something like canned or chopped cooked, diced, the word is put into a place that makes it very confusing for the reader. And I know what that chef or that cook wants to say, but the end user could just be scratching their head wondering, wait, what am I supposed to do? Or what am I supposed to buy at the grocery store?

Bjork Ostrom: So I think that’s a great one and just a good reminder. I’m guessing a lot of people kind of have that in their mind as they’re going through the recipe development, but you have the list of instructions and then you have the list of ingredients. Those are sort ordered by when they’re used. And then the other thing that you said that I think is really valuable, and it reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead. I feel like sometimes that can happen to people just in general, like any instructions, but especially if there’s a lot there and it feels like part of the hard work is removing the unnecessary information. Do you feel like that’s another kind of core pillar of communication within a recipe?

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, I mean, I think in general to write short is so much harder than to write long, and that goes for other type of writing and definitely for recipe writing. And I think to be clear is just, it’s hard today. I mean, first of all, we’re all bouncing around all over the place. And to actually sit down and actually think about how you’re going to write something and actually give a visual and a time and do those indicators that really are helpful. And as I say, to always write your recipe for the person who doesn’t know how to cook. And the reason why I say that is that I know there’s so many different ways that people can write a recipe. There’s no exact one right way, but what I feel is important is the person who’s going to improvise and not really follow your recipe and be that person at the end saying, oh, well, I use this instead of that and I know this and I would toss it in corn starch. It doesn’t really matter because there’s equally, as a number of readers who are going to take it and really want to follow that recipe to the T, they need to have their handheld, they need to really be able to be taken through it. And I feel like a successful recipe writer is going to write it so that person is successful.

Bjork Ostrom: To use music analogy again, it’s not like you’re going to leave a note out. It’s like, no, you have to document every note and it has to fit within the structure of whatever the key is. So in the world of recipe, we’re kind of entering into this unique stage where we have forever people create recipes. Now we’re kind of getting into a world where maybe it’s not a person that creates a recipe, maybe it’s created by a machine. And I’m perpetually fascinated by AI, everybody who listens is aware of it. And there’s this weird balance of is this a threat? Is this an opportunity? And there’s all those classic examples of there’s a pizza recipe that was created by ai, and it talks about using glue as one of the steps. And it’s like, okay, that’s not good, obviously, and people like to talk about

Raeanne Sarazen: That, but

Bjork Ostrom: That will happen less and less over time. But I also think there will always be a place for human-created content. So you talk about writing this book, it was over a long period of time, years and years, and the period of time that you’re writing it, AI kind of started to become a thing. What has that been like for you as you’ve come up against the world of artificially generated content as it relates to recipes?

Raeanne Sarazen: Okay. Well, my first answer is it took me almost five years to write this book. This book was peer-reviewed by other professionals. Each chapter went out to anywhere from three to nine reviewers and I interviewed, which I loved because I love talking to people and getting the knowledge from their head and bringing it down into tips for the people who are going to go into a chapter and look. And I say that because I feel like so many great people out there who are very knowledgeable, have so much knowledge in their head, and I love to be able to get it out and be able to help that person who’s reading and teach others. And I think that that was a very long process. But in this process, and the reason why I led up to saying this long thing, I knew AI was coming out. I knew people at the end of when this book was published that that topic was starting to sort of churn, but not really talked about like it is today. So AI is not talked about in my complete recipe writing guide, but I have

Bjork Ostrom: In the revised version,

Raeanne Sarazen: In the revised version, it’ll be the lead in. Well, okay, this is with most people in the field. Of course, I’ve tried it myself and I have come up with asking very specific questions to things, asking for very specific author or content creators. Give me Ina Garten’s lentil soup recipe or give me your lentil soup recipe. And probably the same things that everybody else is trying out. And I think that in a way, it is a fast way for content creation. So I think it is a great assistant for any of us, whether we’re just food writing, we’re going to go give a presentation, we need a content outline, we need a short quick answer on the history of something food related. But as it relates to recipes, this is, I think that it does work, and maybe this is something that will morph and keep iterating into something that maybe even I’ll use, but I don’t know, because I think what I feel like is missing, even from Google asking Chat GPT or lentil or gluten-free muffin is that it’s so dry, there’s no voice, there’s no person behind it. I have no idea. And I’m assuming it’s not tested because I ask for who is the content creator, who’s the author, and it says it’s like an amalgam of whatever number of the best gluten-free blueberry muffins or something. So I don’t know. I do think it’s going to be something that we have to embrace and something that I’m sure I will use in some way or form. I do use Chat GPT for myself already for other purposes, not recipes, but I think that it has a very blurry line between fact and fiction, whereas the critical thinking, where’s the voice? So I’d say use it maybe as a starting point, but it’s not something that I’m using myself right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I guess I haven’t thought about this, but the key variable of testing, and it feels like if you were going to do something that is the average of multiple recipes, you aren’t testing that. And it feels like in the world of recipes, that’s a really critical step. Is the step of testing from start to end? Was it successful? And who knows over time how it evolves? But it feels like that’s one of the things that’s a little bit of a moat in the world of recipe content is one thing could be a little bit off salt. I remember in high school we made homemade ice cream where you put it in the coffee tin and you roll it back and forth, and it was like instead of teaspoons, we read tablespoons, it was user error. It wasn’t the recipe it is the whole lack of a copy editing team. But that as an example, if that’s just off a little bit, you’ll be able to see that and taste that. Whereas if it’s asking about some, tell me what price to earnings ratio means when you’re investing in a stock, it’s like, oh, it’s going to be able to nail that really well. So that’s an interesting analysis. Have you found that? And I think your point about the assistant makes a lot of sense. I was having a conversation with my brother-in-Law who’s a pediatric doctor asking him about AI, and he’s like, I don’t think it’s ever going to replace doctors, but it’s going to be a really great assistant. It’s going to help you think better and quicker. And the example that I thought of that we’ve talked about is like, Hey, you have a paragraph. You have three paragraphs and saying, Hey, can you help me get this down to one paragraph of really clear instructions to me? And then you still are looking at it, revising it, but it maybe saves you 45 minutes of work of remixing those three paragraphs down to one, and then you’re still putting the final touches on it. Is that kind of what you mean when you talk about being an

Raeanne Sarazen: Assistant? Oh, for sure. And I even think your example of a three paragraph long set of instructions that you are looking at and your brain is just numb and you’re like, I can’t even figure out something. And then you put it in and you’re like, say, nope, do it again. Do it again. You revise it, do it again. So it can act as an assistant to make your workflow faster. And I think that is super helpful. But I agree about the testing part and just because you can go Google and pull up whatever number of gluten-free blueberry muffins, I can tell you for sure from having tested and created many that they are different. And just because I can pull up 25 and give you one, that doesn’t mean that’s the one you’re going to want to make for your wife or for brunch or something. It does, the testing part matters. And I think if a recipe works, that’s ultimately what the person wants, not just that it can spit out a recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so that’s great. And I think of in this interview I had with Alex and Sonia, Alex talked about how he had created a GPT within chat GBT that does his editing. And again, it’s the kind of thing where it’s like you don’t just not read it and then publish it right away, but it acts as an assistant and it says like, Hey, look at this, or maybe this should be changed or adjusted. And that to me feels like today at least the sweet spot is like, Hey, this is an incredible tool. It can help you in the content creation process, but you will be at a competitive disadvantage if you remove the humanity

From the thing that you are creating, whether it be like you said, the voice or just multiple times testing and coming to understand that content that you are creating.

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Do you have any other thoughts around, in a world that is very saturated with content being recipes that are published online, how else can people differentiate themselves? Not even necessarily from AI, but how can people differentiate themselves as a recipe creator online?

Raeanne Sarazen: That is a really good question, and I’ll tell you why. Because I feel myself though, I did this book because I really wanted to have people who are creating content, new people, and people who’ve been around a long time have a resource that’s modern and could help them create better content to make them more confident to differentiate themselves. And I think what differentiates somebody is somebody who takes, and I know this just doesn’t spit out constant contact and constant content, meaning that I do find things entertaining, and I think that’s the focus. But I think the places that I really care about just when I read a novel is really good recipes that actually work.

So how do you differentiate yourself? It’s sort of like there’s so many people self-publishing novels now. How do you differentiate? I mean, I guess it’s story, it’s entertainment, but I think in the end, if that’s all you want, that’s right. But for somebody like myself, I care about you, Bjork giving me a recipe that I’m going to make tomorrow night for dinner and it’s going to work because I’m going to invite my neighbors over and it’s something that I want to taste delicious and that you tested it and you’ve tried it out and you’ve given me something that’s solid. That’s what I want.

Bjork Ostrom: And a huge part of that is number one, baseline are the ingredients, are the instructions accurate? Do they have everything they need? Number two, are they easy to follow? Am I going to understand this as I go through it? And then I think like you said, number three, this is really important and becoming more important. Am I drawn to it from an artistry perspective? Is their voice, is their story? Are the pictures good? And that feels like it’s a combination of those multiple things. Plus I would maybe add a fourth, especially in the world of digital content, which is does this person have me in mind and the problems that I have,

Raeanne Sarazen: And

Bjork Ostrom: Are we working together to solve those problems? It could be a diet, it could be for Pinch of Yum. Right now we think a lot about like, Hey, are there people with kids? We have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. And so we’re, and I say we, it’s like Lindsay, but I’m just drafting off of her success. Okay.

Raeanne Sarazen: Everything in a marriage is we,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right, exactly. But what does it look like to create this thing for a family that have kids and both of the parents are working and it’s going to be successful? And that feels like where it starts to get kind of exciting.

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, that’s why I feel so strongly, it’s your audience. I think you need to know your audience. If you’re saying a family who has a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old is different than a couple who are now empty nesters, or somebody who is single and is trying to cook for one or occasionally two people. And I find it interesting as a dietician when I see recipes out there that are saying that something is healthy and there really isn’t a standard. And then they have the nutrition information and I’m like, okay, is that the way you’re educating that’s healthy? Or something that’s really fast and then buried in step two is an overnight marinade or something that’s really fast. But gosh, you just forced me to mess up three bowls and two sheet pans. And I’m like, I’m like, who is it fast for you? Do you have the sous chef and the kitchen cleaner in your kitchen? So I think that what is important is to really understand who your end user is, who’s making your recipe. And that is a successful recipe is when you make them successful, not to show somebody how much. Yeah. So it can include who’s your audience. For people who don’t cook are with limited resources.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Raeanne Sarazen: That’s a successful recipe too.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of a friend Beth who started Budget Bytes and every recipe that she’s creating, and there’s a team now, so it’s multiple people, but it’s like, here’s how much this costs per serving, and that’s their angle. But then they also have all of those additional elements of really clear instructions and story behind it. And I think the piece that you talked about with adding some of these modifiers quick or healthy, it’s where there starts to be some tension in the worlds that we operate, which is like somebody’s going to go out and they’re going to do SEO, they’re going to do keyword research, and they’re going to see like, Hey, if I add the modifier of easy or quick to this recipe, it’s going to be a little less competitive. There’s going to be a little more opportunity for me to do that. But if it’s not actually that

And people aren’t successful or it’s not quick, or it takes longer than you said, there’s a person on the other side who’s showing up and they’re going through the process of making that thing. And if you don’t deliver on the promise of the branding of the recipe, what happens is you’ve maybe cashed in on a really quick hit from a search result, but over a long period of time, what you’re not going to get is people who continue to show up and people who, instead of just doing a Google search, come to your site to start their search or your social account or whatever it might be. And I think that’s one of the things that we, as content creators need to be aware of is especially in a world where how people discover content is shifting, one of the most important things that we can establish is trust with somebody that they know that we say that they’re going to get. And oftentimes that means all of those different things we’ve talked about, it’s clear, it’s been tested it, it’s

Raeanne Sarazen: Reproducible.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s reproducible. Yeah. It’s all of those things. So as we’ve been talking, I’ve kind of thought about this within the context of a website, and I think a lot of people who are creating those recipes think about it within the context of a website. People come, they cook off of a set of instructions and ingredients. What do you think about different platforms and how recipes are presented on those? You can think about TikTok, you can think about Instagram, short form video, maybe Facebook. Are there considerations that we as digital creators should be thinking about as the way a recipe is presented changes? 20 years ago, it would’ve been a recipe card, it would’ve been a cookbook. It maybe would’ve been a grandparent scratching it down on a piece of paper, but now it might be like a 62nd TikTok video. What does that mean for people who are creating recipes?

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, I don’t know if this is going to not sound super positive for me, but I feel like there’s a difference. I mean, that to me is entertainment, and I don’t know. So it almost doesn’t matter if the recipe works anyway, because if somebody is scrolling on TikTok and they’re looking, learn how to make a gluten-free pasta dough, it’s got to be entertaining. And whether the recipe works or not, I think is less important because there’s so much content and noise out there. I don’t know if everybody who goes on these platforms, and maybe you can tell me, are they actually going to use that gluten-free pasta dough to make that meal at the end of the day, or even on the weekend? I don’t know. I think it’s more about entertainment than actually anything else.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think yes. And I also think there’s probably people who are making crescent roll wrapped hot dogs from TikTok, and part of it is almost like, can you achieve the recipe in a way where it’s easy enough to communicate in a 62nd video? I think for a recipe that is, and some people probably would even say, that’s not a recipe, that’s just putting some pre-made stuff together.

Raeanne Sarazen: It’s a recipe. Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s,

Raeanne Sarazen: There’s still no shame in that. I think we all have to do things fast. But again, it’s a visual recipe and the visual is teaching. And so if you actually want to give somebody that crescent roll that you’re making for dinner and rolling it out or whatever else the talker is going to show, it’s like there’s the actual cooking which you’re filming, and then there’s the actual written on the page or something that somebody can print out that’s like a separate instruction. So I just think of them as two different things and they can both work together. And I think actually working together on a lot of blogs and other things where you can actually have the recipe and you could click on a video and watch somebody make something, I think it’s really helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like one of the nice things about a blog or an article or a recipe post is it’s easy to pair multiple forms of media. You can have the written stuff in a really nice way. You can have a video that goes with it. But one of the things I’m curious about is I was talking to different brother-in-Law, younger brother-in-Law, not the Doctor who, and we were talking about investing, and he was like, oh, yeah, I was talking about you should really think about whatever Roth IRA or something like that. And he was like, oh, yeah, that’s where you can put it in. After you get paid, you can take that money and then put, and I was like, how did you know about that? He’s like 21. He’s like, oh, TikTok, TikTok Finance. So I think that, and my guess is there are, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of people who are hungry at the end of the day and pulling up TikTok and being Taco recipe. And so part of it is, I think our challenge is as creators, not only how do we be entertainment on these platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, but also if somebody is using that as their content to produce the recipe, how can it also then be functional in a way where they’re able to make it? And that feels like, I have never done that. Lindsay does it all the time. It’s what she’s doing. A lot of it is, it’s almost like a promotional piece

Raeanne Sarazen: To

Bjork Ostrom: Say, Hey, if you want the full recipe, go here.

Raeanne Sarazen: And

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s a little bit of the approach that we’re taking. It’s not like we’re trying to hit every step along the way and give people out the other side. But it’s almost like a curiosity for me. Is there an opportunity for people to create a piece of content where from start to finish you can watch it and have success with it just through the video itself. But it seems like maybe that would be a difficult thing, especially with a complex recipe. So

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, I think so. But I think one thing about the Roth IRA, which that sounds interesting, but I’m still old fashioned in the way that I have lots of friends in real life and I know who to call on what subject and what topic. And so if somebody wants a recipe on something for a specific holiday or for a party, or if they have a new dietary restriction with their father’s, got to reduce sodium or someone’s got diagnosed with Celiac, can you help me? Can you help me? I think of that Roth IRA thing as when you’re watching TikTok and you’re doing these videos, it’s like, where do you really want to get your content from a true financial advisor

Or somebody who’s just sort of talking on TikTok? If you have a newly new dietary restriction or something diet related, where do you want to get your content told? Do you want to scroll through TikTok and trust a lot of the things that I see I don’t kind of misleading or confusing and just sort of add to that anxiety of, I don’t know, I’m not saving enough or I’m not following the right diet. So I think to me, sometimes it could just be an overwhelming amount of a fire hose of information. Totally. And I’d rather pick up the phone and call the person. That’s how I wish cooking would go back to, in some ways just you pick up the phone and say, Hey, what am I supposed to do with X? But I know I’m, that makes me sound like a Luddite, but I’m just saying I think that you have to be really careful about the information that you’re getting on these platforms,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially as a consumer. It speaks to the, there is no, there’s much less friction. And so anybody can produce a piece of content. If that’s true and people are incentivized by creating the thing that is most viewed, then what you have is a scenario where you’re going to be tapping into potentially some of the worst parts of the human brain, whether that be fear or greed or anger. And so as consumers, I think we need to be aware of that. But as creators, there’s this weird opportunity then where it’s like, how do you do that in a way where if you were to create the comparable piece of content from a financial advisor, he’d be like, well, dollar cost average into index funds over a long career and prioritize tax sheltered. And nobody would watch it.

Raeanne Sarazen: No, it would’ve.

Bjork Ostrom: But if you were Bitcoin to the moon and you’re going to be a millionaire in a year, lots of people would watch it. And so it is maybe just an observation as creators that we need to balance that trust piece that we talked about where people can feel, and Lindsay talks about this, she got an email from a doctor who is, I feel comfortable sending my patients to your site because I know that I can trust the voice that you use, how you talk about content. That’s really, and that comes from years of making decisions around how to talk about content and how to talk about recipes. But also it’s hard when you can get a quick hit on some of these social platforms. So if nothing else, just like an observation on how hard it is as a creator to walk that balance

Raeanne Sarazen: And to capture the attention of people who are moving all over the place. And I think in terms of nutrition that I see, even doctors that are selling supplements or doctors that are selling courses and how to be in a healthy aging, they come at it, do you want to know the best foods that you can eat to avoid Alzheimer’s, heart disease, Diabetes, whatever. And so it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like you just eat grapes, grapes and almonds.

Raeanne Sarazen: So it’s sort of like they get you with this idea of that there’s this magic answer, and every consumer wants that magic answer, that elixir, that’s going to make us healthier, live longer, prevent all these diet related diseases. But I just think that there’s marketing and then there’s just real life. And so it depends on if you need advice financially or you need to know what you’re going to have for dinner tonight, when two people work, that is really quick. I think people who are good at what they do, it shows, and I think even if it’s online or in real life, it’s where you go to for your information.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So let’s talk about the book a little bit more as we close out here. The complete recipe writing guide, five years of working on it, decades of knowledge that have gone into it. When somebody picks this up, what would your recommendation be? Do they work through it, cover to cover? Do you jump to a chapter that feels like it’s most applicable? And if you did have to point, let’s say online content creators who are writing recipes for a site or maybe social, where would be a good place for those people to start with the book?

Raeanne Sarazen: So the book has six chapters dedicated entirely to recipe development that focus on health and wellness. So anywhere from plant-based recipe development to food allergies for gluten, for celiac, fodmap, which is really big right now.

So if you’re really interested in understanding how to develop recipes, modify ingredients, understand if an ingredient, for an example, I see it all the time. People say that MSG has gluten in it, it does not. And I use it and I think it’s a great ingredient to reduce sodium and recipes. So if you really want to double check and really understand recipe development and ingredients, how to modify them, that’s where I would go. And if on your blog or on how you want to create your substack, you want to kind of put up a shingle as to being that health and wellness specific person set nutrition standards for your recipes, and those chapters will help you do that. The recipe writing chapter is the AP style guide, but just for recipes. So there was once, well, there is an AP style guide. It hasn’t been revised in a while, and there’s an old book that I think my book has replaced on recipe writing. That chapter is super helpful if you want to have testers either that I have lots of examples of testing sheets. So if you want to hire people to test your recipes or give them to your friends and your family, go to that chapter, you can kind of take what I’ve done, make it better for yourself, and look at how I’ve suggested on how you test your recipes and keep track of them. That’s a really

Bjork Ostrom: Useful, what you mean by keep track of them,

Raeanne Sarazen: Meaning that I’ve created Excel spreadsheets on all these different recipes. Who’s sending it out? What are the common ingredients? So how you can sort of the process of it and professional guidelines from, I used to run the test kitchen at the Tribune, how to actually do this because the testing is so key for your success in the recipes you write. And then the nutrition analysis chapter is super interesting because when I was writing it, I used to do a lot of nutrition analysis for food companies, and I do less of it now partially by intention. And I used to do it for a lot of publications, which now use a lot of automated calculators in their nutrition analysis. And I look at the nutrition analysis on blogs, and that’s a whole separate blog. We could do a podcast just on this topic. Yeah, totally. But I would say that’s a really good chapter to understand how to evaluate software programs to really understand the accuracy of your nutrition analysis. And if you ever have products that you’re trying to promote with a food company that’s a nutrition analysis in a deep dive. Super nuanced, it does talk about evaluating the software, which automated plugins to use. And then the last chapter I think would just be helpful if you’re sort of starting out in terms of really understanding the food styling photography and video part, and especially the food styling, which I think is really, really detailed and gives you the bottom line.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yeah, that’s great. I think of the nutrition, we actually had a business a couple of years ago that did nutrition analysis and it’s really hard.

Raeanne Sarazen: Oh, it’s super hard.

Bjork Ostrom: And trying to do it in a way where it lifts the burden off of the creator from having to do a lot of it, but also then continues to be accurate. And I think a lot of times what happens is you have somebody who’s creator, you’ll bunch in the numbers and just kind of be on your way, but it’s like, oh, you actually have to spend some time with it making sure it’s all accurate. And there’s things like sauteing a thing and that changes

Raeanne Sarazen: Everything. I think about brining and marinating and deep frying and making things for their salt in the water, how much salt was absorbed. And that’s why it’s a label, FDA label. That’s one type of analysis. But I think for recipes, it could be less exact. It’s just

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not on the back of a product. It’s a

Raeanne Sarazen: Product tactic,

Bjork Ostrom: But you still want to be as accurate as possible. And it kind of goes back to that trust thing. It’s like you want to make sure that stuff is as tight as possible and complicated business, we sold it. We no longer own it, but still something important to think about. And especially in our world, there’s this thing called structured data and nutrition information is a part of that. And so you are incentivized in some way to include that, but you don’t want to do it as just kind of an afterthought or you’re just throwing the stuff in there and putting it up quickly because you want it to be as accurate as possible.

Raeanne Sarazen: And I think that chapter kind of will explain to people a bit about the nutrition analysis to understand why you shouldn’t be making claims about things or why even as a content creator, you don’t want to say that a pumpkin loaf in a nine by five pan has 16 servings just to get the nutritionals down because it’s not realistic and it’s sort of deceptive as a professional to be doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean if it’s actually eight, don’t say it’s 16.

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, but I’ve seen that and I’ve seen a pound of cost to serve eight too, or

Bjork Ostrom: Process. I went to crumble cookie once, crumble, eat, crumble, and I was like, oh my gosh, this cookie only has like 350 calories in it. This is so good. And I was like, wait a minute, this doesn’t check out. Oh, a fourth of a

Raeanne Sarazen: Cookie

Bjork Ostrom: Has 350 calories in it.

Raeanne Sarazen: I mean, this is very funny because just last night I was looking at a package of, well, Garrett’s popcorn in Chicago, which everyone knows that is such a great place. Well, they have them in little individual bags. And I looked on the back and I’m like, oh, this is super interesting. And it was a serving for two. I’m like, it was barely a serving for 1. And so I thought, okay, it’s just sort of deceptive. So I always like to give people what is real life and accurate and not to sort of skew the numbers to sell something. And one other thing I was going to say that’s in my book that I think is helpful is that at the end there’s really good appendices. So there are sample style guides and I think style guides work for a food company as I gave a food company example, but they work for people when they’re creating content, even if it’s for a Substack newsletter, like how they want all of their content to appear. So when you hire somebody that or do it yourself, you’re following it and you’re creating it and sort of a form that you can use or just take mine from the book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We’re just getting to the point now where we’re kind of looking at building out a team to test recipes. Previously Lindsay would make multiple recipes or if we have ideas that we’re workshopping, so that would be super valuable. When you talk about the Excel spreadsheets, I didn’t see this. Is that something where there’s a link to download? Is that how that works with the,

Raeanne Sarazen: That would be a link to email me and I am always happy to share.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, perfect. Can we include your link in the show notes? Is that okay? Yes.

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, no, that’s fine.

Bjork Ostrom: Or include your email. We’ll do that if anybody has any interest in that. So super comprehensive, obviously a great guide for anybody who listens to this podcast. And I think also, there’s not going to be as many people listening to this, but you talked about this idea of maybe you want to document some maybe your family recipes, or maybe you’re not approaching it from a business standpoint, but you just want to get good, some people want to get good at writing, not because they’re going to accomplish a novel, but they just want to be a good writer. And I

Raeanne Sarazen: Think

Bjork Ostrom: Similarly, there’s an opportunity here to get good at recipes and documenting recipes

Raeanne Sarazen: And make a family cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, love

Raeanne Sarazen: That. It’s a source for people like that. And I do think the information on the nutrition part is super helpful because I just find myself super confused by things that I get in my e email box every day. I’m like, what? There’s a new study and it’s sort of, I always say the advice in that way is try to eat the way your grandparents say it. Dietary advice has not really changed that much, but the problem I would say also for content creators, maybe that won’t sell very well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. Right. Which is back to that conundrum that

Raeanne Sarazen: We talked back to, that we’ve talked before. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe time for, we could cover that in another podcast. Rand, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. It’s called the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, and you cover 400 pages of information that’s really valuable and really helpful, so appreciate your time. And last question, where’s the best place for people to pick this up?

Raeanne Sarazen: I would say Amazon is probably the easiest. I know for book publishers that are not always loving that, but that is the easiest and fastest way to get it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Raeanne, thanks so much for coming on.

Raeanne Sarazen: Thanks, Bjork. It’s been my pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance, and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clariti is your solution. Clariti helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more. It can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data, so you can see keyword, session, page view, and user data for each and every post.

One of our favorite ways to use it, we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes in search algorithms, so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Caroline Chambers, who you might know from her super popular substack newsletter, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Caroline’s career in food started out when she opened her very own catering business, and then morphed into freelance recipe development and a surprise cookbook, which she did for many years. With the start of the pandemic, Caroline finally made the switch to creating her own recipe content and started her Substack newsletter, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Her newsletter is now the number one food and drink newsletter on Substack, and she has grown her business into a seven figure business, which is totally incredible.

Caroline has an awesome perspective on making her recipes unique and useful for her readers, and chats more about how she has grown her subscribers and how she converts unpaid subscribers into paid subscribers, and way more about her strategy with Substack and growing her business on this episode. Her second cookbook, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking is coming out today, on August 13th. We are big fans of Caroline’s here at Food Blogger Pro, as you might gather from the first few minutes of this episode, and just thrilled to welcome her on the podcast. So without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Caroline, welcome to the podcast.

Caroline Chambers: Thank you. I feel very excited to be here. I told the person who helped us set this up that when I was first starting out in the food world, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing, I used to listen to this podcast all the time. So when I got her email inviting me on, I was like, “Oh my gosh, here we are.”

Bjork Ostrom: Here we are.

Caroline Chambers: I’ve made it.

Bjork Ostrom: She would like to tell you, I was reviewing the show notes, she says, “Our team is a huge fan of her Thai-ish steak and Noodle salad,” so it’s not often that I get little fan notes, and it was italic text in the show notes.

Caroline Chambers: That makes me feel very good. That’s a really good one. That was a recent recipe and I’ve been getting a lot of, “This is your best work yet.” It was Noodley, steaky, cabbage, cashews, all the good flavors, so thank you. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks. Emily says, thanks, and thank you for being a podcast listener at one point. Really appreciate that. And here we are. We’re going to talk about your journey as a creator. It’s one of the things that we’ve been trying to prioritize is conversations with people who are building… Their career arc isn’t the same as some of the career arcs of the conversations that we have on the podcast, which oftentimes is like, “I’m going to go out, I’m going to build a site and I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic, probably from search, maybe a little bit of social media, and that’s going to be the path forward.”

But the reality is there’s hundreds of different ways that you can build a successful career by publishing content online. And you’ve done that. Did you start out thinking about approaching it from the traditional standpoint of like, “I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic,” or in that stage where you did talk about trying to figure it out, maybe listening to this podcast, other podcasts, what was your mindset then, and did it shift or has it always been in this space of maybe finding a different way?

Caroline Chambers: Oh, yeah. Yeah. If we take it way back to when I first got into the food world… So I started my career, my post-college career in advertising, hated it. And my husband was in the military, so we had to move. When we moved to San Diego, he was like, “Figure out a way to work in food. That’s what you want to do, figure it out.” So I first-

Bjork Ostrom: When was this?

Caroline Chambers: This is 2012. 2012, we moved. I was working in New York in advertising after I graduated from UNC, Chapel Hill. I had a few food clients, Don Julio Tequila was one of my big clients, and I got to do a ton of really cool… It was the early days of Instagram, Twitter. I was being flown across the country to attend Don Julio parties with Lil Jon, and tweet a blurry Blackberry picture of Lil Jon. That was my job. That was my job. Making $22,000 a year, whatever the hell, I was paid.

Bjork Ostrom: $50,000 of living expenses in New York.

Caroline Chambers: Exactly. Exactly. Nothing like it. So I started in advertising, got this introduction to the food media world that way, but again, Instagram still wasn’t really big. I always said, “I’m not a food blogger, I just don’t want to become a food blogger.” Once I moved to San Diego and my husband was like, “Work in food.” I was like, “I just can’t be a food blogger. It’s just not my thing.” Maybe Pinch of Yum was around back then, but this is like Smitten Kitchen was the food website, the food blog that everyone was going to. I was like, “No, that’s not for me.” So I started a catering company in San Diego and I loved that, but through that, had to grow a social presence to get it to succeed. And when I think about those days, I think that that’s when I first started listening. Do you guys… Was it around back then or was I a couple years too early on that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, would have been.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, I think so. If not, it was my next iteration. I’ve been through about 50 food career iterations. As we do. But I definitely started trying to build SEO and brand traffic for my catering business, and was trying to create a lifestyle brand around that, and I just-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a lifestyle brand, meaning a digital brand connected to the catering? Or making the catering business a lifestyle business?

Caroline Chambers: Making the catering business representative of also who I was. So I was always, even in those early days, cognizant of the fact that I wanted me and my personality to be at the center of this brand. So Cucina Coronado was the name of the catering business, and it was very much pictures of me on the website at these events doing these things. I love food, and I love the connection to people that food brings. And I didn’t know back then exactly what I wanted that to look like, but I knew that… I’ve always had the Ina aspirations. I’ve always wanted to be an Ina in some capacity.

Was it just as a cookbook author? Was it with a show? Was it with a small food shop in the Hamptons? Whatever it was, I had aspirations of me being at the center of my brand. So lots of pictures of me doing the food thing. So yeah, started trying to figure out the like SEO and how to bring… I was putting random recipes on my catering website. I just always really struggled with it, and continued that struggle for many years until I kind of landed where I am today. Yes, definitely. Definitely attention to the SEO thing. There’s a lot of steps in between that we’ll get to.

Bjork Ostrom: In between. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. But yeah, the SEO and traditional blog with Ads thing never quite clicked for me.

Bjork Ostrom: And let me know if this resonates, but one of the things we talk about is sometimes you can see a thing, and that thing that you see is somebody doing something that is representative of echoes of what you want to do. And it might be like, “Hey, I’m building a brand, and it’s a personality based brand and this person is doing it in this way.” And you kind of look and say like, “Okay, the way they did that is they figure out search traffic and they figured out…” So what does it look like to try and do that? It sounds like in you doing that, what you discovered is that’s not the path, and so then were you iterating and saying, “Let me try a different path to see if that feels better for how I am going to hike to this destination?”

Caroline Chambers: Let me take you through my path. So I had the catering business for several years in San Diego. Through that, I started getting asked by local magazines, bigger brands, to do recipe development. So recipe development is basically when a brand is hiring you to develop a recipe, but if you don’t have a name of your own, a brand of your own, they’re just taking that recipe, they’re white labeling it, so to speak, and they’re just putting it on Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi was and is still one of my recipe development clients.

And so they would take the recipe, I would have nothing to do with it. They weren’t paying me for my brand to be a part of it. Nowhere did it say Caroline Chambers and it would just be slapped up on their website in a magazine in what are those things called? Point of sale. When you buy a chunk of cheese and it has a little fold out tag that has a recipe on it. I created a lot of those. And so I started building a brand around recipe development, because what I found was catering was such a slog. I was literally 22 years old with back pain and getting gray hairs.

Bjork Ostrom: Icing your knees at the end of the day.

Caroline Chambers: Icing my knees and laying flat on my ground, just being like, “What have I done?” To make $1000 at the end of the day. I realized how much easier the recipe development side was than the physical, being in a restaurant or being in a catering business just from a literal physical perspective. I could sit in my kitchen and spend a day tweaking one recipe and make… I don’t know what I made for recipe development back then, let’s say $150 for a recipe, and that was so much easier than the labor that went into catering a party and making 300 bucks or whatever. So I started building a brand around-

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like B2B. You were known as somebody who other businesses could come to and do recipe development. But that probably left out the piece that you knew that you wanted, which is consumer connection to-

Caroline Chambers: It left out that narcissistic… yes.

Bjork Ostrom: No, and I would say I would push back against that. It’s connection, community, the ability to speak and interact with people, and it’s the same thing if you’re a musician, you can be a recording artist and you can go into the studio and create, and some people love that, but inevitably there are musicians who, if they were studio musicians and they never got to step in front of a crowd of people, that’s just a different dynamic.

Caroline Chambers: And to take that metaphor one level deeper, there are also musicians who are creating diddies for brands that have their name nowhere attached to it. So I was creating the diddy for a tied commercial, basically, and I was like nowhere attached to it. I would share it on this Instagram @CarolChambers. I’ve had that forever, and I would share it on my Instagram and be like, “You can go to the Woodbridge site and find this recipe.” But I was always missing that personal, you to me, you follow me on Instagram to get recipes directly from me. I was really missing that for many years, but I had built this job and this network of people who were coming to me consistently for recipes and I didn’t have the time to… Can you hear my dog in the background?

Bjork Ostrom: No. But it’s great. It’s like birds chirping in the park dogs barking in the house.

Caroline Chambers: That’s Cooper. I don’t live in New York City, but I do have a dog chirping in the background. I had built this steady income of recipe development clients, and so I always felt this piece was missing. I didn’t have time to post a recipe just on my Instagram for fun for my community that I had built there. But I had, I had such steady work, and so that piece was always missing.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s hard because you know that you could take an hour or two hours to craft a piece of content that you share with your audience, but it’s hard when you translate that into, and then I’m not going to get paid $250 in order to do the recipe development. And so then, I was talking to a friend actually this weekend whose brother is a family therapist and he’s just like, he’s working all the time because he’s attached this dollar amount to his work. And you know that if you’re not going to work in an afternoon that equates to $500 or if you are going to work on something, but it’s something that’s not directly tied to revenue, there’s also an inherent cost to that. So how did you-

Caroline Chambers: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: What did it look like to navigate that?

Caroline Chambers: That’s so funny you say that. That’s exactly because not a lot of people ever bring that up. That’s exactly the cycle that I got into, and I think a lot of small business and entrepreneurs can get into that cycle of, well, I can’t take the time to build this business, because I’ve got this thing set up where I know that my hourly, in one hour I can make $200. And so what happened to me as a mom is that I also, I would get a babysitter for that two hours to develop a recipe in which I would make $300. So I’m going to spend $30, I’m going to make 300, my profit is 270. What happens when you’re trying to build a brand where you’re not making money at the beginning is that-

Bjork Ostrom: You just start losing money, because hiring a babysitter.

Caroline Chambers: You’re just, yeah. And so any amount, at this point when I made this shift, we skipped a point where I, in my mind… So basically in 2012 I started building this catering business, which then shifts to recipe development. I went and worked for a restaurant consulting brand in San Francisco for a piece, but I was still always side hustling doing this recipe development on the side, continuing to build that brand on the side, always left that company to go full force with the freelance recipe development because it was just so much more enjoyable, my own time, all the things. In that time period, I did a stint where I was food styling for the New York Times. My husband was in business school, we spent the summer in New York City and I got a freelance gig styling for the New York Times for the summer for Melissa Clark’s column with a really great food photographer named Andrew Scrivani, who was just such a great mentor and really showed me the ropes.

And through that I reconnected with an old UNC friend who is a cookbook agent, and she was like, “Okay, you’re in the food world. You’re doing all these cool things. Would you ever want to write a cookbook?” And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t even have, I have 1000 Instagram followers leftover from my old catering business. I never even post there. I would never want to write a cookbook until I had a very clear POV on something cool.” I don’t want just another girl gets a community and writes a cookbook, not just like Caroline Chambers here are my favorite recipes. No, I would never. And at this point I had no community anyway. And she’s like, “Okay, yeah, well, you’re going to continue to grow your brand. I can tell you’re going to work on it. Let me know.”

Two weeks later she calls me and is like, “Okay, so I know you said you didn’t want to write a book, but I have a book with a very clear POV Chronicle books wanted to write a book called Just Married, and they needed a person who was just married to write it, who was a great recipe developer or whatever they were. She was like, they don’t need somebody famous. They don’t want the book to be about the person so much as the book.” I was like, “Perfect. I’ll write my first cookbook.” So I got my first cookbook deal in this very back channel only way that doesn’t really happen anymore. It’s pretty hard to get a cookbook deal these days, and I got one having no community, no following anything. So I wrote that book. It’s really successful. It’s still on the shelves at Crate and Barrel because it has its own life and now that I do have built a community, it has even more success. But basically… It published in 2017, so this whole time I’m still doing my thing freelance recipe development.

In conjunction with what you were just saying about your hourly time being so equated to a dollar amount. I also, when you’re freelance recipe developing or you’re a writer or something like that, your time can only go so far. I could only develop so many recipes in a week. I could only do so much with my time. It wasn’t a scalable business at all, and I kept, that was always in the back of my mind, just kind of needling me that it was so unscalable. I’m writing a recipe and I can only sell it one time to one person and then the recipe is over, I can’t… So that was always in my mind, it’s something that I wanted to solve.

Bjork Ostrom: And you probably also know inherently the value of the thing that you’re creating. It’s like your years and years of experience going into this and it’s like a single kind of transaction as opposed to what they end up using it for, which is putting it in the magazine or on a packaging that is distributed to 200,000 people. And so you know there’s value beyond the recipe itself, but maybe didn’t have access to that audience directly.

Caroline Chambers: Totally. It’s funny you say that because, so I still retain a lot of those original recipe development clients. I’m pushing them off more and more, because I just don’t have time with what I have going on now, but I have recipe development clients that I got in 2012 when I had to absolutely know online community, no name for myself that I still write recipes for, and my rate is about a hundred times what it was when I first started. I mean truly, I think I was charging $150 and now I charge, I don’t know, $5,000 a recipe in some of these cases and they still don’t put my name on those recipes. It’s just that I now know what those recipes are worth-

Bjork Ostrom: Are worth. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: That time is worth, where it’s being used, where it’s being licensed out, the fact that they have full ownership of it versus only ownership for one year, they’re like these different things you can then negotiate. And so I’ve jacked my rate way up and every single time they’ve been great, in the contract. They never question it and I’m like, “Oh, dang it, I could have been making-”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Everybody ever who has done any freelance work looks back and is like, oh, you realize. And part of it too is like half of those people say no, but then half still say yes, and the rate is twice as much. You’re getting paid the same amount and doing half the work, but you don’t know until you try and have that conversation. The other thing that I think is true is, I think of when we were first starting out and you get a branded deal and it’s like we’re in a season where a week ago we bought a scratch and then refrigerator for $175 using Lindsey’s babysitting money, and it’s like just your perspective on money is also different where a smaller amount is worth more when you haven’t gone through the experience of even seeing like, oh, a company that is reaching out to you probably has a $500,000 budget for this campaign. And so the difference between you asking a thousand or 2000 feels really significant to you, but to that brand, it’s like-

Caroline Chambers: That is a drop in the bucket.

Bjork Ostrom: But you don’t know that until you know it.

Caroline Chambers: You don’t know that. Yeah. Another funny thing that I think I’ve realized with time is, these brands, you’re thinking like, oh, Tillamook is approving this. No, a 22-year old just graduated from journalism school’s working at an agency or whatever, who’s working at an agency that works for an agency that works for Tillamook is who is looking at this and they’ve been given $500,000 to whatever mess with, and so you asking for an extra 1000 is literally easier for her to just say yes to that than go out and find somebody else to ask for that money. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So we buried the lead here with some of this stuff with your story because one of the really significant periods for you, kind of an unlock I would imagine is the transition into building an audience on Substack and you have the number one food and drink Substack newsletter. My guess is there’s a little bit of that that compounds. I have a friend who wrote a book that’s like a number one book in the business world called The Personal MBA, and he talks about once you’re there, you kind of sit there, but you have to get to a point where you start in order to build it up. So-

Caroline Chambers: Yes, how did we get there?

Bjork Ostrom: How did you get there? What did that look like? And in a relatively short amount of time, when you look at-

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. 2017 is when Just Married, published, and at that point I had sort of started being like, okay, I’m going to be a published cookbook author. I better build up my Instagram a bit. But I still had that issue where I was a freelance recipe developer. That was my main income, and I had so many gigs coming in and I was just so obsessed with just what you were just saying, the equation of my hourly rate or my hour to making a certain amount of money that I wasn’t taking the time to develop those recipes for free to publish on my Instagram or on carolinechambers.com. I just wasn’t seeing the value in that. Basically I was like, “Oh, I wrote a cookbook. That’ll project me into the universe as a food creator.” No, it will not. So Just Married, publishes, it does really well just based on its title alone and where it has placements, whatever.

But it certainly does not all this, I don’t overnight just because I published a book, grow my Instagram audience at all very much realized a book is a great PR-able moment if you are doing the work and you’re a creator who’s hustling hard, but like-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a multiplier.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, it’s a multiplier, but just on its own, you can publish a book and no one will ever know about it if there’s not the right things in place. So between 2017 and 2019, I get pregnant, have my first son. The way that I cook very much changes. And so I have this genius cookbook idea for a book called What to Cook when You Don’t Feel Like Cooking and all of the ingredients would be less than 15 ingredients, nothing that’s difficult to find. Everything you can find in a normal grocery store, all the recipes would take under an hour and it would be a complete meal. So each recipe is a complete meal. It’s your grain, your vegetable, your main, or whatever. It’s a lasagna with a side salad. It’s the whole thing. The idea was you get a cookbook and you have to flip from the side section to the entrees, and then you’re not a confident cook, but you have to figure out does that broccoli go with that main? So this was everything all together.

So I pitched this book and all these publishers were like, “This is amazing, great concept, but oh, Caroline only has 2000 Instagram followers. Like, Nope, pass.”

Bjork Ostrom: Because you’re not going to be able to sell it. Is what they’re-

Caroline Chambers: You’re not going to be able to sell it. So the publishing landscape had changed that much from 2015 when I got the book deal for Just Married to 2019 when I was trying to sell this book that I was like, “No, but the name is so good, it’ll sell itself.” And they were like, “No, it won’t. You don’t know that.” No publishing now is at least cookbook publishing in my experience is you have to be able to sell the book yourself. So whether you are a rapper who has a huge audience and so they get a cookbook deal or you have a food blog, and so you get a cookbook deal, whatever, you have to be able to sell it. They don’t want to be in charge of selling it. The publisher, they want you to be in charge of selling it and have your own built-in audience to sell it.

So everyone rejects it. I am so defeated, and at this point I’m genuinely now looking back, I realize I wasn’t putting in the effort, I wasn’t putting in the effort to building my own brand and doing these things. And it was because of that I didn’t feel like I had enough time in the day to… I couldn’t hire a babysitter for $15 an hour to then do work for free to publish a recipe on my website. No way. That wasn’t good business. And then I am one of the many people whose career trajectory totally changed in March, 2020, all of a sudden my husband and I were both stuck at home with, I was pregnant with our second. Our first was one, a little over one, and I was literally working on a huge Cinco Mayo campaign for I Kid You Not Corona Beer. On March 16th, I was down in Monterey at a food photography studio shooting this huge campaign for Corona beer, and we were like, so Corona beer coronavirus.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s funny. Yeah, totally.

Caroline Chambers: So funny. Wonder what’ll happen. And then the next day, the whole world is shut down.

Bjork Ostrom: Shuts down. And everybody picks a collective golf.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, yes. So I get check from Constellation who owns Corona. I get my check from them, literally never hear from them again. I don’t even know if I ever sent final recipes. They were just like, “Ah, yeah, I think Cinco de Mayo’s kind of canceled for this year. We’re good.” So those recipes went nowhere and in consequence or in quick succession, all of my other freelance recipe development gigs were like, “Pause on that, pause on that. We don’t know what we’re doing right now.” Take yourself back, the grocery store shelves were empty. Getting food was impossible. It was an issue. And so no one knew how to market food, and the only people who paid me were people who market food. So I was like, okay.

I remember March 20th looking at my husband and being like, I think this is my moment to, I’m not making money anyway, so I’m just going to go absolutely ham on the internet. I don’t know if for listeners, have you ever had a friend who you’re like, oh, I think they’re trying to become an influencer because all of a sudden they start hosting a ton of stuff and talking in selfie mode to their camera.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of trying out new versions of themselves.

Caroline Chambers: Trying out new versions of themselves, posting their meals that they’ve never posted before, sharing a link to their son’s swimsuit. You’re like, what the heck is going on? Well, that was me. That was in 2020 totally. And so my advice would be, I’ve had a lot of people since I started trying to be an internet creator or whatever the heck we call ourselves, I’ve had a lot of people, friends, friends of friends reach out to me and be like, “How did you do it? Were you not embarrassed? All of a sudden it’s like you just have to be so vulnerable. And also, who cares? If anyone sees you out there posting a link to your son’s swimsuit and talking to your camera about the great hike you just went on and they think you’re a dork, well then they can unfollow you. I think literally every single person in the world, I don’t care if you’re completely introverted, you hate talking to other humans. I think every single person in the world can be an internet creator because none of us are as unique as we think we are.

There is a community of people who wants to follow somebody, every single person on the planet. You just have to do it. So if you are like, “Oh, I could…” So many people who would be like, I could never, I’m way too shy. I could never, I’m way too self-conscious,” then just get on there and be self-conscious, do it. So I got on there and I’m super extroverted. I love chit-chatting, so it was honestly the easiest thing for me. I just got in there, started talking about my day. We live on an acre with chickens. I would take the camera on Instagram stories down to see the chicken coop, whatever. But my thing that really helped me grow is that I would do, it was quarantine kitchen, like quarantine kitchen with a Q, very chic naming. And I would be like post, because I had nothing else going on.

Remember nothing else going on except for keeping going in your old life. I would be like, tell me the ingredients that are in your pantry and I’ll create a meal for you. So people would write in and be like, I’ve got eggs, lentils, curry, paste, whatever. And I’d be like, “Okay, we’re going to make an egg lentil curry.” Do this, do this, do this. And people just, even if nobody made them, they just got such a kick out of the pantry mashups that I was coming up with that I started, and this is before Reels, which Reels are a really great way to quickly go viral and gain a lot of followers. So this was all just word of mouth, people being like, “Oh, you got to follow this girl.” She’s like, “You can type in what you have and she’ll tell you what to cook with it.”

So I started growing really quickly with that, and I started publishing recipes to carolinechambers.com just because people needed a place for them to live.

Bjork Ostrom: Where do I get it?

Caroline Chambers: And never, I don’t even know my WordPress login. I hate trying to deal with websites. And so I knew, okay, this isn’t how I’m going to make money, like driving SEO. This is never going to be how I’m going to make money. So I just kept building and trying to get more followers. I saw, I swear, I listened on a podcast or maybe it was on here, the importance of having your own newsletter, basically, Instagram can change its algorithm. TikTok could get banned, your website could crash or get hacked, and you could never see it again. Having your own newsletter list of people who you can capture them their attention instantly, and you don’t have to hope that the algorithm shows them your story, they’re going to get your email.

I saw somewhere the importance of that, and it really spoke to me. And so I started building a newsletter list and I would just send fun quarantine kitchen things like, here’s our idea. And it was a great newsletter, but it was just hacked together on whatever WordPress platform I was doing. So I did that for a long time, kept growing my audience. By December, 2020, I’ve had my second son, he’s a couple of months old, my cooking is getting even more… I feel like cooking even less. And this idea of that proposal I wrote, it just was in my mind and I couldn’t let it go.

So I just kept being like, “What could I do with that?” I still only had 10,000 Instagram followers. I was like, all right, what to cook? You don’t feel like cooking. Do I turn that into its own Instagram? Do I turn that into its own website? And Substack was just starting to gain momentum. People were food creators were really turning to Patreon, and I just didn’t dig that for some reason. And I guess I had good reason because has it flopped? Is it over? Is Patreon over?

Bjork Ostrom: Patreon, I don’t think so. But I know any type of contribution model is hard if you’re not… And Patreon, I know you can set it up with tiers where it’s like you get certain access to things, but it maybe leans a little bit into a tip jar. It’s not that, but if it feels like that, that’s different than product or subscription, and maybe there’s a little nuanced difference there.

Caroline Chambers: Maybe. I was seeing Patreons and thinking, okay, so people are going to have to leave Instagram, go to the Patreon app to access this. I was like, “I don’t think that’s,” my people are busy either young professionals, young parents. I was like, I don’t want to make them try harder to get content. And so then I was like, wait, I already have this newsletter. And I kind of heard about Substack and I was like, okay, if I could just continue to create value in my newsletter, I probably first got this idea in October. I already had this newsletter going for many months. People really loved it, but it was just a regular old newsletter sharing recipes from my website, sharing what we did, tips, whatever. I don’t know, it was just a very basic but well-thought-out newsletter at that point. And so I shifted it.

I shifted it to being a unique recipe every week, and I always, because it was COVID times, I always provided a substitution for every single ingredient. So literally I took the ingredient list, I copied and pasted it, and I wrote, because that’s the number one thing back then was like, “I don’t have baking powder. You have, right? There’s no baking powder in my town.” I was like, “Okay, if you don’t have baking powder, do this, this, this. If you don’t have flour, do this, this, this. You don’t have chicken. Okay, you can use shrimp, cook it for two minutes. You can cook beef, cook it for seven minutes.” It was a crazy index of substitutions. And that was when I really started to get a kind of cult following of people being like, whoa, you write these recipes in a way that I could actually follow.

And I also write, most recipe lists are like, add the flour, salt, and butter to the bowl. I write the full amount. So I’m like, “Add two cups flour, one stick butter, and two teaspoons of salt to the bowl.” And I put it in bold so people who aren’t super confident in the kitchen are falling recipes, just really clicking with these recipes. And so I started just, I knew, okay, maybe I’ll turn on this paid subscription model with a newsletter. So I switched over to Substack for my hosting in October of 2020, and I didn’t change anything. Nobody knew. I never talked about Substack. It just looked a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t look any different to somebody.

Caroline Chambers: It doesn’t look any different. All they did was receive an email. All it was no sweat off their back. But I changed the format. So I would still provide these once a week kind of chatty, here’s a soup recipe, it’s cold outside, whatever those newsletters. But I also was sending in the newsletter every single Sunday morning with a full list of substitutions, a unique recipe that I would just talk the heck out of on Instagram and be showing them behind the scenes of cooking it. The pictures, you can only get this if you’re on my newsletter. It’s just the best place for me to send it. I’m doing a newsletter thing. I’ve never been good to websites. It’s coming in your newsletter. So I just would rapidly get tons of new subscribers by being like, you can only access this recipe that looks so good if you subscribe.

And so I did that for several months, and then I, December, 2020, I think December 13th, 2020, I transitioned to a paid model. So I was like, if you don’t want to pay, it’s fine. You’ll still get one recipe a month. And that’s how my model still is to this day. First recipe of every month is free for everyone, but if you want to pay, it’s basically… I told the whole story about how I tried to pitch this concept as a cookbook. Everybody said no, but that I was going to self-publish it and bring it directly to the people one recipe at a time instead. And so I launched it at the price of a cookbook, $35. And I was like, this is my non cookbook cookbook. Kind of like F the publishers, they wouldn’t give me a deal.

So I’m giving myself a deal with my whole thing around it. And again, I probably had, I don’t know, 8,000 total subscribers at this point, and I converted a lot overnight, like 500 overnight or something. And I was like, whoa. All of a sudden, my, let’s say I was making $30,000 all of a sudden annual. I kind of fulfilled on that hope of being able to scale these recipes beyond just being able to sell them once. So instead of selling a recipe…

Bjork Ostrom: That was a singular moment where it was the clouds kind of part a little bit, and the sun comes through and you’re like, this is a moment where after a decade of pondering it, feeling it, the tension, knowing that you’re doing really good work, sticking with it, having a moment where it’s like, oh, this is it. Did it feel like that the moment, or did it feel like that looking back?

Caroline Chambers: It felt exactly like that in the moment. For weeks leading up to the paid launch, I was like, “Oh God, is anybody going to do this? Nobody’s going to pay for, there are a million recipes on pinchofyum.com, what’sgabycooking.com, New York Times cooking those Smitten Kitchen, why would anybody pay me in my own website, carolinechambers.com, there’s a million free recipes, why would people pay?” And so that’s what I put my effort towards was what sets this apart? What makes this worth subscribing and actually paying for it? And so that’s when I really leaned in hard to the way that I write recipes with those bold inline ingredient amounts and providing this huge, it’s really a massive list of notes and substitutions. Often it takes me longer to write the notes and substitutions than to write the recipe itself, really leaning into that. Because it very much is this, “Teach man to fish,” versus just hand them a fish.

Anybody can follow a recipe for shrimp and orzo. But once you have read these notes and substitutions and you realize, “Oh, I can swap in rice and chicken and add some cheese, and all of a sudden I have cheesy cheddar rice and chicken using the same recipe, but just slight tweaks, that’s where people feel really empowered by what to cook, we don’t feel like cooking.” But yes, to answer your question, it was this full sun through the clouds moment where I was sitting on Substack on my dashboard watching one more subscriber come in, I’d be like, refresh, refresh. And you’d be like, 35 more dollars, 70 more dollars. I’m going up in $35 increments. And people are really supporting me because for almost a year during the pandemic, I’ve been pouring myself out for free to give them as much help and assistance in the kitchen as I possibly could.

I was doing Zoom cooking classes. I’ve really connected with this community. And they were like, “Yes, Caroline, we are psyched to finally be able to support your work.” And I’m watching that this desire to create a product that is scalable. I’m watching it scale, refresh, refresh, refresh. I’m watching it scale in front of my eyes and thinking, “Okay, so I could have written that recipe for shrimp and orzo for 150 bucks, sold at once, never been able to use it again.” But now I’m writing a recipe for the sky’s the limit. I am writing one single recipe, and there’s absolutely no cap on how much that one single recipe can make me if I just keep hustling and adding more subscribers. So yeah, that was December, 2020, and it’s been an exponential growth since then.

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Can you talk about what that’s been like to have that change? Because it’s a pretty drastic before and after. And it’s like in some ways it’s slow because it’s a decade of pursuing an entrepreneurial spirit, trying to figure out what it is, but it’s slow until it’s not, and then it’s not. And then today looks very different than four years ago or four years and two months. What has that been like to navigate that? Everything from suddenly, maybe there’s more pressure, maybe not. But also financially it looks different than it did before, and what does that look like to experience that change?

Caroline Chambers: Oh my gosh, so many things. The pressure thing is what spoke to me first. And so all of a sudden I am like, okay, I am pressing launch on this paid feature. And so overnight, I think it was overnight, I got like 500 paid subscribers. And I remember so vividly those first couple of months before I hired an editor, because again, we’re obsessed with how much money we can make to how much we had to spend on this at the beginning as entrepreneurs. So I didn’t hire an editor for months, even though I desperately needed one. I so vividly remember. So it used to go out on Sunday mornings. I recently switched to Saturday based on a lot of the feedback from readers.

So distinctly remember, every single Saturday night was a full anxiety attack. I would reread, read, reread, proofread, have my husband read, have my mom read 500 times, every single recipe went out, because I was so terrified of what if an ingredient’s missing? Because that happens all the time, when you just post something on Instagram, you forget the salt. Somebody says, where’s the salt? You add it because guess what, that was a free recipe, I don’t-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and you can edit the description.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, and you can edit it. And so I was just so terrified of these people putting their trust in me, paying me for something and then, I mean, there’s nothing worse being a food creator. You are inserting yourselves into such an important part of people’s lives, like dinner time especially. I mean, I just say especially I am a community member of the young family of the community. Especially though to me as a young mom, if dinner gets screwed up, because of something I messed up, and then all of a sudden this young mom or dad is standing there and their kids are starving and they’re starving, and the dinner was way too salty, or it wasn’t salty at all or whatever. Somehow I screwed up the dinner, that was so much pressure on me. And so Saturday nights became just fully anxiety riddled. I was panicked that I was going to make some mistake.

I finally ponied up and hired an editor, and that has made such a world of difference. So I think it’s just how I had to finally hire a babysitter for my son to do free work to grow the brand that is now a seven figure business. You had to invest a little, even though you weren’t making any money at the beginning to get to where I am today. It’s the same thing with hiring people to help with What To Cook brand and with the Caroline Chambers brand. Yuck for even calling myself a brand. But you know what I mean?

At first, I was so hesitant and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m making $30,000 now. It’s $40,000, whatever. I just kept seeing it tick up, and my husband went to Standford Business school, so he’s like, “Oh my God, you’ve cracked the code. You’ve created a business with absolutely zero overhead.” And I was like, yeah, there’s no overhead. I make all of this. And so to hire my first editor, I was like, “Oh, damn it. Okay, okay. I’m losing some profit, losing some profit.” But because I now have an editor, it’s now such a more beautiful, perfect publication and recipe than I ever would. And thus, more people tell their friends about it and it gets shared more. And thus, my subscriber numbers have raised so much. And same thing went for hiring my first graphic designer to fully do a branding suite for it.

I was like, oh God, whatever I spent $15,000. Is that really worth it? Yes, of course it is, because then your stuff looks so much more legit and beautiful, and people are so much more excited to get it in their inbox. My branding is really bright and poppy and colorful, and I want it to just be this pop of joy in their inboxes. So they’re like, yeah, they get that, and they’re like, whoa, it’s Saturday morning. It’s Sunday morning Caroline time. It’s what to cook time. And that branding really tells that message. So yeah, it’s been a lot of lessons of when is it important to spend the money? And also as an entrepreneur, and I’ve now grown from the one to two to three small boys in this house. I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a one-year-old.

And so valuing my time as the creator of all of this and knowing when it’s okay to outsource has also been a huge lesson over the past four years, or I guess it’s been three and a half years of What to Cook, but like you said, yeah, four in a couple of months since the beginning of COVID. But knowing when it’s the most important thing for me to actually handle myself as the creator of What to Cook versus, for instance, we write a monthly meal plan that’s hugely popular. A it’s popular with my subscribers. So it’s basically I take all the what to cook recipes. So it could be a recipe from 2020 with a recipe from last week, and I create a week long meal plan that sends out on the first of every month.

And this is a part of our evolution of, okay, now this is a seven figure business. We really need to start providing how can I provide more? I’m like, I’m making so much more money for doing nothing more. How can I provide more? So that was one of those things. They take us a lot of effort. It’s a five-day meal plan, and we basically turn, we’ll overlap ingredients. So if there’s chicken on Monday’s recipe and Thursday’s Cook all the chicken on Monday and then just reuse it in Thursday. So it really gets to this message of what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking. We know cooking is really hard for people. We want to make that easier. And we write a full grocery list.

So I used to write all those myself, and I used to write the grocery lists myself, because I was so afraid of somebody missing an ingredient. And now I’m like, “You know what? My editor has been with me for three years. She knows these recipes just as well as I do.” So she fully writes those, and I was so nervous when I first switched from me writing them to Molly writing them, and guess what? Nobody knows the difference. And now it’s fully Molly’s name, and people are like, “Sweet, thanks, Molly.” People love it.

I was so afraid of losing ownership or something or having people think, “Oh, Caroline didn’t write this, so it’s not valuable.” Well, guess what? They don’t think that I’m not that great. So bringing people into your team and into your fold, bringing people into my team and into my fold, I should say, has been such a huge part of this. Because the more it does become a bit of like, okay, if I hustle harder, I know I can get 1000 more subscribers by the end of the week. And with that hustle comes so much more work. Okay, how are you hustling? You’re creating another meal plan. Because you know people love meal plans, so you’ll get another a hundred subscribers.

You need help so that I can do that. My number one job is being a mom, but I also have a full freaking time job with all of this. So making sure that I can also enjoy my life has been huge and bringing in, I feel like my biggest lesson over the past four years has been assembling the right team to help and knowing that spending more money can make you more money.

Bjork Ostrom: And even if it doesn’t, it’s like a resource exchange. You’re trading it for time or it’s all resources that we have.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. Outsource the things that you don’t enjoy. Because that will mean that you’re able to be really creative and great at other parts that you do enjoy.

Bjork Ostrom: The other piece that I think is important that you pointed out is figuring out the pieces that you can outsource that don’t matter as much if you’re not touching those, or if you’re not a part of those. And you have self-deprecating and like, “Oh, who cares if it’s me or not doing it.” There are some things that people would really care if it’s you doing it or not, and it’s like preserving those. But do people care if you’re the one who figures out how to update their email address if they change emails? No.

Caroline Chambers: Great example.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s 100 different things like that that we do as entrepreneurs every day that we can figure out slowly over time, as our finance resources increase, how do we get those least impactful things passed off to somebody else?

Caroline Chambers: Off our plate? Yes. The things that are bringing down our joy. And then I’m sitting there at the kitchen table, instead of hanging out chatting with my three boys, I’m like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you haven’t received your email in three weeks. Let me stress that.” I had so funny you bring that example up, because I had a meeting with my… I now have a great team at Substack who are there to support me and help me grow because the more I grow, the more they grow. And they scrub into my data and help me make decisions. And I was like, “You guys, it’s killing me.” They basically changed their app, and so now more email issues happen. I was like, “Yo, the app issue is killing me. I get emails 10 a week, that’s like Caroline, I haven’t gotten my email in two weeks, and I’m having to respond to those individually.” And they’re like, Caroline, that’s why you’re on Substack. That’s why you’re not hosting on carolinechambers.com. Just forward the support team. The email, I was like, what?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, awesome.

Caroline Chambers: What? So yeah, I mean, I will say if anybody out there has been considering a Substack, the support within Substack from a technical standpoint has been so incredible, but also from a, “Hey, I’m thinking about changing this or adding a podcast or doing this,” and they can really look into your data and they’ve got a lot of smart people there thinking about it. And then also the community aspect of Substack. When I first joined, this was not the case. You very much had your own newsletter. It was just hosted on Substack.

Bjork Ostrom: Siloed.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, siloed. Now it’s really like when you sign up for one Substack, they give you a list of 10 others that you might, that you can click and say, okay, I’ll join. And I think my latest growth was like 40% of my new subscribers are coming from within this Substack ecosystem. So every now and then I’ll go, oh God, okay. It sucks that substack is taking 10% what their cut is. They take 10% of all of your earnings or whatever. Oh, that sucks. Maybe I should build my own thing, or do I switch to member full, which is Patreons. I thought the Patreon had crumbled and was only Memberful, but I’m wrong.

Memberful kind of lives on your site. It’s hosted by Patreon, but it just looks, it’s like white listed, kind of branded as your own. Do I switch to that? I think they’d have a lower cut, and then I’m like, “No, look at this subscriber growth just from within this system.Emma Lovewell’s podcast or Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast or Emily Oster who’s a parenting person. She was on Substack and recommended me, and I got like 30,000 new subscribers through her. So yeah, it’s a cool program.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there a way to, do you have a rough estimate of like, Hey, if I get a thousand subscribers, here’s how many of those We’re talking to David Lebovitz on the podcast, and I think, I don’t remember if he should specifically, but he just talked about that as a platform and how great it is. But it’s one of the great things that’s different than the world of search optimization and getting traffic or even cookbook sales. It’s kind of hard to know. With this, it feels like you might have an idea of, if I can bring in 1000 free subscribers, my guess is 2% of those 5% of those on the landing page, they say one to 2% is a good conversion rate. Do you have something kind of in a rough number that you think about?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. Well, I can tell you exactly what my numbers are. As of two minutes ago, I have 150,000 overall, and then of that 19,500 are paid. So what’s that percentage? Yes. So here’s one of my issues, and this is actually a role. This is a good therapy. This is a role that I need to fill. I am really bad at digging into my data and with my book tour coming up, my team’s like, “Hey, Caroline, where are your Instagram subscribers based?” And I was like, “How do I find that out?” “Where are your subscribers base?” “How do I find that out?” All of this data does exist. And yeah, basically I take any opportunity I can to get more free subscribers and to provide my free subscribers with really cool valuable content that not only shows them what to cook is, but who I am as a person.

Because I do think that I am a person who on Instagram, who my Instagram is Carol Chambers and I’m not just talking about food all the time. When I first started in 2020 trying to become a food creator, I was only talking about food. And thus my job was really hard and I was constantly like, what can I cook next? What can I share next? How can I create content? And one of I was like, God, Mattis… My then one-year-old, I was like, “Mattis is always in the background. I’ve got to get him down for a nap and then I can do my work.” And one of my friends was like, don’t you think that people wouldn’t mind seeing your one-year-old with you and hearing what he eats for lunch and how you create these meals and how you feed it to him?

And I was like, “Nobody cares about me being a mom. Nobody cares about that.” And she was like, “I would give it a shot.” This is my friend Alyssa. She was like, “I would give it a shot.” You’re not going to have a babysitter for the next several months. If you want to be able to create content easily, he’s going to need to be in the background sometimes and people need to know you’re a mom. And so I started, now I think my Instagram bio is food and motherhood or something because I talk about motherhood and my favorite romance books and my favorite Amazon sweatshirts just as much as I talk about food. But food will always be kind of at the center of what I do. So I take any opportunity I can to convert people to become unpaid subscribers, whether it’s, “Hey, I’ve got this, I’m interviewing Bjork on the podcast next week he’ll be on mine. Come on. You have to be a subscriber to listen whatever.”

And then once I’ve got them in my system, just finding a way to convert them. It’s funny on salad days, so I do a paywall, unpaid subscribers get every single recipe. There’s just a paywall before the directions start and salad days and pasta days are my highest conversions.

Bjork Ostrom: The winners.

Caroline Chambers: Those are my convertor days.

Bjork Ostrom: You do know some of the data, you do know some of the data.

Caroline Chambers: I do know some of the data, but I definitely, that’s one of the places that I’m like, actually, I could probably have some wins if I understood all this a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s super insightful from your friend. I think of in the world of content creation, there’s so many different angles you can take with it, but Gary Vaynerchuk, viral for some people, but he has this phrase that I really appreciate where he talks about, “Document don’t create.” And I think it’s such a great perspective shift on how to approach the creation process, which is you’re documenting, you’re not going into the lab and getting everything perfect, but it’s like how do you best document what’s currently happening? And I think that it’s not the only way, but it’s definitely one way, especially for people who are time constrained to create really compelling content because then you don’t have to create a perfect environment. The environment is the thing that makes for good content and-

Caroline Chambers: I’ve never heard that quote from Ol Gary, but I would say that’s the exact shift that I had when I started to see my numbers really tick up was less sharing a perfect walkthrough of a perfect recipe, more sharing like I’m walking down to the chicken coop to get some eggs. Oh my god, Mattis just wiped out in the pile of chicken poop. And okay, now we’re digging an outside bad. Like the funny parts of everyday life that we all have on our journey to cook meals for our family. We all are living… Whether or not you have kids, all of our lives are just a little bit of a S-H-I-T show. And so actually sharing that as opposed to this perfect pristine, finished, polished thing is when I really started to notice my community becoming a community versus just a bunch of followers. I’ve got people because they’re like…

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s story too. I feel like that’s what you’re doing is your storytelling, which is such a compelling part of why people want to follow. We could talk for hours, Caroline, and my guess is people would be able to figure out where to follow you online, but can you do a quick shout out for where people can follow you? And your cookbook is going to be coming out soon. You can maybe pre-order that you talked about going through the process of this cookbook. So do a shout-out for that. We’ll link to it. And where can people pick that up as well?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, so the cookbook, yeah, basically after a couple of years of having the Substack, I got a call from a really cool publishing house called Union Square that’s owned by Barnes and Noble. And so they just have, they’re really interesting. They just published Dan Pelosi’s book if anybody’s familiar with him Grossi Pelosi and a lot of really cool people. And so they basically contacted me and we’re like, listen, if you’ve ever written a cookbook proposal, you know it’s a frickin slog. They have to be 50 pages long example chapters, example recipes, blah, blah, blah. This editor, Amanda Englander came to me and was like, your Substack is awesome. It is your proposal. Here’s an amount of money that I’ll offer you for a cookbook deal. And I was like, “Sweet.” And my agent was like, “Do you want to shop it around?” And I was like, “I sure don’t. Don’t want to write a proposal. I’ll take it.” So the cool thing is what started as I wanted to write a cookbook, couldn’t get a deal. So I did just upside

Bjork Ostrom: You’d Substack to like-

Caroline Chambers: Then circled me back at getting a cookbook deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Actually, some publishers, I’ll be okay with some publishers.

Caroline Chambers: Actually. Yeah, yeah. Not F all publishers, only some. It was funny, when I first announced that I was writing a book, I was like, are people going to be like, “Caroline, I thought we were anti-publisher.” And everyone was like, “What? You go girl. Like, no.” If anything, people were like, “This is hysterical that you started this being like, screw all these publishers who wouldn’t give me a cookbook deal you got.” So anyway, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking? The book comes out August. You can pre-order it now anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble independent bookstore, and I’ll be doing a book tour 12, 13 cities. So check out, look out for that. You can find more information on @CaroChambers for Instagram. Whattocook.substack.com is my Substack newsletter. carolinechambers.com is my super crappy website, that may be by the time-

Bjork Ostrom: Which you don’t have a login for.

Caroline Chambers: Don’t even know the login for. So just say a prayer and hope it delivers you some sort of meaningful information. I am finally working on redoing that website. Everybody will be pleased here, but it will not have recipes on it. I’m completely removing recipes. That would be a whole other conversation about the decision to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: And the basic idea is it’ll be representative of you and where people can find you, but not the bulk of the information that you’re publishing, which would be on Instagram and Substack.

Caroline Chambers: Pinch of Yum is so I just keep using you as an example obviously, or Lindsay as an example, is a food blog. You go to her for food blog, but I realized I have this, carolinechambers.com is, it has recipes on it, but it also has, it’s like, what is this? And I’m not a food blogger, so sadly all of those recipes I’ve ever put up there going away. So if you love them, print them out. So yeah, carolinechambers.com and come see me on book tour and buy a book and that’s where I can get to meet you in person.

Bjork Ostrom: And people can follow on social. The book tour is, city’s not announced yet, where there’ll be or?

Caroline Chambers: Cities are not announced yet, but probably by the time this comes out, they will be. I’ll be in New York, Chicago, Boston, all over the south, SF, come see me and you can find it all on my website or on @CaroChambers. Or on the Substack, you can find it everywhere. All the information can be found everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: Like and follow.

Caroline Chambers: Like and follow. Subscribe for more.

Bjork Ostrom: And you’ll find it. Yeah. Caroline, super fun to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Caroline Chambers: So fun to chat with you. Thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to go even deeper into learning how to grow and monetize your food blog or food business, or you’re interested in starting a food blog, we definitely recommend that you check out the Food Blogger Pro membership at foodbloggerpro.com/membership. In the membership, we share all of our course content about topics like monetizing photography, essential tools and plugins, building traffic, and so much more. We also host monthly live Q&A’s and coaching calls to dive deeper into the topics food creators need to know about and have a forum where all of our members can ask questions and get feedback from each other, from the Food Blogger Pro team and all of our incredible experts.

We have received lots of amazing testimonials over the years from Food Blogger Pro members. We’ve helped over 10,000 bloggers do what they want to do better, including this one from Tammy, from the blog organize yourself Skinny, Tammy said, “This month, after 12 years working full-time in higher education, I resigned from my position to become a full-time professional blogger. This was a decision I did not take lightly, but in the last seven months, I made more money blogging than I made in my, ‘Real job,’ and decided it was time to take the leap. I strongly believe that because of the knowledge you share within your income reports and also on Food Blogger Pro, I was able to take my blog to a professional level. I have been and continue to be inspired, motivated, and educated by the information you so selflessly and graciously share with all of us.”

Thank you so much for that incredible testimonial. Tammy, we’re so happy to have you as a Food Blogger Pro member. If you are interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member and getting access to all of the content we have for our members, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. Thanks again for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate you and we will see you back here next week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms? With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about.

Memberful has everything you need to quickly get your membership program up and running with content gating, paid newsletters, private podcasts, and much more. Plus, Memberful seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress website, or you can use Memberful to create your own member home within minutes using their in-House tools.

With Memberful, you can create multiple membership tiers, limiting access to certain recipes, meal plans, and cooking tutorials to better connect with your most devoted followers and monetize the content you’re already producing. By using Memberful, you’ll have access to a world-class support team ready to help you set up your membership and grow your revenue.

They’re passionate about your success, and you’ll always have access to a real human when you need help. Food creators are already using Memberful to foster community within their audiences and monetize their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast can go to memberful.com/food to learn more about Memberful’s solutions for food creators and create an account for free. M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Thanks again to Memberful for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back David Lebovitz. It has been six or seven years since he was last on the podcast, and we have really missed chatting with him. We always love everything that David does. He is just a joy to listen to on the podcast. His sense of humor is unmatched.

This is an awesome interview for really every food creator to listen to because David has been in the food blogging space for a long time. He started out as a pastry chef and started his first food blog back in 1999. He has been around for every new social media platform, algorithm update and trend in the last 25 years and has so much knowledge to share from it. In this interview, David and Bjork chat a lot about David’s recent change from food blogging to writing his newsletter over on Substack.

He shares lots of tips and tricks that he’s learned about Substack and why he loves the platform so much. He also talks a bit about what he misses about blogging and just how he thinks he’s had so much success with his newsletter. In the interview, he mentions that he has been able to quadruple his food blogging income by switching to Substack. He’s definitely a great resource on this topic and you won’t want to miss this episode. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: David, welcome to the podcast.

David Lebovitz: Hello. Thanks for inviting me back I’m happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s great to have you back. You were last on in 2017. A few things have changed since then, but that’s the name of the game, though is in this world, things are often changing, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today is showing up, being willing to change and evolve. You have lots of different iterations of that over your career.

I mean, we could go way back if you want to include general food as the focus. You started your career as a 16-year-old washing dishes and went on to be involved in restaurants. For those who didn’t catch that first interview years ago, catch us up to speed on your general arc, your story as a creator, as a publisher, and before that, as somebody who was in the world of food.

David Lebovitz: Well, one word you didn’t use was adapt, and I know that you talk about adapting elsewhere. It’s true, whatever you do in life, you really do need to be adapting to what’s going on or adopting. I was a pastry chef for many years, and when I hit 40, I moved to France and I was writing cookbooks. I thought I would take advantage of this thing called the internet and do a blog, which really nobody heard of. This is 1999.

Bjork Ostrom: What was it on? Was it on blogger Blogspot?

David Lebovitz: It was on movable type. Most people, this is when they start blanking out, but it was thrilling to be able to use this media, this medium, I guess I should say, but I had to code everything just to write one sentence, I had to learn how to code. Before I was a baker, I was making chocolate cakes and ice cream and sharing recipes, but I’m also very communicative. I like talking to people. I like learning from people.

Bakers, especially, we like to learn things and we’re social. We’re like antique dealers. We work well when we’re together. We’re this group of people. I thought I would try, I would start a website and a blog, and I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but everybody thought I was crazy, and they were like, “Why are you writing for free? This is bad. You shouldn’t share things and so forth.” I did that for eight years, seven or maybe six years or eight years, then a couple people started reading it.

Bjork Ostrom: After years of hard work.

David Lebovitz: I’m not really exaggerating. People think now, a lot of people come in, start blogging, and they’re like, “How do I get traffic?” It’s like, “Well, okay, build something for eight years, and then…

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s one of the things that people don’t see often, is the incredible hard work that people put into a thing. And part of that too is your story also existed eight to 10 years before that because you were refining your craft and you were learning how to do what you’re doing to then be able to write about it. Then, the writing was a craft that you were refining and figuring out.

It seems like often we look at somebody and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, they’re an overnight success.” Often there’s years of focus and effort and hard work. It sounds like that’s a little bit of what you’re saying too with creating content online. It was years of doing that, and then there was a few people and then more people, and then more people, and suddenly you look and you have an audience.

David Lebovitz: Then, there’s a tech element that people don’t see. You publish this beautiful blog with great recipes and photos with Lindsay, but people don’t realize to get that photo, you’re not just putting the food on the counter. I mean, now it’s much easier to take a good photo than it used to be, but it’s a lot, formatting. People are like, “Oh, you should have a button that keeps the recipe on the screen.” I have no idea how to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: The act of pressing the button is really easy. The act of building a button that does that, it’s like that is really hard. It’s one of the things that I think exists in the world of technology. I think this also applies to social media is technology now is relatively easy to use. It’s relatively easy to publish something to Instagram, to sign up and have a newsletter. It’s not easy, but it’s a lot easier to publish a piece of content on a website.

Therefore, it seems like the building of a following and momentum and having success should also be easy, but that’s actually really hard. That takes years and effort and it’s easier than it was, for sure.

David Lebovitz: Well, there were platforms like Blogger and TypePad where you could just start going, but then if you wanted to do anything interesting, and also you didn’t own the content, it’s the same thing we’re seeing with Instagram. All these people are becoming Instagram stars, I guess, whatever, lack of a better word, recipes and so forth, but you don’t know the platform. Instagram can change their mind or they decide who sees what.

Bjork Ostrom: For people who have been creating long enough, Facebook there’s this really infamous season where people grew these really popular pages, and then it was kind of overnight you’d be looking around and your friend over here would have their organic reach turned off, and then somebody else would have it turned off and you’d just be waiting for it to come for you. Eventually, it was all pages where the generally speaking, organic reach on just normal posts was turned off.

I hear you saying that you have these platforms that creates this ease of publishing. You can grow a following. You still have to be a sharp creator. You have to create really good compelling content, but even then it could be turned off and you have to evolve into the next thing. You’ve done that so many times, and it’s one of the things that I’d be interested to hear your reflections on, your mindset on it.

What we’ve seen is, especially when we first started publishing content 2010, 2011. There was still maybe some of that lingering idea of, “Wait, you’re publishing stuff for free online.” It’s a little bit of a disruption to an industry. Then it happens and now we’re seeing it again in multiple different ways. Search is changing. We have artificial content like AI-generated content that’s being created. There’s all of these different kind of evolutions that are happening.

You have creators in the food world who are TikTok creators, and it’s like, oh, this is very different than creating five, six, seven years ago. For you as a creator, and this was actually a question that somebody wrote in our Facebook group, we have people who follow along with the Facebook group, with a podcast and a Facebook group, and they said, this is Alexandra. She said he’s been writing about French food and life in Paris for such a long time and knows how to adapt to new technology without losing his true message or vision. I’d love to hear him talk about all his evolution.

What does that look like for you to endure through all of these different technological changes and to preserve your passion and vision and authenticity as a creator, which you’ve done, you’ve had as a through line, despite using different technologies?

David Lebovitz: Well, I was going to use the word through line that you just mentioned, which is great. First of all, authenticity, the Internet’s all about authenticity. Even now, we’re seeing all these TikToks and Instagram and people are staying in these fancy hotel rooms in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Are we going to look back on these people and go, “Wow, that was amazing.”

To me, I’ve always been authentic for better or worse. Initially, I actually got criticized a lot when I moved to France. I was new here. I was writing about this culture that a lot of people have this image that everybody in France is beautiful, skinny, they eat well, they’re polite and so forth. That’s not necessarily the case. It’s a real city. People… also, there was a book Why Frenchmen Don’t Get Fat, which is not presenting an accurate view of the people here because everybody’s different.

Now, I always wrote about the real stuff in my life and I didn’t varnish anything. I also tried to make it funny. Nobody was really doing that about France really and Americans are fascinated by France. I had a little bit of a maybe if I was living in Brisbane or Nagoya, Japan, I might not have had the success that I have or had. There was always a straight line and I’m the same on Instagram.

I use things like Instagram and Facebook and my blog and my newsletter, all for different things parts of me. For social media, I don’t really, I remember using Facebook a lot. I had a friend who when Facebook changed their algorithm, his whole website, he had a whole big, huge website and it just collapsed. You should do a little bit of everything, whatever you like, whatever works, but I like to believe that people will see through inauthentic content.

A lot of flashy people doing all this stuff on Instagram, eating in fancy restaurants, showing caviar that costs a thousand dollars. I love this or the waiter shaving truffles in their mouth. It gets a lot of comments, which-

Bjork Ostrom: Happens at all French restaurants. Isn’t that how they do it in France?

David Lebovitz: How do I reserve that table? I still wonder, the number one cookbook last year was by a TikToker, or number one book maybe. I think the number one cookbook, it’s a fellow who does recipes from yesteryear. He’s not a professional. He didn’t even have a website. He was just looking for something to do. I find it very interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Is the same thing that I was going to say. One of the things that I think is true in the world of content creation right now is that you almost have to have hybrid skills. You have to have some skills in the area of content that you’re creating. For us, we talk about food, but for other people it’s humor or finance, but you also have to be really good.

If we’re talking about platforms right now, you also have to be really good at understanding, and this probably has to be one of the primary skills. You have to be really good at understanding the platform itself, what’s working, what goes viral, how to build a following. What can happen is you can have people who are maybe the ultimate expert in a subject matter, but they don’t have a strong expertise in a platform or in viral content or in mass-producing content.

Whatever it might be that’s working well on the respective platforms. What you get is people who are kind of these hybrids, they have some understanding, a passion and interest in the content, but then they’re really good at understanding the platform. That’s neither here nor there, it’s just an observation around the reality of success on some of these platforms.

One of the places it feels like that’s not true, that really what it comes down to is your expertise, your ability to a pure content creation is building a following through a platform like Substack, which that’s something that you’ve done. You have over 200,000 people subscribe to your Substack newsletter. That to me feels like and would be interested in your thoughts on it, but a platform for a writer, for a creator, for somebody who’s word forward.

Who isn’t thinking about viral content the same way, a platform that’s a pretty good fit for creating content. Has that felt true for you? What does your journey into Substack look like?

David Lebovitz: Well, when I was blogging for so long, near the last few years of it, I started getting the feeling search was all about recipes. What are people looking for? All these blogs started and they were all doing the same recipes and viral recipes without a lot of authority in it. People were just doing them because they wanted to get Google search and I just didn’t want to do that.

I was focusing on recipes because they were organic to me. I would feel like, “Oh my god, I got these carrots, the market, I’m going to make pickled carrots or I’m going to do something.” My blog, it started becoming a recipe blog. I remember telling Elise Bauer who had Simply Recipes, wonderful website and while smiling…

Bjork Ostrom: I think also started on movable type, which is such a weird fact that I have in my head.

David Lebovitz: That’s another story. I actually went to their office once. I was like, “Can you make this easier?” I forgot where I was, but so I was doing recipes a lot, and then I said to Elise once, I said, my blog is not a food blog. She looked at me and she’s like, “What?” I was writing about a lot of other topics like restaurants to go to in France, travel tips, maybe something goofy French people’s obsession with keys everywhere. They really… it’s like $300 if you lose your key. I started just doing recipes, churning through recipes. I’m burnt out on it.

Bjork Ostrom: It felt soulless for you to be doing that type of work?

David Lebovitz: It felt soulless. Plus I was using other people’s recipes like adapting them, which isn’t a bad thing in a way, but my blog was also becoming, well, this is adapted from so-and-so’s new book. I really liked the book and I would promote the book and so forth. On the other hand, I was like, “Well, basically when I’m writing a cookbook, if I’m going to use somebody’s, if I have Lindsay, if she has a caramel cake recipe there’s a story about that.

I could say like, “Lindsay has this wonderful caramel cake recipe and I make it. I like to add kumquat sauce and blah, blah, blah.” There’s a story there. It’s organic to me. I got burnt out on recipes because I was getting the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Bjork Ostrom: Questions about the recipes, can you adapt this by adding, can you use sugar instead of brown sugar?

David Lebovitz: Well, I actually love when I was baking in restaurants, I loved when people had food issues. This is before everybody had all these diets, but when the waiter come in, go, these people don’t eat sugar or they don’t eat flour. This is before the whole everything. To me, it was interesting. It was a challenge. We had one woman that only ate white food. She showed up wearing this all white outfit and we made her white asparagus with white truffles.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a fun challenge in that season. It was like, “Hey, this is fun.”

David Lebovitz: Then, people started challenging my recipes. Well, they would start bragging about how much sugar they cut out of it. I was like, “I’ve been doing a recipe the last three days here I have six pages of notes. It’s like when I post the recipe, I test it and this is how I like it. Then, people were showing off how little sugar they ate and finally had to post something.

I was like, “Please, stop. If you want to reduce the sugar, it’s fine. I got burnt out and I liked having a blog, but then all of a sudden WordPress is like, ”You need to switch to block editor. That was the breaking point for me.“ Also, the photography like Lightroom, I just never figured it out. It was a mess. I figured out how to use some of it, but I was like, ”This isn’t why I do what I do. It’s not just in front of my computer.”

I remember you helped me once with a issue, it was retina screens. That was one of the nervous breakdown moments, I had a timeline. I had a three-week nervous break, and you guys were amazing. The good thing about the blogging community, people are always helpful. When Substack approached me, they said, “We have this platform and would you like to switch?” I said no.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s another thing to do and another…

David Lebovitz: Well, I didn’t believe in it so much.

Bjork Ostrom: When was this?

David Lebovitz: It was three or four years ago, maybe three years ago. I had a newsletter. I’d had it since I think 2006. That’s another, this would be part two of this podcast video cast. I had my newsletter over the years, and I was also a little upset how much it was costing me to send it out. It was like $400 a month. I don’t mind paying people for a thing. I don’t mind paying for services. I was like, “Well, that’s like a trip to Hawaii.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, every year for me to email people.

David Lebovitz: My newsletter there’s no monetization in it. Although people might buy my books and go to my website. Anyway, I started thinking, I spent a few months thinking about it. They actually said, “We think you could make a lot more money than you’re making now.” I’m not motivated by money, which is I’m reading Barbara Streisand’s thousand page memoir. She’s also, she’s like, “I never do things for the money. I always do things the quality first.” That’s why, I mean, she’s wealthy, she lost a lot of money over the years and so forth.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s also like Simon Sinek talks about it as fuel for your car and your car gets you to where you want to go. Similar with the paying, if you’re paying $500 a month versus making $500 or whatever it might be, makes it easier if you do have something you want to do to justify whatever it is that you’re doing.

David Lebovitz: I have a podcast and I pay an editor $300 or $400 per episode to edit it. There’s no ads. It’s not sponsored or anything, but I’ve always wanted to talk to people and in my field. And maybe chat with people that people wouldn’t know, but it was very interesting. I was very nervous about leaving my blog, shall we because it was a part of me for 18 or so years.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and around the same time, you’d won an award of Blog of the Decade. T was right around that time, wasn’t it?

David Lebovitz: That was Saveur Magazine. I was a professional cook and cookbook author, but I also appreciate the fact blogging, one of the great things about blogging, especially when I started, you had people in India and Vietnam and Syria writing about their cooking and food. It was like, “Wow, this is great. There were no gatekeepers. We could do whatever.” Saveur Magazine was like that. They focused on different kinds of people. It was a little surprising. I felt like they were putting me out to pasture.

Bjork Ostrom: How so?

David Lebovitz: No, it was just when you get a lifetime award.

Bjork Ostrom: I see, like applaud.

David Lebovitz: They’re coming back. What’s interesting about Saveur is one of the old editors, she bought the magazine and she’s bringing it back. She’s self-financing and everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that stretch? Because my guess is there are people who can relate to you as you reflect on what it was like to feel a certain amount of burnout. Maybe there’s some industry changes that are happening. I think on the podcast, I’ll occasionally talk about this idea of waves and surfers.

What happens is with the internet, there are these waves, and sometimes there’ll be a wave of early blogging and people can catch that wave. Maybe they’re also a really good surfer. I feel like in your case, there’s this wave of early blogging where people are following blogs and you’re also really good at it. You have this tandem thing where you’re excited about it, there’s a wave, you catch it, inevitably waves will…

David Lebovitz: Crash.

Bjork Ostrom: Crash and then there’s another wave. The question is, do I want to ride this next wave? Do I think I’ll be good at riding this next wave? Another example would be Instagram. It’s very photo forward. People who are great photographers curated that’s a wave. You have people who ride that wave and they’re really good at riding that wave. They love riding that wave.

Suddenly Instagram’s like, “We’re going to do videos and we’re going to do videos that are short form, reel-based story, and it’s 60 seconds.” Now, suddenly these people who are really good at photography, writing story along with it in a description, having a curated feed, now it switches and you have somebody who’s really good at humor and doing short form content and video, and that’s a wave.

For you, what was that season like as you felt either your desire to ride another wave or a certain wave crashing or subsiding as you analyzed the landscape or the seascape and made decisions around what the next wave was that you wanted to ride? What was that like?

David Lebovitz: Well, one of the waves I let go back out to the ocean was Twitter and X. I was never getting any traffic from it. It wasn’t a place where I used to spend time there. It was more interesting. Then, it’s not necessarily for any political or sociological reasons. I left Twitter X, although I hate the name X.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s all right. We can just call Twitter, we’ll call it Twitter.

David Lebovitz: No, I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I used to like Facebook. I liked the interaction I was getting with people, but Instagram’s a very good example because I was doing fine on Instagram and then they were videos, videos. I was like, “I am not a video person. I can’t, it’s just not my skill set.” I once tried to edit a video and it took me literally eight hours to do.

I just don’t. It’s fine, I make really good desserts. Instagram reached out to me. It was right at the beginning of COVID and they go, we really like you. I was like, “What? Huh?” They helped. They said, “You should do lives.” I was like, “Absolutely not.” Then the pandemic hit, started doing lives every day because my book tour got canceled. I had written a book on spirits and alcohol and French drinks. I had 250 bottles of liquor to use up and everyone had nothing to do.

I was working really hard. That was, but the videos were a success, so it showed that I could, even though my voice goes up like an octave when filmed, and I lock this up because you say something like, “I hate X.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. 3:00 AM you’re thinking, you hear that words of you echoing, “I hate X.”

David Lebovitz: Right, all of these people like “he hates X.” Anyway, I try to do reels, but it’s not my skill set and it’s fine. We don’t have to be good at everything. I mean your parents and you make mistakes. People drop their babies. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It means you made a mistake.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally.

David Lebovitz: Don’t drop your baby.

Bjork Ostrom: Pro tip. What did it look like for you to come out of that? To essentially put a bow into, or maybe it’s not putting a bow on it, but to say, “Okay, I feel this tension. I know that things have evolved and what was now isn’t, but I’m going to endure as a creator and find the next thing that feels like a good fit. Do you feel like you have that now with Substack? It feels like a little bit more of a pure place to just write. How did you navigate that season for other people who are trying to figure that out, what advice would you give them?

David Lebovitz: Well, there were some caveats. I was worried about before I switched to Substack. One was, who owns the content? They’ve actually thought of everything. They’re like, “You can actually download your whole newsletter. Here’s a button to do it.” I was like, “Okay.”

Bjork Ostrom: Export all your subscribers and the content you’ve created.

David Lebovitz: Also, at the time they were, Facebook had started their own newsletter service and so did Twitter and a couple of them. I said, “What if you guys get blocked by Facebook?” They’re like, “That will never happen.” I was like, “Hmm.” Facebook and other newsletters were offering some writers a substantial amount of money to move to the platforms. We discussed that and it was a lot. It was probably, I know your audience is very open about talking about money, but it was more than twice what my annual revenue was writing my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: That was an offer to come to Facebook specifically?

David Lebovitz: That was Facebook was making a similar author offer to other people, and people took them up on it, but this was Substack. My contact at Substack, he said, “To be quite honest, you’re going to earn that kind of money anyways, so I don’t think you need to take it.” They actually dangled. They actually mentioned a lot of money to me at the beginning. I was like, “What? Not me, I would never.” That said, it’s been very fruitful. I’m making about four times what I made from my blog with my newsletter.

Bjork Ostrom: Which I think is encouraging for people to hear because, and I’ve mentioned Substack specifically. One of the things that I feel like is great about it is the game is different. You’re playing a different game and there are people who are passionate about food, who are passionate about creating content, who are passionate about connecting with people and sharing that content, but they aren’t passionate about writing a piece of content that’s structured to be discovered on Google and to do keyword research.

There are people who are really passionate about that and they do great with search optimized recipe content, but it’s like a different wave for a different surfer. For us as creators, part of what our job is, I feel like, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this, is to find what is the wave that we feel best fit to surf? It sounds like to some degree you’ve maybe found the new version of that in writing an email newsletter. Does that feel true?

David Lebovitz: Yes, it does. I mean, just backing up a little bit, people have asked me about Substack and moving to Substack. When I showed up at Substack, I already had about 80,000 newsletters subscribers. Well, I came out of the gate and I was already the number two newsletter on food newsletter on Substack. Once again, I had that longevity. I think people starting now, I see, and you talk about numbers a lot with your followers and listeners and people are like, “Yey, I finally got 10,000 followers.”

Then, how many of those are paying subscribers? I had a really hard time asking people to pay because I had what I do for free for so long. I didn’t really necessarily want to put up a barrier to me. In Substack for people that don’t know you have a free version and you can have a paid version and you can set it so that only paid people comment. You can do special content for those paid people and so forth.

Their philosophy though is to put your best content forward for free to get people to come and subscribe, that’s what makes them subscribe. That said, I think a lot of people might be thinking of moving to Substack like it’s hard to get people to spend $50, which is what Stack recommends. It’s $4 a month, which anybody who has a computer, $4 is not a huge amount, really not a big ask.

I do a sale once a year on Black Friday, but I think it’s going to get tougher, there’s a lot of newsletters. I mean, I can’t read them all. Some people are really excited about having a newsletter and they’re putting out one every two days. I’m like, “Well.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, settle down. I think it comes back to one of the things that I think can often happen when I have conversations like this with people is you hear the strategy, you hear the tactic, you hear the platform, and it’s like, “That’s cool.” I should go and do that. It’s like if you and I were carpenters and we were talking about the things that we had built, and it was like, “Here’s this really cool cabin on the North Shore in Minnesota on Lake Superior. It’s really beautiful. The primary tool I used was a hammer and a saw.”

If everybody ran out and got hammers and saws, they’re like, “Awesome. You can build cabins with this thing.” I think it’s important to remind people that really what people are buying isn’t the tool or the mechanism or the strategy. What people are buying is the content that you are creating and whatever that offers them. It could be education, it could be entertainment, it could be, could be connection. That is the thing that really takes time and effort.

We’ve talked about it a few different times. For you, it’s decades of work and consideration around you as a creator and people wanting to follow along with what you’re doing and if purchased your books. It’s the ultimate example of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, and it’s just that amplified. Are you familiar with that, Kevin Kelly? He has this great iconic blog post where he talks about the internet and 1000 True Fans.

If you have a thousand true fans, in the case of Substack, true fans would be people who subscribe that you can start to play the numbers game a little bit with that. Not that that’s like a living salary in Paris France, but it’s like, “That’s a salary that you can get if you find these 1,000 True Fans. I feel like you can play the numbers game differently when you have Substack and subscribers. I think that it’s a exciting platform in that way.

Do you have thoughts on or does Substack provide general numbers around, “Hey, if you have a thousand people who sign up, two of those will be paid subscribers?”

David Lebovitz: It said 5% is a good number to go for. 10% is you’re successful. It’s getting back to that point you just made about the thousand hits. I used to tell people when I had my blog because I write code books and they’re for sale on my site. I’m like, “It’s better to have five people reading your blog if all five of them buy your books than 5 million people and none of them buy your books.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s the difference between that true fan and somebody who’s kind this passive observer. It feels like Substack is a way to quantify a little bit. Are these people true fans? Are they willing to pay.

David Lebovitz: I didn’t believe actually that people would pay. I have a contact there and we talk a lot about it, and he always tells me I’m too cheap, not cheap, cheap because my newsletter is 50 a year, and some people are 60 or 70. He’s like, “People pay because they like you and they want to support you. We’re living in this time where people don’t like paying for things, just somebody using the F-word.

You didn’t want to go to somebody’s link in the profile to get their recipe and use the F-word. I was like, “It’s a free recipe. I went to the profile and it was easy to get. You just tap on the picture.”

Bjork Ostrom: You literally have to click twice, yeah.

David Lebovitz: That’s what a lot of us are facing. On the other hand, you want those people as your fans, you need them. One thing my first editor told me, which is amazing advice for anybody who, especially in I’m talking to you and your audience who are food people and writers, she said, “Don’t waste people’s time. When you write something, she didn’t elaborate on that, but when you write something, when you do something, you should do it, do a good job.

“Think, am I being useful to people? I think when I write my newsletter, am I entertaining people with this story? Is recipe going to be something they’re going to want to make and enjoy reading about? You have a different tact like Elise Bauer, when she had Simply Recipes, I remember she was like, ”I want to do a meatloaf recipe. I want to show people how to make meatloaf.”

She was into teaching people how to cook, whereas Lindsay might be doing a tofu bowl with broccoli miso sauce. It’s not something that people are searching for online, but they like her.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like that’s this a little bit of a crossroads that as creators, we need to figure out is are we optimizing for discoverability, are we optimizing for a following that we have or want to maintain? How do you view as a Substack newsletter? What does it look like for you to get people to discover it? You have your site, you have a social following, so you have those avenues, but what does it look like to get people to actually sign up? Does that come from Substack, your site, social, a little bit of everything?

David Lebovitz: I don’t really look at the stats, they send them to me. I do have, when you go to my website, I have a thing at the top says, follow me on Substack and so forth. I do put links in Instagram stories. I don’t know how many people I get, but I just got a thing today as an email they send every month or something. I lost 160 paid subscribers the last whatever, either month, year, I don’t know.

I gained 2,000 free subscribers. I don’t really know where they come from. It’s very easy, I used to, when I linked to paid things, people would get furious. They’re like, “You linked to a paid thing.” Now I say, for paid subscribers.

Bjork Ostrom: Wasted their time by having to click link in profile.

David Lebovitz: I did do something very interesting though that got a lot of paid subscribers. I had written a book about an apartment renovation 10 years ago. People kept saying they really wish I had put them, wanted to see pictures, and the apartment renovation was a nightmare. It was a disaster. I wrote a book about it. It might be a TV show at some point. It was a horrible, horrible thing.

I post pictures and I didn’t take pictures and I was crying in the court, crawled up in a ball crying in a corner for two years. This time, this is a year or two ago, I took pictures and I thought I would share these stories and pictures, but only with paid subscribers. Once I found a way, I didn’t really want to have pictures of my apartment out on the internet. They were like, “We want to see your bathroom.” I’m like, “Uncomfortable with that.”

Bjork Ostrom: For a price.

David Lebovitz: It’s like your bedroom. People are like, “We want to see your bedroom.” No.

Bjork Ostrom: Can we see your pillow? Can we see a close-up of your pillow?

David Lebovitz: Yeah, people do that. They have all these sponsored posts with kitchens. That was a really good way that I found to do something fun for people. It was fun for me to show and people had to pay and it worked out well, and those people stuck around.

Bjork Ostrom: It provides a little bit of a fence around certain content that, like you said, maybe you don’t want mass distributed and living on Instagram forever or on a blog or online. It allows you to control it in a certain way. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. CultivateWP, the agency or the company focuses on designing and developing food blogs, and it was founded by Bill Erickson who’s this incredible WordPress developer. We know him because as I’ll share, we’ve worked with him and Dwayne Smith, who’s this incredible designer. Bill developed a version of Pinch of Yum before we had our own internal team.

It was one of the fastest growing versions of the site that we’ve had. As you know in this industry, word spreads quickly about people who do good work. Bill and Dwayne have really filled their calendar over the past few years with doing these custom websites for some of the biggest food sites on the web. You can see the list on their website. They would create these fully custom designs, but they would cost literally multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

That makes a lot of sense if you’re a site that gets multiple millions of page views. What they realized is there’s a lot of really successful sites who need the best technology in the world to power them, but can’t justify spending multiple tens of thousands of dollars. That’s why they launched Cultivate Go. It’s a semi-custom theme design and a White Glove site setup.

You choose one of the core themes, they have multiple options, and then their team customizes the logo, the brand colors the typography, so it matches your brand exactly. Then they set it up on a staging environment where you can test it out, get a feel for it, and can launch your site within just one week. The cost is only $5,000. Here’s the thing, you have the exact same features, functionality, and support as the themes that cost up to 10 times as much as a Cultivate Go theme.

That means your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food sites in the world. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to foodbloggerpro.com/go or you could just search Cultivate Go in Google. Thanks so much to CultivateWP for sponsoring this episode.

In a normal week or normal month, what does the rhythm look like for you? Do you send out one free newsletter and then one for paid subscribers? Is it just more week by week what you’re feeling?

David Lebovitz: I send out a monthly newsletter on the first of the month, which is what I’ve been doing. When I switched to Substack, I said to everybody, if you’re a subscriber to my newsletter and nothing changes, you’re going to get my free newsletter and extra content throughout the month. Paid people will get premium extra stuff. It ended up being, I probably send out five newsletters a month, two of them might be paid.

I’m working on a book now, and I was like, “What should I do? What do I do?” I actually want to focus on that. Another thing Substack has and I’m not an ad for Substack, but we have what’s recommended you do a paywall. You send out a post to all your subscribers so people can read the story of my nervous breakdown remodeling, and you start writing the story and then there’s a cutoff.

It’s like click here to subscribe seven-day free trial or click here to read more. That is a proven way to get people in. They keep telling me, “Do that, do that, do that.” Don’t do that.

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t feel good to you to send out something that’s partial-

David Lebovitz: Content.

Bjork Ostrom: … you want to send out either something that’s anybody can get and read fully or if you pay for it, then you get all of it, but not something that’s halfway.

David Lebovitz: Well, it seems and I don’t want to use the word mean, but a lot of people do it they put the recipe behind a paywall. I would do it if I wrote a story like favorite restaurants in New York, and I would list 20 restaurants and I might do top the first 10. Then I would save it for the rest, I just don’t use it but that’s actually they say that’s very good to do.

Bjork Ostrom: The interesting thing as you talk about before you have this newsletter, you’re paying for it, and then now on Substack you’re not, but you’re making money from it, do you feel like you lost anything in terms of your ability to even, I think of some email service providers, most of them will have an onboarding sequence where you can send out automated emails. Is there anything like that that you feel like, “It was really nice I had this before and now I don’t,” or not necessarily?

David Lebovitz: No. I remember when blogging, we had the RSS feeds, which were amazing. I don’t know what happened to them, but I remember when I had my blog redone, the designers like, “David, no one’s using RSS feeds anymore.” That was a blow to me because that was such a great way for people to get your content without having to subscribe or anything. One thing I do miss is to me a blog is like you’re home on the internet.

No one can take it away from you. It’s available to all you have. I was looking at, because writing this book, I have a thousand recipes on my website, I think, and then there’s like 220, no, 2,025 whatever posts, and there’s 300,000 comments. I miss that feeling like you’re building something.

Bjork Ostrom: In a central place.

David Lebovitz: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: When people ask you what you do, how do you describe what you do now?

David Lebovitz: Well, it depends. People ask me that a lot and it depends. I was an am or pastry chef. I’m a cookbook author and a blogger. When you say newsletter, especially in France, France is five years behind. Blogger was a bad word. It depends if I’m in a group of pastry chefs professionals, especially in France where they might not, they don’t know that I actually know what I’m doing as a pastry chef, pastry chef.

If I’m with a group of journalists, it depends. Sometimes people used to make fun of me when I had a blog and I’d go to these French food journalists meals, and the guys, the American, they were trying to teach me about food.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re a blogger, so you don’t know. Let me teach you also.

David Lebovitz: They were showing me what arugula was. I’m like, “I got that.” They were like, “You have a blog. Do you have any readers?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have 1.8 million a month.” They would just… I would use that in that. Now with my newsletter, nobody knows or cares. I have a newsletter with a couple hundred thousand people. They’re like blank.

Bjork Ostrom: Just because there’s no context around what that is necessarily.

David Lebovitz: Well, they want a number, but they want to quantify it. People know what Instagram is now people have this big thing, I have 320,000 followers.

Bjork Ostrom: That means something because Instagram means something.

David Lebovitz: It does, but on the other hand, there’s people that have a million followers and those people are thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot.” As you know, you can buy followers. It’s not that hard to get a million. If you really wanted to do it, you could do it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like what really matters is engagement. Are people interacting with the content? Is it people who are actually wanting to follow it?

David Lebovitz: That’s actually such a word that so few people who don’t do what we do, don’t understand. I have a really engaged audience. When I was building my kitchen here, I was trying to work with a kitchenware company like a Bosch or someone, and nobody wanted to talk to me. A friend of mine said, “They’ve been trying to get everybody to use induction stoves in America, you’re the perfect person. They should have made you the guy.”

I had to learn how to use induction. I’m just like everybody else, I’m trying to make coffee in the morning, and it’s like, “How do it with this thing?” Brands are not necessarily, they’re looking for whatever, maybe somebody who has a million followers on Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: A really engaged audience for the thing that they’re selling. I actually just had this conversation. We went to a hockey game last night. My friend’s brother plays in the NHL. He was talking about how he was trying to work with a brand to get a cold plunge and all the brand, he’s a fresh hockey player. I don’t know, he has maybe tens of thousands of followers.

How he’d reach out to these brands and wasn’t really getting anybody to reach out to him. My friend’s wife has a site and a social following. He talked about the interesting contrast between her reaching out and brands or not even her reaching out, but brands reaching out to her. She just had this influx of people reaching out. What we came up with as we tried to figure out why that is this idea of engagement.

You can have an audience that might be the same size, but if it’s a really engaged audience that’s interested in you and the recommendations you have and what you’re doing, that’s brands I think recognize that that’s more powerful.

David Lebovitz: I don’t know, I mean, European companies operate differently than American companies, and I had some funny interactions with European companies. I don’t necessarily work that hard to try to engage with them. I did have a funny, I was doing a book and I wanted to use a certain cookware on the cover, and I contacted the French branch of the company and they were like, “Well, we can sell it to you for half price and so forth.”

When you’re doing a book cover, you never know what’s going to look good. I don’t live my life to get free stuff, but cookware is expensive. Anyway, to make a long story short, I didn’t use it. Then, when I told the American people about it, because they invited me to their factory once in France, they were like, “You’re kidding, right? We could have been on the cover of your book.”

Bjork Ostrom: Totally realizing how significant that would’ve been and the opportunity that was missed.

David Lebovitz: On the other hand, I’m not against people doing sponsored stuff, but in a way it’s often cleaner for me. It’s like, “You know what? I’ll just buy the damn pot for fun.”

Bjork Ostrom: Not have to worry about recommendations.

David Lebovitz: I get invited to restaurants in Paris sometimes, and I’m like, “Well, if I don’t like it, do I have to post about it?” Then it feels weird.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally. This is circling back around. We have some of those questions that people from the group are interested in. Yeah, go ahead.

David Lebovitz: I love questions.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. This one is from Betty and she says you’re one of the original food blogs, but if you’re starting out as a new food blogger or content creator today, what would be your priorities or what would you do differently?

David Lebovitz: Well, the game has changed now. Like I said, you don’t have to deal with coding and stuff. I think I would just do what I did and be authentic. I wouldn’t change what I posted. I was posting a lot of silly, if you go back into my blog, there’s like poem or Haiku about Italian candies and a lot of silly stuff. I think be useful. Create something like when you go into a blog, don’t just, or even a newsletter, say, “Hi, this is my newsletter. Welcome, hope you like it.”

Think about what do I want to do? What is the purpose of what I am doing? Do I want to make myself happy? Do I want to present people foods from, if you live in Wisconsin, maybe this blog is going to be about Wisconsin food and I’m going to go visit cheeses. Make it something a single subject rather than family friendly recipes from my kitchen with a health.

Bjork Ostrom: Be specific, be useful and be clear.

David Lebovitz: Stand out.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s great. That’s helpful. Then, this is coming in from Carol. This is maybe a bigger question just in general, but in the world of creating and blogging, Carol says, I’m keen to hear his thoughts on the future of food blogging, especially in relation to AI. For you as a writer, for you as a creator, what are your ponderings around the world of AI?

David Lebovitz: I guess because one day I went on AI and I said, David Lebovitz’s favorite bakeries in Paris. It said, “Sorry, I can’t show you anything about a specific person, David Lebovitz.” Same thing. Then, I did like cassoulet recipe, which is a French casserole dish, it’s thing and a recipe popped up. I want to see though, that somebody made that recipe and that whole thing about get to the recipe, or why do I have to go through all this conversation?

I’m like, because that person is saying, I tried this with potatoes and it didn’t work. Then when I stirred in a half a cup of rice, it ended up being delicious. I just don’t think AI is going to replace a well-written or a good recipe. All people really care about is a recipe that works if you buy a cookbook, I have a wall of cookbooks, some books I’ve only made one recipe from, that’s all I need to. I love Deb of Smitten Kitchen. She’s a good friend of mine.

I don’t know if I’ve ever made anything from her blog, but I’ve made stuff from her books and the recipe comes out really good. She’s behind it. You see a real person behind it.

Bjork Ostrom: Part of what I think about in the world of all things online digital technology is what are we replicating? What are we as humans trying to get out of this new experience? And one of the things that I think is deeply ingrained in us is it’s almost like storytelling. I feel like a little bit of what you hear saying is people being like, “Just get to the recipe. Get to the recipe.”

You leave out the context of the story and the story a lot of times is what builds the case for the thing that you’re making. I think when I think of a recipe that’s handed down from my grandma that my mom made, and now Lindsay makes, there’s something to that. I think we try and replicate that in our normal life by saying, “Hey, what is the story behind this? Where did you get this from?”

I think that’s an important piece of it. Maybe, I don’t think it’s to say that five years from now, there’s not some version of people getting their recipes in different ways than a Google search. It feels like the point about wanting to understand where this comes from is important. Who is this from? Where is it connected to?

David Lebovitz: I also have to say when I sometimes adapt recipes from people’s books, I have to change the recipe to get it to work right. I’m working on a book now and I’m trying to make this rice cake and a computer can’t. You can give me a list of ingredients and tell me how to do it, but I taste it and I go, “This is too flat. It needs to be hot. This needs more vanilla or doesn’t need vanilla. I could use cinnamon.” I think when people use my recipes, they trust that I have-

Bjork Ostrom: Done that

David Lebovitz: … done that work for them. Whereas, AI is taking a thousand rice cake recipes and putting them together and you’ll get a recipe. Like Dianne Jacob who writes Will Write for Food, she did a peanut butter recipe and she posted a picture of it that was AI-generated. They looked terrible, but the cookies were pretty good. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I’m sure if I got that recipe if I made it, I would change it and make it better. I’m not saying that I’m any great.

Bjork Ostrom: I think maybe as a last point that wraps the conversation well is there might be a time when a certain subset of people, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, go to whatever search engine it is and get a recipe that is functional and that process of, “I need a recipe, I’m going to go somewhere, I’m going to get it, and I have a recipe for whatever it is, French toast.” It gives you a decent french toast recipe.

I think one of the things that we need to think about as creators is in a scenario where the very transactional, I need recipe, I get recipe process is replaced, then what do you do as a creator? I think what’s great about where you are and a reflection for other creators to think about is your transaction isn’t, “I need a recipe. I’m going to search. I’m going to get it.”

Your transaction is more relational. I think that’s a great moat in the world of digital content because people are following you. They’re not transacting with a recipe and who knows what comes from AI and search generated content. One of the things that is really helpful to have as a creator is a personal connection, a following, and not as transactional of type of business. It’s not just like the recipe itself. Does that resonate with you at all?

David Lebovitz: I think it does go back though to always, people want a recipe that works and it comes out well. People take a flight and they’re like, “I’m never flying American Airlines again. It was awful.” Then, next time they’re looking for flights and the American’s cheapest, they fly that, they’re cost sensitive. Recipes, you make a recipe from somebody’s book or their blog and it’s a mess or it’s a disaster and you don’t want to go back to it again.

When I moved, I started writing books for HarperCollins, but then moved to Ten Speed Press and they said, I was like, “Why do you want me?” They said, “Because your recipes work.” I said, “Well, don’t everybody? They’re like…

Bjork Ostrom: No.

David Lebovitz: It was very interesting to hear cookbook editors talking about that and that used to be a deal breaker. A lot of times people send a proposal to an editor with recipes in it and then the editor would go home and make the recipes and they didn’t work and they wouldn’t buy that book. Same with a blog like we’re going to talk about Elise Bauer again, Simply Recipes.

She tested everything and if it didn’t work, there was comments and she would fix it and make sure it worked and talk people through it. Same with I tested recipes, I wanted to make sure you would get feedback. That’s the interesting thing about the internet is you get feedback right away if it doesn’t work. If you forget an ingredient, you guys wake up at 6:00 in the morning and someone’s like, “It doesn’t say when to add the salt.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s how you start your day.

David Lebovitz: Then you’re like, “These people are trying to make the recipe and they couldn’t figure out when to add the salt and you ruin their dinner over a teaspoon of salt.”

Bjork Ostrom: Quality, it comes back to that idea of you as a creator, your reputation, your authority, your expertise, trustworthiness, all of these things that we talk about.

David Lebovitz: I think the people that succeed also, you work with a lot of bloggers, the people that succeed do a good job.

Bjork Ostrom: Are borderline obsessive about it, their craft. David, we could talk for hours. It’s always such a joy. Can you talk about your podcast, talk about where people can sign up for the newsletter and just generally where people can follow along with you online?

David Lebovitz: Well, before we go on, I want to talk about whatever lighting situation you have is great because you rip it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s actually these really huge lights that I have to each side, so I’m cheating and then there’s some natural light to the side.

David Lebovitz: I need to come to you for a two-day intensive-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ll do it.

David Lebovitz: Everything is circled around my Substack right now. My Substack is davidlebovitz.substack.com. My podcasts are there. They’re also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever podcast platforms people use. I’m on Instagram @DavidLebovitz and same at Facebook. I’m a firm believer in always taking your name even if you’re not going to use the platform.

Bjork Ostrom: Just grab the handle even if you don’t.

David Lebovitz: I’m like Snapchat, I was the oldest person on Snapchat. It’s good for people to have like to have a podcast. I’m doing it for fun. Same with I do like having my blog. If people are happy blogging, they don’t want to switch to a newsletter, blogging is a great platform. You have to do what works for you. I was just overwhelmed by the technology and all this stuff.

Thankfully, Google’s now changing its parameters of how they list websites and go back to quality rather than see who’s got everything plugged in the right place.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and you’re a great example of this. We have a lot of friends who are in the deep, the search world. Really it sounds like what Google’s trying to do is place an emphasis on expertise of a single source for a creator. You have a author, you have a publisher, you have a creator. Does this piece of content go back to that person and do they have the expertise? When you have nine cookbooks or books, nine books, and you’ve been publishing since 1989.

David Lebovitz: Also, is it a real person who’s making Lindsay writes personal stories about her life, Deb Perelman, even if you didn’t see the header, you’d know it was a Deb Perelman post because she’s writing about herself. That’s what Google says now that they want to see, rather than just people writing mechanical-

Bjork Ostrom: Optimized content.

David Lebovitz: … optimized content, I like that. That was their objective when they started to bring the best content to the top.

Bjork Ostrom: Back to that, it sounds like in some ways which is such a great thing.

David Lebovitz: Also, if you’re listening, they want to do a newsletter. It’s a very interesting medium and there’s no cost to doing it. Having a newsletter is a great thing. I when I was just blogging, I always told people it’s like, “Do a newsletter. Even if you only send out one every six months, just have a mailing list because you never know when all this is going to be taken away from you by an algorithm.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Maybe a great note to end on for those who haven’t either done it or haven’t placed an emphasis on it, to find ways to collect some of those subscribers, to start those conversations because you own that in a different way than all the platforms like we talked about.

David Lebovitz: You can take it with you and those people want to hear from you too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. David, thanks so much for coming on. It’s always such a joy to talk to you.

David Lebovitz: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: I really appreciate all that you’ve done through the years for this community. We’ll have to make it happen again here sooner than six years.

David Lebovitz: That’s okay. It’s good to check in every few years, I’m happy to. If you come to Paris, you can be on my podcast. I haven’t figured out how to do anything online.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’ll make it happen.

David Lebovitz: You guys can hang out in my kitchen with me and cook and talk.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ll love it. I’ll let you and Lindsay cook. I’ll talk, that’s my expertise. Thanks for coming on, David.

David Lebovitz: All right, thanks.

Emily Walker: Hello, there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro.

We have hours and hours of courses available including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business.

You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. I kid you not, I was going to record this half an hour ago, but I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with. I created a video, communicated it with the Pinch of Yum team and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.”

In our case, what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum.” Then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use. I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year, got zero-page views and I realized we have a lot of really thin not valuable content, and it’s important to clean that up.

In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it. It wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized that that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that. It’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that. We’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum.

That’s what Clariti is for. It’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it, and either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team. Then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time. We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti like a Swiss Army knife for your content. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to Clariti.com/food, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food, and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Amy Palanjian from Yummy Toddler Food. Amy worked in the magazine industry for many years before transitioning to starting her food blog. Since then, she has really leaned into the niche of Yummy Toddler Food and has grown an incredible resource for parents, and a super successful food blog.

Bjork and Amy chat a lot about all of her different strategies for running her blog because everything she does in her business is super intentional. She talks about how she built out her affiliate marketing strategy and how she’s worked to diversify her income streams. She also talks about why she decided to transition from selling e-books on her site, to selling her first printed cookbook, which is out now.

Amy talks a lot about being intentional about choosing the parts of her job that she loves doing and is good at, and outsourcing those that don’t bring her quite as much joy. She also talks about the nitty-gritty of outsourcing certain tasks, including how she manages all of her business-related files and how she communicates with her team.

Bjork and Amy also chat about email marketing and why she uses both Substack and ConvertKit in her email marketing strategy, and why she chose to work with a manager for her sponsored content. It’s a really interesting interview. Amy is full of great information, so I know you’ll enjoy this interview. I’m going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Amy, welcome to the podcast.

Amy Palanjian: Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This is one of those interviews where as I’m looking into it and researching it, I can get lost and transition from a podcast host and interviewer, to consumer of content because we have a two-year-old and a four-year-old, almost three-year-old and five-year-old.

Your specialty, your focus is all about food for kids, toddlers, and that’s the world that we’re living in. Tell me about how you came into that and how you started back in 2014.

Amy Palanjian: Sure. I worked in magazines as an editor for about a decade, and during that time, all the magazine jobs I had kept going away.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Was that internet industry, things are changing, that general shift?

Amy Palanjian: Yep. The magazine industry has consolidated so much, and so a company would buy magazines and then they would hire and staff and we would give it a go, and then they would give it two years and then the magazine would be shut down. That was happening, and then that was the heyday of the original style of blogs. It coincided with having my first daughter. I had worked as a food editor and a recipe developer and also a lifestyle editor.

I knew how to create content for an audience. I didn’t know how to put it on the internet, but I came into it with that audience angle. I started just on Squarespace posting recipes that I was making in real life, and solving the things that were coming up for me with my daughter who was then one. At that time, there was no content for this in-between stage. There was baby food stuff and there was kid food, but there was nothing in the middle.

It’s such a particular, as you know, phase of independence and voicing opinions. Then also just still learning the logistics of eating and having slightly different nutritional needs. It started as a hobby, so I was doing it alongside of my other jobs. Then there was a point, I think it was in 2017, where I knew the magazine job I had was going to go away. I could read the signs. I knew it was going to be shut down.

I just had to make a decision that I had to turn the website into my actual job, because I was spending so much time on it or I had to stop doing it and do something else. I learned how to be a food blogger. It took me about a year to figure out how to use a camera, how to properly format a recipe so that Google could read it. I had my website moved to WordPress and learned how to do SEO, and formatted every post I had correctly.

Then within six months of doing that, it was my full-time job because all of the URLs had history on them. Then they were suddenly formatted correctly, and then my traffic just jumped.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. That must’ve been a cool moment. So much I think of what happens in this world, is the culmination of a lot of effort over time and then occasional unlocks. It’s like something gets unlocked and you get similar to like in North Dakota. We’re in Minnesota, so we hear about people who go in North Dakota and they drill for oil. You drill and you drill, and you drill and you drill, and then eventually you get to oil.

But I think a lot of that is the same in this world, where you work on something for a long period of time, you try and figure it out, and then occasionally you get an unlock. Obviously, there’s always those incremental things along the lines. But I think another point with your story that’s important to point out and for all of us to think about, is it wasn’t even just the three years that you had between 2014 and 2017 where you were producing content and learning how to do good content.

It was also the 10 years before that where you were learning editorial process, recipe development, how to craft consumer-first content. What would you say were the biggest things from that decade of work in the magazine world that you took with you, that were helpful for you to have a leg up and to have a little bit of an unfair advantage? To use a term you hear occasionally in the world of publishing, but just digital publishing versus traditional publishing.

Amy Palanjian: I think one thing was understanding the goal of solving problems, so that when just in the way that I talk about the process of cooking something or even when explaining the difference between two products that I might like, intuiting what the pain points are going to be for the audience. Really putting your mindset with the person that you’re trying to reach.

Since I was in that phase with my daughter when I started, I knew it, but I also knew just from cooking, like a cooking standpoint, where the pain points might be. Then another thing that I did differently, which was directly out of magazines, is that I started doing product recommendations really early on.

Because I knew that if I was showing something or I was trying to give the easiest way to pack a lunch or the easiest way to cut something for a child, that I needed to give people the information on the things I was using. That over time has also built up into a very strong affiliate presence. Also, just building trust with my audience because they know that I actually use these things.

I think all of us who do this job, have our favorite things and we have the things that we use all the time, but there can be this reluctance to talk about them because it can sometimes feel salesy. But I just embraced that this is a service, this will potentially make someone’s life easier. I’m going to always tell you the thing that I’m using.

I packaged the content from an early point, as you would do if you were flipping through a magazine story.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. In a magazine story, you would have things like here’s this tool, here’s this product. You have these different kinds of categories of content. You’d have recipes, but you’d also have recommendations for travel. You’re traveling with your kid, here’s some great products that will help make that easier. I think one of the great things about having a niche and a focus, is that you’re maybe able to identify a problem set in a different way.

I think of Pinch of Yum as a pretty broad site in terms of who could potentially go there, but as you start to get more focused, you also can get more focused on what the problem is. I think things seem less salesy the more connected they are to a specific problem. In the case of food for toddlers, yummytoddlerfood.com, it’s like, “Okay, people know what it is when they go there.” You also know that they’re going to have these problems.

If you create an affiliate post with like here are the after six years, seven years of producing content, the products that I feel like are the 10 best food-related products for you as a family with toddlers in your house. That’s incredibly valuable and it’s a really great overlap with your audience. I think it becomes so much less, it feels less like a sales pitch, the more connected it is to the problem set, which you talked about, and the greater the need there is for that.

People are looking for it and they want it, as opposed to let’s say on Pinch of Yum, we were like, “Well, same thing. Here are the top toddler food-related items you should get.” It feels like, “Wait, it’s going to be a match for some people, maybe 10% of our audience, 15% of our audience.” But for the others it’s going to be like, “This isn’t super helpful.” I think it’s one of the things that you have going for you with a niche.

Can you talk more about what that has been like to create content in a narrow path? Because it’s an incredible advantage in that it provides boundaries, “Hey, it’s going to look like this.” But my guess is there’s also some challenges where you maybe are like, “There’s this really cool thing that I want to talk about, but it doesn’t make sense for me to talk about it here, because it’s going to be outside of the boundaries of my focus or my niche.” Is that true?

Amy Palanjian: It’s interesting because when I started the site, I didn’t know anything about how to choose your topic. I just chose the thing…

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, like all of us.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah, yeah. I chose the thing and the name that fit at the time, and it definitely has been beneficial. I think the thing that has surprised me, because everybody thinks what you just said about it being limiting.

But the thing that has happened over time, is that I’ve been very deliberate in covering making a really comprehensive website that works for families with kids in this age group, so baby food to three, four or five years old.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Amy Palanjian: But once I did that, the flexibility that I now have to post recipes that are more generally for families with kids of any age, has increased in a way that I couldn’t really have predicted. The ability that I have to rank for, I’m never going to compete with a giant food site, but I hold my own pretty well with general recipes that appeal to both the younger age group and an adult.

My goal is really to make most of the food appropriate for an entire family, so that you’re not needing to cook more than once. But it’s been really satisfying to be able to have my core content and then to be able to post more general recipes that are the ones that I want to do. I feel like I have two things going on at the same time.

I’m always posting and updating my core stuff. Then if I want to do vegan chocolate mousse or some sort of popsicle or a pasta recipe, it’s I think showing people that they can make the same food for their family with very small adjustments, has been really helpful for my audience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s almost like you focus on that narrow, and I think this is one of the best approaches to any niche or genre or focus area, you do complete coverage of that. What does it look like to holistically cover all the different angles that you could look at this piece of content or this content category from? Then you can build around it with content adjacent things.

Maybe it’s something that’s not like a lunch for toddlers, which as just a curiosity, I Googled as we were talking here and you’re number one result for that. It’s like it’s such a great example of what it’s like to own a category, but then you can start to do a banana bread and it might not be like, “That’s something you’ll always make for lunch for toddlers,” but it’s something that you could make.

We’re entering into this stage with our four, almost five-year-old, where Solby is starting to help make meals now. It’s like what does it look like to work on that together? Or what would this look like to make something that’s not like a kid meal necessarily, but something that everybody would like and enjoy and you can expand out from that?

That makes sense when you think about the approach for covering the category and then expanding beyond that as well. What does it look like for you as you’ve built it up? You’ve talked about the different focus areas, the different buckets that you think of. You’ve talked about affiliate, you talked about building the traffic, which would be ad related.

Are there other buckets that are unique to the niche or even within a niche to focus on? I know that email’s another important one for you. I’d be curious from a business perspective.

Amy Palanjian: I don’t know that they’re specific to my content type, but I did, I think it was about three years ago, I paid a lot of attention to diversifying where my income was coming from, because every six months there’s some Google scare where everyone thinks they’re going to lose all of their organic traffic. I have the ad revenue and then I have affiliate income. Then I do a fair amount of sponsored work with brands, and then I sell e-books, which are embedded on my website.

They just sell themselves. I push them maybe four times a year on Instagram and in my newsletter, but they are mostly like there’s a Yummy Toddler Snacks. There’s a Yummy Baby Food, there’s Yummy Toddler Lunches. It’s like all of the core areas of my niche, have a corresponding e-book so that if someone wants all of the content together, they have an opportunity to get that. They’re really low-priced, so that’s a volume thing.

Then I don’t really do this anymore, but I did do freelance writing for a while. I have a cookbook coming out and then the newsletter.

Bjork Ostrom: Could you talk about the cookbook? It sounds like that’s a more traditional cookbook. What was the thought process with doing e-books first, and then what was your thought with going into the more and more traditional cookbook?

Amy Palanjian: I went back and forth for a long time about whether it made sense from a business perspective, because financially the income that you can make online from ad revenue, is more than I could make from a cookbook advance. I think that’s quite common depending on how your traffic is and all of that. But I felt like I was getting so many requests for a printed book.

While my e-books have the option of printing them, I knew it wasn’t the same. There just came a point where I was like, “I think I just want to do it and see if it does anything for my brand.” I don’t know, it was like, “I’m curious to see if this makes any sort of a difference.” It has been the longest process.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It’s so hard and it’s such a different way to produce content. We just hear that over and over, that it’s just a really difficult process. In our world, we have such a short feedback loop.

You have an idea, you develop the idea. It’s different for everybody, but you could go from idea to development, to publishing within three to four days potentially. Whereas a book, it’s like a year or longer depending.

Amy Palanjian: My son I think was six months old, he’s four and a half now. I think also one of the things that I love about my job, is that I have that direct connection with my audience. I can make adjustments to things. I can go into a post and edit it. That was like I will not look at the book because I’m convinced that there’s going to be something wrong.

But I do think the book, which is called Dinnertime SOS, has all of my tips for simplifying that time of the day. It’s like how to reduce food waste, what to do when you get to the table and the kids don’t want to eat. How do you cook a meal for everyone? It’s like all of the context. Then there’s the stable of recipes that are really easy, really doable. There’s no blenders, there’s no food processors.

There’s minimal chopping. I try to use frozen vegetables or jarred sauces, or kits or things that a parent with a two-year-old on their leg would just be able to put into a pot.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Amy Palanjian: But it is true that it would be, if I wrote this book now, it would be different. I have lived a lot of life since I wrote that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. In three years, four years, what you go in the perspective, like any of us, it changes over time. It’s also one of the hard things when we’re used to chronicling our journey as people, as business owners, parents, like content creators in real time. It’s like you pick a time and you develop it, you document it, you ship it, but then by the time it’s getting in front of people, it’s maybe two years after you were in that same headspace.

But to your point, and I think there’s something really true about that that’s hard to identify, is there’s something about a traditional book that shows up in Barnes & Noble and on Amazon and is a physical book that you can buy, that lifts your brand in some way. I don’t know what that is or how that works or what all of the different indicators are. I think there’s just that perception in general from people, but I think there’s also something around your authority as a published author that changes.

I don’t know if that ties into search at all if you are a published author in the E-E-A-T world of Google, but all of that stuff I think adds up and makes a difference. I do think that there’s something there and something valuable, and it’s a gift to your followers and your readers. It’s something they want and it’s something that, I would assume, part of it is a labor of love as well.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah, yeah. I do think that it is going to be useful. I hope it is as useful as I intended it to be when I put the whole thing together.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. One of the things that is really impressive about what you’ve built, is your presence on all the different platforms. Obviously, we’re all kind of always trying to think about building out a following in different places, but on Instagram as an example, almost at a million followers.

How do you view the different areas where you’re showing up online? How do you prioritize those, knowing that for some people they have a million followers on Instagram and that’s all they do? They just are on Instagram as an influencer. But for us, we have these different places we can show up.

The site’s really important, an email list is really important. How do you view and prioritize the different places that you show up?

Amy Palanjian: My website is always my first focus. That is the thing that is the most planned. I am usually six weeks out scheduled, and I feel like I have a very good handle on that schedule. Because of holidays and seasonal things with back to school, I know when to put everything on the calendar. I have a good system with my VA, who she formats posts for me and puts in the images, and then I write the bulk of the content.

Then from there, I think Instagram is next because that is where my sponsored content primarily shows up. I post everything on TikTok, but TikTok, I waited. Now I post the same things to TikTok, and then it’s interesting to see what happens to it. I think website and then Instagram, and then everything else comes after that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, all the other stuff.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. Keeping up with the video production for Instagram, for sure is the thing that is a constant struggle because just volume-wise, it’s so much content. Figuring out when to do it, just the logistics of producing all of these different things. But one thing that for sure helped was so I moved to a different state about a year and a half ago.

I was like, “I have to figure out a better system for the way that I am working throughout my week.” I found a local food photographer, who comes to my house on Wednesday mornings, and we usually shoot four recipes. He brings his camera, he does all of the lighting and everything. Then he edits all of the images and drops them in a folder. I used to do all of that.

Taking that off my plate and making it just this regular thing that we do, has completely changed the way that I work.

Bjork Ostrom: Previously, that was you doing it?

Amy Palanjian: It was me doing it, and it took me three times as long and then I had to edit everything and upload everything. It just was like it was more than I could do. It’s a really cost-effective way to have professional photos done.

Because I’m making the food and styling the food, and then he’s here for a certain amount of time. That totally changed things for me and then gave me a little bit more time to work on making videos.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I know one of the things that you’ve intentionally done, is protected the stuff that you enjoy the most about how you work and what you work on. It sounds like also thinking strategically about what are the things that you don’t want to work on?

What are the things that you can have somebody else help with? Can you talk about how that’s changed over the last few years, as you’ve started to reflect on preserving the things you want to do while passing off the things you don’t want to do?

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. I get a lot of people asking me, “What do you want to do next?” I’m like, “Well, I like my job a lot.”

Bjork Ostrom: I’m there. I don’t want to do anything different. Yeah.

Amy Palanjian: I made this job and I want to do. I want to be the content creator. I don’t want to turn my job into managing other people, because that’s not what I enjoy most. I keep the content development with me. I come up with what the recipe is going to be. I develop the recipe, I test the recipe, I make it when we’re shooting it. Then I have surrounded myself with three people who do all of the other stuff.

I have my photographer and then I have an assistant who is behind the scenes doing like she makes sure my e-book shop is working properly. She formats my newsletters, she formats the blog posts, she does a lot of things. She’s amazing. She posts my Reels to Pinterest, she posts them to YouTube Shorts. I took myself out of anything I could think of that was not about making the content. Then I also have a copy editor.

I did work with someone to help me figure out what I could take off of my own plate. That was a very helpful process because I didn’t really realize all the ways I could take myself out.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say you worked with somebody, what do you mean by that? Was it a coach?

Amy Palanjian: Yeah, I forget what she calls herself. Her name is Emily Perron or Perron. She helps people do a job flow situation for business, so you can see who you need to hire or who’s doing what or where you can streamline your own work.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah. We interviewed Emily, I think maybe has been on a couple times on the podcast. She’s a great resource and somebody who it’s really helpful to have somebody like that. Let me know if this is what it felt like for you, who can come in and look from the outside and observe you as you work. I think about that with myself sometimes.

If I can float outside of my body and then look down on myself as I’m working, I’ve had the thought multiple times. I bet there’d be somebody who would have some feedback for me, much like if I was a tennis player or soccer player. The two sports I played growing up, always had a coach being like, “Hey, just so you know next time, here’s how you can do that a little bit differently.”

But the work that I do every day, I don’t really have a coach like that sitting and observing and saying, “Here’s some things that you could do differently. Or I’ve done this with 30 other people, here’s a change that they’ve made that’s been really helpful.” I think that’s really cool to go through that process.

Like you said, probably freeing in a lot of ways. What did you learn and what did you do in that process that was helpful?

Amy Palanjian: I think it was easier for me to identify what was more administrative task and what was more the stuff I actually needed to be doing. For example, in a blog post, I write the introduction like two paragraphs at the top. I write the meta description. I write the words that is going to sell someone on the recipe, because I know it best, and then my assistant does the rest of it.

That was a very important distinction because that’s a lot of time. The other thing that she did that was hugely helpful, is she recommended a project manager who worked with me for maybe a month, and she set up a shared server. She organized all of the things that I use to run the business, so we have shared folders. I didn’t need her after that, but I couldn’t visualize it beforehand.

Bjork Ostrom: It set up a system. Yeah.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. Now I’m like, “How did I live without all of this stuff this way?”

Bjork Ostrom: Was it emailing files back and forth? What was it before and what was it after?

Amy Palanjian: It was a mess of the Google Drive before that and she just put everything in its proper place, so that somebody else could easily find it.

Bjork Ostrom: Could you describe for somebody who wants to try and get something organized on a server, what does that look like? It’s hard on a podcast.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah, it’s like there’s a folder for Reels. There’s a folder for sponsored work. Then in the sponsored work, every campaign that I do is labeled in a certain way with the month, the year, the name of the brand. There’s a folder for blog posts, and so every blog post is named with the recipe name.

Then there are the various formats of photos each have their own folders. If we need a vertical version of something, we know exactly where to go to find it. It’s very basic, but it is really helpful. My e-book files are all in one place versus being on my desktop.

Bjork Ostrom: Scattered around, documents folder. Yeah, right. It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking a lot about this as it relates to AI, but I think there are starting to be some of these tools and we’re testing these, but essentially what it is, the importance of information retrieval. What we can do right now is, like you said, have this really organized system where the folder’s in a certain place. This becomes increasingly more important as you start to work with other people.

It’s less important for myself, if I have a chaotic desktop, chaotic documents’ folder, but I know where everything is, where I can just search it easily. But once you start to work with other people, needing to have that central place where somebody can go and where they don’t have to ask you. You’re working on something and they’re like, “Hey, where’s the e-book file?” They just know where it is.

Setting up those types of systems, like you said, you can do it in a month, work with somebody who’s organized and specializes in that. Then the system is there. This is a side note, but I’m excited about and have tested some of the tools to allow it to get even easier to do document querying. For our team, when did we publish the recipe on dah, dah, dah, dah, dah? Or even for our internal team, what’s the policy for PTO for somebody within the first year?

I think what we’ll be able to do is start to get these, ingest all of these documents and then start to search through them. Anyways, that’s like a nerding out side note. But one of the biggest things that we did was we switched over to have all of our files hosted on we use Google Workspace, which is the premium version of Gmail. Then within there, they have what’s called a shared vault. We have all of our files in this shared vault.

Anytime somebody gets an @foodbloggerpro.com handle, they get added to that vault. That vault has all the files. The podcast, as an example, has for every podcast episode we do, is organized in the same way. What do you use for your shared server?

Amy Palanjian: The same thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah, Google Workspace.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. The thing that what you were saying about how everyone can find everything, I send my assistant one email a week on Mondays.

I don’t have to tell her, she just knows. I just send her the list of what she needs to work on, and she knows exactly where to go.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Amy Palanjian: My photographer knows where to put his stuff. I don’t ever have to be on the phone. It’s really simplified.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. In the email, are you essentially saying, “Here’s what we need to do this week and here are the places”?

You probably don’t even need to say, “Here are the places to go.” It’s just like this recipe, this recipe, this recipe.

Amy Palanjian: Here are the blog posts to work on this week.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Amy Palanjian: If something is unusual or not what she would expect, I explain it, but usually it’s just a list. Then we have a shared spreadsheet that we use for newsletter tracking and stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s awesome.

Amy Palanjian: Very straightforward.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. As knowledge workers, so much of our time is spent looking for stuff and it’s not value-add. What I hear you saying is you’re trying to figure out how do you get to the things that are two-pronged? Number one, the things that you enjoy the most, and number two, the things that matter the most that you’re doing them.

If the majority of your work is work that matters if you do it and you enjoy doing it, that can be a really enjoyable workday. That can be a really enjoyable job. To your point, when people are like, “So what’s next?” You’re like, “This is it.” I love it. You’ve crafted a job that is a dream job, but you’ve had to be intentional to do that along the way.

For somebody who’s on the other side wanting to get there, what do you feel like were the steps that you took to allow you to get to the point where you were spending the majority of your time on things that you enjoyed?

Amy Palanjian: I think really thinking through what I wanted my role to be. A lot of people that I know who have similar websites, manage people and they love doing that. I think those are two very different paths. Working with Emily, that was one of the main things that she had me do. She was like, “What do you like? What are the areas that you want to be spending your time?”

It was very, very clear that it was the content creation and it was not all of the surrounding stuff. I do not ever want to touch a camera. That always feels like a foreign language to me. I made myself do it when it was the budget constraints, but I am not confident and it’s not fun for me. I would rather be making the food.

I think just thinking through where are the areas that I want to spend my time? What can somebody else do better than me or what can I give to someone with autonomy? I think one of the reasons that my relationship with Madison, my assistant, works so well is she can do her work whenever she wants to, and she has full autonomy to do it.

She’s never waiting, except for Mondays, she’s never waiting for me to give her anything because she always knows what it is.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things that I’ve been doing, it’s not like this rigid routine, but it almost comes from this activity that we’ve had when we sit down for dinner, it’s not like we do it every time. But now our oldest daughter recommends, she’s like, “Can we do sunny and stormy?” What we do is what’s a sunny part of your day and what’s a stormy part of your day?

We just reflect on what was something that was really good, and what was something that was really bad? What was the worst part of your day? For me, one of the things I’ve been doing, part of it is an effort not to stare at my phone as I’m going to bed. I’ve been trying to not have my phone in bed, so then I’m like, “What do I do with my brain in this moment?”

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is in my workday, what was the sunny part of my day and what was the stormy part of my day? Part of it is just self-reflection and self-awareness to say like yesterday was a day where I had four different meetings. I had this car appointment that I had to drop off the car in the morning. Then I went home early because Lindsay was staying a little bit later.

I was reflecting, I was like, “Gosh, that didn’t feel great. I wasn’t able to get to any emails. I didn’t really follow up on Slack.” But it informs and makes these micro adjustments, which for those of us who are building our job description, I think sometimes we forget we can do that. We can go through the process of building something that is a good fit for us.

Probably to some degree, even for anybody who’s working in any job to think how do I shift and change this to be a good fit for me and communicate with somebody I’m working with, to say, “Maybe this isn’t a good fit, maybe somebody else could take it on”? I think we can all do a better job of reflecting on our work and how we can see if we can make micro adjustments to get it to a point where it overlaps well, so we can have majority sunny days and less stormy days.

Amy Palanjian: I was thinking about that lately because this is the time of year when I do a lot of sponsored work tied to lunches. I work with a manager and I emailed them three days ago. I was like, “We have to do something different next year because this is making me hate everything.”

I think it’s demands of I love working with brands except when there’s 12 at the same time. Then it’s just so I was like, “What are the options that we could narrow the amount of things I’m doing?” I think it’s speaking up and just noticing when that happens, so that you can make adjustments for the next time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally. Just essentially always monitoring and being like, “Okay, that didn’t feel good. Why was that? That day felt like a drag. Why was it?” This was really a sunny day. This was a stormy day. Our daughter, Lena, her default answer is to the stormy, her stormy part of the day is always the storm. There was a storm once and it really bummed her out.

She’s like, “The stormy part of my day was the storm,” which is I think for a lot of us, it’s true. You have a storm in your day and that’s the low part of the day. One of the things that you talked about as we were connecting here and thinking through the interview, was growing your email list. I know that you’ve had some success with that and you’ve approached it maybe a little bit differently than people normally approach it.

Can you talk about number one, why your email list is important? Then number two, some of the things that you’ve done to help increase the growth there?

Amy Palanjian: Sure. I try to think of my email as a direct way to communicate with people where they can respond to me and I won’t lose it, versus my Instagram DMs, you will never find it. If someone responds to me on email, I will always see it and I will always be able to respond to it, so that connection is very important to me. It is a place where I share a little bit more longer form writing sometimes, because that’s my background.

I like writing and giving more context to the idea of feeding families. I have a lot of friends who had moved to Substack, and I know you’ve had some people on who have talked about this. I’ve had a lot of friends who’ve moved to Substack, and watching them build community there has been really inspiring. The way that people can talk to each other, is totally different than a traditional email marketing service.

You can like posts, you can comment, people see the comments and people can respond to each other. I really wanted my newsletter to feel like a safe place that people would know that I was monitoring the comments, because the internet can be a little crazy. That if there was anything inappropriate, they knew it would be taken care of. I can manage it better than I could manage some posts on Instagram.

I currently have both Substack and ConvertKit running at the same time, which is not something I’ve ever heard anyone else do. I use ConvertKit for opt-ins and landing pages, and all of the traditional email marketing. Then I’m using Substack to send my newsletters each week with the community element. That does mean that I have to manually import new subscribers from ConvertKit over to Substack.

But other than that, it has been I love it. My open rate has been trending upward as I’ve moved it. I feel like I have options for the future if I want to turn on a paid segment, if I want to do a podcast. There are all of these tools that are in Substack, that I feel like are things I might want to explore. Then I worked with Matt Molen, as most bloggers do at some point, to really commit to a strategy for sharing my newsletter on my social accounts.

Once a week I do something free. I either share a guide or a free PDF, or something that is enticing to people. For a long time, he was recommending doing a five-day series like a miniguide. I have learned that one email, literally one email with five to 10 links on one subject is really effective. It’s like I did one that was a kids’ summer lunch guide. It was five links to posts with camp lunches, cold lunches, really easy lunches.

Then my go-to lunchboxes and ice packs and things. Everything was together, people really liked that they didn’t have to go hunting around, they didn’t have to wait for anything. It’s just a a filtered way to get to the website content. Those convert, when I share those in my Instagram stories, it could be like two to 5,000 people are signing up from that. That’s once a week, so that’s a huge way to grow the list. It’s been fun to see what’s working really well there and just to play around.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think psychologically, because I think that’s so much of it is user behavior, what’s the difference in the user behavior?

With something like that, what’s happening that’s different than the normal path that people are taking to try and get email signups?

Amy Palanjian: Well, I think it feels faster because a lot of the signups are, like I said, you have to wait for the content. Then I think there’s something about doing it in Instagram stories versus doing it as a popup, because I am directly explaining why this thing is valuable.

I know that everyone is struggling to continue to come up with lunches this summer. Here are 27 no-cook lunch ideas. I’m going to send you the PDF. You can save it to your phone screen and open it like an app. You don’t have to do anything except put your email in this thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s keeping people in the place where they are, where they know they’re comfortable. It’s not trying to bend somebody’s behavior to get somewhere else.

Amy Palanjian: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s just a natural way to engage with people where they are.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. You view ConvertKit as the platform for opt-ins, getting people on the list, bringing them over. Once they’re on there, your preference in terms of communicating is Substack.

Do you take the people off of ConvertKit and bring them on to Substack, and is that manual or is that automated?

Amy Palanjian: The only way to do it is manual, so every few days I just export. I try to keep track. It’s not a clean process. It works best if I just do it every morning. I just export the new subscribers and then put them in my Substack list.

I’m leaving my ConvertKit list alone because I’m not sending to it. I’m just using it as a collection spot, and then I’m just moving them over so that they get the two emails a week.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s an interesting observation and you alluded to this, every platform, every place you’re communicating is like a party, and every party has a different vibe where different things are okay, has a different feel for how people are communicating. We are the same everywhere, like we as the creator, we as the person. Part of what we’re trying to do is figure out what party is best for us to hang out at. For some people, it might be a rave where you’re up all night and you’re partying.

For other people, it might be a book club, and for some people it might be hanging out with your best friend. All of those analogies could apply to different social media platforms. Or even to your point, a traditional one-to-many communication with a ConvertKit type interaction, or MailChimp or whatever the email service provider is, is different than a platform like Substack. Substack, where the culture’s different and it’s neither good nor bad, it’s just different.

There’s interaction in a different way. You can have comments like you said. Maybe what’s different with the Substack is the element of community, in regards to some of the functionality of community built into that email platform. Like you said, it opens up then the opportunity to have a paid subscription, maybe you have a premium subscription that comes later on. Just do a quick reference here to interview that we had with Matt.

This was years ago, 2019, but he talked about email marketing. He’s been on the podcast before. He has a site called Email Crush, is that right? We’re talking about the same Matt? Okay, great. One of the things that I hear in your story, and tell me if this is true, is you are intentional to know what you want to do, what you want to focus on. Then you’re bringing in experts to accelerate an area that you want to accelerate in email or outsourcing, working with the team. Does that feel true?

Has that resulted in recognizable growth for you when you do take those steps to bring in the outside expert to help?

Amy Palanjian: I think so. There was a point, I think it was two years ago where I was doing regular sponsored work, and it became clear to me that I didn’t understand the contracts at all. I went out and found a management company because I was like, “That income has significantly increased since I took myself out of the negotiation process.” Also, just to have someone pitching me that I’m not involved in.

I would say it’s true with that, it’s true with email. I check in with Matt once a year, and just make sure that things are running properly and he’ll just look over things and give me fresh perspective on stuff. I think it’s very helpful, especially when if you primarily work alone, you can just lose perspective on what other people are doing or even how you can just make things easier.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Can you talk about what it was like to work with the management company? What was the before, what did that look like? Then what did it look like after?

Amy Palanjian: The before was brands would email me asking for my media kit that I put together on Canva. I made up rates because nothing is standard. It’s like who knows? Now I’m with Cookit Media, I’ve been with them for about two years, and I’ve made the choice to stay with them because I feel like they know my brand really well. I’m very comfortable with them pitching me to people, but they’re great.

The only time I am in communication with a brand, is when I am delivering ideas or I’m delivering actual content. All of the back and forth about things I don’t understand like whitelisting or exclusivity, I am not the one who is dealing with that. They’ve been able to pitch me to clients that I wouldn’t have even known were options for myself, because they’re in the industry seeing all of these things happen in a way that I just don’t have access to.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Part of it is the difference between reactive, which that would be true for us. Stuff comes in, we’re like, “Hey, let’s take a look at this.”

And proactive, actually reaching out and saying, “Hey, we know these brands. We’re going to reach out to these brands. We’re going to pitch you to work with these brands.”

It sounds like would be brands that you maybe wouldn’t normally look at and be like, “This would be an ideal brand.” You weren’t even aware of them or didn’t know that they worked with creators.

Amy Palanjian: Or sometimes they’ll just know that there is somebody who has a campaign coming up. Even with holidays coming up, they’ll start pitching four months ahead in a way that I just would not have the bandwidth to do it by myself.

Bjork Ostrom: Whenever I have friends who work at Target Corporate and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re putting together the Halloween stuff for next year.” It’s like, “Wait, 2024 Halloween, not that extreme.”

But it’s just such a different way of operating. Even if you’re planning ahead four weeks, eight weeks, it is just so different when you get into those big corporate budgets.

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. The other thing I will say is it’s been really great to have backup when I want to say no to something.

I will regularly email them and remind them to tell me to not accept something if it’s below a rate that I want to work at, because my inclination would be to say yes to everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Initially, and then once it comes around, you say, “Curse my past self.”

Amy Palanjian: Exactly. It’s nice to have them be able to take that and just remind me of what I want to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. What do you feel like in this current state of things? It feels like for a lot of people who are looking at what you’re doing, they’d say, “That’s awesome.” You’ve created this dream job, have found success in a lot of ways. If you were to distill down the variables that existed for you in your story that allowed you to get to where you are, what were the most important ones?

If somebody wants to look to your story as inspiration and try and not replicate it in the exact same way, but replicate it in terms of areas of focus or things that you did that were important, would you be able to distill that down to a few different variables or even one?

Amy Palanjian: This question is so hard because I don’t think I could have done it had I intentionally set out to do it, but I do think the covering the content in your niche has been incredibly important for the foundation of my site online. I don’t remember who it was, but I read some book that was like or maybe it was on your podcast, I don’t know.

An expert was talking about make a website as if it is the book you want on this topic and continually add to it. I had a spreadsheet where I was like, “This is every single keyword I can find on baby and toddler food, and I am going to do all of them.” It sounds crazy, but I think that is a hugely helpful thing as the starting point. Then I think I’ve done a good job of listening to my audience when if someone is…

After I did that, I then made a list of all of the questions that people ask me all the time. I made blog posts that corresponded with each of them so that someone DMs me on Instagram, I have a saved autoresponder that I can start typing website and it fills it in and it sends someone to my website.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Amy Palanjian: Listening to what people are asking for has been really helpful. Then I think the part about just looking at what I was doing in my workweek, and taking out the parts that I didn’t want to be doing or that I didn’t have to be doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I just wrapped up an interview with Liam from MealPro App. I’m not sure when it’s coming out, maybe before or after this interview. But one of the things we talked a lot about on that interview, in that interview was the idea of product development or customer development. In the context of the software world, it’s like making sure you understand what the problem is so you’re building the correct software.

But in our world, it’s making sure you understand what the problem is, so you’re building the right content. It’s cool to hear you reflect on that and how that’s been impactful for you having come out of that interview with him, where he reflects on how important that is in the software world. It’s kind of all of us, we’re building partly for ourselves, but really we’re building for an audience who has problems that we’re trying to solve, we’re trying to help with.

The more you can understand that, the more beneficial it’s going to be for both you and your growth, but also for the audience. For those who…

Amy Palanjian: Yeah. I was just going to say, people are always asking, “What are you going to do with your site now that your kids are getting older?” I’m like, “Well, the site’s not about me anymore.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You can stay in that and be an expert in that in a pretty significant way, even if you’re not in that stage still.

But for those who are in that stage, want to follow along with what you’re up to or maybe just keep in touch with you, what’s the best way to get ahold of you or follow along with what you’re up to?

Amy Palanjian: The website is yummytoddlerfood.com, and it’s @YummyToddlerFood on all of the social everything. Then the book is Dinnertime SOS, and it’s in all bookstores or online.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. When did that come out?

Amy Palanjian: It’s coming out on the 22nd.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. It’s coming down the line, so by the time the podcast comes out, it’ll be out so people can check that out. Awesome, Amy. Thanks so much for coming on.

Amy Palanjian: You’re welcome.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there. Alexa here, and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We hope you enjoyed it, and we just so appreciate you being here. I actually wanted to give you a little bit of a sneak peek into what we have going on on Food Blogger Pro in September. If you’re unaware of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, the podcast that you’re listening to right now, it’s only one part of what Food Blogger Pro is.

The other part is a membership, so you can learn more about it by going to foodbloggerpro.com/join. You can learn about all that’s included within the membership, but we add new content to the site for our members each and every month. We’d like to say that your membership will look different at the end of each month, because we’re always adding new value to it. On the seventh, we have a coaching call going live between Naomi from a lifedelicious.com and Bjork.

In that call, they talk about positioning yourself as a resource and incorporating your story into your blog. They answer questions like how to deal with older content that doesn’t currently match your niche, a glaring issue with user experience and more. It’s a great call and all members will get access to it on September 7th. On the 14th, we have our member only live Q&A and it is with, drum roll please, Bjork and Lindsay.

They’ll be talking all about content. That is such an important topic for food bloggers because it’s the “product” ’re selling as food bloggers. In this Q&A, all members will be able to ask any questions for Bjork and/or Lindsay, and it’s just going to be a great, great call. That’ll be on the 14th. Then on the 21st, we are re-releasing a course that we have updated all about understanding recipe plugins.

We will talk about the ins and outs of using recipe plugins, which recipe plugins we recommend, how to use those recipe plugins to set up a recipe on your site and more. It’s a great course and we’re really excited to release it to you all on the 21st. That does it for us this week. Thanks again for being here. You’ll see us next time, next Tuesday, and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s the question, are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool? Maybe it’s like Airtable or Asana, or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all? When it comes to optimizing and organizing your content how do you know what to change and how do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle?

With Clariti, all of that stuff is easier. It’s easier to keep track of things. It’s easier to know if the changes you’re making are having an impact, and that’s why we built it. We realized that we were using spreadsheets and cobbling together a system, and we wanted to create something that did that for you. And Clariti brings together WordPress data, Google data, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and it brings all of that information into one place to allow you to make decisions and also inform you about the decisions that you’ve made and if they’re having an impact. I could talk on and on about the features, but the best way to understand it is to get in and to work with the tool yourself. And the good news is Clariti is offering 50% off of your first month if you sign up. And you can do that by going to clariti.com/food. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food, so check it out.

Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey. Hi. Hello. Welcome to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. My name is Alexa and I’m part of the Food Blogger Pro team. And we are just all so excited that you’re here today because today’s episode is a good one, and that is because we are welcoming someone who we’ve had on the podcast a couple of times before back on to talk about something that’s just really top of mind right now.

So Dianne Jacob, she wrote the book on food writing called We’ll Write For Food, but she is just a powerhouse and has a well established background in food writing. And today, she’s actually going to be talking about how the landscape of food writing is changing with things like AI, ChatGPT, and Substack. So this is going to be a great episode. Just be sure to have a pencil and paper available to take notes because you’re going to get a lot out of this episode.

So she’s going to talk about what she learned from testing ChatGPT, how recipe attribution currently looks like for AI tools, why your voice matters more than ever right now, and so much more. It’s such a good episode. You’re going to love it. And without any further ado, let’s dive in.

Bjork Ostrom: Dianne, welcome back to the podcast.

Dianne Jacob: Hey, Bjork. Nice to see you again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’re at the point now where we have these longstanding work connections, work relationships, and it’s so cool to be at that point in our respective careers to be like 2015, I think was the first time that we interviewed you. And a lot has changed since then. Some things are still the same, but many things are different. We’re going to be talking about some of those things, but for those who haven’t listened to the other times that you’ve been on the podcast, give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you do.

Dianne Jacob: Okay. Well, my name is Dianne Jacob and I wrote a book starting in 2005 called We’ll Write For Food, and it’s about how to be a food writer in all its glorious iterations. So there’s a chapter on blogging, there’s a chapter on getting a cookbook deal. There’s a chapter on how the publishing industry works. There’s chapter on social media, you name it, freelance writing, what happens when you write a book, how to be a good photographer, it’s all in there. It’s in its fourth edition. And I guess I’m best known for that. I also have a free Substack newsletter on food writing, and I coach a lot of people who want to start a blog, start a newsletter, get a book deal, write better recipes, be a freelance writer. I’ve even coached people in promotion, because you have to learn how to do it along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and one of the things I feel like that’s probably changed since when you first started is this idea of what does promotion look like in this world? And today, 2023 promotion, it feels like is up to you. For the most part, if you’re getting a book deal, if you’re building a business, you are the one who has to figure out how to promote yourself, or you have to bring somebody in yourself or somebody who understands that world to help educate. This is what it looks like to promote yourself. Does that feel accurate?

Dianne Jacob: Yes. Yes. Well, if you get a book deal with a traditional publisher, supposedly they help you with promotion, but unless you’re a really big fish, they don’t really help you a lot. So you have to figure it out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s on you.

Dianne Jacob: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that’s cool about your book is… And maybe this is rare for book, you would know more than I would, but when you publish something in 2005 and then it continues to evolve. I’m trying to figure out what a comparable would be, but it’s different than a regular book because it lives and breathes a little bit. And the 2005 version is probably pretty different in some sections than the most recent version. Is that right?

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. There wasn’t much to say about social media. The funniest thing is, I didn’t even cover blogging in 2005 because blogging had started, but I was a snobby print person, and we all looked down on bloggers. We were like, “Who are these people? There’s no gatekeepers. There’s no editors. We don’t know what they’re doing. Why would anybody be interested? Because they haven’t been vetted and edited and blah, blah, blah.” We were so print. We were focused on print. And print is in many ways so irrelevant these days. People don’t have food magazine subscriptions anymore, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: It’s really difficult for that industry.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s a slow, yet obvious transition where it’s not overnight, but when you look at, if you see were to see a stat of magazine subscriptions for a household 2005 compared to 2023, my guess is it would look really different.

Dianne Jacob: Really different.

Bjork Ostrom: I think probably what would look different is number of words read on a screen compared to on a piece of paper that also probably looks very different. Yeah. The vast majority of content that we’re consuming right now is on a screen. And it doesn’t mean that print books or print in general shouldn’t be a consideration. It’s just not the same as it was in 2005. One of the things I’ve noticed as we step into what feels like another reinvention of how we consume content, speaking specifically about AI, is I’m thinking back to 2009, 2010, 2011, when we would go to a conference and it would be food publishers, and we’d come in and talk about blogging and they’d be like… And I was surprised by it. Oh my gosh, what I’m saying is a little bit offensive. And so I tried to be respectful, not offensive, but-

Dianne Jacob: How could it be offensive?

Bjork Ostrom: Offensive in that threatening maybe is a better word.

Dianne Jacob: Oh, threatening. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: In offensive, in regards to, “I’m going to come in and tell you how anybody can publish content online.” And these people that we were speaking to had worked really hard to establish credibility. And it felt like in some ways it was just saying, “Anybody can do this.” And it’s like, “No, anybody can’t do it,” which is true, but like you said, there’s no gatekeepers. And that I think, felt weird. “Wait, anybody can come in and do this.”

But what I see happening now is a similar thing, except this time I’m on the other side where traditional publishing in the sense of blogging. You publish content online, I’m writing this content, original content, and now people are like, “Well, you can have artificial intelligence create this.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no.” But I’m trying to keep an open mind and say, “You know what? This is just a very similar thing to what I experienced 10 years ago. So how do you see the opportunities here, but also be aware of the downside or the threat?” So for you, as somebody who’s deeply aware of the industry of writing and crafting words intentionally, what has it been like for you to observe the presence of AI in people’s lives more and more?

Dianne Jacob: It’s exciting and worrying at the same time, if that makes any sense. It’s exciting because it can be really helpful. A friend of mine who’s a writing teacher said that she asks ChatGPT to write her syllabus, and it’s pretty good. It’s a pretty good start. And then she figures out the rest. So that saves her a lot of work. There’s a lot of things that bloggers can use AI for. Should we back up and say what AI is?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, let’s do that. I think, there’s enough conversations I’ve had with friends and family where I’m like, “You’ve used ChatGPT, right? Or Bard, right?” And they’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Let me show you. It’s one of my favorite things.” So can you give the background on what it is and how it works?

Dianne Jacob: Okay. I married to an engineer and he gets very cross with me whenever I say AI because he thinks that’s a misnomer. He wants me to call it machine learning, because computers have been programmed to read content and shape it for you. So it’s not quite the same as AI. But then he’s an engineer, so he worries about that thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, those nuances. Is his general opinion on it, that it’s not truly artificial intelligence happening is essentially an equation that you’re feeding in and a result that a machine is giving you based on inputs, which isn’t necessarily intelligence?

Dianne Jacob: Right. It’s regurgitated and reshaped from what has appeared on the web previously. And that’s, I think, what creates a lot of problems because it says, “Oh, we only absorb the really good stuff,” but clearly when I tested it, that was not true.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you mean by that? What did you test?

Dianne Jacob: Well, I tested its skills in recipe writing, ChatGPT, and it gave me a recipe. It didn’t include a headnote, it didn’t include a yield. It gave me a recipe that actually didn’t work when I made it. And then I asked it to give me a headnote after that. Let me just read this to you.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Dianne Jacob: What it said, it started out well because it talked about the specifics. Maybe there’s one, two sentences about the specifics of the ingredients. But then it said, “These cookies are sure to stand out on any dessert table and will leave your guests asking for the recipe. Don’t be surprised if they become your new go-to cookie recipe for every occasion, perfect for sharing with friends and family, blah, blah, blah.” And I can rail about generic content, but it really bugged me that here it is generic. Here it is regurgitating this generic content, all these cliches of recipe writing that it has found, because that’s its job is to find content and telling you, “Oh, this would be perfectly good to use. This recipe is easy to follow, and yields consistently delicious results.” Come on. None of this is good.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, none of it is good from the perspective of creative, engaging. It doesn’t have a hook. But my question is, could it be good? And I think what I’ve found in certain categories, it is good for information. And my question to you is, to what degree do you feel like creative writing is defensible versus informational writing to get people what they need? And I don’t have an answer to that, but if somebody wants an awesome chocolate chip cookie recipe, they’re not going to get it via ChatGPT or Bard right now.

Dianne Jacob: No.

Bjork Ostrom: But probably in two years or would you disagree with that?

Dianne Jacob: I don’t know what would make it awesome. When I was putting questions into ChatGPT, one of the questions I asked is writing a recipe going to become irrelevant soon because you can just generate them? And it said, “Oh, no. Voice is an important part of developing a recipe, and people are innovative and creative, and we can’t really match that.” But then I said, “Okay. Why don’t you give me an innovative and creative recipe?” So it gave me one. And one of my commenters, she was so mad when she read that recipe. She gave me six paragraphs about how awful that recipe was and how there’s nothing innovative or creative about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. And point being, even if you give it the right prompts, it’s not going to be able to replicate some of that. One of the things, and it’s interesting in the response that it said this is it can’t replace creativity… And Lindsay said this the other night when we were talking about it, the thing that she has as a creator that’s uniquely defensible is that she’s a human. And as much as possible, how do we figure out to be how to be as human as possible? Because at one point, strictly delivering information, what was something that you could do is still something that you could do on the internet to build an audience, build a following, top 10 places to visit in Minneapolis when you visit, as an example.

Dianne Jacob: Sure. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Those feel like potentially the first things to fall generic information that’s accessible in other platforms, or that’s accessible on other places like Bard or ChatGPT.

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. ChatGPT probably do a pretty good job of making that list.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I’m thinking of doing a trip to Birmingham with my dad, and I was like, “Hey, I’m thinking of going to Birmingham for three nights, four days. We’d like to do a civil rights tour and see some of the museums. And also we’d be interested in eating some of the iconic restaurants. Can you build an itinerary?” And it did.

Dianne Jacob: It could do. Yeah. Yeah. It could do a good job on that.

Bjork Ostrom: And so there are all things that it can do well, it does feel like recipes isn’t one of those things right now. Do you think it’ll eventually get there? Will it get to the point where…

Dianne Jacob: Yeah, sure. It’s going to get there. Yeah. And the recipe that I asked it to make a peanut butter cookie with miso, and it gave me… So then I made the recipe because I couldn’t tell exactly from looking at it whether it would work or not. So I thought, “Okay, I’m just going to make this.” And it made a super, super soft dough that tasted good, but it said, shape it into balls and put it on the cookie sheet. Well, you couldn’t shape it into ball balls. It was too soft. And so, you would have to know, “Well, how do I fix this?” So I add a quarter cup of flour, and that helped. And then it was still hard to shape it into balls. And then there was a further step with a peanut butter cookie, which is after you shape it into a ball, then you have to get the fork and make the pattern on the top, right?

And I press down on the cookie and the whole thing would lift up because it was so soft, I couldn’t really make the pattern. So then you have to know things like, “Okay, I put it in the refrigerator for half an hour to see if that would help.” And it did help a little bit, but really the only thing I had to do to it was to add the quarter cup of flour, and it made a cookie that tasted really good, but it didn’t look like or have the texture of a peanut butter cookie. So was that a failure or not? I guess if you wanted an iconic peanut butter cookie, it was a failure, but the bottom line was the cookie was really good.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Which is like, “Whoa. That’s crazy.” One of the interesting things with it, and you talked about this a little bit, so essentially there’s a dataset, and that dataset is the web. The way that they give you content is they’re trained on all the content on the web or a lot of it, or the best content on the web, whatever it is. So that’s trained on recipes that people have published, and then it makes tweaks and iterations on that. Do you know or have any thoughts on how the process of crediting is going to work in the world of these new types of search or AI?

Dianne Jacob: Well, first, I tried to get ChatGPT to tell me, where’d you get this recipe? I got nowhere with that. It just gives me these answers. “Oh, it’s an amalgamation of various algorithms, blah, blah, blah,” and we don’t have to worry about stealing because this is something entirely new. But then I tried feeding the beginning of the recipe into Google to see what would come up. And the first recipe that come came up wasn’t even a peanut butter cookie recipe. It was a cookie recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: You searched for that, those that information in search, and it just gave you a peanut butter recipe or a cookie recipe.

Dianne Jacob: They gave a cookie recipe, but not for peanut butter. So I thought that was interesting. And it was from some home EC website. It wasn’t from a person, but you can’t really, because it’s a computer, it’s compiling stuff and sorting, and that’s what it’s supposed to do. It can’t give you a strict answer. So that part is, okay, so if you’re going to generate a recipe from ChatGPT, and then put it on your blog, then the question is, are you going to say, “Well, this is a ChatGPT recipe.” And I suspect that most bloggers are not going to say that. And plus, they shouldn’t just put on their blog. They should rewrite it to match how they write their blog posts and put it in their own words and add their own personality to it. And they should test it. Just make sure it works, because what is the point if it doesn’t?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. The interesting thing too is I don’t know copyright law very well, but my understanding is that AI generated content, purely AI generated, isn’t copyrightable?

Dianne Jacob: Correct. And recipes aren’t copyrightable, so it’s the same.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. But almost on the flip side, what I’m interested in is what does it look like for some of these models like ChatGPT or Bard to give credit to the places that they’re getting the recipe from? As an example, as we were talking here, I asked Bard, so for everybody uses Google for search, bard is Google’s solution for AI content, like AI interactions. I said, “What’s a good peanut butter cookie recipe?” And it said, “Here’s a good peanut butter cookie recipe.” Gives me the instructions, the ingredients, tips. And then I said, “What sites did you get this recipe from?” And it said, Sally’s Baking Addiction, The Kitchn, and Preppy Kitchen.”

Dianne Jacob: Oh, wow.

Bjork Ostrom: And it tells me the three of them, and I’ll screenshot this so we can include it in the show notes, but even in giving credit to the different sources, it shows the URL, but the URL isn’t clickable. And so, it feels like there’s still these pretty significant kinks that need to get worked out in the world of search where they’re using this content and building answers based on it, but not giving credit to the source of where that was built from. Which feels like there’s something there.

Dianne Jacob: At least two of the sources are very big and well-known sites are very credible. So that was good. I don’t know Preppy Kitchen, so that was good. But I wonder how they would feel about being the source of-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, probably not great. If it was us I wouldn’t feel great. And I think that’s the bigger question that I think all of us are… And we don’t have an answer. And my hope is what happens is there’s some type of credit given, but I think the world of search is evolving in a way where we’re moving away from 10 blue links that you click on.

And that’s a huge driver for a lot of blogs. And so, similarly to what we talked about before we press record, the question is has to move beyond just blogs into creating your creators. And you alluded to this. There’s like fear with this new reality, but there’s also opportunities. And as a creator, as somebody who wants to build a thing online and to have autonomy in their work and potentially get compensated for it, what are the ways that we can lean into our humanity and still persevere and build a following despite these significant changes that are happening?

Dianne Jacob: I’ve been fighting a losing battle talking about the importance of voice, but I know it’s still a huge part of Pinch of Yum. I can recognize Lindsay’s voice, and it’s a differentiating factor, but people do feel as I think largely as a result of where they’re going to rank in SEO, that they have to be as generic as possible. And I just don’t really understand how that helps people. So that’s where you have a unique advantage, is the power of your own strong voice. And if you’re going to just write this generic stuff, you and everybody else will be producing material that your reader can’t differentiate. And so, what is the point of that? You can ask these machine learning software, there’s a whole bunch of them now to give you an introductory paragraph, to write an FAQ about your blog. It can give you summaries, it can give you a first draft, it can help you write lists. But then you don’t just leave it at that because you’re good at your job. You make it yours, and only you can make it yours, and that’s your kryptonite.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I love that reflection on voice. And I think you talk about fighting a losing battle. I think one of the things that I’ve observed, and maybe you can comment on this as well if you feel like you can relate to it, but in any industry, but I think anything online, there are waves. And when those are changes, they’re platforms, there are things that are working, and a wave will work, a wave will come. And if you’re a surfer, you can catch it. And to catch that wave is a really great feeling. But no wave lasts forever. And one of the curiosities that I have is a wave that I think is especially true, and we’ve seen it in the last five years of a mechanical approach to search optimization. You need to include these different components to the site. It needs to be worded like this. The structure needs to look like this. I think those 100% work. It works. You can get a ton of traffic. And there are people who have built massive amounts of traffic based on that process.

Inevitably, with any evolution of a thing that works, the more people do it, the more crowded it gets, the more similar it potentially it gets. And eventually any wave stops. It doesn’t go on forever. And what I’m curious about in the world of content creation, on a website or on other platforms, but specifically now on a website, is what does the next wave look like after this one subsides? And there’ll always be components of search optimization in terms of how you structure your site and best practices. But my curiosity is is there a way that voice comes back into it? And just as one more quick observation, there was a time when one of the search optimization things that worked really well was you’d create an article and then you’d do this process called article spinning, and you’d go through and you would replace words in that article with similar but different words. And then you would post that article to 10 different sites and you’d have all of the links pointing back to your main site.

Dianne Jacob: No, good.

Bjork Ostrom: And it worked, and people built these followings on it. But eventually, what happened is Google said, “We see what’s happening here. We’re going to move away from this.” And I’m curious to know, is there a time when the search results page as it needs to become more human, does Google make it where the answers that you’re finding are embedded, generally speaking within the search results page? And then does it fold in a human layer for those who are looking more for the social media experience? That’s just a hypothetical, but I’d be curious to hear your reflections on that. And even waves that you’ve seen working and in this world and how you need to either stay up on those or just say, “I’m not going to fight that fight and I’m going to stick to what I’m good at.”

Dianne Jacob: Wow. These are really big questions. Well, as we were saying before, we pressed record, putting ads on your site really works for people. It’s still the majority of the income that bloggers receive. Right? If you go to a different kind of medium, there aren’t any ads. There aren’t ads on Instagram in the same way.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Sponsored content or working with brands, but not like-

Dianne Jacob: But not ads.

Bjork Ostrom: … based on views. Yup.

Dianne Jacob: And ads is still the main way that bloggers make money. Right?

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: And that has continued, and people have switched their ad network and gotten more money, and they’ve refined their processes on how to get more followers to come to their pages. And all that is still working. But there are other models that also work. The people who are making a lot, who have the biggest food newsletters on Substack are making six figure incomes. And I’m not talking about the low six figures either, and they’re no ads.

Bjork Ostrom: And the experience is really clean. You get a newsletter a lot most often, and maybe you can talk about this because I know that you’ve done it. It’s a free newsletter. It’s full of great content. And then you also have, generally speaking, a premium newsletter that people pay to be subscriber to. And I think these are the things that get me really excited. The industry is changing. Things are shifting for sure. I think as things are right now, people are still searching for recipes. They’re still going to sites to get recipe content, but inevitably things will change.

But the thing that will continue to exist throughout it all is if you are good at creating and connecting, creating and helping, creating and entertaining. There are going to be opportunities for you to do that ongoing. The platform might change, how you do it might change. But if you’re good at that core thing and you’re willing to evolve, there’ll always be opportunities for you to serve an audience and to connect with people.

Dianne Jacob: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s interesting to see your evolution in pausing your blog and spinning up your Substack newsletter. So can you talk about the decision to do that and what you’ve learned along the way?

Dianne Jacob: Well, I’m lucky in that David Lebovitz, who’s a huge blogger and author, has mentored me. And he’s an early adopter, which is cool. He is not 25, but he still gets really excited by new technology and wants to try things and master them. And so, he was on Substack for about a year, and then he paused his blog and he said, “I should do the same thing.” And I was terrified of pausing my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Why were you terrified of it?

Dianne Jacob: To your earlier point, things don’t have to go on forever in the same way. And you don’t really want anything to go on forever in the same way, unless you’re maybe a really dull person, I don’t know. Even when it’s working, you get a little impatient and you wonder what’s next, right? So I did it. I moved to Substack, and it’s much easier than blogging. SEO is not even a consideration. I kept asking them, I would email support and go, “How does SEO work into this?” Because we’re all obsessed with SEO. And I would get like, “No, no, that’s not how this model works.”

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s for people who don’t want to do SEO very freeing.

Dianne Jacob: Very freeing. And it works in that Substack creates a community that promotes each other. And so most of my growth on Substack has been from other Substack newsletters that recommend mine.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that naturally there’s other people who have a newsletter and they say, “Hey, be sure to check out this newsletter.”

Dianne Jacob: Well, the way that it works is really interesting because you have your homepage and you read X number of Substack newsletters yourself. And so Substack asks you, “Well, which of these would you like to recommend to your readers?” And then it prioritizes maybe three or four Substacks, and then you can write a letter of recommendation underneath. And so on my homepage, you’ll find people recommending my newsletter. But it’s really exciting to get like yesterday I got an email from Substack saying, “Jeremiah Tower just recommended your newsletter.” And you may not know who he is. He was a chef at Chez Panisse, and he lives in Mexico now with his husband and living a good life. But he’s an amazing storyteller. He wrote an outrageous post about what it was like at Chez Panisse in the early days when there was a lot of cocaine use in the kitchen.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is I’m sure so interesting. Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: All this crazy stuff. And it’s really fun to read his newsletter. And so, I was hugely flattered that he was recommending mine. He doesn’t need to learn how to start a blog or get published in the Washington Post or anything, which is my most recent one. So yeah, we feel subscriptions ourselves because you’re pre-approved, right? If this very well established person who’s writing a newsletter recommends your blog, then people will go and will click on it and see, “What is your newsletter? Well, oh, what is that newsletter? Let me check it out.” Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What’s exciting for me is it feels like, and we interviewed David on the podcast a long time ago. I don’t know him super well, but I have a huge amount of respect for him. And the idea of somebody like David doing keyword research to find how to get the least competitive keyword for a certain recipe is like, “No,” it just feels like sacrilegious because of his… And again, I don’t know him super well. It feels like baked into his soul, who he is. It’s so genuinely, and what does it look like to let that be its purest form?

And for a season, publishing on your blog was that. It was a place where people would follow along with you. There wasn’t as much consideration around search optimization, and that worked really well for that season for people who wrote in that way. But as the industry shifted, as it changed, people spend more time on social now to get those connections. They’re not doing that on blogs naturally. You talked about this season where you’d publish something and you’d have 50 comments, and that just doesn’t exist anymore. And as that’s shifted, there are people who are really, really good at keyword research and finding a piece of content to write about and doing the recipe development, having a system for it. And that’s their wave, and that’s awesome. And they’ve figured it out.

But the thing that I think is important, and you point this out and David’s story is an example of this as well, is being light on your feet and saying, “Okay, where’s a good place for me with these skills and these abilities to go that’s going to serve me well?” And it feels like Substack is a great example of that for somebody who is a writer, who has rich story, who connects with their audience. Do you feel like there’s other places similar Substack for writers? Where are the other places that writers should think about living or going? Or is it really newsletters, email, or even-

Dianne Jacob: Newsletters, email, blogs. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s what you would say.

Dianne Jacob: If you want to write for the Washington Post or food and wine, great. I don’t think it’s the same thing, because there are gatekeepers and you can’t do it on a regular basis. You can with your own product.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You’re asking permission more than just doing it.

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. They’re not going to publish something that you wrote every week.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. That makes sense. It feels like there’s also an opportunity for certain platforms for people who are writers to bend at the platform in a certain way. Twitter as an example, I see a lot of people being successful on Twitter in these niche communities, writing in really creative ways. Does that feel true or do you feel like it’s hard to find that in the food world?

Dianne Jacob: Well, Twitter’s having a moment right now where people have left and we’re not sure about what’s next. And so it’s hazy and people aren’t participating as much, is what I’m noticing. One of the things that’s disturbing about Twitter is all the fake news that gets put on there. And it is one of the things I worry about with AI. I don’t think in food writing, it’s not a fake news situation, but it could be very serious if AI is used as a tool to put a lot more fake stuff out into the world. And I don’t have any doubt that it would be, and it’s like we’re already in a bad enough situation right now with it so-

Bjork Ostrom: Generating, convincing, not true content.

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Dianne Jacob: Fortunately, food writing is not about that. It’s a lot more joyous than that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not exactly our world, right?

Dianne Jacob: We’re having fun. We don’t have to make stuff up that could harm other people.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. The stakes aren’t quite as high.

Dianne Jacob: No.

Bjork Ostrom: As maybe the world of politics or something like that. So to get back to Substack before we get too far away from it, can you talk about even just the mechanics of how it works? So for you, have a newsletter people sign up for it, and then once a week, do you send out a premium newsletter and does that have additional material in it? Is it once a month? What have you seen other people do that works well? And then what are you doing as you get to know the platform?

Dianne Jacob: Well, when you start it, you’re going to be free because you’re just getting started and it’s just going to be a free newsletter because you have to figure out how to get it to be a paid newsletter, and it’s very much blogging. I find it a lot easier to use than WordPress because you can’t really mess around with it that much. They have a format and you have to stick to it. In a way that’s good. So you have to decide, same as with blogging, how often you’re going to send something out, and then eventually they’re going to want you to go to paid how they make money, and you get all these encouraging emails, “When should you go paid? Here’s how to do it.” And so, you have to figure out what of your content should be paid. A lot of people are putting recipes behind a paywall. So that’s one approach. And what I’m wondering is can Bard and ChatGPT access your content if it’s behind a paywall?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. On a site, I think it probably depends on how the paywall is set up, but yeah.

Dianne Jacob: But is it engineered to overcome paywalls and go and grab your content? It’s the same question, right?

Bjork Ostrom: I sure hope not, but maybe.

Dianne Jacob: I hope not too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. But I wouldn’t be surprised at the same time.

Dianne Jacob: Right. And then sometimes people do cooking classes or cook alongs or private sessions or… So you just have to figure out, “Well, what is it that people will pay for?” And it’s a good question because that’s so different from blogging where everything is free pretty much, and you’re making your money from ads unless you’re going to try and sell an ebook or something.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, go ahead, finish that thought, and then I have to.

Dianne Jacob: Well, you have to figure out how often. Is once a week too much? I only send out two a month unless there’s some breaking news. When I was on David’s podcast, I put that up as soon as I could, and sometimes I’ll do what’s called the thread where you ask people a question and you hope that there’s going to be a big response, and they’re going to interact with each other in the answers. So you have to figure all that out.

What’s nice about it is that it doesn’t feel like you’re paying fees because there isn’t a lump sum, it is a lump sum, and then stuff gets deducted from it. Stripe is processing all the payments, so they charge a fee and then stack charges a fee. So you just get money transferred into your bank account and-

Bjork Ostrom: Which is great.

Dianne Jacob: … and it’s really weird. Some days it’ll be $4 and 25 cents was deposited in your bank account, and some days it’ll be $350 was deposited into your bank account. I don’t know what they’re doing, but-

Bjork Ostrom: How it all works. Sure. But the idea, and what I love about that, and one of the things we often talk about is, “Okay, if you can make $100 in a month from doing a thing, you can probably make $200.” And what does it look like to play the numbers game with that and think strategically, and I think the numbers game is easier when it’s subscriptions versus ad revenue. It’s easier to see, “Okay, if I get 1,000 subscribers, here’s how much I could make.” Let’s work backwards from that and see, “Okay, if I know that every 100 people who sign up one of them becomes paid, what does that look like?” Starting to do the math around that.

Dianne Jacob: They will tell you the math. They will tell you what the percentages of people.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, do you know what they are off the top of your head?

Dianne Jacob: I can’t remember. 5% maybe.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Which is I guess higher than I thought it would be. Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. But okay. But see, I’m thinking about the magazine model. When I was a magazine editor, it was ads that paid my salary not subscriptions, because ads adds so much more.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. The subscriptions were essentially just a mechanism cost so much Yeah. Right.

Dianne Jacob: How much can you charge for a subscription you can’t charge?

Bjork Ostrom: I think it depends on what you’re delivering. If you’re telling people where gold is buried, probably a lot. So I think it really depends on all of the variables of market and product and…

Dianne Jacob: Well, it depends, but at least in the magazine model, one of the reasons so many magazines, the main reason why magazines went under is because all their advertisers left and went to Google and Facebook because it was cheaper.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, more effective. More impactful.

Dianne Jacob: One page in the New York Times is, I don’t know, $50,000 for a full page ad or something. And then if you’re just getting people to subscribe for a $25 a year. It takes a lot of subscribers

Bjork Ostrom: Subscribers to make that substantial. Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: Yeah. And it’s the same with Substack. If you’re charging, I think their base is $30 a year or $5 a month, I think, you got to have a lot of paid subscribers for that to add up to something. And so, of course, for the great majority of people, it’ll be a little supplemental income, but since you’re not Alison Roman, then it’s not going to buy you a house in New York.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. We talk about occasionally on the podcast, this idea of the egg carton method, but you have this egg carton and visualize filling those in different ways to get you to the point where your goal income is. If your goal is to produce income as a creator, one of the ways you can think of it is not just one source, but to say, “Okay, I can maybe get $500 a month from ad revenue from my blog in the beginning stages.” Obviously, any of those, like you said, could be massively successful. But when you’re first starting out, if you want to get there, what does that look like? Okay. You can do some consulting. You can do a subset newsletter, get really good at that. Starting to fill those in little by little to get you to the point where you’re like, “Okay, now I have part-time income, or potentially getting to the point where you have full-time income and stacking those up over time.”

Dianne Jacob: Well, I agree with you theoretically, especially at the beginning, but for the great majority of freelancers who earn money from their blogs, isn’t like 80 or 90% of their income from ads?

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Yep. I think if you were to look at anybody who’s creating in the food space and they’re creating strictly from digital income, the majority of it is ads on your blog. I think that will change. And I also think us as an example, when we were first starting out, I was making $250 or we $250 from the blog. I was doing consulting for people. I was working hard time. We had a product that we were selling. We had this ebook that we were selling. We’re doing affiliate related stuff.

So in the early stages, piecing these things together to get to a point where it’s like, “Okay, this is great. This is how we’re making our money.” I think usually what happens is out of that, there’s an expertise or a skill that somebody develops and that becomes their lead generator. Sometimes people get into it and they’re like, “I love photography.” And that one egg becomes their primary egg. They do freelance photography, or they realize they love development, or they develop a product and they sell that product.

One of the ways that you can come out of it is like you get good at getting traffic to your site, and so ads become the primary way. So I think long term, it usually becomes a lead and there’s one lead generator, and I think a lot of times then what happens is once you have the capacity to hire other people, you bring in other things that start to even out the egg carton a little bit. Like we started to sell meal plans, as an example.

Dianne Jacob: Meal plans, really?

Bjork Ostrom: We’re starting to diversify a little bit. Yeah. Yup.

Dianne Jacob: Oh, wow. I didn’t know. Do you still do that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we just started within the last year. Yeah.

Dianne Jacob: Oh, in the last year. Okay. I have to go check that out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This is awesome, Dianne. Super fun to connect. Anytime that we get to chat, it’s like you know the industry so well. I so appreciate your-

Dianne Jacob: Well, you too.

Bjork Ostrom: … deep knowledge around it and expertise. For those who’d want to work with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Dianne Jacob: Oh, just shoot me an email, dj@diannej.com. D-I-A-N-N-E-J.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And check out your Substack as well.

Dianne Jacob: Sure. I would love that. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, awesome.

Dianne Jacob: It’s the same content for anyone who’s writing about food, basically. And although I don’t really cover a lot of historical writing, it’s not anything. It’s not fiction. But it’s for food bloggers and food writers, so…

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. You could just search Dianne Jacob’s Substack and it would bring you there.

Dianne Jacob: Yep, diannejacob.substack.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Dianne, thanks so much for coming on. Great to connect.

Dianne Jacob: Thank you. Great to see you.

Alexa Peduzzi: And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed it, and we hope you got a lot out of this episode. But the Food Blogger Pro Podcast is just one element of what we do here at Food Blogger Pro. We also have a membership, and that is a community site where we teach people like you how to start and grow their own food blogs through courses, through events, through forum discussions, and more. The Food Blogger Pro membership is just a great place to be if you’re really ready to level up your blog and your online food business because we have just so much awesome content for you as soon as you join.

Every month, we like to add new content to the site so that your membership is always growing in value, and August is no different. So on August 3rd, we have a new coaching call and coaching calls are new this year, and they give a member of the Food Blogger Pro community a chance to jump on a call with Bjork and ask him a bunch of questions about their blogs, their businesses, and pretty much anything under the sun. They’re always just really great conversations, and all Food Blogger Pro members can benefit from the conversations as they’re recorded and then published. So our coaching call with Delete will be available on August 3rd, and in that coaching call, Bjork and Delete will talk about how to differentiate yourself in this space, how to become an expert, establishing your niche, getting started with video, and so much more. It’s a really, really great coaching call, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it.

Then on August 17th, we have a Q&A with the one, the only, Andrew Wilder from Nerd Press. Andrew is one of our longtime experts here at Food Blogger Pro, and he’s going to be joining Bjork to talk about some of the plugins and site speed tools that he recommends for bloggers. It’s a really great topic and one that’s top of mind, especially as we’re slowly but surely heading into Q4 this year. We want to make sure that our sites are up to snuff, so definitely make sure to check that out.

Then on August 24th, we have a brand new course all about Canva coming out. Now, Canva is such a powerful tool, and there are so many features within Canva that you might not even be using if you’re already familiar with the tool. So definitely get excited for that. And then we have a blog post coming out on August 31st. That is our Foods Trending this fall blog post. You can find all of our past blog posts at foodbloggerpro.com/blog, but this one in particular is going to focus on some of the recipes and food ideas that your followers and readers may be searching for in fall. So it’s going to be a good one as well.

And that does it for our little, looking forward to August 2023 on Food Blogger Pro recap. If you’re interested in joining the membership or just learning more about it, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join. There’s all the information about the membership right there, and you can get signed up either with an annual or quarterly membership. But that does it for us this week. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we’ll see you next time.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s a question: are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool? Maybe it’s like Airtable or Asana, or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all. When it comes to optimizing and organizing your content, how do you know what to change? And how do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle?

With Clariti, all of that stuff is easier. It’s easier to keep track of things. It’s easier to know if the changes you’re making are having an impact … And that’s why we built it. We realized that we were using spreadsheets and cobbling together a system, and we wanted to create something that did that for you.

Clariti brings together WordPress data, Google data, like Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. And it brings all of that information into one place to allow you to make decisions, and also inform you about the decisions that you’ve made and if they’re having an impact.

I could talk on and on about the features, but the best way to understand it is to get in and to work with the tool yourself. And the good news is Clariti’s offering 50% off of your first month if you sign up. And you can do that by going to clariti.com/food. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to check it out. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Matt Briel from Lulu. Matt is the vice president of marketing and communications at Lulu, which is a print on demand, self-publishing, and distribution platform.

In this interview, Bjork and Matt chat about the differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing, or print on demand, and why you might want to consider self-publishing a cookbook.

Matt talks a lot about what it takes to be successful when self-publishing a cookbook: hiring a team, promoting your book, and other things you’ll want to consider. If you’ve ever dreamed about self-publishing your own cookbook, or publishing your cookbook any other route, this is a super-informative listen, and we know you’ll get a lot out of it.

Just a quick reminder here: that next week’s podcast episode will be coming out on July 5th, which is a Wednesday, even though we normally release episodes on Tuesday. Because of the 4th of July holiday here in the US, we will be releasing the episode a day late. So keep an eye out for that wonderful episode next Wednesday in your podcast feeds.

And with that, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Briel: Thanks. Good to be here. I appreciate it, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to start by … I’m actually going to pull a little line here in about you, which I really appreciated. It says, “I’m a combination of equal parts loud music, Disney culture, tattoos, and book nerds.” Which it feels like if you’re playing a game of Build a Person, those would be the foremost random cards that you could pull … but all really awesome.

So the two that I’m specifically interested in: loud music. When you say “loud music,” in what category? What is that?

Matt Briel: Oh, gosh. Okay. You’re about to lose most of your listeners right now.

No, I grew up on a lot of punk rock and metal. Then as I got older, you would think that that would’ve softened, but it actually leaned even harder into a lot of stuff that’s Borg labeled; what they would call hardcore and deathcore. But a lot of it’s also kind of silly. But yeah, the loud music refers to that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Loud music, both in the general feel of it, but also probably the volume at which you listen.

Matt Briel: Yes, absolutely. Both ways.

Bjork Ostrom: But then, Disney culture coming right after that. Are you a Disney fanatic?

Matt Briel: I am absolutely a Disney fanatic. Yes. I was born and raised in Florida, so around Disney, obviously. Then in college, I worked at Disney for a while, and that solidified my love of Disney and Disney culture and just …

I think back then I didn’t realize it, but I really think latched onto a lot of the culture that was their employment and hiring practices, and the way they treated their employees. And I think maybe that’s what resonated with me beyond just the whole lore of Disney.

But I always gravitated towards Walt Disney as well, and just some of the stuff that he did. Then later in life, especially as I could afford it, I’d start going back all the time. And especially now that I don’t live in Florida anymore, I go even more so.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Matt Briel: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: My really good friend has a podcast with, I think it’s three other dads, maybe two other dads in his neighborhood called Disney World Is Awesome.

Matt Briel: Oh, wow.

Bjork Ostrom: They just get together once a week and they’re like, “Let’s talk about the three best rides to go on with kids.” And they’ll all go around and debate. Or they’re like, “Let’s do a virtual walkthrough of EPCOT,” or something like that. All of these different-

Matt Briel: Yeah, I love that stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: … kind of nostalgia, trying to access the magic of Disney. So a little shout out to the Disney World Is Awesome Podcast.

Matt Briel: I’ll have to find that. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But also have a huge expertise in sales and marketing. You’ve been working in that world a really long time. And most recently, and what we’re going to be talking about today, in the world of self-publishing books.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: You work for Lulu, which is a company that helps people do that. How did that come about? How did you get into the world of self-publishing, as we use that as a transition into talking about how digital publishers can publish physical books?

Matt Briel: I’d like to say it was pure luck, but it wasn’t. I went to school; my degree was in English and creative writing; and I always thought I’d work for a publisher. And after college, I realized that was not the path for me; at least not initially, because they didn’t pay very well. And there was a lot of red tape … and not enough loud music, honestly.

But later in life, about seven years ago, my wife was working for Lulu at the time, in a completely different department. I was looking to transition away from where I was at, and they just happened to be hiring for a growth hacker in marketing. I interviewed and got the job, and never looked back since.

Always had an affinity for books and reading and writing. And again, early on in college, I always thought I would work for a publisher. I just came full circle in a stroke of either luck, or just because I have an awesome wife … one way or the other.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, probably both.

Matt Briel: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: So my guess is in that position of growth hacker marketer, the intent is Lulu’s bringing you on to think strategically about growing and building the business for Lulu.

But a piece of that also, I would imagine, with a company like yours, any success that you find in getting more books sold is also success for the creator that you’re working with. Their success is your success.

How much of what you’re doing is thinking about how do you sell more books? Because then you benefit from that, Lulu benefits from that, versus growth in general as a marketing engine for Lulu?

Matt Briel: Yeah, you’re 100% right. In fact, you already know more at this point than I did when I first came to Lulu. About what we do and what my job would be.

But absolutely, the business model that Lulu has, and some other self-publishers, is that we actually only make money when books are sold: because we don’t charge any fees upfront or anything like that. So it’s in our best interest to help our customers sell more books.

I’d say a good 70 to 80% of my time and my marketing team’s time is spent on finding ways to help our users sell more books. Whether that’s exploring new technology that we then take to our development team and say, “Hey, can we build this in? Or can we create this?” Or whether that’s just understanding what the latest trends in marketing and sales are. That is the focus of most of the time that we spend on what we do, is educating and helping users sell more books.

The other 30 to 40% of our time is really spent on some of the normal marketing activities around any brand or business, whether it’s PR-related things or stuff like that. But you’re right: the bulk of it is really helping people sell more books.

Bjork Ostrom: Can we talk about the mechanics of what it would look like? Let’s just use the cookbook publishing world as an example.

Matt Briel: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: I think people have generally a good idea of what it looks like if you’re going the traditional publishing route, where you get an advance. And that money is this upfront payment that you have to pay back over time.

If the book does well, eventually you’ll get into a point where you’ll collect royalties, or you’ll collect an additional percentage … Fingers crossed for anybody who’s not watching. Point being, a lot of times that doesn’t happen, depending on what the deal is. So the advance really is what you’re getting, unless it sells really well.

The other world is self-publishing: where you’re not getting an advance, but everything that you do sell is, or potentially is, just profit in your pocket.

Can you talk about maybe some of the mechanics of what it looks like to sell a self-published book? And my understanding it would be print on demand. Is that always true? Or is that specifically what Lulu’s doing?

Matt Briel: It’s not always true. These days, you will find that more and more self-publishers utilize print on demand versus the other way, which is offset printing. It’s just more cost-effective for both parties involved in the long term.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about the difference between those two?

Matt Briel: Sure. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For those who aren’t familiar?

Matt Briel: And it’s much better for the environment. You have print on demand and you have offset printing.

Offset printing is what most books in bookstores are using to print. It’s the process of printing 5,000 copies of one book at one time. So the machines, you don’t have to switch out rolls of paper or anything quite as frequently, and it’s a little more cost-effective to do it that way.

Most of the inexpensive printers that are located in China, that’s offset printing. You can go and get 5,000 copies of a pretty standard book printed in China for relatively cheaply, then shipped back over here. And then you figure out how to fulfill them, to ship them out for every order that comes in.

Versus print on demand, which utilizes pretty much the same kind of printers, although more on the digital end: and a lot more, I think, innovative these days. And that digital printers that are set up for print on demand, they’re able to print one book at a time. I mean one specific book, one after the other, different types of books.

So you could load up on one machine, 57 different books and print one copy of each of those 57 books in a single roll of paper within minutes of a time. So it’s much more ecologically friendly, and it’s much better for somebody who is maybe only selling 10 copies a day of their book, or two copies a day, or even 500 copies a day. It’s just a little bit more economic and ecologically friendly.

Offset printing requires a large upfront investment as well, as you can imagine. So if you’re going to order a couple thousand copies of your book upfront and have them offset printed to save some money, you still have to pay all that upfront. Then they’ll get printed and shipped over, usually from China or India. And then you have to store them and then ship them out. Whereas with print on demand, there’s no upfront fees.

Again, as a book sells, it’s then printed and shipped, and it’s paid for at that time. It also helps to offset the costs upfront for anybody who’s looking to get into it in a low-cost way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. You talked about it being ecologically friendly. Is the reason that’s true because you’re not potentially having a bunch of inventory that doesn’t sell? Or is it more of the shipping that’s happening when you purchase overseas? It has to be shipped over and everything that goes into that?

Matt Briel: It’s both. I was going to go into that when I went back to your original question of the mechanics of the two. But that’s a great, great question. And it’s both.

Ecologically friendly: we’re referring to, again, let’s say a traditional publisher, Simon & Schuster, wants to do your cookbook. The initial run is probably going to be something like 10,000 copies. They’ll stock a bunch of Barnes & Noble with it and other stores. And so their offset print facilities in China will print the 10,000 copies, ship them over to the States and anywhere else that they’re going to be sold.

And then what happens is if those books don’t sell, there’s a number of different things that could happen. But almost always, it results in waste. There are some recycling possibilities. But these days, what they do with pulping books and recycling books really isn’t that much more friendly for the environment.

Then on top of that, yes, when you talk about shipping items to the United States from other countries, there’s the obvious carbon footprint there of … Again, you’re loading them into containers. They’re put on ships that are crossing the ocean, and all of the trucks and everything else to deliver those books from the different ports to the stores.

Again, with print on demand, you’re eliminating a lot of that: but especially the upfront waste that can happen, too.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Matt Briel: That’s a great question.

Bjork Ostrom: And in the case of let’s say you’re printing on demand: can you talk through what that looks like start to finish?

Matt Briel: Yep. Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: So somebody comes on and they say, “I want to buy one of these books. Here’s my address, here’s my credit card.” What happens on the back end?

Matt Briel: Absolutely. In the situation where somebody is selling their book directly from their website, which is what we always push; then you go on and you buy, let’s say, my cookbook from my website.

What happens if they’re using us, what’ll happen is because of the direct integration, you’ll click Buy, you’ll put in your credit card info right there, make the purchase. That order data is transmitted behind the scenes from my website to Lulu’s print facility. That book will be printed and shipped directly to you. And most of it happens seamlessly behind the scenes.

And what has happened on the front side, if I’m the creator of that cookbook, is I’ve created that book and I’ve loaded my files into Lulu. And inside of my Lulu user interface, if I’m using Shopify, I’ve connected to my Shopify store. Or if I’m WooCommerce for WordPress or any of those other things. So it’s actually pretty easy and seamless. Once the connection is made, that data’s just transmitted automatically for every transaction.

The really cool thing is that if I’m the seller of that book, if it’s my cookbook that you just bought, I’m collecting all that money up front immediately. Then when the book is printed and shipped from Lulu, I just pay whatever the small manufacturing shipping cost is. That’s different than any other retail model, so that’s really cool, too.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being, the transaction happens. Lulu takes a significant cut because it has to, because of the book being printed. That’s the most expensive part. But then you as the creator, get your percentage of that. In the case of Lulu, is it in a Lulu account that then you can transfer into your bank account? Or does it directly go into your bank account? How does that work?

Matt Briel: No, that’s the beauty of it. What you’re describing is a mix of selling direct and the old way of … If you’re self-publishing, and a lot of times maybe you did it through Amazon or one of the others, they take a huge cut. If you’re selling direct from Lulu, we’re not actually taking a huge cut.

So if you set the retail price of your cookbook at, let’s say, 25.99, and it costs us, let’s say, $8.50 to print it, that’s what you’re getting charged. So you’re keeping every last bit of that.

Whereas in a different model; if you’re using Amazon and you’re selling through Amazon; they’re going to take the manufacturing cost. But then they’re also going to take a percentage of the royalties, like you said.

Bjork Ostrom: Marketplace cost for-

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Then when it comes to the actual receiving the funds, because you’re the one facilitating the transaction on your website using Shopify or whatever it is you’re using, it’s actually super easy. You have that money immediately. You’re not waiting for it from Lulu. In fact, you just have a payment on file with Lulu, so you might keep a credit card on file with Lulu.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. It’s the other way around.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: You get all the money, and then it … that makes sense what you’re saying.

Matt Briel: 100% the other way around. That’s the way it should be, to be honest with you.

Bjork Ostrom: So you sell a book for $25, somebody buys it. There’s a, whatever, 3% credit card fee that goes into it, like there would be with any other transaction.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: And then it triggers the process on Lulu’s side to print the book.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: And then you have some automatic payment set up to say, “Okay, you printed this book, shipped it. We’re going to cover the cost of the printing and the shipping.”

But in my mind, one of the things that exists is, “Oh, usually if you’re self-publishing or just in general, if you’re selling a book or cookbook, it’s single-digit dollars that you’re getting.” But you’re saying that doesn’t always have to be the case.

My guess is one of the biggest variables is what type of book you’re publishing. Is it every page color and hardcover book? That’s the biggest equation that you’re working with from a cost perspective?

Matt Briel: That’s right, 100%. With taking on the process of selling direct, you also take on a little bit of the responsibility to understand what type of book you’re going to create.

If you create top-of-the-line 8–1/2 by 11, full premium color on the inside; full, beautiful, photographic color, everything; yes, the cost to manufacture that book is going to be a little bit more. And you may have to sell it for more.

Quite frankly, I was at Barnes & Noble the other day. Really high-end cookbooks that are full color, they’re not cheap. But they’re also not cheap to produce. So something like that, let’s say 150 to 200 pages, you’re probably going to sell that for between 30 and $40. And it’s probably going to cost you about a third of that to produce it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Matt Briel: But you’re keeping all of the rest of that. Whereas you go, again, with anybody else, you probably are bringing home single-digit dollar numbers.

I think the most important thing here is that understanding with what technology exists now versus three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you are able to obviously keep a lot more of your profit and handle all of that stuff up front. And tools like Shopify or some of the others on the front end, you can spin up a website in a day that looks beautiful.

And Shopify’s tools, they’re going to handle all of the processing fees for the credit cards, the taxes, all of that stuff. It’s become really easy to be your own store.

So for people who have built up a blog following, or a lot of traffic or anything like that, you’ve got that audience already. And so the last step there in your journey really is to just sell the products directly, instead of letting the retailer take a cut.

The other side to that, though, the real benefit, I think, and what people really need to start paying attention to, is that when you do something like that, when you take that on, you are keeping all of the customer data. That’s something new that nobody really gives you. When you sell through a third party retailer, you don’t get any of that. You have no idea who bought your book, which means you also can’t really remarket to them.

Even if you have 100,000 followers and you say, “Hey, my cookbook’s coming out tomorrow. Please, everybody go buy it. I’ll put a link up,” or whatever that might be; and you send them to a third-party retailer, you really have no idea how many of them actually bought it, or who bought it. So when you come out with the next version or some other product or an online course about how to make the perfect dumpling or something, you don’t have that built-in database. And that’s the real benefit.

So if you’re interested in building a long-term following and a long-term business from your content, it’s imperative that you start collecting data as soon as possible, if you’re not already.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Love that. And it’s interesting, in the world of publishing; you would know this better than I would; but it seems like there’s really been a shift where 15 years ago, 20 years ago, what would’ve happened is you would’ve been relying on the power behind the marketing engine with a publishing house. Where; and I think this probably still exists; they’re going to be able to get you in front of people in certain ways and have connections. And that’s all still very real.

But what also is true, and has shifted, is that individuals now have an immense amount of power to be marketers. They have a following on social, they have an email list, they have obviously a blog. And I’ve heard; we haven’t experienced it, because we haven’t gotten through the process ourselves; but I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the expectation in their relationship with publishing a book was that they are going to be the ones that are promoting it, marketing it, selling it. They take on the role of not only creator of a cookbook, but also then marketer of that cookbook to their audience, which makes sense. You have an audience, you have a following; it’s the best place to go for that.

But I can see how, in certain situations, it would make sense to say, “You know what? I’m going to go through the process of doing this on my own, and place the bet that this is going to do well, and that I’m going to capture more of that.”

You talk about going into Barnes & Noble and looking at one of those hardcover books, it’s maybe 30, $40. Are you able to produce a similar type of product on demand? Or are there limitations in terms of the type of product that you can get in on demand versus printing 5,000 copies?

Matt Briel: Yeah, no, that’s great. And what you said leading up to that question was also pretty spot on. I mean, the differences between what you might have got 15 years ago being traditionally published and now, there’s a huge delta there. In fact, most traditional publishers these days don’t want to take anybody on unless they have a massive following already.

The marketing budgets for traditional publishers is tiny these days. They don’t want to do any of that. So you’re right. I mean, they’re looking for people who have a following already, because that’s the easiest place to start.

So when you talk about traditional versus self-publishing and the quality of the books, it’s actually in many cases better on the self-publishing side, when you’re using digital print on demand, because of how advanced the technology has gotten. You can imagine if I say “offset printing press,” exactly what you’re thinking about in your head is very similar to what’s going on.

So when you think about digital printing presses or digital printing machines and book creation machines, also what you’re thinking about is pretty much what it looks like. All the innovation is happening there, and the quality happens there.

We have examples of people who’ve created amazing, beautiful cookbooks, photo books, art books, using all the premium-color presets that we have. You could set that next to a book on a bookshelf in any bookstore, and you would not be able to tell the difference. In some cases, the self-published one that was print on demand might look better, actually.

That quality component has come a really long way. Which honestly, I think has been a big part of what’s helped self-publishing take advantage of the shift that’s been happening that you just talked about.

If the quality hadn’t caught up to some of the other technology that’s made it easier to self-publish, then we still wouldn’t be experiencing what we’re doing, what we’re seeing right now. So the quality keeping pace with the technology on the other side of publishing, I think is what’s made for that perfect storm.

The quality is no longer a question. Any self-publisher that can’t show you an example of a quality book is definitely one that you don’t want to go with.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Briel: But amazing, beautiful books. Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think probably what exists in my mind is one of the realities of what you have to deal with in self-publishing is, there is no gatekeeper. And that’s why it’s wonderful. Anybody can self-publish a cookbook, whereas in the traditional publishing world, there are lots of gatekeepers.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: But what ends up happening then is there’s a natural selection process for who can eventually do a traditional publishing. And they probably have graphic design departments and support and all these different filters that something has to pass through before it gets published traditionally.

With self-publishing, what you’re saying and what we’re talking about, is the actual product: the color quality, how do the pages look, how’s it put together? But it’s like you could come in and use clip art from the ’90s and technically still self-publish something. There’s nobody that’s going to stop you from doing that.

So then what has to happen is if you want something that is to the standard of traditional publishing, you have to have the product that you’re creating, the digital pieces of that that eventually get printed: the design, the writing, the quality of the pictures. All of that stuff has to be up to a certain standard.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you see in the finished products that are at that traditional publishing level, but are actually self-published? Are you able to identify any commonalities or themes for people who get an end product that is just excellent? What are they doing to get to that level?

Matt Briel: Yeah, the commonality there is that they paid somebody to help them, plain and simple.

Self-publishing is what it says. Literally, like you said, there’s no gatekeeper. So you can step up to the plate and publish a cookbook, or any other book for that matter, in any way that you want. You can use Microsoft Paint from 10 years ago and put out something that is arguably subpar. If that’s your brand and you’re comfortable doing that, you can do that.

The really high-quality stuff that we see coming through right now, they are utilizing freelance help; or they have friends that are designers or editors. Or the point is they’re getting help. So the files, by the time they’re getting uploaded into Lulu, the cover file was done usually in a pretty top-notch program like Adobe or Affinity or our cover tool.

We just released a new version. It’s actually pretty advanced. You can create a really nice cover on Lulu now, which is great: because up until about a year ago, our cover tool was pretty garbage as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Matt Briel: But yeah, the commonality is you get some help. You don’t go it alone, even though it is self-publishing. And it’s not as expensive as you would think these days. There’s a lot of great designers and editors and layout people who are on Fiverr, 99designs.

You probably know somebody and maybe you don’t even realize it, and it gives you another opportunity to connect with other creators in the process. But again, you could design or have designed and composed a really nice book, whether it’s a cookbook or not, for less than 700, $500. It’s not hard, but I would recommend it.

That is the common theme to any book you see coming through a self-publishing platform that looks like it was produced by Simon & Schuster.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that you are working with somebody who’s really good at what they do.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: You can probably find those people, like you said, in those marketplaces. My guess is also in; as is often the case with freelancers, contractors, anybody that you’re working with; as you get more of that better skill level, better history, the price also probably goes up.

Somebody with a lot of history who’s had repeated success with it, definitely can find those people for 250 bucks on … Not Upwork; what is it now? Elance? No. Upwork.

Matt Briel: I don’t know what the new name is.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s Upwork. But point being; and I think this is a good takeaway; you’re building a team. Whereas if you go the traditional publishing route, they probably have those people, they have those recommendations, but they’re maybe expensive. So that’s either coming out of your advance, or built in in a way where you’re not getting paid as much because it’s a part of the budget.

So I think what’s great about it is for those who are hungry and ambitious and are used to working with a team, or have some specific skills and abilities in a certain area, it’s a way to do that same behavior that you’re doing online, but creating a physical product. And instead of somebody doing a web design, they’re doing book design; and somebody doing blog copy, they’re doing book copy.

And so you can see for people in the digital publishing space, I can imagine a lot of that crossing over in terms of skills and abilities.

Matt Briel: There’s not a lot of difference, either, though, these days. Again, let’s say, like you just alluded to, if you’re just a graphic designer by trade and you’re used to doing mostly web design or working on some other types of graphics for other clients, designing a book cover is not much different than a homepage on a website these days. You’re literally working with certain templates and size parameters. And so these days you’re not seeing that it’s that far of a stretch, and there’s a lot more designers that are adding that to their services offered. It is easier to find it.

And you’re right, the level of expertise and quality will probably change at each price point break. But we’ve definitely, on a pretty regular basis, seeing quite a few coming through where it did not cost an arm and a leg at all. So you’re right there.

Bjork Ostrom: What are the book-specific experts that you should have on your team? Because I’ve never published a book; I wouldn’t know. But I would imagine similar to running a website or building an Instagram following, once you really understand the industry, there’s a lot of nuanced insights or advice or tips that you can have. Even thinking of, how do you best structure table of contents? What does the flow of a book look like?

Are there experts or advisors that you could hire? In traditional publishing they’d maybe have that. They’d say, “Here are the steps.” Is there somebody who would do that in the self-publishing world that can come alongside you and help fill those different positions? Or the unique positions that maybe exist that we don’t think about?

Matt Briel: Yes, absolutely. Again, another great question and point is that, again, if you go with a traditional publisher, if you’re lucky enough, they do have a team that does a lot of that. If you’re self-publishing and you want to do it right, you do need to find some of that guidance and some of that help.

There are people out there that specifically operate in the world of book layout and book design. That’s all they do, so that stuff is just second nature to them. Table of contents, where do the copyright page go? Metadata, all those things. We actually have templates and things like that on our site for all that as well.

Again, if you’re overly ambitious and you really want to go at this yourself and give it a shot, you can do it. That’s the beauty of a lot of this, too: is that for so long, the gatekeepers did a really good job of not only gatekeeping, but also making people think that this was just too hard to do on your own. And it really isn’t.

I promise you: if somebody like me could figure it out, anybody in your audience could figure this out. It’s not complicated, but there are people that specialize in it. They are easy to find. You won’t have trouble finding somebody to help you with that.

And some of this stuff sounds a little daunting, like, “Oh, table of contents and metadata; what is he talking about?” Those are all things that are oftentimes already packaged in a template you’ll find for free online, either with us or somewhere else. But you can find book layout and other people who specialize in those types of things.

Again, they’re all pretty good at what they do. We’ve not really seen anything come through where somebody utilized freelance help in the way of editing and layout and design. And it just threw us like, “Whoa, what in the hell are they …?” Most of the ones that we’ve seen, they’re really well done.

And so I think that if somebody goes out there and says, “Yeah, I specialize in this,” it’s pretty safe to say that they do. And honestly, you would know pretty quickly if they didn’t. Because what you would get back, even you would understand, “This is not a table of contents. This is not what a glossary or resources or footnotes look like. So I’m going to hard pass on this one.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Matt Briel: But yeah, there are people that specialize in that.

Bjork Ostrom: How about some success stories that you’ve had? I’m guessing that you’ve had a lot of exposure to different publishers; a lot of exposure, I would guess, even to people who are publishing cookbooks.

Can you talk about some of the people who have found success? And maybe why you think they did find success, whether sharing specifically who they are or not? Just in general, I think it’s helpful to hear stories that people have had around successful self-publishing.

Matt Briel: Yeah, I’m going to start from the backside of that question, because I think that’s important to define the success stories: is why they found success. We’ve talked a lot so far, we’ve crammed a lot in so far about publishing, traditional versus self-publishing, and some of those things.

I think what’s important to understand is that especially with this new wave of creators that have come on in the last three years or so, as people really start to understand just how fulfilling this can be to make a go of this as a career or whatever that might be, treating it like a business is something different than just doing it as a hobby.

When you flip that switch and you have that business mindset and you say, “Okay, I want to productize what I do,” or, “I want to monetize my content,” or, “I want to create a book for whatever purpose that might be,” or any other product, for that matter; it doesn’t necessarily have to be a book.

But the point is, is when you make that decision to turn it into a business, some of these things that we’ve just talked about, they become arbitrary. They fall away. So whether or not some of the old tried and true romantic notions about publishing still remain, it’s not important when you’re treating it like a business. You could treat self-publishing as merely a manufacturing goalpost. That’s it, right?

If I have, again, a food blog or website or some other business that’s parallel to food, for that matter, and I’ve worked hard to build an audience and I’m ready to monetize or productize what I do because I have an audience that’s ready for it as well, I’m merely looking for a manufacturer or a company, a business that can make this product for me.

So really what you’re looking at are the things that we most recently touched on, which is quality and delivery: getting it into market. And those are the things that matter. So looking at how fast I can get my product into market, and at the quality that people should come to expect from me as a creator and as a brand.

So some of that other stuff, really at the end of the day, becomes a little bit arbitrary.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say “the other stuff,” what do you mean?

Matt Briel: Yeah, so when we talk about things like advances or having a team at your disposal and working with a traditional publisher, things like that, that’s less of a concern when you’re approaching your product that’s based on the content that you’ve created. You really want to stay in control of all of that; you don’t want to give that control to anybody else.

Similar to anybody else that’s just started a business, whether that’s productized or whether it’s something that’s not necessarily monetized just yet, you don’t want to give any of that control over.

So in self-publishing, you keep total control over that. You decide who your team is going to be, you’re going to find a freelance designer, if you’re not a designer. Or if you don’t want to go at it yourself, you’re going to find an editor. You’re going to find the right person to help you lay it out.

But at the end of the day, you’re going to make the final decision about how that book looks, what paper weight it’s on, what stores you’ll sell it at, and how it’ll look on your site when you deliver it to market and all of those things.

Whereas with a traditional publisher, you’re really relegating yourself to the world of publishing. You’re saying, “Okay, I’m just a author. I’m going to give this book to Simon & Schuster now, and they’re going to do with it whatever they do with it. I’m just the author of that book. I don’t actually own it. It’s not my business. It’s their business now.”

And oftentimes what’ll happen is what goes to market is not the cover that you chose. It might not even be the title you chose. In fact, they might cut out 20% of the recipes you had in there. But you don’t have any control over that anymore; you lost that.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, they can also decide to stop publishing it, right?

Matt Briel: That’s right, 100%. Again, in that scenario, you’re an author; you’re not a creator or a business owner. In this scenario, you’re a business owner, you’re a creator; this is yours. Again, some of those other things, they’re not as important anymore because you’re not doing this to be an author and be published by a big traditional publishing company. You’re doing this because it’s what you want to do.

And if it’s a long-term game, the things that you really should focus on are what we’re about to talk about: which again, are quality, money, delivery to market, logistics, those kind of things.

So when we see these success stories, and I’ve got a few here for sure, those are the things that they have focused on. They worked to build an audience around what they were doing. All of the ones, or the few that I’m going to talk about here, they were bloggers; still are. And again, got to a point where they realized, “It’s time to monetize or productize what I do, I have an audience that’s asking for it, and I’m going to make a go of it.”

These three specifically, they went the route of selling direct. They all used Lulu, but only as a manufacturer. When one of their customers gets one of their books, it comes from them, so we white label it. It doesn’t come from Lulu, it comes from them. And they’ve all spent time to get a really nice finished product.

Bjork Ostrom: What you mean, “it comes from them,” just real quick: even on the return address, it says whatever the name of the brand is.

Matt Briel: Yeah, that’s right. One of the first ones I was going to talk about real briefly, this is Peachie Spoon. She has a great blog, obviously food related, and she talks a lot about blood sugar balance and things like that.

Again, beautiful book. She did a lot of full color on the inside. But she did a great job of building her audience first. She created the book. She worked with some people to help her create the book, connected it directly to her website, which is The Peachie Spoon. You can find the book there. And she offers it in two different formats. Sorry.

That’s really important for her, because she wanted to be able to offer it in a lower-cost option, which is a coil bound, so it can lay flat on the counter while you’re cooking or making these recipes.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Matt Briel: Then there’s a hardcover option, which is a little nicer and costs a little bit more, and obviously doesn’t lay flat quite as nicely on the counter when you’re cooking. But she did a wonderful job of creating these products, taking them to market, did a great job of hyping them up to her audience, and very quickly over 1,500 copies sold so far. Did a great job, and is continuing to push that book.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Matt Briel: Again, though, really treated it like a business and thought about, “Okay, what’s the best way to take this to market to my audience, and then grow beyond my audience?”

Another one is Lauren Levy. She does Lauren Fit Foodie, another really cool one. We like to use her as an example a lot. Also, pretty much the same story. Did a pretty good job of building an audience first and then realized, “This is a great opportunity for me to look at how to monetize my content.”

The obvious step for her was a book, but she decided to do a meal planner instead of just a traditional recipe book. Again, she’s at about over 2,000 copies sold so far. This is all direct to people who are already her audience. A great-looking book.

And then one of our favorites: this is a couple that they’re local to where we’re based out of, which is Chapel Hill, Raleigh-Durham area. This is Tiny Home, Big Flava, Justin and Juby.

When they created this book, which is all plant-based recipes, they … Kind of see it on the cover, for those of you who are watching the video. But if not, it’s them on the cover. And they lived, I believe, and still do, out of a converted school bus.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Matt Briel: That’s where they cooked all of their meals. And they basically put together 50 of their favorite recipes, all plant-based, into a beautiful book. I promise you this thing probably looks better than any book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Again, when it was time to push this out, they told their audience, “Hey, we appreciate all the support. We’ve got a book coming out. We’d love for you to buy it directly from us.” And again, wonderful sales numbers for them.

But that business mindset: it wasn’t that they were going to create a book, then find a traditional publisher to take it off their hands, and they were just cookbook authors. They wanted to completely own that business and make a better life through some of those choices they made.

So a lot of this also, like we said, just revolves around how much control do you want of your content? What are your goals? There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, I want to be famous for my recipes. I want to be the next, I don’t know, Joanna Gaines or whoever’s really out there on TV all day every day right now.”

That’s fine if that’s your goal. Then if that’s the case, you should shop that around the traditional publishers and look for the best deal. But if this is something you want to do long term, you enjoy creating content, and you want ways to monetize it, I think this is the best route for creators these days, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. One of the things we talk about occasionally is this concept of an egg carton method for diversification of income. It’s not that you have to have 12 sources of income, but it’s just a visual for people to think about.

Okay, if your goal is to get to a certain amount, whatever that dollar amount is, one of the ways you could think about it is like, “Okay, I’m going to get this much money from advertising, and it’s all going to come from advertising on my blog; or this much from sponsored content.”

But another way you could approach it is you could say, “I’m going to try and make $1,000 a month from publishing a cookbook. I’m going to try and make $1,000 from ads.” And you can start to fill those different spots in the egg carton with different income sources.

This, to me, feels like a really tangible way to do that, where you can say, “Okay, what would it take for me?” And you can break it down. “If I’m going to make $10 per published cookbook or whatever that number might be, and I want to make an additional $5,000 a year, $10,000 a year from it, how do I do the math on that to say I need to get to selling one a day or two a day, or whatever it might be.”

And you can play the numbers game with that in a way that’s maybe a little bit more abstract or difficult in the world of traditional publishing: where you can’t play the numbers game in the same way, because it’s more obscured. And maybe even if you are selling really well, maybe you haven’t earned your advance back yet.

Matt Briel: Well, that’s the other part of it too, right? When you publish traditionally; if you’re lucky enough, by the way; we talked about those gatekeepers. That’s literally what they’re paid to do: is to make sure that they filter out 99.5% of the manuscripts they get.

But if you’re lucky enough, and they do give you a decent advance, it will take you a while to advance out and to pay off that advance. Then once you do, you’re going to get a very small royalty per book sold after that. But these days, most people aren’t advancing out. It’s not common. It’s really hard to do.

I like that egg carton approach. That’s pretty cool. And we tell people all the time, “Yeah, absolutely. There are lots of ways to diversify and monetize your content. And you should explore whichever ones make sense for you. Never have all your eggs in one basket,” I guess, to follow the same pun.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Matt Briel: And the more reliant you are on one particular platform, the more danger you’re in of disrupting your financial flow. So having something like a book or … I don’t know, your own line of cookware where it’s not dependent upon whether or not some billionaire wakes up in the morning, deciding he wants to buy YouTube or Twitter and make it go crazy. You’re better off if you’ve got some more stability in your product lineup.

And with books, you literally can earn while you sleep. Because once you set it up, they’re just buying it right off your website, as long as you’re telling them where to get it and reminding them that it’s there.

Like you said, maybe you’ve got that goal set to sell 100 books a month, because you have a fixed amount you want to make. You just make sure you’re pushing that book at every opportunity you get.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about, as we close out, some additional questions that I think would be interesting? One of them is, can you talk about the benefits of a book that are non-financial? Because I know that that’s a huge component of it, too.

Matt Briel: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Even in the world of search, you see that where it can be a variable in authority; you have more authority. The potential to be looked at differently in the world of search that exists … Or I know people talk about that.

But also I know a lot of people who have published a book for the sake of being known as an expert in that field.

Matt Briel: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: You think it’d be the other way around, where you have to become this massive expert, and then you publish a book. But I think a lot of times people have that expertise but aren’t viewed as an expert yet, but want to solidify that with a book. Can you talk about that a little bit, or other angles that you can think about that are non-financial?

Matt Briel: Yeah, those are my favorite parts of publishing a book, by the way. You can make any amount of money you want, but that’s all going to be up to you, and how hard you push it. So the financial aspects aside of publishing a book, I’m much more excited about the other opportunities having a book creates for you.

One of those is, yes: it’s almost instant authority and credibility in whatever field you’re in. We all see it. You might see somebody on social media or LinkedIn or at an event or somewhere like that. Next to their name, it’ll say, “Published Author” or “Bestselling Author” or “Literally wrote the book on the subject.”

Subconsciously, we can’t help it. We immediately think, “Oh, I’m going to listen to this person and see what they have to say, because they know what they’re talking about.” And the beauty of what’s going on right now is that nobody cares if you were traditionally published or self-published.

If you have Published Author next to your name, or the fact that you have a book and you appear in search results because somebody searched for whatever; best plant-based recipes for blood sugar, and your book comes up; that’s a win right there. Having that book creates those opportunities for credibility and authority where you might not have those otherwise.

We like to joke, “It’s better than a business card these days, is having a book.” Handing somebody a business card happens probably every 20 seconds or more. Handing somebody a book and showing them that, “I took the time to do this. I am an authority on this. There is a lot that I have to offer.” It’s a whole new ballgame.

There are other opportunities that come with books as well. We see this all the time with people who are really trying to grow their audience and establish a community around what they do.

Having that physical touchpoint for people to interact with each other as well as the creator, and it creates that source of conversation. And another reason to communicate with each other is great, especially in the food world, where recipes can become such a touchpoint for people and a communication point.

And then another way is obviously with the amount of creators that are entering the creator economy, whether it’s in food or any other vertical, there are times where you probably feel like, “Oh, why would I do a book or anything else? I’m just another food blogger,” or, “I’m just another art blogger,” or whatever.

But one of the best ways to stand out and differentiate yourself amongst a lot of that white noise is to have something like a book. Because again, it shows authority, credibility; it shows that you took the time and felt that your content was valuable enough to put it into a book. People will really recognize that and respect that.

You’d be surprised how many people will pay what you want for that book, just based on the hard work that you put into it, especially if they were already followers of yours to begin.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I think that’s a great note to end on. This technically last question: my guess is coming out of this, there’ll be a lot of people who will have additional questions, curiosities, or will just want to learn more.

What’s the best way for people to take the next step? If they’re not at the point where they’re like, “I know I’m going to do this.” But if they’re self-publishing curious, what does that look like for them to dig into that a little bit more? Is it reaching out to you? Is it exploring on Lulu, the different resources? Would be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Matt Briel: Any and all of those ways will work. But I’d say the easiest way for people to really take a deep dive into what we just talked about, because it can be a little bit overwhelming. We’re cramming it all into whatever, 30, 40 minutes here. And when I talk about it, I take it for granted. I tend to make it all sound so easy, and a good part of it is. But some of it’s not.

So I would go to lulu.com. At the top, there’s a tab for Resources. And in that tab you’ll find all of great things to help. The biggest source of help will probably be our blog. But you’ll also find a link for Hiring a Pro, or I think maybe it says Partners Page now. But that’s where we’ve listed a lot of people that we’ve worked with that we know are good freelancers and things like that.

But if you’re more of a visual learner, we have an amazing library of videos on YouTube. So you can just go to YouTube and look for lulu.com. And we have our Lulu University series, which literally breaks down every aspect of self-publishing. We have cookbook-specific videos, videos to help you learn how to sell direct and set up your stores, all of that stuff.

So again, if you’re visual, hit up YouTube. If you prefer good old-fashioned blogs, just go to Lulu.com and pull down the Resources tab. But always feel free to email me or anybody else you can get your hands on at Lulu as well. We’re always happy to help.

Bjork Ostrom: Email is … Are you okay to give it out of the podcast?

Matt Briel: Absolutely. Yep. Yep. It’s M-B-R-I-E-L, mbriel@lulu.com. And I’m sure Bjork will probably put it in the Show Notes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Hey Matt, super fun to talk to you about this. I think it’ll open the door for a lot of people to step into the world of publishing in a really great way. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights.

Matt Briel: Awesome. I appreciate it, Bjork.

Alexa Peduzzi Hey there. Alexa here. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for tuning in this week.

Wanted to let you know that we actually recently launched something called the Member Directory. All Food Blogger Pro members have access to it, and they can access it by going to foodbloggerpro.com/directory. And it’s there that you can see and connect with all of your fellow Food Blogger Pro members and industry experts, and those of us on the Food Blogger Pro team.

You’ll see different things like social links and blog links and bios and just ways to connect. It’s just such a fun place to go if you’re looking to build your own community on a social media platform, or just be able to connect with other people and see what they’re up to on their blogs. Again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com/directory.

And if you are a Food Blogger Pro member and you’re interested in filling out your profile, you can do that over in the Edit Profile area of your membership. Then once you fill out that information and you’re exploring Member Directory, you can filter by cuisines. So if you’re blogging about vegan recipes and you want to connect with other vegan bloggers, it’s very easy to do that on the directory. It’s very fun, very cool, and just a really awesome place to connect with one another.

So if you’re a member, be sure to check that out at foodbloggerpro.com slash directory. And if you’re not a member, all good. If you’re interested in joining, you can learn more at foodbloggerpro.com/membership.

But otherwise, we’ll see you here on the podcast next time. And until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. And I kid you not, I was going to record this half an hour ago, but I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with. So I create, created a video, communicated it with the Pinch of Yum team, and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.” In our case, what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum.” And then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use. So I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year, got zero-page use, and I realized we have a lot of really thin not valuable content and it’s important to clean that up.

In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it. And it wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized that that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that it’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that. So we’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum and that’s what Clariti is for. It’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it and either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team and then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time.

We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti, kind of like a Swiss Army knife for your content. So if you’re interested in checking it out, go to clariti.com/food C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Hey there, this is Bjork. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about all things book, specifically cookbook publishing. We’re going to be talking to Sally Ekus, who has years and years of experience in the publishing world, and we’re going to be talking about everything from advances specific numbers. We’re going to be talking about increasing your likelihood of getting a cookbook deal, if that’s something you’re interested in doing, some of the reasons why you might want to do that, some of the motivations with it, how it’ll impact your career potentially as you think about publishing, along with traditional publishing along with the publishing that we talk a lot about, which would be content publishing on social media or on your blog and how that all fits together and can potentially be part of your business strategy as you think about growing your following and your audience online.

So it’s a great interview. I learned a lot from it, and I think you will as well. Let’s go ahead and jump in. Oh, before we do the Facebook group, we have a Facebook group for podcast listeners, which you can check out by going to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook that will redirect you to this group. And it’s a place for us to have conversations and connect with anybody who is a listener and would love for you to join and be a part of that if you’re interested. Now, let’s actually jump into the interview with Sally Ekus. Sally, welcome to the podcast.

Sally Ekus: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: So for people listening, they won’t be able to see this, but for people watching, they’ll be able to see behind you there’s a bunch of books when I mentioned that on the call before we pressed record, you’re like, it’s just a drop in the bucket. So have books always been a thing for you?

Sally Ekus: Yeah, but I like to say I’ve been informally training for this career my whole life because I grew up around tons of books, lots of cookbooks. Also shared a childhood dinner table with Julia Child and this has been a part of my life before it was professionally a choice that I made. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say shared a childhood table with Julia Child, what do you mean by that?

Sally Ekus: She came to dinner at my house. So the story goes, I was upstairs, supposed to be in bed, and snuck downstairs and wanted to be a part of the action, and so I just pulled up a chair right next to her at the dinner table while my parents were-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh my gosh.

Sally Ekus: …entertaining her. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. And how did your parents know her?

Sally Ekus: So my parents, Lisa, who started our agency 40 years ago, was at the time married to my dad and they were working in culinary publicity. So I don’t exactly remember why she was at the table that time. She’d been here a handful of times. So potentially it was either a book project they were working on or media training of some sort of just like the opportunity, because we also, our agency is near Smith College, which is her alma mater. They just dedicated a building to her, actually. So maybe in town for something one of the books… Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Say it again.

Sally Ekus: I used that terminology, but I was a kid at the time locally there was an event called Books and Cooks and it was bringing together cookbook authors and chefs, and I believe that’s why she was in town.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And so this was part of your growing up? It was a family business that you’ve then taken over, is that right?

Sally Ekus: Well, so growing up it was my mom and dad, and then they separated, and my dad went off for his professional trajectory and Lisa continued the agency forward and it wasn’t supposed to be a family business. I was never sort of encouraged to even know more than what I would say. My mom worked in food or publishing or something, and I went to college and was on the trajectory for social work. And really looking back, I was trained and I went to school for active listening, negotiation, and crisis counseling, which is applicable to working with cookbook authors because I’m actively listening to what the market is doing and what their desires are as authors, negotiating book deals, and crisis counseling covers that people don’t like on a regular basis.

So I deferred from a grad program, moved home, started helping out at the agency, this is now 14, 15 years ago, and realized I’d been informally training for this my whole life. And then just a few years in decided this is really a passion of mine. I loved it. The authors were responding really well to my work. So Lisa and I started talking about this being the formal succession plan of the agency and now this past April of 2022, we celebrated 40 years in business, and this coming spring on our 41st anniversary, Lisa, we’ll be formally retiring.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow, that’s incredible. So when you talk about what you’ve talked about, the behind-the-scenes, what it is that you do, how you’ve gotten here, but explain what it is for people. What is the actual business, and what is your day-to-day look like?

Sally Ekus: Sure. So the agency is now called The Ekus Group. It started as Lisa Ekus Public Relations, and it started as a publicity firm. Back when publishers were sending authors out on multi-city book tours, we would be… Lisa essentially created the category of culinary publicity. So we were sending authors out on tour that then became a desire and need that we were sending these authors out, but they didn’t really know how to cook and talk on television. So Lisa co-founded the first culinary media training program, which is still a fee-based service that people can come to the agency to get trained for.

How do you break down a recipe for three minutes essentially? Then out of that, we realized we were sending out these spokespeople, and so we started our, what is now billed as our talent representation. So if people are approach, if food bloggers are approached for influencer campaigns or sponsored blog posts, we negotiate those opportunities and then sort of fast forward to where we are today, the talent representation is still a key aspect of what we do at the agency and the capacity in which we’re mostly talking about is also our literary representation. So I’m a literary agent, which means that I work with authors, I represent the author to the publisher, so people pitch me their book proposals or they pitch me a query, and we can talk through all of that today, but my job is to be an advocate for the author and represent a book project and find the best publishing agreements out there.

Bjork Ostrom: So at what point, if, let’s say somebody’s been building a following online and they’re kind of thinking about doing this, at what point do people usually reach out to you, or ideally, would somebody reach out to you?

Sally Ekus: Yeah, two very different timelines, points in their timeline. So there’s the big question of platform, and how big should you be, and how big should your following before you’re sort of ready for a cookbook deal? And it really depends on what somebody’s goals are, but for us as an agency, we get sort of the two ends of the queries, not much in between. We get the, I really want to do a book and I don’t know where to begin. I’m just starting out, this has always been a dream and we’ve created resources for people who are in that camp and then people who are saying, I think my platform is ready.

I’m looking for literary representation, here’s my query. And they follow it up with a book proposal and the time in which somebody’s ready for agent representation really runs the gamut. And all agents work in different ways. Our agency has crafted a sweet spot of representing people that have very big platforms and also people that have up-and-coming platforms. So we look for longevity in an author relationship in a long-term career. So we’re with you for your first book. Yes. But ideally for your second or your third in this whole authorship journey.

Bjork Ostrom: In those situations, are you assessing on talent? You’re looking at the ability for somebody to was really early on to say, is there some raw talent there that we can totally capture and work with long term?

Sally Ekus: When I first started at the agency, we weren’t actively scouting at the rate we are now. So people would be pitching us for representation, which is great, and we still receive queries. But now, and for many years at this point, I’ve been saying, “Hey, I love what this person’s doing. They’ve got a book in them. Let me help teach them how to get it out and cultivate it.” And there’s no one size fits all for when you’re ready for an agent or what your readership should be. But in terms of the food blogging-specific community, I entered this whole industry right at the time when the blog-to-book craze was just starting to happen.

Bjork Ostrom: When would you say that was?

Sally Ekus: 13 years ago. 13, 14 years ago. Would you agree?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you know better than I would, but kind of like 2010-ish. 2009, 2010, publishers started to become a thing,

Sally Ekus: You’re a food blogger. Oh my gosh, what’s your readership? We have to publish your book. And then some of those books did well and others, most of them, it was a lot more than, oh, what other questions can we ask besides, what is your readership? Because yeah, that needs to be there.

Bjork Ostrom: And in some ways what I could see happening in those early stages is you say, what is readership? But it’s confused for what is page views and page views might be you have one really popular post where 80% of your traffic comes from, so it looks like, oh my gosh, you have all of these people coming to your site, but it’s because you have this one recipe that’s popular on search or social, but that doesn’t translate into being able to sell a cookbook.

Sally Ekus: Exactly, exactly. And even now, the sort of requirement or guiding principle of a hundred thousand followers on, let’s call it Instagram, even that if somebody has that many followers but they don’t know how to engage and capture the one to 3% of those followers that actually convert to book sales, historically speaking or statistically speaking, then it doesn’t really matter how many followers they have, right? So they’re deeper, more specific industry questions or curiosities that I have as an agent that when I’m scouting or having initial calls with someone, we’re talking about those nuances and you don’t necessarily have to answer those questions or know how to answer them though, to work successfully as an author being open to that process and figuring that out is, I think going to yield better results for sales and for just the promotion and success of your book.

Bjork Ostrom: So what are those things like when you look at somebody and you say at this point you have a pretty good read on it based on multiple exposures, I think you said have done multiple hundreds, 300 in book deals at this point? Is that right?

Sally Ekus: Yeah, our agency has done well over 500, and personally, I’m definitely in hundreds. I don’t know exactly how many. I lost count at some point, which is nice.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so at this point, you’re probably able to distill down some variables that are important in the success of a book. Well, in some degree, I would imagine there’s also those moments where you’re just like, oh my gosh, this did amazing. Why was that? Or, this should have done amazing and it didn’t, not really knowing, but my guess is you have some idea of some kind of quantifiable things that you’d be able to pinpoint and say, here’s some important variables and success outcomes.

Sally Ekus: Yeah. I mean there’s the science and the art of the publishing process and you can learn the science and there’s some great resources out there to learn it. And then there’s also, I think with the sort of successful or breakout titles or just those books that hit the right mark, there’s the art to it too. There’s an author that is willing to work so hard, first and foremost, it’s never like, am I done yet or I’ve already. It’s yes. More. How can I help? Right? Yeah. Then there’s the time and place in the industry and the larger social context of whatever could be going on.

So maybe there’s something happening socially or politically or historically that meets your topic just by chance. Then maybe there’s a movement of social change that happens to intersect with your book, or you have a great relationship with the indie book market or your readers grab onto… There’s just kind of that something special too that can happen, but it’s easier to learn the science. So in order to do that, it starts with a book proposal and so much can be told on how a deal will go, and then also how successful book will be based on how somebody’s willing to work on a book proposal. That’s the barometer, in my opinion, for everything.

Bjork Ostrom: And the reason for that is it kind of this idea of how you do anything is how you do everything. And if you see somebody who does a really good book proposal that’s a good indicator of them being somebody who’s going to do a really good job with a book. Is that what you’re getting at? Yeah.

Sally Ekus: Yeah. Because it’s the business plan for your book, so you’ve got to be willing to work on it. And I don’t have any two clients that work on their proposal exactly the same way, however, everyone’s doing that work. So I might have an exploratory call with someone that I think I want to work with, and then I give them homework to see how they do it because that’s checkpoint number one. It has to be a good fit both ways too. So I want to make sure they like my working style, I’m a little bit of a chameleon, but there’s also certain things that are just non-negotiables for me and my style, and if it doesn’t work for you, totally fine. There’s a bunch of other great cookbook agents out there and it’s got to work for them too. So their style, which is probably less flexible, needs to be something that blends together well.

Bjork Ostrom: So the book proposal piece makes sense. One other question on that, are you working… You’re working with somebody to do that together or are they bringing that to you?

Sally Ekus: Both. So if I’m scouting someone, they may not have ever put a word onto a page other than their blog or social media, but generally speaking, they’ve got something started, and sometimes people are coming to us pitching us with a query and then following up with a book proposal. There are book proposal coaches out there, so sometimes people invest in working with one of those first to present something polished, which frankly a lot of the proposals coming my way from coaches, they’re beautiful and they’re very comprehensive.

They’re never fully finished to my standards, but sometimes then I’m like, okay, I love what you’ve done except I don’t love the idea and it feels like maybe this would be the idea I would pick for you, or that I’d be curious if this was on brand for you and you’d be willing to work on it. So now they know what goes into making a book proposal, but I kind of wish we were at the beginning in terms of the topic together. However, it is never a waste of time or energy, or resources to go through the proposal process whether or not that’s the book that gets published. Because in my opinion, if you want to publish a book, going through a proposal process is invaluable no matter what happens with that actual content.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. You had mentioned that idea of a hundred thousand followers and people using that as kind of this number, and I think people really like having, you got to get to here and there really is no magic to that because there’s so many variables that go into it. But if somebody’s thinking about, how do I do this thing well, this thing potentially being like, get a book deal and have a book that does well, what are the things that people should be concerned with? Where are the areas they should be focusing and trying to optimize in preparation of maybe two years from now starting that process?

Sally Ekus: Yeah. Yeah. Think about just starting by thinking about it that way is ideal. If you now want to publish a book, start thinking about how to set you up for success now is a great plan. Things to do would be to work on your social following. That certainly helps people pay attention faster let’s say. Also getting a byline here and there or getting quoted in a couple really high-profile articles, having your name out there positioned as a thought leader or an expert in the genre that you want to write about is key. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a book deal. It means maybe you’re not ready or it’s just not the right time yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I’ve heard people talk about the choice that you have for your first book in terms of focus and that being really important because you want your foot first book to do well, it’s kind of like a CD or an album you want your first album to do well because it’s going to make it easier for the second one. And a lot of times I think what will happen with publishers is that they might be approached to do a really niche book and it’s almost like a publisher wanting content in a certain category.

Sally Ekus: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: As opposed to the brand that the author represents. Can you help distinguish between those kind of books and how we as creators should think about that?

Sally Ekus: Absolutely. Because this is one of the number one emails we get from food bloggers. I’ve been approached by so-and-so to write a book on X, what do I do? We have many guiding principles here that are helpful and in this particular case, I would encourage you when you’re met with those scenarios, to say and ask the question or reflection just because I can, doesn’t mean I should. Okay. So yes, a publisher’s job is to create a publishing program and a brand and maybe publish in very specific single subject categories or publish based on trends or fill in the blank. And that may be the right decision for you as a content creator or food blogger to say yes to that. It may not and that’s okay too. You never have a second chance to write your first book.

So think about where is your brand now. What are your goals and does that align or is it close and is it worth a conversation? Most likely if that publisher really wants to work with you because you are the right person for this topic, they would be willing to have a conversation about the book that you really want to write. Because the more invested an author is in the success of their book, the better the book will do. I have never once worked with someone who was half-in on a book topic and had that book be wildly successful because it is ultimately that author’s baby, and it is a long, hard process, even if it’s very single subject or niche based. It’s a lot to do. It’s a lot of work. So you got to be all in.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that you talked about in the onboarding or some background information, you talked about different book deals and there’s 12,000; 60,000; 25,000; 250,000; 500,000. I think whenever you have a range, one of the things I’m always curious about is tell me more about the top end of that range. What are the commonalities for somebody who’s getting a book deal for half a million dollars?

Sally Ekus: So I always get the question, what do you think I could expect for an advance? I don’t care, but I’m just wondering. Valid question. Everyone wants the six-figure advance. There is no science. Right? There’s some art in there too. But I will say there is science and art in that answer. And I will say that generally speaking, the better the book proposal, the better the book deal, and the more robust somebody’s entrenched in a conversation about a topic, really positioning themselves as the expert, the better the book deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of that?

Sally Ekus: If you are the number one science writer for tomatoes, then you are the person who needs to write the big book of scientific tomato recipes. Not a real book deal I’ve done, but you know what I mean? So you can dress up a big platform and fit it into a couple different topics and get a very good book deal. However, if you are really truly the expert, you’ve been working in this field for 15 years and this is your breakout title and you’re finally publishing a book because you’ve spent the time to do all of those other things as part of your career, and now it’s time for that big beautiful business card and calling card, yeah, you’re going to get a better book deal.

Versus there are also very big deals for people who are just starting out and they get this big social traction right out of the gate. Yeah. They also oftentimes do get those six-figure deals and do they earn out? Do they earn any additional money? Does that matter to the author? Does that matter to the publisher? How do those sell? It depends on the topic and the publisher behind you and the support that you get from a marketing and publicity standpoint, which is all over the place depending on your deal and the publisher too.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? So the two things that I’d be interested to hear talk more about, one was earn out. Can you talk about what that is and maybe how often that happens? And then the marketing piece. What does that look like, and how often are publishers actually helping? So both of those things would be curious to hear.

Sally Ekus: Sure. So when in traditional cookbook publishing or non-fiction publishing you’re offered in advance, which is some sort of upfront payment on an elongated timeline, which we can talk about to write the book. Then you have to earn back that amount of money in order to earn additional monies. And the formula that is for earning that amount back is calculated through a royalty structure that’s outlined at the deal point of your negotiation and then also in your contract. So you might earn 72 cents per book sold for the first 10,000 copies of your book, and then that ticks back up to earn out that $60,000 advance, for example. And then you can earn additional royalties. I have heard it said many, many times that most cookbooks do not earn back their advance. The advance is the only guaranteed money though. So many authors want the highest advance possible. Some might take a slightly lower advance to get published versus not get published and it really depends on what are your hard costs. Do you have to pay for photography? Are you the photographer?

Having an agent to help navigate the payment structure of that advance is also important because if you have to pay collaborators as part of the delivery of your material, that needs to come out of the earlier part of your advance. So there’s many nuances to an advance and royalty schedule that are important to consider as an author. Yeah. The nuances of that, my brain’s like, well, I could go on, but that’s kind of like 2.0, not your job, don’t have to worry about it. But important to educate yourself on finding an agent who understands those nuances. Because cookbook publishing in particular is a nuanced type of deal in that there’s usually a visual component and that needs to be addressed.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Meaning the branding of the book is a variable in how successful it is?

Sally Ekus: It can be, but also there’s just a practical component. So in your contract, you might have to deliver 75 recipes and 75 photos. But if you are not the one actually taking those photographs, then your advance needs to cover the cost of hiring that person. And depending on the publisher that you work with, will determine how that advance is paid out. And they’re usually paid in either often at this point, like thirds or fourths. Ideally, there’s some flexibility there and it’s negotiated in your best interest. But really, I once had a client say they should stop calling it an advance because their last payment is post-publication, let’s just say.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. After the book is out, that’s when-

Sally Ekus: So is that really in advance at that point?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. And, so would it be safe to say that when you’re negotiating this, it’s best to assume that the advance is going to be what your total payment will be majority of the time?

Sally Ekus: I think an important question is if I was only ever paid this advance to create this book, can I say yes to that deal?

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Sally Ekus: That being said, many of the books we represent do earn royalties. So it really depends. My answer to everything in publishing is it depends because there’s the science of how it works and the art of the unique scenario for that author, that book, that publisher, that payment schedule.

Bjork Ostrom: And also the timing of it. Like you said, it seems like if I were to guess the books that do best, they catch some macro wave, whatever that wave is. And as an individual, they’re working extremely hard and they’re extremely talented at what they do and if those three things align a macro wave meaning something culturally that’s happening, a trend or a change, so you catch that wave, you are working really hard and you’re extremely talented and capable in the area that you’re focused in, those would be probably the kind of breakout successes. Does that feel accurate?

Sally Ekus: It does. I will also add that sometimes that macro wave can happen two years after your book has been published. So depends on the publishing partner, but how responsive are they? And this goes into the marketing and publicity question, are you working with someone who is going to, in addition to working on their active publication list, also reply to your emails to say, “Hey, there’s this thing happening socially and I want to make sure my book is available, or I want to do X, Y, Z thing will you support me? I actually think that we are living in a time where we see a lot of backlist titles supporting the consistent publishing programs that are out there. And certain publishers keeps their books in print longer than others. And there’s pros and cons to that. There’s a million little, it depends conversations to have around how long your book should or should not be in print based on the threshold of sales. The bottom line, thinking about the backless potential of your topic is an important thing to think about as an author.

Bjork Ostrom: Backless potential, meaning the potential for it to be continually be published and available for purchase.

Sally Ekus: So backless is essentially outside of the new publication window, so let’s call it a year, but really it depends on the publisher, but keeping a book, if your book is a couple years old, it’s more on the backlist of a publishing program than a front list. The front list title is the books that are being published in that season. And there are certain publishers right now, particularly because of supply chain and inventory costs and pure human power to operate an inventory are saying, “Hey, it costs more for us to operate this inventory than books are selling. So we’re going to put this book out of print, even though it came out two years ago.” I don’t know if you’re experiencing anything like I’ve experienced in the past two years. It’s kind of been in an exacerbated time. So let’s see how things shake out maybe this topic will be something you want to have available to the public in a couple years.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that something that’s negotiated in a part of a contract?

Sally Ekus: It is, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. And then how about on the marketing side? My understanding from a distance has always been there’s been this shift in the world of publishing where it’s kind of on the shoulders of the author to market their book. Is that true or-

Sally Ekus: I would say-

Bjork Ostrom: …would it be safe to say publishers can help? Okay.

Sally Ekus: It’s safe to say that publishers can help.

Bjork Ostrom: But will they? Yeah.

Sally Ekus: Depends. Right? I like to set the bar real, real low with my clients so that they can be pleasantly surprised and feel like they’re getting supported and that there’s a little bit off their shoulders when it comes time for marketing and publicity. Generally speaking, the more you’re prepared to do on behalf of your book, the better the book will do.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Sally Ekus: We can elongate that expectation or condense it and the big publishers are going to throw more support around than some of the smaller ones. Although that being said, some of the independent publishers we work with are really author-focused and they’re super collaborative because they are relying on the books that they published a couple years ago to continue to carry them forward. So when an author shows up with a new idea or a new request, if they can support it, you bet they want to because they want those books to do well too. A publisher’s job, a marketing person, or a publicists’ job is not to be like, no, I don’t want to help these authors or book, but they do have the current published titles in front of them. So that’s going to take the priority. So the more you’re prepared to do for the longevity of your book, the better the book will perform.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And as one of the variables in the success of the book is the marketing. In so much any type of business transaction marketing is important, but especially in this world where if you have a following, if you have the ability to email people and post about it, the more exposure it gets and the better you are crafting a message, a compelling message, when you are giving it exposure, the better it’s going to do.

Sally Ekus: Right. And then I go back to the proposal. So what’s in your marketing and promotion section? What are your ideas? Who are your connections? What do you imagine doing with and for them? If you can’t fill that out in the most detailed and robust way, that’s fine. It just tells me you’re not ready to write a book.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And that’s why it makes sense when you say the proposal is so important in what you had said, the proposal being the business plan is such a great comparison because if you have a business idea and you put a weak business plan in front of somebody, they’re going to be like, wait, this isn’t super compelling and I don’t want to partner with you on this. But if you put together one where it’s like, not only is it a great idea, not only does it fit with things that are happening, maybe you have a following in that area, but then you also have these really specific examples of how you’ll help it do well. Suddenly that gives confidence to somebody to put money behind that as an investment to say, “Hey, we think that there could be something here.”

Sally Ekus: Exactly. You’re giving them the roadmap for how you’re going to get to the successful benchmarks and then first agents and then publishers are saying, oh yeah, they get it. Right. They have a plan and with my expertise, we can go even further. So it’s like I don’t expect an author to come to the table knowing all of this. I am looking for people who A, want to learn it and B, want to work really hard to execute it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So can you walk me through just high level what the steps are? So somebody hasn’t done anything related to a book and they want to move forward with it. How do you do that?

Sally Ekus: I would say start by doing your research and just consuming the educational content that’s out there. There are great resources out there. I am a big fan of another podcast as well called the Everything Cookbooks Podcast. And I love that podcast because it’s hosted by four authors. So they’re using their shared experiences as four authors rather than one author’s one experience with one publisher. I think this podcast is a great resource too. I mean, you did an entire book publishing series and consume the content that’s available to you.

There’s courses out there, I created one, there’s other coaches and things, but the first step in conjunction with doing research and just being a sponge is to start on a book proposal. Because if that is just the cursor on a blank page for five weeks, cool. You’re not ready. Great. Now you know keep doing what you’re doing. It really goes work on a book proposal, come up with a query pitch agent, sign with an agent, fine-tune your book proposal, have that agent pitch publishers, ideally have more than one offer. Negotiate your deal, write the book, deliver the book. The book gets published, promote the book, sell the book, have great sales, do another book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure.

Sally Ekus: And other places to research just because I really value being there’s tons of great content out there. It’s not that hard to figure out how to do this. Publishers’ marketplace is a great place to do some industry research and you can subscribe for just one day. So you can look and see who’s done certain deals in this category. That’s all part of the market analysis and competition research that’s essentially part of the proposal process and network. So look in the acknowledgment sections of cookbooks that you know and love and maybe your colleagues that are food blogging and have previously done cookbooks, see who they thank and sort of work within the network of the industry and you will be off to the races.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. A normal timeline, let’s say from the process. When somebody comes to you, let’s say they have a proposal, but it’s not polished to when a book publishes, would you have a range for how long that usually is?

Sally Ekus: On average in traditional publishing, if it’s not a trend-based book, it’s about a two-year process. So if your book proposal was ready today, I signed you tomorrow and I sold it the next day, which is a very fast timeline, you’d have about nine to 12 months to deliver your material and it would go through about another year of production. That includes editing, copy editing, layout, design, printing, shipping, and distribution. So in traditional publishing, an average timeline is about two years. And the proposal process in and of itself completely runs the gamut. I have a client right now that I signed just a few months ago, and we’re about to take her project out on submission. That’s a pretty fast turnaround time and I have another client who I’ve been working with for years just kind of like, I know we’re going to get there and one day we will.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So part of it depends on like you said, a trend. If it’s a trend, it’s going to be-

Sally Ekus: If it’s a trend, it’s a much faster timeline.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. But then it also depends on the author and how much they’re interested in hustling and getting things done. But also probably is there any life to the idea? Is there anything with the proposal? Because my guess is sometimes you’d have a proposal, you’d bring it out, you’d chop it, and nothing comes from it. Is that common or?

Sally Ekus: Every now and then. I mean, I don’t sign anybody or project I don’t think I can sell. Sure. Though I once heard another agent say if they sold 100% of the projects that they took on, they wouldn’t be taking enough risks and I really like that perspective too. But every now and then I’ll pitch a proposal and we’ll either get all the same type of feedback from editors, so then we go back and revise it and re-pitch it, or we get a bunch of no’s and we’re like, huh, let’s hit pause.

Let’s retire it or let’s really reimagine how we’re presenting it. And then there was a project years ago that I didn’t successfully sell, and then all of a sudden something was going on and it was more of a single subject and it just sort of found its interest in general culture and society. And so a publisher came back and was like, “Hey, did you ever sell that proposal that was on this topic?” And I said, no, it’s still available. Sent it, sold it. Now it’s coming out and its second edition or anniversary edition soon. So it really depends.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Interesting. So you had mentioned the course that you have. I want to make sure to be able to shine a light on that. What is that about and who would that be a good fit for?

Sally Ekus: So we get the same questions over and over again and I love talking about this because I’m really passionate about answering people’s publishing questions and being transparent because there’s this big, what does an agent do? How does this work? How do I break into it? So my project was answering these questions over and over again. So I created a course called How to Write a Cookbook, and it walks people through the primer on the industry, but also really specific details on deals I’ve done without identifiers, obviously. So you can make the decision, does this financially make sense for me right now? It walks you through every single component of a book proposal and it goes deeper into the questions that people ask about each of those components. It walks the people through the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Because that’s a question I get a lot and it’s essentially two and a half hours with me at your own pace.

And also I moderate a community that is welcome to anybody listening to this podcast or looking for information called How to Be a Cookbook Author. And so it’s really an educational resource for people who are asking themselves, is now the right time? Should I or shouldn’t I? How much money can I make? How do collaborations work? Do I need an agent? What does an agent do? It’s those questions that go through our heads or author’s heads over and over again. And it’s a way for me too, I can’t represent everybody, but it’s a way for me to offer insight and transparency on the industry for people curious about writing a cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about that Facebook group? Is that free for anybody to join?

Sally Ekus: It is, yeah. You just have to request access because it really is a place where just right now somebody’s asking about putting together a custom ebook and looking for digital resources so other people that have been down that path will chime in. So it’s a place for people to get recommendations, ask questions. There’s complete newbies in there and there are very, very seasoned cookbook authors in there and everyone in between.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. One of the things you talked about was in, and we’ve hit on a couple times is this idea of, hey, what is the earning potential for this? But I also think there’s lots of other benefits that come with publishing a cookbook. Can you talk about what some of those are to fill the picture in a little bit? Think about and analyze if they would do that or not.

Sally Ekus: So I really do believe that a book is a big beautiful business card, and very rarely is it a retirement plan. Even those hundred thousand dollars deals I’ve done paid out over two, three, four years, that goes fast, right? So a book can be a wonderful new shiny thing that you can offer to open up all kinds of new doors for you. So it positions you as an expert on a topic and all of a sudden you can get paid speaking engagements to speak on X, Y, Z topic. You can use it as a new shiny thing to offer media that you’ve been trying to crack open. So, hey, I have a new thing to pitch. Have me on your show, have me on as an expert. Let me do this demo.

It can be that calling card that you need to open the door so that you stand out versus all the other people pitching the same topic, the same idea. They want something new and fresh. The book can open those doors and it can also generate revenue in other aspects of your business. So if the book is going on this free PR tour, but it drives people to your site where you earn revenue from clicks or you have a whole affiliate store of your favorite high-end cookware and that’s where you make your money, but a book is driving new eyes to your site, that’s great, right?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah.

Sally Ekus: Brand partnerships I mean really I actually think that the advances is one very specific small earning potential component and it can open up all these other opportunities for income generating opportunities.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It kind of reminds me a little bit of this one time that Lindsay and I were invited onto a small local TV network. This was years ago, but it was all of our family followed up after and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, awesome. Yeah, you were on TV.” And there’s something about traditional media, like physical books, TV, that’s valid in the eyes of people in a way that a site with a million visitors in a month isn’t. And I think a book is like you said, it becomes a multiplier on all those other areas that exist because there’s a lot of authority that comes with real and or perceived. Part of it is it actually is authority because somebody has said, yes, I believe in you enough to go through this publishing process, but also there’s just something about traditional media that’s a little bit carries more weight I think, than digital media. So you see that happening and we’ve seen echoes of that in little ways here and there.

Sally Ekus: And I specifically for the food blogging community too, there you have this incredible community of readers. I mean hundreds of thousands of people sometimes. And there’s more, right? There are other forms of exposure and media out there. And so it can be really exciting to step away from your computer or step out of your kitchen and into a different forum and the book can be a mechanism to accomplish that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. My guess is, Sally, that there’s going to be a few people who have been listening and they’ll think, I would love to have a conversation with Sally and reach out and connect. What does that look like for you to connect with people? Do people go through a formal process of saying, here’s my information? What would it look like to work together? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sally Ekus: So I’m a fairly accessible literary agent and one that is pretty transparent and easy to get in touch with sometimes to the demise of my own inbox. But there are a couple different ways to connect, certainly through social media, that is a great way to stay connected and understand more about our agency brand and ethos, and client roster. Also, I welcome anyone listening to join the How To Be a Cookbook Author Facebook community. It’s a great place to contact me, but it’s also even more valuable to connect with other people, peers, and people who’ve been through it or are just starting out.

And then it’s also pretty easy to get in contact with me via email, which I’m happy to give out because honestly if you’re ready for an agent, I’d be interested in talking with you. And if you’re not, keep it on file because this is our agency’s longevity and the career of myself and also some other fabulous cookbook agents out there. I love to connect the right people for the right type of representation and match. So you can reach me at sally@ekusgroup.com and I hope that people listening don’t abuse the privilege of the email and connect first via social media and get a taste of how we offer content and resources. There’s just some great ways to engage with us virtually and via the email inbox.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And the site then is ekusgroup.com.

Sally Ekus: Ekusgroup.com. The Facebook group is How To Be a Cookbook author, and we host our course on Podia, and that’s easy to access through the Facebook group or other emails that you’ll get from us over time.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Sally, it was really fun to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Sally Ekus: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delightful conversation. I appreciate the opportunity.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there. Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I wanted to take a quick second to make sure you are aware of the Food Blogger Pro membership. So the Food Blogger Pro membership, Food Blogger Pro in general was started when Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom. Lindsay is the content creator over at Pinch of Yum when they started getting a ton of questions about starting and growing and monetizing food blogs. So people would come to them and say, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. I love what you’re doing. How can I do the same thing?” So they just started Food Blogger Pro to be the place where food bloggers, food content creators can go to learn how to start, grow, and monetize their own food blogs. So we have different courses, we have different events, we have different tools and deals for our community.

We have a community forum where members can connect, collaborate, and troubleshoot with industry experts and their fellow food blogger pro members. And it’s just a really active place. I always like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership won’t look the same the next week after you join because we’re constantly adding new content, new value to your membership. I wanted to read this testimonial from Food Blogger Pro member Alistair from the Pesky Vegan, and he says, “Starting a food blog can feel pretty daunting. More often than not, it’s probably something you’re trying to do on your own without much prior experience. Signing up to Food Blogger Pro was one of the single best things I could have done as it removed a lot of the worries I had and provided me with a supportive community and a wealth of invaluable information. When I think about the journey I’ve been on, I simply can’t imagine getting to where I am without this membership.”

Thank you. It’s so cool to see so many different experiences with Food Blogger Pro. We have tons of testimonials on our site. If you’re interested in learning more, and if you’re interested in learning more about the membership, what that looks like, what you get when you sign up as a member, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join. You get access to everything we have the moment you sign up, so no content is dripped. You can kind of just create your own journey through our content and access what is most meaningful and beneficial for you. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com/join if you’re interested in learning more. Otherwise, we’ll see you here on the podcast next week and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s the question, are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool? Maybe it’s like Air Table or Asana, or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all. When it comes to optimizing and organizing your content. How do you know what to change and how do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle? With Clariti, all of that stuff is easier. It’s easier to keep track of things. It’s easier to know if the changes you’re making are having an impact. And that’s why we built it. We realized that we were using spreadsheets and cobbling together a system, and we wanted to create something that did that for you. And Clariti brings together WordPress data, Google data, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.


And it brings all of that information into one place to allow you to make decisions and also inform you about the decisions that you’ve made and if they’re having an impact, I could talk on and on about the features, but the best way to understand it is to get in and to work with the tool yourself. And the good news is Clariti’s offering 50% off of your first month if you sign up. And you can do that by going to Clariti.com/food. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to check it out. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.


Hey there. This is Bjork Ostrom. You’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today we are having a conversation with Katie Webster. She has a site called Healthy Seasonal Recipes and deep experience in recipe development. And we’re going to be talking about her history with that. And also recommendations for anybody who’s creating recipes to create a strong process and system around the recipe development that you are doing.


And we all know that that’s a really critical piece, it’s a really critical component of building a successful site, is making sure that the content that you’re putting out, not just like the structure and the organization of the content, but the actual meat of the content, for lack of a better word, the recipe itself needs to be really good. That’s what it’s all about. And she’s going to be talking about how she makes sure that every recipe that she puts out is quality and she’s going to be talking about different jobs that she’s had and her history of recipe development, how that’s led her to success with her blog. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Katie, welcome to the podcast.

Katie Webster: Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about all things recipe development because your background is in recipe development. In some ways we’re all doing versions of that. But really you’ve been doing it as a career as your work for a long time. And I’d be curious to know what that looks like. So take us back to when you first started in the world of recipe development. What were you doing and what did your work look like at that point?

Katie Webster: Yeah, so I started out, I went to culinary school. I was on the sort of restaurant track and I had my… He’s now my husband, but back then he was my boyfriend.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Katie Webster: His family was always joking that I was the made up girlfriend that didn’t really exist.

Bjork Ostrom: Nobody ever saw you.

Katie Webster: The girlfriend from Niagara Falls because I just was always working. And the lifestyle of working in a restaurant was really not… I realized it wasn’t for me. And so I quit and I went on to a job listing forum for graduates from my culinary school. And there was a listening for a personal chef. And I ended up getting this job, but it was only part-time. And so I needed to figure out how to fill the rest of that week. And I ended up getting a part-time job working in the test kitchen at EatingWell Magazine. My mom’s friend had worked there and got me an interview. And so I ended up starting out working in publishing. So in print as opposed to being online.

Bjork Ostrom: The personal chef thing, was that just an inroad to the idea of working in other industries or did you actually do that as well?

Katie Webster: I did end up doing that for a few years. So I ended up sort of working part-time at EatingWell and personal chefing. So I started out working for one client who had special dietary needs. She had celiac, but she also had major gut issues. And so I worked for her for a few years. And then I ended up starting a little catering and personal shopping business as well.


And I specialized in healthy cooking, but also cooking for people with special diets. But I live in Vermont and so there’s a pretty small population. And so I really needed two different jobs. So working at EatingWell was great because it was part-time. And at the time they were only doing four magazines a year. And so they didn’t need me that much. So it was a good balance of the two.

Bjork Ostrom: What was it like to do… What’s the role of a personal chef, When I hear that, I’m like, gosh, that must be so interesting. Not only because of the work that you’re doing, but I’d also imagine it’s interesting to work with people who are in a position where it makes sense for them to hire a personal chef.

Katie Webster: Oh gosh, yeah. It was such a dream job, I have to say mean. It was really incredible. So it started out where I was working for this one woman and she definitely was a person of means. She had two kitchens, she had the fancy kitchen and then my back kitchen, which was a galley kitchen and it was set up with tons of equipment and it was super efficient.


And I would cook and then I’d go display everything in fancy dishes in her refrigerator and she’d like be like, “Oh, what am I going to eat tonight?” And then from there I ended up launching this personal chef delivery business, which was much more geared to the everyday person.


And I had people who… I had one guy who was a bodybuilder who was trying to constantly build. And so he wanted all these high protein things. This was back, low-carb was pretty popular. The South Beach diet was really popular. So I had several clients who were on the South Beach Diet. And then of course, since I had this experience with the gluten free cooking, I also ended up with a couple other gluten free diet clients.


It was fun with the delivery stuff, it was definitely I would deliver to them once a week kind of a thing. And I had different packages that people could choose from. So that was really fun. It was a lot of work and a lot of running around all the time. Not something that probably would work at as a mom. It would probably be hard to make that work.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Schedule wise, it’s not something that you can adapt around. It requires you at certain times. What did you learn in that process? And the context for that question is I think a lot of times our previous experiences fold into our future experiences and we can learn whether it’s within a job or a business that we’ve had. In this case, for you it’s a business. What did you learn in the process of building those two businesses?

Katie Webster: I think that doing the personal shopping business was super important to ultimately becoming a freelancer as a recipe developer. Because I learned about creating boundaries with clients and how to deal with writing a contract and creating packages to sell my product.


I had no idea how to do that. And my mom’s friend was a business coach and she sort of took me under her wing and she was like, you really need to create these packages. Because you can’t just go out there and say, “I’ll cook for you.” It’s much easier to go out and say, “I will cook for you. These are the three products that I offer.” You can get once a week delivery once every other week, or you can get two times a week or whatever it was. And then to have a pricing structure set up. So that then when somebody comes to me, I don’t have to spend six hours trying to price out what they’re looking for.


It’s already pretty much set in place. And I definitely applied that when I went into freelance recipe development to saying, okay, well now I offer six recipe packages, that kind of thing. The other thing I learned from that process was how to be a better cook. Because, well, for example, the woman who I cooked for, she was not afraid to give me feedback. And I remember she was really into stews. And I remember one time I was sort of short on time and I didn’t sear the meat before I added the liquids. And she called me on it.

Bjork Ostrom: She let you know about it.

Katie Webster: She was like, “I don’t know why this doesn’t taste as good.” And it was really that kind of experience where I was learning from feedback that I really sort of was like, oh gosh, this makes a huge difference in whether or not something’s going to be successful. So I think both of those things were two things that I brought with me.

Bjork Ostrom: So in the world of recipe development, so you’re doing the personal chef stuff, but then you’re also doing some of the recipe development for EatingWell Magazine. How do you apply that same level of that standard, but internally for yourself? You talked about learning for that quality standard, but what does that look like for you to have your own personal standard and how do you know when a recipe’s done. At what point you’re like, yes, this is good enough?

Katie Webster: Oh, well, I have a whole process of developing a recipe. I think when first started writing Recipes for my blog, I was more likely to put something out that I wasn’t 100% behind. But as I started to get more and more readers, definitely I was like, oh gosh, this better be good because it’s got my name on it. And I think being in a test kitchen at EatingWell, there’s tastings. Everybody has to agree that it’s good enough to print it. So that’s easy. But for me, I have to really like it and feel like it tastes really good. And then of course I’ve got my family to taste it as well. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Bjork Ostrom: No, for sure. And let’s talk about that process. Because I think that’s one of the things that as people get into systems around their business, whether that be content or publishing or whatever it is, there’s all these different components that we have to navigate as creators. One of the most important systems or processes would be around the development of recipes. And for those who aren’t as familiar with that, I think there could be a lot that we could learn from somebody who is very familiar with it. So what is your system when it comes to developing a recipe? And we could go from idea to when you actually press publish on it.

Katie Webster: Okay, so at EatingWell I was trained on how to develop a recipe. And they had a whole system that they used and I really took that as my own when I started doing it on my own. So yes, absolutely, it starts with the idea of the recipe. Of course now with food blogging, that’s all wrapped up in the whole SEO thing and keyword research and all that stuff.


But actually the first thing I do once I have my concept is I actually type the recipe first. And I know that sounds really backwards for a lot of people, but I have found over the years that if I do that, the recipe is so much clearer and has much my far fewer mistakes. If I start out with a first draft, and I call it my hypothesis draft because it’s never been done before and it’s just a guess of how it’s going to go. But I use a recipe template, so I use Word and I just keep a template there that has all of the components of the recipe. And then I-

Bjork Ostrom: What are those components?

Katie Webster: Oh, so you’ve got your… Well let me pull one up here. You’ve got you-

Bjork Ostrom: So this is in Word, you’re opening up word and within Word is a template that you’ve built called a recipe. And when you have an idea [inaudible 00:13:34].

Katie Webster: Recipe or recipe template, So there’s the title, the yield, the servings, which are two different things, active time, cook time, and total time. So I do active time as opposed to prep time because I think that that’s much more helpful for the reader than prep time.

Bjork Ostrom: Explain the difference between those.

Katie Webster: So prep time would be the amount of time that you spend before you start cooking. Active time is the amount of time that you are paying attention to the food, you are in the kitchen, busy working with the food. If you can walk away for five minutes or more, that’s no longer active time. Prep time connotes just the time that is spent prior to turning on the stove or the oven. And then my template has a recipe description. So that is what would end up going into that field in the Tasty-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a description.

Katie Webster: Is it called recipe description in Tasty?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah.

Katie Webster: I don’t even know. And then I also put my keywords in there too. And then the ingredient list, the method, and then I have a section at the bottom where I put in the nutrition, so the calories, all that. And then I have the ingredient notes, tips and make aheads. So that’s all part of my template. So when I write my-

Bjork Ostrom: Write, as you said before, we get too far away from it, was servings and yield being different? Can you explain that?

Katie Webster: Sure. The yield would be, makes eight cups, servings would be, makes four servings, two cups each. So it’s different. It’s just more information for the user, basically to have both those things. I was going to tell you about-

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, before I interrupted you. But to recap, so what I find interesting is you’re not just jumping in and going through the process of creating a recipe and experimenting. It’s almost like you’re kind of developing a hypothesis around how that recipe will be made. And then you’re going through the process of actually making it. So you have the kind of framework of what it might look like before you go in and actually start working on it. Is that generally speaking what this step is like?

Katie Webster: Yes. So I’ll truly type the recipe out and I’ll write out the ingredient list. I’ll write out all the measurements, all of the method and the timing. And I know a lot of it’s going to be wrong, but it’s all there. And so I have to really think it through. So I think that your first test is more likely to be successful if you’ve really thought it through and all the information is there so that when you are testing it, you’re like, “Oh, I thought that it was going to be four to five minutes.” And so you set your timer for four to five minutes and then it actually ends up being six to seven and you have something written down where it’s sort a placeholder for where you would change that.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And I can imagine with that process, one of the things that’s really nice is you’re doing some critical thinking before you get into stuff that’s a little bit higher stakes, putting ingredients together and it kind of forces you… It’s a forcing function to think through things, to be slow with it a little bit and to make kind of a prediction of what you think it will be. How accurate would you say that first version is compared to what it ends up being, eventually?

Katie Webster: For a baking recipe, it’s usually the first of six versions. For a dinner saute kind of a thing, the first of three or four. It really depends on the recipe. Once I’ve written that hypothesis draft, I print it out and I take it into the kitchen with me, with my pen, with my scales and my measuring cups.


And I start a timer, write down the time I started, and I mark that document up extensively as I test and I make changes in live time. And sometimes I’ll get to it and I’ll be like, I can’t believe I wrote down that I need a quarter teaspoon of salt that’s not nearly enough. And I’ll change it on the spot. I mean, it’s there for me to fix.


And then from there, once I have tested it, then I’ll take that, go in and edit it, change the title from example recipe E1 to example recipe E2. And then I have a second version that I’ll print out, staple that on top of the E one, and then I take that back into the kitchen, same process over and over again. Next one is an E3, until I’m like this thing as bulletproof, I’ve tested every single element in here. I know that it’s going to work for me in my kitchen and for someone in their kitchen at home who isn’t an expert chef.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What does the E stand for? Or did you say V?

Katie Webster: E, that’s from EatingWell. I got that all from EatingWell. I actually don’t even know what E stands for.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, funny. It’s just one of those holdovers of that was the process. And so that’s what it is.

Katie Webster: I have all sorts of weird stuff like that when you don’t know something and you need to find out, it says… There’s a capital T, capital K is what you put in as a place holder. And I don’t know what that stands for either.

Bjork Ostrom: I still use it. Yeah. So I really like that idea. It’s almost like the versions are stacking on each other. And you can start to see, my guess is from version one to version two, a lot of changes. Two to three, not as many, three to four, probably even less. At what point do you call it good? Do you try and get two recipes in a row when you’re… Or like made it once it was good. I’m going to make it again, make sure that it’s good. Or at this point you’re confident enough with that final one, once you’ve nailed it to know, great, this is good.

Katie Webster: Usually when I go to shoot, it will be my final test where I’m like, the last time I made it was good and everybody enjoyed it. And when I go to shoot it, I might find a typo or something like that. But at that point I’m not trying to adjust measurements or anything like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. We have a question from Robin from the Facebook group for those one who want to jump in FoodBloggerPro/Facebook, and sometimes we’ll get some questions that we ask in the podcast interview. This is related to documenting, Robin’s asking, “Do you take pictures and record videos of the process during your first test just in case it comes out perfect the first time? Or do you wait until you have nailed it to go through the documentation process?”

Katie Webster: No, I don’t. And the reason I don’t is that I’m always timing myself. So to get that active time, total time, all that accurate, you can’t be taking photographs. You need to be actually cooking. And also I find that so distracting and using a different part of my brain anyway. And also, I test recipes when I’m making dinner. I test it 5:00 at night in my house while my kids are running around and asking me to sign stuff or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: Like field trip forms or something.

Katie Webster: So yeah, that’s enough of a hindrance to getting an accurate timing.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think that it’s a service for your readers that you’re so insistent on that. Hey, I’m going to make sure that when I put in timing here, that it’s the actual amount of time that it takes. And what I hear you saying is if you’re also then trying to do photography or video or something like that, that’s not going to give you an accurate representation of how much time that it’s taking.


So I think that’s great. Related to that, another question that Robin had is around timing. So, “If you were to guess, how much time would you say that you put into recipe development, keyword research and trying out the recipe before your first recipe test?” So almost in that pre-stage, getting it ready, getting it prepared, researching would you have a guess as to how much goes into that before you actually go into the process of actually testing the recipe?

Katie Webster: For example, I was thinking about doing a brown rice risotto in my instant pot. But I’ve never made even white rice risotto in my instant pot. And so I was like, well, I should try this. So I looked up a recipe and I tried it. That’s probably all I’ll really do for a pre-hypothesis draft step. Or I’ll go to a cookbook and I’ll use a recipe from a cookbook if I’m not familiar with something, because in general I want to create something new.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So we go through the process of first drafting it up. You have a template within Word where you’re entering everything in, taking some time to do that, print it out. Do you have a clipboard that you put it on? Is that…

Katie Webster: I am a clipboard queen. I have it right here.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. So you put it on the clipboard and you’ll mark it up as you’re going through and attempting to replicate that first version, continue to do iterations on that. Eventually you get to the point where you say, great, I feel good about this. And then you make it one more time after that to document the process. Is that right?

Katie Webster: Right. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. What does it look like from that point? Is it then going into the publishing stage where you’re entering it into WordPress, you’re bringing the photos in, editing the photos. Anything that you’d add to that kind of in the development stage that’s worth noting?

Katie Webster: No, I mean there were some things that I learned from the EatingWell process. There are lots of parts of the testing process that aren’t in the kitchen. For example, the test kitchen manager when I was there, she used to say, “Testing always starts at the grocery store.”

Bjork Ostrom: What did she mean by that?

Katie Webster: What she meant is you have your ingredient list. When you go into the store. Is there such a thing as a 10 ounce box of lasagna noodles? No, there actually isn’t. And so knowing that we’re… Or I did an enchilada recipe and I called for a certain number of enchiladas in the recipe, and then I got to the store, thought I was buying a package of tortillas that had enough for the recipe and it, I’d come home and I’m like, oh, there’s only eight in here. This isn’t enough to make a whole batch of enchiladas. So it’s that kind of thing where you’re just making sure that this recipe actually will be replicable in any grocery store in any town.

Bjork Ostrom: And so that being an important critical piece of it. Other things that you learned from EatingWell? Kind of maybe like dos and don’ts of recipe testing, things that you consider to be like things that you learned that you do, and things that you learned that you don’t learned that you don’t do.

Katie Webster: They had a very rigid system, so they do nutritional analysis for everything. So we had to weigh our food before and after cooking. Sometimes, for example, if you had to bone in meat and you were to discard the fat and bones after braising or something like that, you would weigh your roast before and then after the braise. You would literally pick it apart and just weigh out what the edible portion was in order to use that for the nutritional analysis.


They were very strict about timing. One of the things that we learned about was using… We had a gas stove and an electric stove, and we always tested on both. And obviously that’s not something we can do as food bloggers, but I have a stove that has different size burners, and so I will test it on the medium burner and on the big burner too to create a range. Because not everybody has a high powered burner in their house, but some people only have that. Things like, oh, for example, I developed a recipe for the magazine that was a breakfast bar. And the whole time I tested it, I tested it in this one pan. And then we started getting letters about it and it was burning because turns out the pan that I had tested it in was an insulated pan.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. Which most people wouldn’t have.

Katie Webster: Totally. And so I think as a food blogger, obviously we can change a recipe on the fly if we need to, so that’s good. But it’s important to remember to, if you have two different crock pots, try it in the two different crock pods or try it in the different pans because a cast iron pan and a stainless pan to get as much information as possible and create those ranges so that your reader can be successful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. It’s all of those little things that you don’t learn until it happens. That filter doesn’t exist in your mind until you go through it and it actually happens to you. So then you think, Oh, what type of pan is this? And is it one that is going to be common for people or not common?

Katie Webster: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Katie Webster: I think the only other thing I would say that they were really sticklers about was about sort isolating variables. If you’re doing a subsequent test to not change too many things at once. Because then you don’t necessarily know what it is that affected the change if you change a bunch of things at once.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So one factor at a time allows you to know the impact that changing that one factor has.

Katie Webster: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Versus multivariate testing where you’re like, hey, I’m going to change five things, turned out really well, but you don’t know the one thing that really contributed. Was it everything? So being selective about what you’re changing along the way, if that makes sense. How about staying organized? My guess is for anybody listening to this, it could relate to the fact that you have hundreds of ideas, you’re maybe testing things, multiple things at a time. What does it look like for you in terms of organization as it relates to the different stages of things, but also ideas that you have? Any advice for people in that regard?

Katie Webster: I actually have… I use a spreadsheet to organize where everything is in terms of it. I told you about my e-version. So that is within this, I have a whole spreadsheet where it’s like… So actually I use it… At the very bottom I have just a junk pile of recipe concepts where I’ll just throw ideas in there and eventually they’ll make it up onto the actual list where it’s all organized by date and it has a checklist moving across where it’s like hypothesis, draft, written, first test, second test, third test, photos taken, video shot.


It’s got all those checklists. But then I work from paper. I always try to keep my recipes printed out. I am a firm believer in that. Having written my cookbook and worked with editors, just having those documents with all of your notes on them has saved my behind so many times when they come back and they ask, “Well, where did this change come from?” And to go back and see where those changes crept in, maybe it was on the second version of it, that kind of thing. It’s really helpful. Excuse me. And I keep everything… Well, I have my active pile and then I file everything from there. And so I have 20 years worth of files.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. Of all of these Recipes that you’ve done. One of the things that I think about as you talk about that is how bad our brain is at storing information. It’s a really bad storage facility for information and remembering a change that you made.


And so if you develop processes around documenting, you’re going to be so much better off because you’ll be able to look back and say, “Why did I change that?” Maybe you’ll have a note on what you changed, but even more helpful if you have a reason why you changed it. And in the moment, for myself at least, I think that I’ll remember that. But I never do.


Even if I’m parking somewhere and I’m coming back six hours later, I need to take a picture of the parking garage and what level I’m on because I won’t remember unless I document it. So I love that. As a takeaway, when we think about the development process. I know you’ve gone through the process of writing a cookbook, we just did a series on Blogger to cookbook. What did that process look like and how did it differ from when you were publishing on your blog to when you were doing something for a cookbook, which feels a little bit higher stakes when it’s going to be printed as opposed to on a website where you can go back and change or tweak something?

Katie Webster: It was way faster. Way, way faster. It was so stressful.

Bjork Ostrom: In terms of how quickly you had to produce content.

Katie Webster: Yeah. We signed our contract for the book deal in the summer, and it was due on New Year’s. So I had a very short window of time to develop 100 recipes. So what I ended up doing there was I really had to batch everything. And I wrote probably 40 hypothesis drafts in a matter of a week. I just sat down and cranked.


And then I ended up needing to work with individuals to help cross test. So I did the first test of every single recipe, but then from there I had various people helping me. And when I went through that process, I used EatingWell’s test report form. I adapted it for my own, and I used that to send to my cross testers. So this is a form that they use for the testing process where you have to document… In addition to what you write on the hard copy of the recipe, you have to write notes in it. So it asks you questions. Are there any variables that may have affected the results of your test? And so you’d say, yes, I used an insulated baking pan.

Bjork Ostrom: For instance, speaking from experience.

Katie Webster: Yes. And so I assigned that to… Or I sent that to all of my cross testers. And every single time that they tested it, they needed to submit both a photograph or a scan of their hard copy and all the notes that they took on there, but then also their test report form. And then that whole process was a whole can of worms. Just managing a team of cross testers, excuse me. But it was necessary in order to get those recipes to the point where I felt comfortable putting them into a book. Because you’re right, there’s no going back and changing it once it’s been published.

Bjork Ostrom: So the thing that I would imagine would be hard, which you kind of alluded to is you have a tight system, you have a process, but as soon as you bring other people in, what you’re having to do then is kind of train them on a system or process. But I think the upside of that, that is it’s a little bit more of a real stress test out in the wild. Here’s a recipe, can you make it? Somebody’s like, “I couldn’t figure out why it was so sweet.”


And it’s like, “Well, how much sugar did you put in?” They’re like, “Well, I put in a cup.” And it’s like, “Oh no, that’s like a half a cup.” And they’re like, “Well, I thought it was one or two cups.” Something weird like that. One slash two, your option, but also weird little nuanced stuff like that exists within the world, which I think anybody can relate to if they’ve ever published something or given instructions to somebody and watched them try and follow it. So was that part of it was allowing people to see the process or to create something and to not only give feedback on the recipe itself, but also just are there formatting changes or ways that could communicate this more clearly? Even if it was accurately communicated is there a way to shift or adjust so people understand it better?

Katie Webster: Yeah, I mean definitely through that process, learned a lot about being more, I guess… I don’t know what word I would use, but I definitely… For example, I had one tester who always went off script.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, like I’m going to improvise a little bit on this.

Katie Webster: Yes. And so for her, when I knew that that was happening, it was almost like I needed to explain to her why I was doing something. So I would say one teaspoon of grated ginger, and then she would write back and say, “Well, I didn’t grade my ginger, I chopped it.” And I’m like, “Okay, well a chopped teaspoon of ginger is going to be a lot fluffier and have actual less ginger in it than a teaspoon of grated ginger.” And so now I need to add a little tip at the bottom of the recipe and explain why we like to grate our ginger. And if you don’t have a greater use, two teaspoons of finally chopped instead or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And it feels like you could potentially go down that rabbit hole in many different ways. So at some point you have to draw the line and say, I’m going to assume that people are going to follow this, but if you get enough feedback on something, maybe tweak it or change it. But it feels like there’s an art and there’s a science with it, and it’s hard to know for sure. I guess what I’m getting at is over-communication versus simple communication and finding that balance between those two things really with anything, not just recipes.

Katie Webster: So that gets into the whole world of the recipe writing part, which is definitely, I have strong opinions about that, and I know there’s two very different sides of that. But the way that I write my Recipes is very structured based on coming from a print world where we needed to fit our recipes into galleys and there was no room for extra words and there’s no rooms for flowery language. And so I feel like being sort stuck within that framework of this very rigid sentence structure, blah, blah, blah, I think that I’m sort of forced into being very clear for people.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So as we come to an end here, I think of the people who are just getting started out and they know that they love this world, they know that they love food and recipes, but they maybe don’t feel quite confident as somebody who’s going to develop a recipe that they can publish, that somebody’s going to make. What would your advice be to that person who’s in the early stages just starting out excited about it, but maybe not super confident? Anything that you would tell those people who are in the early stages?

Katie Webster: I would say to don’t be afraid to mess up. It’s better for you to make a mistake in your home kitchen when you’re testing a recipe than your readers to be making the mistakes. And so it’s okay to come across errors in recipes. It’s okay to burn something. That’s how to explain to someone not to burn something.


I think the other thing that I would say is it’s just super… I think the most important thing is to create a consistent writing style. There’s a book called the Recipe Writer’s Handbook. It’s a great book, so if you’re just getting started, it’s a great way to learn how to write a recipe. They give you a guideline of how to build your sentence structure. And so if you follow that, you’re not going to forget to do things like explain the timing and the degree of doneness. That way you’re going to include all of the elements that you need to include to make somebody successful, because that’s ultimately what your goal is to get your readers to be successful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What was the name of that book?

Katie Webster: The Recipe Writer’s Handbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, cool. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well. One of the things I think a lot about is just the formal education process. You go through college, you learn a specific thing. One of the ways that you do that is textbooks and lectures. And I think in one way, this is a lecture, it’s somebody sitting down and hearing something. But what’s the accompanying textbook? What’s the thing that we can go to and learn about?


And almost for anything in the world that exists, like you can learn about all of these different things that we have questions about, whether it be podcasts or videos, or in this case, a book that somebody can look through. So Katie, this is awesome. I know that people are going to be able to take little nuggets from this, apply it to what they’re doing .little by little will make the recipe world a more accurate, better, higher probability of success world through conversations like this.


But for anybody who wants to follow up with you, to connect with you, can you talk a little bit about your site? And you’ve been doing that for a long time and have had a lot of success with that. So talk about where that is, and if people want to connect with you on social, where can they do that?

Katie Webster: Sure. My website is HealthySeasonalRecipes.com, and I can be found online, on social. Facebook is Healthy Seasonal Recipes, but then on Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, I am Healthy seasonal.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. Katie, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Katie Webster: It has been a true pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here, and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We appreciate you being here so much. And if you want to go even deeper into the topics of recipe development, food blogging, business owning, and more, we really encourage you to check out the Food Blogger Pro membership so you can learn what’s included by going to FoodBloggerPro.com/join. That’s J-O-I-N. And there you can sign up for either an annual or a quarterly membership and you get access to everything we have on the site as soon as you sign up.It’s a really great thing to do to just make a ton of progress on your blog because we have courses, we have a community forum, we have experts that help out our members. We have different events, and it’s just a really positive place to be. I really love it, and I think you will too.


So I wanted to give you a little bit of an inside scoop onto what we’re planning for Food Blogger Pro this month. So Thursday, November 10th, we have our live Q&A. So each month we have a live Q&A where members can ask their questions to either Bjork or whoever is hosting the Q&A. This month it’s going to be Leslie and I and we’re going to be talking about creating great Recipes. So if you enjoyed this episode with Katie, you will definitely get a lot out of that Q&A.


Then on November 17th, we’re releasing our brand new updated Instagram for food creators course. As you know Instagram changes very often, so we wanted to give this course a nice refresh and that’ll be available for all members on the 17th. And then we have a blog post all about the foods that are trending this winter coming up at the end of the month. And that’s just a really nice place to go if you want to build out your content calendar for the next couple of months. So we are really excited. We have a great month planned for our members. And of course, like I mentioned, you can go to FoodBloggerPro.com/join if you’re interested in becoming a part of the membership. But that does it for us this week. We will see you next time, and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This podcast is sponsored by Clariti, that is clariti.com. And Clariti is really the hub for you if you are a blogger or a publisher, if you have a website, it’s really the hub for you, the place for you that allows you to better organize your portfolio of content and it’s all in one place.

Bjork Ostrom: So maybe you’ve been manually keeping track of your blog post in a spreadsheet or a project management tool, or maybe you’re not sure if the optimizations you’re making, so you make changes, but you’re not sure if those are actually moving the needle or potentially, I know this is true for us in our team.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re spending hours manually organizing what to update or keeping track of it in this massive spreadsheet and it’s just kind of overwhelming, or maybe you’re just too overwhelmed to start. That’s why we built Clariti. We wanted to have a tool that brought all of the most important things about publishing and blogging into one place.

Bjork Ostrom: And right now that includes WordPress data, Google Analytics data and Google Search Console data. And what we do is we bring that data in and we centralize it. So you can look at a specific piece of content and you can see all of the different components, traffic. You can see information about keywords and then you can see the information about that post itself.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s really two areas of Clariti, there’s the ability to filter and kind of understand your content. We call that area Explore. So it’s a place for you to look holistically at your content and say, “What does it look like?” You can easily slice and dice and get a better understanding of it.

Bjork Ostrom: And from there you can create projects to improve your content. And sometimes people say, “What do I do when I get in? What is the first thing that I should focus on?” And it’s a really powerful tool, but sometimes it’s helpful to give some simple examples.

Bjork Ostrom: And I have actually five here and I’ll talk through each one of these and for anybody who does sign up for Clariti, you can try these out as your first ways to filter and create projects. So number one, inbound links. Meaning, are you having links to new pieces of content that you’re publishing from other old pieces of content?

Bjork Ostrom: This is an area for Pinch of Yum that we could improve on. We just published a bunch of really awesome how to articles and we need to go through old posts that reference those, or that could reference those and include links that point to that new piece of content. Because right now we’re not linking to that new piece of content anywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: And Clariti really quickly surfaces any pieces of content that don’t have inbound links from other places. Number two, broken links. So sometimes we publish a piece of content and five years pass, and there’s a link within that piece of content that’s now broken.

Bjork Ostrom: It could be an internal link on your own site pointing somewhere that maybe you’ve changed the URL or removed a post or it could be somewhere else, it could be an external link. You can easily look through broken links within Clariti and create projects to fix those up. Number three, labeling your content.

Bjork Ostrom: Now within WordPress, you can create a category and categories are usually going to be public places within your site that somebody can go and look through the different pieces of content in that category, but sometimes it’s helpful internally to label content.

Bjork Ostrom: An example for Pinch of Yum is we’re labeling every piece of content that has step-by-step tutorials in it. You could also label sponsor content versus editorial content. So you could quickly go back and see, great, in this last year, how many pieces of sponsored content did I do? Or how many sponsored content articles do I have in general?

Bjork Ostrom: Number four, find a post that has missing meta description. So the meta description is an important piece to include because it’s a suggestion to Google for what they should show, or what it should show when somebody searches for a keyword and it shows a result. Now Google doesn’t always show that meta description, but it’s best practice to fill that out and sometimes we forget to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: So you can look through all of your content and see any pieces of content that are missing in meta description. And number five, find any content that has more than one H1 and H1 is a header. And best practice for H1s is you generally just want one of those, but sometimes we forget about that.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re editing a project or editing a post, and we add an H1 and technically it should be an H2 or an H3. So with Clariti you can quickly filter to see and then say, “Hey, show me anything that has more than one like two plus H1s.” And you can create a project to say, “Go into these pieces of content and change those H1s to H2s or H3s.”

Bjork Ostrom: So those are just five examples of ways that you can quickly use Clariti and see value from it. If you’re interested in signing up and becoming a user, Clariti is offering podcast listeners 50% off their first month by going to clariti.com/food, that’s clariti.com/food to receive 50% off your first month of Clariti.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you to the Clariti team for sponsoring this podcast. Hello. Hello. This is the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. And for those of you who might be tuning in for the first time or maybe you listen to a couple episodes or just getting familiar with who we are and what we’re all about, we exist to help creators, people who are creating content online do that better.

Bjork Ostrom: And whether that be building a business or having an impact, because you want to share maybe a missional type thing that you’re working on, you really believe in a certain way of eating that’s helped you and you want to share other people about that, or you just want to share a story.

Bjork Ostrom: Or in the case of today’s interview, maybe you’re getting started because you want to document the story of your family and your family recipes and that leads you to build a business and to build a following online. That’s the story of Yvette Marquez.

Bjork Ostrom: And she’s going to be talking about what it was like for her to get started way back in 2010 with Muy Bueno. She’s going to talk about the story behind that name and how it started as a cookbook, but as she started to talk about that cookbook realized that people were interested in purchasing it.

Bjork Ostrom: And that kind of led her into the idea of publishing content online. And she’s going to be sharing her story of starting and also the things that she learned along the way, really focusing in on the cookbook aspect.

Bjork Ostrom: Because this series, it’s a little two-part series that we’re doing called From Blogger to Cookbook Author is all about how people can take the momentum that they have online and fold that into a product, specifically a product that is a cookbook. And Yvette has done that three different times now. She’s in the process of working on her third cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom: And she’s going to be talking about what she’s learned along the way and each step, how she’s kind of iterated with each cookbook and the different parts of the process, the different people that were involved and how she’s really parlayed that into not only a successful following online, but also a really successful book deal here for her third time around.

Bjork Ostrom: So if you’re interested in potentially writing a cookbook, publishing a cookbook, Yvette story is going to have a lot of insightful information for you. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Yvette, welcome to the podcast.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This is part two of a short series we’re doing all about going from being a food blogger to a cookbook author. And I know you’ve done the cookbook thing two times and soon to be three times, which we’re going to talk about that.

Bjork Ostrom: So how soon into your food blogging career did you do the cookbook thing, because it seems like it was relatively early on, or was it even before you had been publishing? Tell us a little bit about that story.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. So what’s funny is I think I was completely opposite. I didn’t even know what a blog was at the time. I just knew that I wanted to write a cookbook and it was my daughter who was eight years old at the time who, my mom was visiting and making lots of food.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was working full time as a graphic designer and in marketing. And my mom was just making all the home-cooked meals that I loved growing up. And I’m originally from El Paso, Texas. So her food is very Mexican, Northern Mexico from Chihuahua and El Paso style.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I was craving all these dishes. And my daughter was the one who was like, “You should really put together a book so that when I go to college, I can have this book.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a cute idea.” And like I said, I was a graphic designer.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I was like, “I’ll design a cute little Shutterfly book and have it for my family and whoever wants to wants a copy.” So I just kind of thought of it in that way. And it was a friend of mine who was seeing all these photos that I was posting on Facebook and saying, “Oh, I’m going to write a Cookbook.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And she’s like, “Where do I get a copy?” And I was like, “You want to buy my cookbook?” She’s like, “Yeah. You should start a blog.” And I was like, “What is a blog?” I literally had to Google what is a blog?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was like, “Okay, I’m a graphic designer. I could design a cute little logo and acute little free website. And that way I can share recipes for my family who already are asking for the recipes and that’s how it started.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I kind of had the idea of just wanting to write a cookbook. I just wanted something tangible in my hands and I didn’t know how I was going to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The boss that, or founder, he wasn’t somebody that I worked for directly, but of the non-profit that I used to work at did that with his mom.

Bjork Ostrom: And she had all these Italian recipes that he wanted to have somewhere archived essentially, not on little scraps of paper, but to really have this kind of album of recipes that then you’d be able to pass down through generations.

Bjork Ostrom: And it sounds like it was similar for you where the heart behind it was like, my mom has these incredible recipes. I want to preserve them in some way. And you having the skills to do that said, “Great, I can put this together on Shutterfly or something like that.”

Bjork Ostrom: So in that first version of it, is that really what it was, or when you started to think about publishing recipes on a blog, did you start to think, “Hey, maybe I can actually publish this in a way where more than family and friends are going to be purchasing it.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah, it definitely grew. And just like you said, your friend with an Italian mom, Italian grandma, a lot of the recipes that I grew up with were never written down. So I literally had to follow my mom with a measuring spoon before she threw it to make that-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. Because she’s not going to be measuring it. She knows what it feels like-

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah, it’s all a pinch of this and little-

Bjork Ostrom: … to hold it in her hand and then put it in. Yeah.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah, exactly. It’s all about feeling and touch and flavor as you go. So yeah, so that was a really hard part, but so I initially was just going to do a family little cookbook, but then as I started the blog, right away I started getting comments from people.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And it’s funny too, I look back at my blog now and to think everything that you’re taught not to do is what I did. It was all about storytelling. A lot of stories, everything is based on a memory. And when I had that dish and what makes it special for me and very personally, what my kids love.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So it’s just very storytelling. And a lot of people actually loved that. They fell in love with those same recipes, that there’s so many cultural Mexican recipes that if your grandma doesn’t share them with you how to make it, you don’t really know how to make it right.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so many people were reaching out to me saying, “Oh my gosh, I made your capirotada,” which is a Mexican bread pudding. “And it just reminded me of my grandma’s home as it was baking. And you said you’re writing a book, where can I buy this book?” And I was like, “You want my family cookbook?” That’s when I just realized, wow, so many people-

Bjork Ostrom: There’s something here.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: People have these same stories and people have these same memories and these same dishes. They might be a little bit of a different type of recipe because region to region in Mexico or El Paso, every family makes it a little different, but I thought, okay, maybe I can turn this into something.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I’m so happy, looking back now, because I was so naive thinking maybe I could write a real cookbook. Maybe I could really have it published. Initially I looked into the self-publishing route and thinking that’s just a big investment.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I don’t want a thousand books in my garage. I don’t want to have to deal with shipping. And I don’t really think at the time there was really a lot of on-demand publishing options.

Bjork Ostrom: Options, yeah.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: It was definitely more, you had to fork out the money to have it printed and ship and figure out how are you going to get it into stores. And I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that. So maybe I can just reach out to some publishers.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And at the time I didn’t have a huge following. I mean, all I had was Facebook and my blog. And so I started researching and learned that you had to write a proposal. So I bought this book.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: It was like recipe, I don’t even know if it’s still published or out there anymore, but it was like recipes, how did it go? How to Write a Cookbook Proposal, but it was in a recipe template format.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, sure.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I was like, I could literally do a piece of this. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. This is fitting. Right. Right.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I was like, that’s-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like a recipe, but a proposal for a cookbook.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Exactly. So I was like, okay, that was very specific. And I used it as a little Bible and it’s like, okay, write your introduction and write your competition. And then I started looking at competition and thinking, who’s my competition?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I mean, I wanted a Mexican home-style cookbook, but there wasn’t even a lot of Mexican cookbook out there. And if they were, they were huge celebrity chefs. Rick Bayless, Diana Kennedy, Marcela Valladolid. So these huge, very popular Mexican chefs.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was like, “Oh gosh, I’m not a chef. Who’s going to really want to publish this book?” But I found all those books and every book that I loved, I just would set them out and literally write down what I loved about it, what I didn’t love about it.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I think having that edge of having that graphic design skill really helped me. I’m a super visual, like I love to know what catches my eye.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so I finally finished writing my proposal then I started thinking, okay, I didn’t even know at the time that I think that you have to get a literary agent. I just went straight to the publishers. And this was-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, it’s one of those things where you don’t know until you know, and the only way is by going through the process. Like the best way to learn is to, there there’s the research side, but you could research forever.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And sometimes you’re at an advantage if you don’t know and you just get after it. Like for myself, I found the quickest way to make a lot of traction in a short amount of time is just to start moving forward and seeing where you hit walls, seeing where you bounce off a little bit, refining from there and that’s the best type of education.

Bjork Ostrom: So you go through process, you’re learning. It sounds like the steps that you went through, it was first step was idea phase where, “Hey, we want to do this. And I want to do this to capture these recipes that are meaningful to me and my family.”

Bjork Ostrom: And then the second phase was, as you started talking about that, some people started to say, “Hey, I’d be interested in it. How can I purchase it?” And somebody was like, “You should create a blog where people can learn about this cookbook and you can promote it.”

Bjork Ostrom: So then you started to learn a little bit about the promotion side of it through a blog, and then learn how to do a proposal from this book and then started to shop that to publishers. Is that right?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And this was 2010. So at the time publishers wanted a printed, mailed copy of a proposal. They didn’t even allow a email, which is kind of crazy to think about it. But I was like, “Well, I’ll just start small. I won’t go to the huge publishing places.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I started looking at smaller books and I found this one publisher that was at a New York, Hippocrene Books. And they published a cookbook by another author out of El Paso.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was like, “Wow, that’s great. This publishing house, it’s a big place specializing in ethnic and international type of travel or cultural books. Maybe I can reach out to them.” So I initially just did an introduction email. And what was crazy is they had already heard about me.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: They had already seen my blog and we’re even thinking about reaching out to me. So I was like, “Okay, this is definitely meant to be.” I was either, do I continue reaching out to other publishers or just go with them? And I figured I loved that it was an automatic connection and that they were small, but they were still big.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: But at the time they had only published, I mean, they published hundreds and hundreds of books, but not what I was visualizing. I wanted beautiful paper, glossy pages, all color, hard cover and-

Bjork Ostrom: Stylistically, there wasn’t anything that you could look at that they had done and could say, I want to replicate in look and feel that content, this thing. And that wasn’t there.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. But I they’re like, “Well, you know what? If you have that vision, we want to work with you.” And it was a very collaborative opportunity where it was like, I literally got to fill it and paper. And as a graphic designer, I had already started designing the book because initially I was going to just do my own or just self-publish.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was like, “I already have it kind of laid out. Can I still do the design?” And they’re like, “Yeah, if you want.” So once the whole advance and all that was written up, they had the photography budget, the graphic design budget.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And it was nice to still be able to really have a hold of that because it was like my baby, it was literally my family recipes that I wasn’t ready to give up to somebody else to design it.

Bjork Ostrom: So in that case it sounds like within the kind of deal structure of the Cookbook, they said, “Hey, we have this amount for graphic design,” but you just didn’t hire a graphic designer. You yourself went through the graphic design process.

Bjork Ostrom: So you hear about that a lot, most often with photography, where somebody would just say, “Hey, I’m going to do photography on my own to save the cost of hiring somebody.” And if you’re good at it and you like doing it, makes a lot of sense to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: What did you learn in the process of going through that first cookbook? And can you talk a little bit about what that was, was your original vision for it what it ended up being?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. I mean, I feel like initially when I first started it was just going to be me and then my mom’s like, “I want to help.” So I said, “Okay, let’s write this together.” And then my sister’s like, “Hey, I want to be a part of this.” She’s always wanted to write a Cookbook.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I was like, “Okay, it’ll be from the three of us.” So it’s three generations of Mexican recipes. So recipes from my grandma, recipes from my mom and recipes from my sister and myself. So it was fun to just collaborate and really see the evolution of Mexican food of the classics. And to the other-

Bjork Ostrom: And those would be your grandma, the classics?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yes. And then to the kind of everyday Mexican dishes to more of the entertaining style appetizers type of thing. So it was fun to-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that same order would be grandma, mom, and then you and your sister.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Right. Right. Yeah. And my grandma had already passed away, but I mean, it was the recipes that we all know and love that my mom knew how to make. So thankfully she’s the one who helped us develop those recipes and literally write them down.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. And so original idea was kind of preserved in what the cookbook ended up being. What did you learn going through the process start to finish?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I learned it’s a lot of work. It’s just so much work. And at the time I didn’t experienced with writing. It was kind of therapeutic. It was definitely, you dive in and it’s more for me a storytelling moment and the way we organized it is by author.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so I designed these little silhouettes of each of us so that you know who’s telling the story in the cookbook. So even though maybe we didn’t develop that recipe, it’s what that recipe means to us. So it’s really cute because some people have just told me that they read the book cover to cover because of the stories.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so that’s what I love to hear is that not only is it beautiful and the recipes are delicious, but it’s graphically beautiful and it’s just more than just a cookbook. There’s a lot of storytelling.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. We hear that a lot, it’s a lot of work. And kind of as a through line, with anybody to talk about, who does a cookbook. And I think people who listen to this podcast know creating is a lot of work, but it almost feels like from what I can see from the outside a cookbook is a level above that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a lot, a lot of work, but you ended up doing it again. So talk about what that second time and now coming up, you’ll do it a third time, how did you do things differently the second time? And what was your hope in doing the second cookbook?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Well, what’s funny is I always compare it to having a baby. That just that whole pregnancy phase, it’s tiring. It’s just emotional draining. It’s just like, you’re just done, you just really want this baby out in the world. And so then with the second cookbook, I wasn’t even planning on it. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do or that I even thought of doing.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: The second book is a cocktail book. And it was a friend of mine who’s also a food blogger, her name is Vianney and her blog is Sweet Life. And she wanted to write a book about, or I was actually encouraging her to write a book about margaritas because I call her the margarita queen. She loves making margaritas.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a good friend to have.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so then I was like, “You really need to write a margarita cookbook.” And so she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve thought about it.” And so then after we talked about it, I said, “You know what, why we co-author a book together and maybe pitch it with a publisher that I already worked with and see if they’d be interested in.” And so that’s how that one came together.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: It was a fun book. I mean, it’s cocktails. So it’s all cocktails from Latin America and Spain, because I didn’t want to take away her margarita future book if she ever decides to do one. So we did it by chapter of Latin America and Spain and all these just fun exotic cocktails.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So that one was a little easier just because it wasn’t food, but still it’s a process and still takes a lot of time. And that one, I decided I’m not going to do the design for it because that part on my first book was just too personal. It was too hard to make a decision and do I like this font?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And do I like this color? And do I like this chapter opening? It was just too overwhelming that I didn’t want to get so involved with those little details. And so it was actually fun to have somebody else. It was Heidi with FoodieCrush who actually designed our cocktail book. And so they hired her and she did the design for our book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It seems like one of those things where even if you have the skills and the ability to do it it doesn’t mean that it’s not work. And I’ve heard that again with photographers who are really capable skilled photographers do a cookbook and they’re like, you know what?

Bjork Ostrom: The decisions that I have to make around the recipes, around everything else, the deadlines, like to add in another layer of consideration and that consideration being photography, or in your case graphic design, it just doesn’t make sense.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think there comes a time whether within a mini project, like a cookbook or kind of the greater business, day-to-day business considerations, where we have to make a decision around having somebody else do the thing that we’re good at. And it maybe feels weird to do that, but you can’t do everything.

Bjork Ostrom: And the best things to pass off are the things that you don’t like to do or you aren’t good at, but eventually it might come to a point where you have to pass off the things that you are good at and you do enjoy doing just in service of your own sanity and time and all the above.

Bjork Ostrom: So with that second cookbook, did you work with the same publisher for that or did you go to a different publisher or self-publish?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So for the second book, yes, it was still again with Hippocrene Books out of New York. And again, I loved working with that team. I was already familiar with them and we just had a great synergy, great process of how to turn things in. And it was still a lot of work.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: We had the same photographer for the first book and the second book and everything was shot in my home. So that’s a mess in itself. It’s a lot of cooking, a lot of cleaning, a lot of styling, a lot of buying decor and props.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So yeah, it’s a lot of work, but I love that creative side of it. That’s what was natural to me is trying to learn how to make things look pretty on a plate.

Bjork Ostrom: And what about working with a co-author? It feels like you’d have to have two very unique people in order to pull that off and for that to work both with your first one, with your family, but also with the second cookbook, working with a friend or an acquaintance in the food publishing world.

Bjork Ostrom: Anything that you learned in that process that you would want to communicate to people who are thinking of maybe writing something together?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I think when it comes to a niche book like that, it works perfectly. Obviously the first one is very family-oriented and very personal. So I don’t think I would just get any author to coauthor it with me. And it was special because it was my mom and my sister.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: The second one was because she’s a cocktail expert. I love making cocktails and learning about cocktails. So I think it was fun and works well for a niche type of book. But yeah, I mean, for this new cookbook that I’m writing it’s completely solo, which in itself is a whole other level of crazy, but in a good way.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s talk about that. So first the name of the first cookbook in the second cookbook, what are the names of those?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So the first cookbook is Muy Bueno, which is what my blog is. It’s Muy Bueno. And then my second cookbook or the cocktail book is called Latin Twist. Because anytime we would make something it’s like, “Oh, and we’re going to do it with a Latin twist.” So it was, all that just always kept coming up.

Bjork Ostrom: And can you talk about the meaning behind Muy Bueno?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. So Muy Bueno, the way it started was I remember one day my mom and I, this is when we had this idea of writing this cookbook, I said, “Well, what are we going to call it?” And again, this is before I even had the blog and I said, “Well, think about a name and call me if you come up with an idea.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I was at work and just thinking and thinking about it and she called me and I was calling her at the exact same time. And so finally I was like, okay, I let her call me. And she’s like, “I have the name.” I was like, “No, I have the name.” And she’s like, “Okay.” I was like, “Let’s say it on the count of three.”

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s awesome.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so we both said Muy Bueno.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s awesome and so great.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so the only reason we said we Muy Bueno was because my grandma would always welcome people in her house that way, she’s like, “ [foreign language 00:28:47],” which means sit down and eat. It’s very good. So I just thought that was something that was just so natural and something that reminded me of my grandma. And I definitely wanted to honor her in that way.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So this third cookbook, you’ve been through it twice. You have some experience. And I feel like the third time around with a big project like this, you’ve really developed some opinions, you know what the process is like.

Bjork Ostrom: And I know it was a few years ago that you published these other cookbooks, but you’re coming back around to it now. Tell us about what that was like, this third time around. Did you work with the same publisher or did you use a literary agent? What was your game plan for this one?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So with this one, I definitely wanted it just written by myself and I’ve had this idea as soon as we wrote the first cookbook. Everybody’s always asking, “What is your favorite dish?” And for me it always changed depending on the time of year. And that’s the way we eat. It’s all seasonal. It’s all about the holidays.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I know that I wanted to write a cookbook surrounded with the holidays in mind. And I had talked to our original publisher and they loved the idea and they were excited. They would’ve published it, but the budget wasn’t there. I really wanted it big.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I wanted to really have money to go all out with a great photographer. I wanted to be compensated for myself enough to really dive into it. So they just couldn’t meet the advance that I was hoping for. And so then I said, “Well, you know what, maybe it’s time for me to really try and figure out how to find another publisher.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I started researching how to get a literary agent and that in itself is a big thing. The proposal itself for this new cookbook took me close to a year to write. So that in itself was writing a book. It was just a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of heartache. Thinking, is it worth it?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Is somebody going to love it as much as I am going to love it? And so it was just that in itself was super emotional. And then that was right before the pandemic. So I was like, “What am I doing? Do I really want to keep doing this?”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so during that time what’s great, now that I think of it, what a blessing 2020 was, because I think it’s made you step back and do completely different things that maybe I wasn’t doing.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And one of them was listening to podcasts. And so I started listening to podcasts and hearing about other people’s journey writing a cookbook and finding literary agents. And one of the agents that really kept standing out was Sally Ekus with The Ekus Group and had seen her name floating around.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I was like a stalker. I started stalking her, I started listening to every podcast that she was in, googling every interview that she was in and trying to figure out what is it that she’s looking for and what can I do to make her notice me?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And at the time I had already gotten a couple other rejects from some other agents. Right away they would say, “No, your numbers aren’t high enough, or your other books didn’t do amazingly well.” So it was very about the numbers and very discouraging.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So when I finally reached out to Sally Ekus, I had my proposal. And she said, “Your intro letter was the best intro letter I’ve ever received.” It was very personal, very in sync to what she’s looking for. And so she she’s like, “I definitely want to work with you.” So that just made me-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like that comes from, and worth pointing out, you had done, you called it stalking. I would call it research, but you had done a lot of work leading up to that point to get to the point where you’re essentially pitching her.

Bjork Ostrom: And my guess is that you had developed some opinions based on the podcast that you heard, the interviews that you read around how to do that. And it reminds me a little bit of when I was, this is different but the same, when I was in college, one of the things I would always do is before a paper would be due, I’d try and finish it a week ahead of time.

Bjork Ostrom: And then I would email it to the professor and say like, “Hey, I finished this paper. Could you take a look through and let me know any changes you’d like to see with it or things that should be different?” And then they’d essentially grade it and then send it back to me. And then I would do the updates and then send it in, like submit it.

Bjork Ostrom: And they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, this is great.” You get a A or whatever it was, not always, but essentially what you’re doing in that phase, I would guess is you’re listening to her, say what’s important to her. Say how to frame up a story around a book. And then you encapsulate all of that in the letter.

Bjork Ostrom: And she looks at it and she’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is great,” but it comes from doing the work ahead of time. And I think sometimes what can happen is people can get so rushed. They can be like, “I’m just going to send off this thing.” It’s not personal. It’s not aimed at somebody.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s a weak pitch because there’s no personalization to it. There’s no story and you’re not aligning it to that person. So I think worth pointing out how important that research phase was for you in order to set you up to have a successful interaction with her.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: For sure. And I think it’s like internet is today, you have that one few moment make a good impression. Is it going to be a good one? Is it going to be a memorable one? Is it going to be like, “Who is this person?” Or are they going to be like, “Next.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I just really, really knew in my heart that if I make it personal, at least she’ll read it. I didn’t care if she would say no, I just knew that I just wanted her to know that I geared it towards her. And she saw that and she loved it and it just worked out in my favor.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And so she read the proposal. I already had it completely done. And they gave me great feedback of what ideas to change or how to frame it differently or what to include that maybe I didn’t include. So we tweaked it a bit more. And then from there they pitched it to different publishers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about the role of a literary agent? It feels like there’s so many different people involved in the cookbook process and I’d be curious to know, when do you involve somebody? Essentially, what would your advice be for somebody who wants to write a cookbook?

Bjork Ostrom: Now that you’ve been through it three times, now that you’ve gotten to a point where you were able to get that advance that you wanted to get, what would your advice be for somebody who’s like, “I want to write a cookbook.” What do you do? And what are the first steps that you take?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I always say, start writing the proposal because so many people don’t really understand the whole proposal process. You have to write in the proposal your biography. It’s your marketing plan. It’s your business plan.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: How are you going to pitch this? How are you going to sell it? How are you going to promote it? What are your numbers on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all your social medias? What awards have you won?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: All these things that you have to write in there because if you’re grandma may, next door, yell your recipes might be amazing and your little community, your church community might love them, but who are you to the everyday other world and how are you going to compete in this book plan?

Bjork Ostrom: And would you write a proposal and then use that to have a conversation with the literary agent? Or it sounded like when you were working with your literary agent she, and maybe what you’re saying is she revised the draft that you had created, is that what it was?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah. I mean, my proposal was pretty much complete. There was just other little tweaks that they recommended me add in. But for the most part, if you’re going to start even looking for a literary agent, you need to have a proposal.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Unless they’re going to really fall in love with you because you have these amazing numbers that they could say, “Oh yeah, that sounds great. Now work on your proposal.” But for the most part, a literary agency isn’t going to take you seriously until you at least have that first part done.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: That makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So get working on the proposal right away. It sounded like for you, it was a long process of making sure that you had it right. And it’s almost like, I can imagine working along, set your proposal kind of in the lab while you’re doing the forward-looking things like your blog and your social and continuing to build that.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Then working on this proposal, making sure that’s tweaked and adjusted to the point where you feel good about it. At what point then would you say, hey, it makes sense to reach out? And where do you find information for these people?

Bjork Ostrom: You talked about podcasts, but where are the other places that you can find a literary agent or an agency or publishers? Is there a database that exists for that? Where do you go?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yeah, I definitely Googled a lot. Just literary agents, cookbook literary agents. I talked to other bloggers that I knew and asked who their agents were and if they liked them. And so then I would reached out to a couple of those and those were the ones who were like, “Nope, your numbers aren’t big enough.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So yeah, there’s definitely lots of places to look. It’s just a matter of researching. And if there’s, what I did, it would just look at their roster of other books that they’ve published or that they’ve partnered with.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And to see if, sometimes agents will be, “No, we’re already working with a cookbook that’s similar to yours. So no.” So you never know why somebody might not want to work with you, but I mean, there’s so many agents out there.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and the interesting thing is you talk about numbers not being good enough or whatever, but you’ve built a business that, and I think about this a lot, like other professions. It’s like the salary of a medical professional, like a doctor.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like you have this really successful business and you can… I think number one, it’s just important to remember that for us as creators, sometimes we have these markers and then you’ll hear those interactions from people and be like, Oh, the numbers aren’t good enough.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, oh, actually it’s really impressive what you’ve built, what we’ve all built. I’m curious to know what it was like for you to push through that. When you hear somebody come back to you and be like, “Oh, your numbers aren’t good enough,” be like, “Oh shoot, that doesn’t feel great.” Did you remind yourself of the good work that you’ve done, or what did that look like for you?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I mean, it’s definitely discouraging and definitely makes you second guess it. And do you even want to do this because maybe it won’t be successful? And that does get into and play in your head, but then just like you said, it’s like, okay, I’m working with brands.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: I have a great audience. My business is growing and it’s successful. I mean, just to think how much… I mean, this is a really cool thing to share, that it’s so funny to share it is that I want an Emmy on a video.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And never would I have ever thought that in this world that I’d be producing a short format video and it win an Emmy. So I was like, “Okay, I might not have the millions of followers on Instagram, but there’s certain things that have really been noticed in this business journey that I knew that I had something.”

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: And I love the feedback just from people who are following me and resonating with my story. And I knew that there wasn’t a lot of Latina authors who are writing books, writing about their culture, writing about their history, writing about their journey and their family and their recipes.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: So I definitely want it… I kept reminding myself of that, that those are the things that are important and our voices need to be heard.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. And a great note to wrap up on. Yvette, before we go, actually one more question. If you were to go back in time, 2010, you’re just starting out. You’re kind of thinking about this potential of a cookbook or the potential of a blog. What advice would you give yourself?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: It’s the same advice I give to other people is just do it. Just like you were saying, don’t think about it, or even though you might be naive in the beginning, just put yourself out there and you’re going to learn from your mistakes and then you’re going to keep growing from them.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And where can people get in touch with you, Yvette? If they want to reach out, if they want to maybe shoot you DM, are your DMS open? Can people DM you? What’s the best way to get in touch with you and also follow along with what you’re up to?

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Yes. So my blog is muybuenocookbook.com and Instagram, muybuenocooking. I totally respond to every single message on Instagram. I’m obsessed with my Instagram family. And yeah, you could shoot me an email, send me a DM. I’m totally open for that.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Yvette, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Thank you.

Leslie Jeon: Hello. Hello. Leslie here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really hope that you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Before you sign off, I wanted to mention one of the most robust features of a Food Blogger Pro membership and that’s our courses.

Leslie Jeon: So in case you’re not familiar, as soon as you sign up for a Food Blogger Pro membership, you immediately get access to all of our courses on Food Blogger Pro.

Leslie Jeon: And we have lots and lots, hours upon hours of courses for you to check out ranging on all different topics from SEO to photography, to video, to all types of social media, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, the list goes on and on.

Leslie Jeon: And all of these courses have been recorded by our Food Blogger Pro team or by our industry experts, by all of the Food Blogger Pro experts that we have on our team. And we are constantly going in and updating old courses.

Leslie Jeon: So you can rest assured that you’re getting the best information possible as you’re working to grow your blog, to grow your business. The courses are the best way to learn how to do that.

Leslie Jeon: So like I mentioned, you can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. So if you’d like to do that, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership and join the community. We really hope that you enjoy checking out our courses.

Leslie Jeon: They are one of my favorite parts of a Food Blogger Pro membership, just because we have so much knowledge for you to check out there. I think that’s everything we’ve got for you this week though. Thanks again for tuning in and for listening to the podcast. And until next time, we hope you have a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This podcast is sponsored by Clariti. That is C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. Clariti is really the hub for you if you are a Blogger or a publisher, if you have a website. It’s really the hub for you, the place for you that allows you to better organize your portfolio of content and it’s all in one place. Maybe you’ve been manually keeping track of your blog post in a spreadsheet or a project management tool, or maybe you’re not sure of the optimizations you’re making.

Bjork Ostrom: You make changes, but you’re not sure if those are actually moving the needle, or potentially, I know this is true for us in our team, you’re spending hours manually organizing what to update or keeping track of it in this massive spreadsheet and it’s just kind of overwhelming, or maybe you’re just too overwhelmed to start. That’s why we built Clariti. We wanted to have a tool that brought all of the most important things about publishing and blogging into one place. And right now that includes WordPress data, Google Analytics data, and Google Search Console data. What we do is we bring that data in and we centralize it.

Bjork Ostrom: You can look at a specific piece of content and you can see all of the different components, traffic, you can see information about keywords, and then you can see the information about that post itself. There’s really two areas of Clariti. There’s the ability to filter and kind of understand your content. We call that area explore. It’s a place for you to look holistically at your content and say, “What does it look like?” You can easily slice and dice and get a better understanding of it. And from there, you can create projects to improve your content. Sometimes people say, “What do I do when I get in? What is the first thing that I should focus on?”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a really powerful tool, but sometimes it’s helpful to give some simple examples, and I have actually five here. I’ll talk through each one of these. For anybody who does sign up for Clariti, you can try these out as your first ways to filter and create projects. Number one, inbound links, meaning are you having links to new pieces of content that you’re publishing from other old pieces of content? This is an area for Pinch of Yum that we could improve on. We just published a bunch of really awesome how to articles and we need to go through old posts that reference those or that could reference those and include links that point to that new piece of content.

Bjork Ostrom: Because right now we’re not linking to that new piece of content anywhere. Clariti surfaces, really quickly surfaces any pieces of content that don’t have inbound links from other places. Number two, broken links. Sometimes we publish a piece of content and five years past and there’s a link within that piece of content that’s now broken. It could be an internal link on your own site pointing somewhere that maybe you’ve changed the URL or removed a post, or it could be somewhere else. It could be an external link. You can easily look through broken links within Clariti and create projects to fix those up.

Bjork Ostrom: Number three, labeling your content. Now, within WordPress, you can create a category and categories are usually going to be public places within your site that somebody can go and look through the different pieces of content in that category. But sometimes it’s helpful internally to label content. An example for Pinch of Yum is we’re labeling every piece of content that has step by step tutorials in it. You could also label sponsored content versus editorial content. You could quickly go back and see, “Great. In this last year, how many pieces of sponsored content did I do? Or how many sponsored content articles do I have in general?”

Bjork Ostrom: Number four, find a post that has missing meta description. The meta description is an important piece to include because it’s a suggestion to Google for what they should show or what it should show when somebody searches for a keyword and it shows a result. Now, Google doesn’t always show that meta description, but it’s best practice to fill that out and sometimes we forget to do that. You can look through all of your content and see any pieces of content that are missing a meta description. Number five, find any content that has more than one H1 and H1 is a header. Best practice for H1s is you generally just want one of those, but sometimes we forget about that.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re editing a project or editing a post and we add an H1 and technically it should be an H2 or an H3. With Clariti, you can quickly filter to see and say, “Hey, show me anything that has more than one, like two plus H1s.” You can create a project to say, “Go into these pieces of content and change those H1s to H2s or H30s.” Those are just five examples of ways that you can quickly use Clariti and see value from it. If you’re interested in signing up and becoming a user, Clariti is offering podcast listeners 50% off their first month by going to Clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to receive 50% off your first month of Clariti. Thank you to the Clariti team for sponsoring this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey, hey, hey, it’s Bjork. You’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We are doing a series all about going from blogger to cookbook, so from blogger to cookbook author series, interviewing people about how they went through the process of becoming a cookbook, author, things they’ve learned, insights they’ve had along the way. For some people who start a blog, one of the goals that they have is to become a cookbook author. There’s a lot of benefits that come from it, and there’s also a lot of really hard things that come from the cookbook process.

Bjork Ostrom: What we want to do in this series of which this podcast interview is the first is to discuss all the ins and outs that go into the process of doing a cookbook. This is part one. In this interview, we’re talking to Adrianna Adarme. She has a site, a blog called A Cozy Kitchen, and she also has a couple cookbooks that she’s published and has had success in varying different forms with those cookbooks. She’s going to talk about the things that she’s learned from cookbook number one to cookbook number two and has some really specific insights. She also shares numbers around how many cookbooks she sold both the first time and the second time, why she thinks that one cookbook did better than the other.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s just really a gift to hear her be transparent in the whole process. I know for me, I learned a lot along the way, and I think you will as well. Hey, before we jump into it, I’d like to give a quick shout out to our podcast Facebook group. If you go to FoodBloggerPro.com/Facebook, you can join the group that’s specific for this podcast. It’s a way for us to just continue the conversation around all things blogging, publishing, recipe creation, recipe development, cookbooks, whatever it might be. We would love for you to join that group and continue the conversation there. It’s free to join.

Bjork Ostrom: Again, you can do that by going to FoodBloggerPro.com/Facebook, or you could go to Facebook and just search for the Food Blogger Pro Podcast and you should be able to find it. Go ahead and check that out. What we’re going to do right now is jump into this interview with Adrianna, and I can’t wait to share it with you. For all of you who are interested in publishing a cookbook, I know that you’re going to get a lot out of it. Let’s go ahead and jump in. Adrianna, welcome to the podcast.

Adrianna Adarme: Hi, thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about all things cookbook or cookbooks, in your case, multiple cookbooks, for this series that we’re doing, where bloggers go through the process or writing cookbooks and seeing what we can learn from bloggers who have done that. But before we do, love to get a little bit of a background. Tell us who you are, what you’re about, your site, and maybe what a normal day or week looks like for you.

Adrianna Adarme: Okay, yeah. My name is Adrianna Adarme, and I write the food blog A Cozy Kitchen. I started it in I think I want to say 2011, so I guess I’m considered like an OG Blogger.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, 10 plus years.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah. I started it when I was like a lot of people around that time, I started it when I was bored at work and very uninspired. I was working at a trailer house here in LA, and I really wanted to do something creative, but that was on my own. When I was at work, I stumbled upon food blogs. I stumbled upon I would say Joy the Baker was maybe the first one that I read, I started reading, and Smitten Kitchen. I was like, “Wow! This looks like so much fun.” I would cook their recipes and bake their recipes at home. And then I was like, “Why don’t I do something like this?” I really had no experience cooking or baking, but I did want to go into food media.

Adrianna Adarme: I really wanted to go and work for Food Network or work for a food sort of channel. But all that stuff was based in New York and I was not willing to move to New York. This was kind of a way that I could get my toe into creating food content without actually having to commit to living in New York City.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s something that we have the ability to do now, right? 20 years ago you’d be like, “I want to get into food media,” and it’s like, well, you should figure out how to do TV or write for a newspaper. Having your own platform wasn’t really a thing and I think we forget that.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah, I know, and I was super inexperienced when it came to food. I felt like it was somewhat of a hobby of mine, but I definitely wasn’t… I didn’t understand how to write a recipe. I didn’t really understand all of the rules of what that meant and what went into that. I certainly didn’t know how to take a food photo, but I did go to film school. I think my learning curve was a little shorter because I had that foundation of film and I understood ISO and f-stop. I understood all of those things. So then when it came to digital photography, I was like, “Oh, I kind of know this.”

Bjork Ostrom: When you say you were working in a trailer house, what does that mean?

Adrianna Adarme: It’s basically like there’s marketing companies here in LA that specialize in making trailers for feature films. They also do featurettes. They do behind the scenes. They do all of the marketing promo for major motion pictures. I worked at a company like that. I started off as a production coordinator, and then moved to an associate producer. I was producing kind of like behind the scenes content that would live on different websites and live on like a DVD or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: This is the difference between LA and Midwest. In LA, you say trailer house and people are like, “Oh yeah, you work on the film.” For me, you say trailer house and I’m like, “Oh, like a mobile home park.”

Adrianna Adarme: Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, no little different, a little different, a little different. Yeah, no, trailer houses, they pump out trailers. I mean, trailers definitely…

Bjork Ostrom: They have a guy who has the deep voice.

Adrianna Adarme: Yes. The famous guy that he… He came into the office one time. He’s very famous. He’ll go over…

Bjork Ostrom: Does he do all of them?

Adrianna Adarme: He does a lot of them. What happened that particular day that I saw him, very small, short older guy. He came in a limo and they booked him out. They booked him that day for one trailer. I forget which one it was. And then he was on his way to three or four other trailer houses to do audio. I mean, he came in the booth and he read the script and he nailed… I was in the booth and it was like he nailed it on the first take. You’re just like and everyone’s like, :I guess we should have him do it again for safety, but I don’t have any notes. Does anybody have any notes?”

Bjork Ostrom: And then you hand him a check for $30,000 or whatever?

Adrianna Adarme: You’re just always, “Oh, he’s a professional.”

Bjork Ostrom: He gets back in his limo and goes to the next place.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly. He like, “I work one day every three or four weeks. Put them all in one day and I’m going to go and do my…” And he kills it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. I think it’s worth pointing out, it’s one of the things that we try and talk about because I think a lot of times people look at this space, whatever that might be, social media, posting to a website, and they think, “Oh, I don’t have experience with that thing,” but a lot of times you have something leading up to that that actually will really help you if you lean into it. For Lindsay, it was teaching. It was a huge part of her background and her experience. For me, it was an interest in IT and computers and gadget and all things technology. It’s like didn’t understand the space, but had this background.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s an important reminder. It sounds like that was the case for you. You want to get into food media, maybe don’t have the food piece, you have the media piece and you can kind of craft that around the exactly ways that you need to deploy that within this space.

Adrianna Adarme: I think a lot of people have applicable skills and they don’t necessarily think they do, and I think that it’s really important to under… I mean, at the time, I didn’t understand how my skills could be applicable. I just wanted to do something fun and creative. I went to art school. I went to film school. It was an art conservatory. I knew I wanted to do something creative every single day. I think that was really what drove me towards it. I was like, wow, I don’t have to rely on anyone to be creative every day. I can take this into my own hands and do it for myself. And whether it makes money or not, doesn’t really matter because I feel fulfilled. I didn’t feel fulfilled at my job.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s interesting, because I think when I hear trailer house and I think of the stuff that you’re doing, I think like, oh, it’s the peak of creativity would be movies, media, whatever, sound effects. You’re putting music behind these dramatic scenes. But that wasn’t the case.

Adrianna Adarme: It’s not. I think making movies is very different than marketing movies. I think when you’re making movies, you’re obviously coming up with the story and crafting the cast and putting the pieces together, depending on what department you work in. Even if you’re a producer, you’re putting those pieces together and it can be really creative and really fulfilling. But I think when you’re dealing with the marketing of a movie, it can be really formulaic and it can be all about hitting a certain demo. It can be very data and statistic driven, and it can feel like putting a little puzzle together that is… It’s already there.

Adrianna Adarme: You just have to scoop the pieces together. That part is not super fulfilling or creative at all. The trailer, those also have a formula to them. Those also aren’t super creative. I mean, most trailers are pretty much the same. They follow the same structure. It just didn’t feel very creative to me. And also, when you’re dealing with a studio and you’re dealing with the company that you work for, it’s like there’s a lot of politics involved.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. You don’t necessarily have creative autonomy to go and create the thing you want. It’s like there’s a lot of decision makers involved and people along the way. You say, “Great. I know to be in the space of food. Explore that.” You kind of have some of these people that you’re following. You’re like, “Oh, it’s really cool what they’re doing. I’m interested in doing a similar thing.” You spin up a blog, start to post a little bit. You said initially it wasn’t something that you’re interested in necessarily doing for financial benefit, but eventually did become that and you started doing it. What did that transition look like?

Adrianna Adarme: It was rocky.

Bjork Ostrom: How so?

Adrianna Adarme: Well, I think that I maybe jumped the gun too soon. It was one of those things where I was like, “I feel like I could wing this. I can figure it out,” and so I quit my job a little too early. There were someones where I was like, “Oh my God, I need to find a job.” This is also pre-Instagram. This is pre-Instagram, pre-Pinterest, pre-social media platforms that sort of assisted you in making money in different ways. It was really just off of ad revenue that wasn’t as fruitful as it is now. It was kind of…

Bjork Ostrom: What year was this?

Adrianna Adarme: Maybe 2012, 2013. It was kind of before the AdThrive and Mediavine sort of started. I mean, maybe they had started already, but I wasn’t with them certainly. It just didn’t feel like super stable, even though my numbers on my blog were great. I was building an audience. People were there. People were commenting. People were remaking my recipes, which felt really great. The money just wasn’t there yet.

Bjork Ostrom: How long did you hold on in that stage, or did you end up getting another job to smooth things over?

Adrianna Adarme: I didn’t get another job because I didn’t get the job, but I did apply to YouTube. And then I ended up selling my first cookbook, which I think helped a lot and it made me be like, “Okay, I have some money coming in and it’s going to be okay.” It also I think just reaffirmed that this is maybe the path that I should go on.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that specifically as long as we’re in the cookbook world? How did that come about? Did somebody reach out to you? And then in terms of the deal itself, insofar as you’re comfortable, how much of that would you feel comfortable sharing in terms of what that looked like?

Adrianna Adarme: I actually went after an agent. I contacted an agent, because I had gotten a proposal demo, like an example of a proposal.

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning you got from somebody else, a proposal demo? Here’s what a proposal would look like.

Adrianna Adarme: Here’s what a cookbook proposal would look like. Here’s what you need to have involved in the cookbook proposal, which included everything from an opening bio of me and the subject of what the book would be like and examples of what the recipes would read like, and then also what the marketing plan would be like, who I’m connected to that’s somewhat famous that would give me blurb or anything like that.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you come across that?

Adrianna Adarme: A friend of mine I think sent it to me, another food blogger sent it to me. I forget who. But on the cover, there was an agent’s name. My agent that I used, the first one was Danielle Svetcov and she’s at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency in New York. I just blindly cold emailed her and was like, “I got this proposal and this is what I’m trying to do. What do you think? Would you be interested in representing me or representing me and my book?” She got back to me pretty quickly.

Adrianna Adarme: I think at the time I think there was a lot of buzz around food bloggers and a lot of like, oh, they’re this new entity that has this following and we should maybe see if they can sell books. We don’t know. I think a few of food bloggers at that point had really sold some books.

Bjork Ostrom: To make sure I’m tracking, you got this demo of what a proposal might look like. You took that. You had the contact information. A friend sent that to you. You had the contact information. You spun up your own actual proposal out of the demo. I can see what it looks like. Great. I’m going to create my own. And then send it to the person whose name was listed there and said, “Are you interested in working with me?” Had you also developed a concept for a book?

Adrianna Adarme: Yes. I was like, I really want to make a pancake cookbook. Why? I have no idea. Who told me this would be a good idea? I have no idea. I think it started with me… I think I came up with a concept for two reasons. Number one, I did really like pancakes growing up. I mean, most kids do.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It’s a good place to start.

Adrianna Adarme: But I think I also just didn’t have the confidence in A Cozy Kitchen to say it’s going to be A Cozy Kitchen cookbook because I felt like my brand wasn’t big enough, my site wasn’t big enough. In hindsight, that’s definitely not the move.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you mean by that?

Adrianna Adarme: Well, I’ve been told by a lot of people that work in cookbooks like editors and stuff like that, “You should actually start quite wide, and then go into single subject, whatever that is.” It should be A Cozy Kitchen cookbook or something very wide, and then the next one is simple meals or dinners or desserts or kid food. That’s how you should go at it.

Bjork Ostrom: Start, meaning your first cookbook should be?

Adrianna Adarme: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you know why that is?

Adrianna Adarme: I don’t know. Think what it does is it establishes a world. It establishes an umbrella of what your ethos or what your point of view is. And then after that, you can go in with more specialty sort of subjects.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like saying, “Here I am. Here’s my brand. It’s me,” versus coming in really narrow, which it has the potential to establish that as your brand. If you come in with this really specific thing, then it’s like, “Oh, you’re the pancake person.”

Adrianna Adarme: Right. I’m not a pancake girl. I don’t want to be a pancake girl.

Bjork Ostrom: But you’re interested in it, but you’re interested in it in a silo. Whereas if you were to come out broad, it’s like the brand is your actual brand and within that, much like categories on a website, you have these specialties.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly. I mean, I think Pioneer Woman is someone who has done that well. I mean, her first book was The Pioneer Woman Cookbook, and it was like everything she makes on the ranch from Featuring Charlie to things that she makes to her children, to her husband, to her girlfriends. It’s a very wide umbrella of things that she makes. And then after that, it’s Christmas recipes. It goes in very specific and you know exactly what those things are going to be. You have an idea. I think she’s someone that has done it right from the beginning.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. But going through this process, it sounds like it worked in that you were able to get a deal coming out of it and publish a cookbook.

Adrianna Adarme: Yes. My first deal was sold to St. Martin’s Press, and it got actually pretty good traction when it was sent out to publishers. A lot of publishers were interested. I mean, I think single subject also a thing that I learned is they don’t pay very well, because you’re betting off of, do people really want this single subject? We don’t know. Are you really that interested in chili? I think now we realize appliance-based cookbooks actually crush it.

Bjork Ostrom: Like an instant pot cookbook as an example.

Adrianna Adarme: Instant pot, air fryer, crock pot, those types of single subjects actually do really well. I do think that eBooks on single subject do really well as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Because you’re able to sell against that I would assume based on matches that people are doing with buyer intent searches. If somebody searches instant pot recipes, you know they’re interested in that versus if you have… It almost seems like the difference between selling out of your following versus selling out of an interest. It’s like with an interest, you might know that people… It’s like people like pancakes, right? How much so and would it be to the point where people would be interested in buying a cookbook? That’s another question.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah, and probably not so. I think when you get an instant pot, you’re like, well, I already invested $80 or whatever it is in this machine. I want to be able to use it a lot. Buying a $10 cookbook is in my best interest because then I get all these sorts of ideas to use it. It actually makes more sense. When you go searching for a pancake recipe, you’re not looking for 40 different types of pancakes. You probably want just a normal morning pancake.

Bjork Ostrom: Eventually it goes through the process. You find an agent. Great. Just understanding, the process, the agent then works with you to pitch publishers on a cookbook. It sounds like from what you said, publishers were interested in it. What happens next in the process?

Adrianna Adarme: Generally what an agent will do is they’ll come up with a list of editors that they want to send it to that they think will be interested in. They send you the list. This is how it would happen with me. She sent me the list and I approved the list. I had no idea who these people were, so I was like great. And then she sent an email with a proposal to each of those people, and then they respond either, “Great, not interested. Looks lovely, but going to pass,” and then a few of them were interested, maybe two or three were interested in it.

Bjork Ostrom: These are editors?

Adrianna Adarme: These are editors with buying power. At the time, I believe it was around this time, which is not a great time actually to send out a book because most people are on vacation.

Bjork Ostrom: Time meaning July-August.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah. July-August is not that great of a time. I think a better time is probably September because everyone’s back in the office. There were some people that were out and they were like, “I’m really interested, but I’m on vacation in Mexico.” What happened was a few people responded saying that, one person was like, “I’m really interested in the book.” She was like, “Well, I have these other two people that are interested in it, but they haven’t sent offers because they’re on vacation.” This one publisher was like, “Well, great. I’m going to do what’s called a preempt,” where they send an offer to beat out the other offers.

Adrianna Adarme: They sent an offer for I believe $40,000 for the first book. I was like, “Wow! That’s amazing.” I was like, “That’s incredible.” Now, I mean, I would never take a deal like that and I think that it’s very low, but at the time, I just was like, “Wow! That’s a lot.” $40,000 sounds like…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a salary.

Adrianna Adarme: I was like, “Wow! I’m going to make that off of a book? That’s incredible.” I was like, “Okay, where do I sign?” I was like, “Okay, I’m down.” That was the deal. That was it, that one email. It was in a preempt.

Bjork Ostrom: What you’re saying, if I pull the thread a little bit, is that because the initial contact with these multiple different potential buyers happened at a time when people were out, it kind of reduced the ability to have any type of bidding on it or a bidding war. You think of the real estate market and the shift that’s happened and eventually I think the prices will start to go down because there’s not as many people who are looking now. Whereas in January of this year, you’d list your house and you’d have 10 people bid on it. Naturally, supply and demand, going to get a better price for it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s one learning. Make sure you’re doing it at a time when you can optimize for the number of people that would be bidding on it. A question that I have coming out of it is you’d mentioned editors with buying power. What’s the difference between a publisher versus an editor with buying power?

Adrianna Adarme: Well, I mean, I think there are people who work at publishing houses that their title is publisher I think. But most of the people that this was sent to was senior editor positions where they have…

Bjork Ostrom: Within a publishing house.

Adrianna Adarme: Yes, exactly, at an imprint or a publishing house. They have either an allotted amount of money that they can spend on books every year on advances. Sometimes it doesn’t really have anything to do with you too. It has to do with their roster. If you’re coming out with an instant pot cookbook and they just bought one, they’re not going to buy it no matter how much they like it. It’s all about fitting into their roster too.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. $40,000, how does that work? Do you just get a check that they cut for $40,000 and they’re like, “Go write the book?” Or is it kind of tiered out as you have certain deliverables? How did that process work after you signed to get the deal done on that first cookbook?

Adrianna Adarme: They don’t really tell you exactly the way the process is going to work, but sometimes it’s either tiered out into two payments or three. Obviously if you have two book deals, it could be broken out into seven or whatever. Mine was broken out into two. The first is upon signing, which is like… Sometimes it can be three. Sometimes it can be two. If it’s on two, usually one’s upon signing, and then second is usually upon delivery of the manuscript or when it comes out. I believe mine was upon signing. It takes around three or four months to finalize the contract.

Adrianna Adarme: You don’t get that first check for a really long time, and you’re expected to move forward and produce the book, which for someone like me who didn’t really have a lot of money, that’s very difficult. I can’t sit here and dip into my savings and lend myself the money in order to go and do it. I just have to go and spend money on groceries to test the recipes and all of that. I was like, well, I can’t shoot the book because I actually paid a friend of mine who’s a food photographer to shoot the book. I have to pay her. I don’t have the money to pay her if you don’t pay me. In that advance, you’re generally expected to pay for the photography and the production of the book.

Adrianna Adarme: Whether that’s if you hire an editor, a writer, a food stylist, a prop stylist, whatever staff you want to hire in order to assist you in making and creating that book, you have to pay them out of the advance. And a lot of times publishers want to approve the photographer. They approve the photographer. For my second book, which I’m sure we’ll get into, I actually shot that myself and that was approved by them as well by the publisher beforehand. They knew I was going to shoot the book.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. You can start to see how you have this kind of one lump sum and it’s like, hey, that’s awesome. $40,000 to get paid for this thing that I’m building. That’s a huge piece of it too is it’s a validation of you as a creator, as somebody who’s building a thing. Somebody looks at it and says like, “I think it’s worthy enough to pay you a substantial amount of money to create something in the world.” That’s awesome and that’s a huge validation. And then as you get into it, you start to back certain things out like the cost of a food photographer. That backs out, right? Cost of taxes maybe.

Adrianna Adarme: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: You talk about this idea of net proceeds and net proceeds mean how much are you actually getting after it’s all said and done. Slowly you kind of work those numbers back and it’s like, oh, actually there’s probably still some leftover, but you can see how quickly 40,000 becomes not 40,000 when you factor in everything that you need to make it happen.

Adrianna Adarme: Everything from agency fees, which is taken out of the advance and sent directly to them. They get a separate check, because it’s written in the contract obviously. I mean, you’re talking about 15% taken off the top. And then after that, you have groceries that you have to buy, and then you have the photographer and whoever you’re going to hire. If I wrote another cookbook, I would be hiring quite a bit of people just to help me because it is such a large amount of work, especially considering everything that I have going on now. But back then, I wanted to do most of it, but I still have to spend a substantial amount of that advance.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s this great thread on Twitter for… This is completely unrelated industry that we’ll put in the show notes if anybody wants to check it out, but it’s about NHL players and how you hear that an NHL player gets a $6 million contract. But then this guy walks through… I don’t know what his role is, if he’s an agent or maybe somebody who used to play. But you slowly start to walk back agent fee, and then it’s taxes, and then all of these different pieces. You get down to it and it’s like, oh, you hear $6 million. But when it gets down to it, it’s actually $2 million or $1 million, I forget what he ends up at, which is still obviously an insane amount of money, but it’s not the amount that you see as the top line.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Coming out of that first cookbook, you get to the end, you publish it. It’s in the world. You get some time behind it. What did you learn after going through that first round of writing, photographing, negotiating, publishing a cookbook?

Adrianna Adarme: I learned that pancakes is a really difficult subject to have that many opinions about. It was a struggle to come up with that many recipes on a single subject, and I realized that it should have been much broader breakfast or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. How many recipes were in the cookbook total?

Adrianna Adarme: I think it was 75. It was just quite challenging to really come up with that many recipes that I felt good about.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Adrianna Adarme: There was some things about it that I didn’t really. I was just kind of like, would I make that? I don’t know if I would make that. That was probably the thing that I took away from it the most and also just how much work it was. It was just a tremendous amount of writing, a tremendous amount of editing. It was just a huge workload.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you keep your blog up at the same time?

Adrianna Adarme: I did, and that was also really challenging.

Bjork Ostrom: Those were long days.

Adrianna Adarme: Those were really long days. I mean, when I think of that time and some days… Now, Tuesday, I’ll take a Tuesday off and I’ll go and get a manicure or something. I kind of worked for this.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Adrianna Adarme: I paid some dues.

Bjork Ostrom: In the world of money, it’s like those were deposits you made into your bank account that have paid dividends that allow you to have some flexibility now.

Adrianna Adarme: I can enjoy this today.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Totally. You deserve this. How did that first cookbook do? We’ll use that as kind of a contrast for talking about your second one.

Adrianna Adarme: The first cookbook, when I posted that I was going to come out with the book and here’s the pre-orders and all of that, the reception was really great and everyone was super excited. I had tons of comments on my blog. But I realized that even all the people that maybe purchased it from the blog, it wasn’t really enough. My first cookbook didn’t do very well. I maybe sold 4,000 copies at the end of the day. I mean, I think now I’m somewhere at seven or 8,000 and it’s been a really long time. It didn’t really do well. It was a very humbling experience. I think it was one that I learned a lot from. I think it was really beneficial for me.

Adrianna Adarme: I think that I’m the type of person where I almost need to fail a little bit to really understand and dissect what went wrong, and then I can have a second chance. I mean, I think cooking in general… I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen Lindsay fail a million times on recipes. If something doesn’t work out, you learn so much from those failures and you just keep going.

Bjork Ostrom: We haven’t done this for a while, but for years we would do, it was actually Lindsay, but the recipe failure recap of the year. It was pretty extreme. We’ll link to those in the show notes as well. You could probably just search to find them as well. But I think one of the things that I feel like is really true in your situation and can also pull some of my own experiences from is first of all, 4,000, 8,000, that’s 8,000 people who look at something and say, “I want to purchase this.” To me, when I look at that, I think that’s actually pretty incredible. We live in a weird world where we can see everything and we can then use that as a contrast point. Using a contrast point of somebody who sells a million of a thing is a really easy place to access.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s easy for us to see those stories. But I think a lot about this idea of… Kevin Kelly wrote a post, he’s kind of a technology pundit, the 1000 True Fans. It’s like, man, for 8,000 people to exist in the world who say, “I want to buy this,” while it might not be a “financial success,” I feel like it’s a great validation. One of the things that I think is important, and this is where it ties back to a thought framework that I have, is thinking about your entrance into a thing like selling a cookbook or trying to understand a social media platform or a new venture, I thought about this when we bought our first investment property, like real estate, was like, I’m probably going to mess this up and I’m not going to get the deal right.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s going to be a lot of things that I don’t know about it. I actually don’t know what I’m doing as I’m getting into this, but I know that the only way that I’m going to get there is by starting and figuring it out and then getting to the other side and being like, here’s what I could have done better or different. It sounds like for you, that was a version of this. You wouldn’t have had all of those learnings that you just talked about if you had just read blog posts about cookbooks. It had to be you going through it.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s a really cool thing and important to point out and important for listeners too to know that’s one of the greatest ways to eventually reach that point of success is to go through the thing and be like, oh, this felt off. This wasn’t good. I’m going to adjust that. It doesn’t have to be a home run on your first one I guess is what I’m saying. You get to this point, you sell 4,000, 5,000 copies. You get what was in advance of $40,000. Did you have to get to a certain point? What would the number have been if you were to get royalties above and beyond the advance and can you talk about how that works?

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah, It’s called earning out. For very single cookbook… Now, I’ll also say this, piggyback off what you said where 8,000 copies is a lot. If you saw 8,000 copies of an eBook where you take all of those proceeds, you’re actually doing pretty well. 8,000 times $9 is you’re doing all right. This is negotiated in your advance is for every copy that you sell, you’re going to get a percentage of what that is. Actually that percentage hits back to the advance. Say you get a dollar for every copy that is sold. Say I sold 8,000 copies, that $8,000 hits the advance of the $40,000.

Bjork Ostrom: You have to work through the advance before you get your royalty.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That cut. it kind of becomes a little bit of a numbers game a little bit where you say, “Do I want a bigger advance that’s more guaranteed, but maybe you don’t have as much upside after?” You hear about this in the movie industry as well with Tom Cruise and Top Gun. It’s like he’s going to make a lot from that because he negotiated his contract in a way where it was based not just on a lump sum that he gets paid for the movie, but also ticket sales. And because it did so well, he’ll get more. In your case, it’s like, great. It could still get there in time. Maybe it catches on and it gets to that 40,000 mark and then eventually works through it, but that was strictly the advance. That’s what you’re paid for that.

Adrianna Adarme: I didn’t earn out.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense.

Adrianna Adarme: I’ve never earned out.

Bjork Ostrom: And that phrase earn out, meaning that you earned out the advance and then you get… Would it be considered royalties? What is it actually called?

Adrianna Adarme: It’s earning out of your advance. And then after that, you get paid in royalties. You get royalties essentially. You get paid for royalties. My second book, I get royalties, and we’ll talk about that soon. But I get paid every six months. May and October I get royalties from that book.

Bjork Ostrom: This is a really specific question. I have a friend who had a band. Gosh, it was probably 15 years ago. You can’t really find their music anywhere, but they also don’t own the rights to the music. On that first book, could you buy that book from the publisher and then just switch it over to self-published? Do you know how that works?

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah. Actually that’s a good point. I didn’t think about that. I have to look at what the contract says, but I’m pretty sure that I own all of the recipes and I license those recipes to the publisher in perpetuity. I believe that’s how it works. I own all the recipes, so I’m able to do whatever I want, but they are also able to print that recipe, print that book for however long they want.

Bjork Ostrom: Could you buy that back from them essentially?

Adrianna Adarme: I probably could if I wanted to. I don’t know if I want to, but yeah, I think you could. I don’t want to say this in a blanket statement, but I will say that the publishing world seems less corrupt and messed up than the music world.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Totally.

Adrianna Adarme: From what I’ve read and everything that I’ve experienced, it’s definitely not the nightmare stories of the exploitation that happens in the music industry. It’s a bit more ethical. That’s what I think, but maybe other people have bad experiences. I didn’t have really super bad experiences in publishing. Thank God.

Bjork Ostrom: You have these lessons learned and you rolled that into your next cookbook. Can you talk about when that happened? Was it years and years later? Was it the next year? How anxious were you to jump back in and do a new deal and how did that one come about?

Adrianna Adarme: I was very anxious to try again because I felt like I had learned so much from the first one. I was determined to succeed on the second one. It was one of those things where I fell down and I was like, “Oh, no. I’m going to do this.” I think at that point I had honed my photography skills and I understood what I wanted to say. I understood exactly what went wrong with the first book. I had had some conversations and with publishers and with editors in publishing and I learned that single subject books just aren’t really set up to succeed. They’re very difficult to succeed at. A lot of people don’t want them.

Adrianna Adarme: A lot of publishers don’t want single subject books. They run away from them. This is also in 2013, so that might have changed, but that’s how the sentiment was then. I also understood that I needed to go wider. The subject needed to be broader and it needed to just be something that was more captivating to more people. You want a larger quadrant. You want the net to be this wide versus this wide. Around that time, there was a big, old… She’s been around for a really long time. She was a publisher. She reached out to me and was just like, “I think that your talent is incredible and this and that.”

Adrianna Adarme: She said, “The thing that I love about your website,” and this conversation actually really taught me a lot, “was when I go on your website, I feel like I’m entering a world. When I open up books, I don’t make books. I don’t publish books. I publish worlds. When you open a book of mine that I’ve edited and I’ve published, I want it to feel like a world that you’re entering.” I was like, wow, that’s a really interesting way to put it. That actually really resonated with me because it was exactly what I learned in film school, where the first thing that you do before you even write a script is you write down what the world is going to look and feel like.

Adrianna Adarme: I was just like, wow, this is exactly making a movie or writing a script. What are the rules of the world? What does it feel like? What does it look like? What’s the color palette? All of these things. I was like, okay, I feel like I can do this. I wanted it to be a very cozy, warm feeling when you opened it up. I figured out a color palette that I wanted to follow. I wanted it to go by the season, so I called it The Year of Cozy.

Adrianna Adarme: I wanted it to feel like something where you could live this way all year long through cooking and doing DIYs and life activities, like going for a walk with your dog or going for a bike ride or things that would elevate your life in really simple ways. I kind of wanted it to be this guide in how to live a life that was a little bit more cozy and full.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like the difference… It’s such a strong contrast to a specialized cookbook where it’s a specialized cookbook, you’re selling a really specific thing. You’re selling instant pot recipes or pancakes, whereas what I hear you describing is it’s almost selling a feeling, like it’s selling experience. It’s like a brand in and of itself. I almost think about a novel like Lord of the Rings. It’s like, oh, there’s a world there and there’s rules to it and languages and all these things surrounding it. It’s not quite that extreme, but it’s also a book. It’s a book that is functional in that you can make recipes from it, but there also is that element of experiential feeling, emotion that comes with a novel. That’s really interesting.

Adrianna Adarme: I wanted it to feel like a non-linear story. At the time right when I had started to write the proposal and kind of got the idea, I was going through a really difficult time with being estranged from my dad. I think that I wanted to escape. What is this escape? How do I escape? How do I escape something really painful? Well, I cook something. I do this in my life. I go and try something new. I go and find moments of joy when it can be really hard to find joy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like, what are the therapeutic activities when you need those in seasons of stress or anxiety?

Adrianna Adarme: I think that that is actually… I think it’s relevant now. I think it’s relevant for everyone in their own way, because like so many people, life is not perfect. How do you find joy and moments of struggle. That’s how I started the idea. And then obviously I didn’t really touch on that very much in the book. I did a little bit, but really it wasn’t about that. It was sort of just this world that I was creating. That was the start of it for me. I think once I painted that picture in the proposal, I think it got a really good reception. But when you have a failed cookbook, you have what was described is… They described it as I have soot on me. That’s what someone said.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you for telling me that.

Adrianna Adarme: That’s what one of the editors said was… I don’t want to say the publisher’s name, but like they said, “Here at this publishing house, we love Adrianna. We think her content is amazing. But she has soot on her, so we are going to pass.” This is what she said also. She said, “I would get eaten alive in our buying meeting.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of those things where it’s like, okay, you can make that decision. Do you need to put that in writing and send it along as a way to describe it? Probably not, but to each their own.

Adrianna Adarme: I was just like, wow, okay. I mean, it was very honest and I think what I realized is I didn’t have a lot of options. Because once you have a failed cookbook, you’re not a proof of concept. You’re a proof of failure.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. You have to prove yourself essentially is what they’re saying. Yeah.

Adrianna Adarme: It’s easier to almost get published as a first time author because they don’t know whether you’re going to fail or not. But as a second time author, as a third time author, they really know what you’re going to do. As a second time author, I hadn’t proven myself as a first time author, so I didn’t really have a lot of choices. Again, the advance that I ended up going with was around $50,000. It wasn’t really monetarily that great. But at the same time, I was shooting it myself, so I knew I wasn’t going to have to outsource that. I was going to keep some of the money. I ended up hiring an assistant who worked with me throughout the entire time, Billy Green. He ended up working with me for years after that too.

Bjork Ostrom: What did he help with?

Adrianna Adarme: He helps with everything, from recipe development, which we did together. He would be like, “Okay, you’re going to do three recipes today. I’m going to do three recipes. All right. Let’s collaborate on those recipes.” And everything from doing the DIYs, to He would help with the photography, to help with just the ideas. Is this dumb? Is this good? Him and I worked together for years and years after that even on the blog. Him and I have created some really amazing content together until he recently moved. That really was a great partnership in creating content. I mean, I saved money because I did so much of it.

Adrianna Adarme: I think because I did so much of it, I was a little traumatized from the workload, editing photos, delivering those photos. There was also step by step photos in some of the instances, which is when you do the photography production, you’re talking about not just one final photo for a recipe. You’re talking about delivering six recipes that have to be edited and all of that. But when the book was almost finalized, when they sent me back all laid out, I just was like, wow, I think that I did it. I think that I did something that I feel really proud about. And that’s kind of what I wanted more than anything. I just wanted to feel proud about something that I was putting out into the world.

Adrianna Adarme: We went back with the cover multiple times. One thing that I learned on my first cookbook was, okay, I have some selling power through my own audience, but I also want to create a cover that will be good in special sales, meaning I want it to be sold in places like Anthropologie and stationery stores. I want people to walk into… Mainly it was places like Anthropologie and buy the book.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what special sales means?

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I mean, you can kind of pick up on it by what you’re describing.

Adrianna Adarme: Yes. There’s different royalty tiers, right? You get the most royalty sales when it is sold at a place like Barnes & Noble, or you’re buying it directly from the publisher’s website. Most people aren’t going on the publisher’s website and buying it directly from them. But you get the most from places like Barnes & Noble or when Borders was around, places like that. You get less from places like Amazon and specialty sales you generally get even less. But what’s good about specialty sales is a place like Anthropologie might put six copies in every single Anthropologie store across the United States. You’re selling two, 3,000 copies all at once. I believe how it works is they just buy them outright.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. We buy these and then we just sell them on our own. They buy in bulk, which is all nice.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah, exactly. But they usually under buy because they want to sell out. They don’t want 30 of your cookbooks in their stores. They want six because they want to make sure they sell all of them. Places like that would be considered specialty sales. TJ Maxx, Marshalls, they all bought my book. A lot of people think that if they end up at TJ Maxx or Marshalls they’re rejects. They’re not. They buy them for holiday or whatever. And then a lot of times specialty sales is like places will buy them to merchandise them with other merchandise. They’re not just selling cookbooks. Say they have a merchandise sort of setup where they’re selling mugs and cozy things and then they have a book.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like they’re adding it to the aesthetic of a certain display.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly. Target actually did a huge buy. They bought something like 30,000 copies a few years ago because they had these me merchandise sections that were all modeled after millennial pink during the holidays and the cover of my book is of that mauve pink color. They put them, they merchandise them with tons of other things. It was one of only two books in that kiosk thing that they created. That was where the book really, really did well. I mean, it ended up being a huge success over the… Even Target carried it this past holiday season. They merchandised it again. I mean, it’s a book that’s almost… It’s like five, six years old.

Bjork Ostrom: We kind of buried the lead on this, but the sales for that book right now, if you’re comfortable sharing, are at what?

Adrianna Adarme: They’re about at 110,000 I would say.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is awesome.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah. It did really, really well. I mean, it did well out of the gate with my audience. It did really well, and then it just continued to build just season after season. Places would carry it all the time the first season it came out. A lot of places actually didn’t carry it the first season, which was really heartbreaking for me because they didn’t have enough lead time. Because most specialty sale places, they’re buying for holiday in June and they only buy when they see the finished book. They don’t buy off of a proof that they’re being sent, a paperback proof. They didn’t buy for that holiday season, which I was devastated about.

Adrianna Adarme: But the next season, places like Anthropologie, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, all of these places started to carry the book and even little small boutiques. People would send me pictures of them in little stationery stores and places like that. I really knew that I wanted to create a cover for specialty sales and I think it really benefited me in the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you anything to facilitate that, or is that the publisher pushing for that, or is that the book being good and so people just naturally discover it and say, “We want to put this in our store?”

Adrianna Adarme: I really wanted to be involved in that part. I wanted a meeting with the sales team and I wanted to talk to them how to sell the book. I wanted to really be involved in that. They wouldn’t let me. I just don’t think it’s traditionally how authors are involved. It does kind of feel like a distant arm from the editors that I dealt with, which is kind of strange for me because I’m just like, well, why don’t I go and talk to them how to sell the book? They’re like, “They don’t want to talk to you.” I was just kind of like, okay. But yeah, I did try to get involved. I did try to get involved in really talk to them and how to pitch it and who to pitch it to. I really push for that. There was some resistance. I don’t know why. I have no idea.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Just maybe the way the industry works. When Target buys 30,000 or whatever, are you seeing that on a royalty statement? Because my guess is if you sell 110,000, you’re at the point now where you’re actually getting royalties for that continually, which is really cool. I have a friend who’s written a really successful business book. He talked about when you write a book that does well, it’s the ultimate source of passive income, because it’s like you’re not really working. The book is then living on its own and kind of existing,

Adrianna Adarme: Especially with a publisher because you’re really just not involved at all. You have no idea what’s going on. You just get checks. I just get direct deposits every six months and I’m like, “Wow! Okay, great!” I earned out of the $50,000 that was given to me from the advance pretty early on. I think I would say that I earned out within a year maybe. I think collectively if I add everything up including the advance, I’ve probably gotten around 150, 160,000 in total, which I think is… A lot of times what agents will try and do is they’ll try and get you the most from an in advance so that you never even earn out.

Adrianna Adarme: Just because you don’t earn out doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. There’s a lot of really successful authors that never earn out, but that just means that they got really sizeable advance.

Adrianna Adarme: The publisher still make tons of money off of the books. I earned out pretty quickly, and I started getting royalty checks every six months. And I still get them. I mean, I got one back in May and it was great. You’re just like, “Okay, this is awesome.”

Bjork Ostrom: My hope is that you time your Tuesday manicure right after the Monday direct deposit check from those just so you can really make that correlation.

Adrianna Adarme: This is truly paying dividends. What’s encouraging to hear about your story is this idea of like, you know what? You go through it, you learn, and then you get after it and say, “I’ve learned from this and I want to do it again, and I want to do it even better.” You were able to do that. One of the questions that I have for you is now you have proven that you’ve been able to do this, to do it well, to have a successful cookbook you said five, six years ago, would you do it again? And if so, why? And if not, why?

Adrianna Adarme: Yes, I will do it again. I will do it I think soon again. I needed a break from it. And for a while, I was sort of like, well, I kind of succeeded at it, so I don’t want to do it again. I figured it out. Moving on to something new. There is a big part of me like I like change and I like things that are different. I get bored easily, so it’s like, I don’t really want to do that again. I already proved myself. I’m done. But now I think I’m in a different season of my life and enough time has passed and now I can kind of see doing a book and how I would make it work with my current business and the way it is, which has changed a lot.

Adrianna Adarme: I don’t have as much time to dedicate to a book where I’m doing every single little tiny thing. This time I would hire an editor to help me organize it. I would hire a photographer, and I would hire some recipe testers to make sure everything is succinct and done right, which also would mean that I would need a bigger advance.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. All of those things kind of roll up.

Adrianna Adarme: At first, I really didn’t have that much to say. I was like, well, I don’t really have anything to write about. But now I feel like enough time has passed where I have different perspective and I feel like I have a lot more to say. I am revving up to possibly come up with a new cookbook idea and send it out to some publishers and see what happens. I’m excited about having taken that break and writing something that I can feel really proud about. I think that that’s what was the big thing is I just want to write something that I’m really proud about all the time. Because after that book, I felt really happy and proud about what I put out into the world, and so I didn’t want to put something out just to put it out.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. It’s almost like if you’re a musician, to go back to that analogy, it’s like you don’t want to put out an album unless you have songs that you’re excited for people to hear.

Adrianna Adarme: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you’re an author, you don’t want to publish something if you don’t have something exciting that you want to say.

Adrianna Adarme: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You need to wait for that.

Adrianna Adarme: I also come out with recipes all the time. Because I have this other medium, I have this other platform like social media and a blog. It’s like, well, Mike, I’ll just write a recipe. I also didn’t want to just come out with a cookbook where it’s just a bunch of recipes. I don’t want to do DIYs ever again because I don’t that, because it’s just so difficult to do. I’m at the stage also in my life where I’m like, I’m not going to DIY something. I’m just going to buy it. Let’s be honest, I’m past that. I don’t want to do that anymore. I do want it to stay to food. But again, I do want to create a world. I do want to have something to say.

Adrianna Adarme: I do want it to be a non-linear story. I do want it to feel like you’re stepping into a world, and I want it to feel really great. I want it to feel different than anything that I put out there for free or on my blog or on social media. I think I’m kind of going towards that where I’m like, oh, I think I’m warming up to this idea. I think I have something to say.

Bjork Ostrom: That is starting to look like a possibility.

Adrianna Adarme: Absolutely. I think because I’ve sold a good amount of cookbooks before, I am sort a proven concept I guess or whatever now and I have my social media following and my blog number, I’m hoping that that means that I get a substantial amount of money because I feel like I earned it.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. It’s one of the things that comes with doing something, to come back all the way around, for 12, 13 years is the ability for that to be your time and energy and work that you’ve done over decades, like a decade plus, then pays dividends with you being able to come to the table and say, “Here’s the…” It’s not just the work itself. It’s the work of the product plus 13 years of showing up every day and connecting with people and building an audience and all of that. I know that people are going to be deeply appreciative of your story and also sharing specifically what things look like.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s a rare thing that people are able to do. Just really appreciate that. I think it makes it so much more tangible and tactical and helpful. Thank you for your willingness to do that. I know that people are going to be interested also in following along with you, checking out the cookbook itself, both of them. But where can people follow along with you, Adrianna, and see what you’re up to?

Adrianna Adarme: Well, you can find me at my blog. I post recipes every week, ACozyKitchen.com. And then you can also follow me on social media. I’m on TikTok, ACozyKitchen.com, and then also on Instagram, A Cozy Kitchen.

Bjork Ostrom: This would be my last question for you. As somebody who has been publishing content for 10 plus years, were you initially resistant to TikTok? Or was it like what, “You know what? Being a video person, being comfortable being in front of the camera, bring it on?”

Adrianna Adarme: No, I was not resistant at all. I jumped on it during the pandemic, at the beginning of the pandemic, because I was really bored. I opened up TikTok and I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. And then I was like, maybe I should cut a video together. I cut a video and then I got all of this response and all of this feedback. I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. I actually really have always really taken to TikTok and I’ve always loved video content. TikTok actually really taught me how to make video content in a way that I really liked, which was doing a bit of VO, a little camera.

Adrianna Adarme: I didn’t have to do this traditional to camera talk through every single step because I felt like that just seemed really cumbersome to do all by myself. I really liked the idea that I could just shoot how I make the recipe and then add voiceover and it could be funny and it could have personality. I’m actually one of the rare OG bloggers that really loves TikTok and I love Reels. I love Instagram Reels.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re in a good place and it reflects, like 500,000 followers on Instagram and 250,000 on TikTok. It’s a reflection of like you being good at that. It’s a good place to be as things shift and change and go more towards reel and video content, it’s a good place to be. Adrianna, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really fun to have a conversation with you. Appreciate it.

Adrianna Adarme: Thank you so much for having me.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, hey! Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I wanted to let you know that we have a live Q&A coming up. We typically have a live Q&A every single month for our Food Blogger Pro community for our Food Blogger Pro members. And if you’re not a member or maybe you’re a new member of the community, maybe you don’t know what they are. I wanted to give you a quick rundown on what you could expect from a live at Q&A Food Blogger Pro. Like I mentioned, we have one per month.

Alexa Peduzzi: In these live Q&A, we typically focus on a specific topic. Whether that be photography, SEO, WordPress, developing recipes, we kind of cover everything and anything on these live Q&A. And then Bjork or sometimes Bjork and a guest, an industry expert, come on and answer all of our community’s questions live. Our community submits questions and then Bjork and whoever is joining him in that specific Q&A will answer the questions live. All of our past live Q&A’s are available for all members. They are just such a great time, and we love being able to connect in a way that’s sort of face-to-face in a virtual setting.

Alexa Peduzzi: If you’re interested in joining our next Q&A and you’re not already a member, be sure to head over to foodbloggerpro.com/join so you can learn a little bit more about the community and sign up there. And then if you are already a member of the community, hello, hello. We hope to see you at our next one soon. You can head over to the live tab whenever you log into the site to get access and register for our next live Q&A. Thanks again for tuning into this episode of the podcast. We appreciate you so much, and we’ll see you next time. Make it a great week.