You may already know that I’m bonkers for Bircher muesli. This week, I continue to spread the word over at Diets In Review. Check out the post for a little history lesson and a tasty recipe.
Here’s a snip:
In 1900, Bircher invented the now famous “muesli cereal”. His original recipe is vastly different from the sugar-coated, toasted muesli we typically find in the grocery store today. Instead, Bircher combined soaked oats, fruit and nuts with grated apple and lemon juice to create a naturally sweet breakfast cereal designed to energize and heal the body.
For any raw foodies in the audience, be aware that rolled oats aren’t raw (they are usually steamed before packaging). However, you can sub sprouted buckwheat or whole oat groats for a totally raw breakfast treat.
Read on for the recipe…
Veggie Breakfast Bircher Muesli [Diets in Review]
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
Now that Tim and I have released Writer’s Residence, we’re in full-tilt marketing mode. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get my own freelance writing career off the ground, an entirely different beast in itself. Or is it? Both are marketing problems, and it doesn’t end at the commission or the sale. The writer has to sell their work to the reader, as well, usually by creating a hook, and then working that in to the rest of the piece to keep the reader’s attention.
Tim sent me an interesting article that talks about the parallels between this writing approach and effective marketing:
For a web site, you start with a Hook that’s short, sweet and above all else is an idea that everybody can get. Then you start working through your message, getting more detailed, more technical, more finegrained. As the reader (or viewer, or listener) goes down the trail you’ve laid out, take the time to connect back to what you’ve already said, what you’ve already started to explain. Use the power of association to make it easy to follow the dots.
To reach customers, layer your message
Tim and I have been hard at work these past few weeks creating our latest product, Writer’s Residence, a website where writers can create their own writing portfolio. Sink your teeth into this tasty morsel of marketing:
Writer’s Residence: The fast and easy way to show off your writing online!
Add samples, clippings and tearsheets with just a few mouseclicks
Impress editors with a clean, professional website
Display your logo or portrait
Customize your website’s colors and fonts
Bring your own domain
No HTML necessary!
Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you know of any magic formulas for marketing this thing, I’m all ears.
As some of you are aware, I like to write recipes, but I often feel a little lost when I sit down to write the instructions. I know I can do better, so I set out looking for guidelines on recipe writing. Here is a concise article that has a few good tips that have helped me:
Order. List all ingredients in order of use.
Measurements. Use measurements that will help cooks shop. Say “1 medium onion, chopped,” for example, and not “1 cup chopped onion.”
Advance preparation. Alert cooks to anything that must be done ahead. If onions must be chopped, butter softened, or chicken cut into pieces, tell cooks in the ingredients list instead of at the point where that particular ingredient will be used.
How to Write a Cookbook: Recipes [Suite 101]
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
I’ve been a full-time freelance writer for over four weeks now and in an annoying way, things seem to be moving more slowly than they were while I was working.
The ratio of responses to pitches has dropped significantly since I left work, but that’s only because I have more time to dream up new ideas and send more pitches. Also, I tend to aim high and pitch to the national newspapers before considering smaller publications. The effort is not completely wasted. I’ve had two commissions in the past few weeks, both in smaller magazines, but their deadlines are months away and they certainly won’t pay the bills. It’s time to go where there’s less competition and hopefully more money. (We wants the money, Lebowski!)
I’m going to take a short break from pitching to dream publishers and try to tap the “customer publisher” market. I don’t know the exact definition of a “customer publisher”, but I do know that they create magazines and websites for corporations like the British Heart Foundation and Weight Watchers for the consumers of their products. For example, PSPRare Publishing publishes the magazine heart and soul for the BHF. It’s a magazine aimed at the South Asian community and distributed at Asian Mela festivals.
There are loads of these publishers out there, and according to freelance writer John Borchardt, author of Career Management for Scientists and Engineers
Custom publishers, because of their low profile, receive relatively few queries or [Letters of Introduction] from freelancers. Thus they can be good targets for your LOIs. Pay rates vary from modest, perhaps $0.50 per word, to more than $1.00 per word. Most include titles of some of their publications on their websites.
Instead of pitching my own ideas to these guy, I’m going to start by sending them a “Letter of Introduction” along with my CV and a few samples. I’ve heard good things about “LOIs”, and it seems to be a good enough strategy that a few writers have written articles about it (judge not their skills in web design):
How to find these publishers? The Association of Publishing Agencies has a directory of consumer publishers in the UK. Here are but a few:
My strategy is to target 5-10 of these sorts of companies and tailor my LOI for each. Now, time to stop writing about it and to start actually doing it. Fingers crossed.
It seems that the QUICK way to building a blog’s reader base is to build SMALL useful things and then get them linked on a popular site. Yesterday, Lifehacker linked to my “Grocery List Templates For Healthy People”. In one day, our subscriber count went from 174 to 249 and our page visits went from 174 to 1,736. And, perhaps more exciting than anything else, I just about quadrupled my daily Adsense revenue to $4.26 which pushed my total Adsense earnings over the $100 threshold needed to get Google to cut me a check. It’s a small income, but it’s an independent income and that’s really exciting.
[Update] Whoops, make that 408 subscribers. I should have waited for Feedburner to update its stats before posting this. =)
I’ve taken the advice of my former freelancing teacher and started an Excel spreadsheet to log the pitches I send to editors. The spreadsheet has columns for
- Article title
- Publication
- Sent Date
- Follow-up Date
- Response Date
- Commission Date
- Publication Date
- Paid Date
- Comments
This will help me remember who I’ve sent pitches to, and thus avoid the embarrassment of sending the same pitch to the same editor more than once. This will also help me keep track of who I need to follow-up with, when I’ve been commissioned, and [the marvellously blissful days] when I get paid.
Looking at the spreadsheet, I see why Andrew Crofts of The Freelance Writer’s Handbook warns that it takes years to set yourself up with a real income: the lag time between pitching and publication is daunting (as if getting a response from an editor wasn’t hard enough). I suppose this is all the more reason to keep sending ideas, every day, to as many publications as possible. But it’s also a good reason to keep writing. Like Andrew suggests, treat this getting-started period as an “apprenticeship”: pursue leads, interview sources, and build some credibility to put in those pitches. That’s how I got the runner’s high article published. So why not do it again?
Last Tuesday was my last day working at the bank. Today is day number two of my new freelance career and time feels like its whizzing by. I spent yesterday in a sleepy haze after enjoying a few celebratory drinks on Thursday evening. I spent today trying to get comfortable in the new role.
Comfort comes easy when you can work from the couch, kitchen counter, bed, shower, or whatever’s most comfortable at that particular moment. I accomplished a lot today: I pitched an idea to a few editors; I blogged on smarterfitter; I wrote some comments and emails to friends, former colleagues, and fellow bloggers; I did a brain dump of all my various projects and lists and recorded it all in TaskPaper. I also made time for tabouleh, the library and an episode of The Wire.
I feel like I’ve been productive, but I also feel like I’m moving way too slowly. The only way around this sense of urgency seems to be stricter time management around my various tasks. If I give myself two hours a day to work on SmarterFitter, and another two hours to write and pitch story ideas, then I can feel good about doing both things in the time I give them without getting distracted by a sense of guilt that I should be working on the other thing.
An income would also help!
Then there’s all my side projects, like photography, this blog, and a blog I want to build about free data (freedatablog.com, stay tuned!). And the most important project of all: plan my mom’s visit to London in less than a week!
Like I said, I’m still getting used to this. I really don’t want to become one of those GTD-obsessed productivity hounds, so I’ll leave my rant at that and actually DO something, like write about freelancing on this blog, yet another project.
Until tomorrow…
Chai Pani
64 Seymour Street
London, W1H 5BW
020 7258 2000
http://www.chaipani.co.uk/
Category: Indian
Travel: Marble Arch
Open Daily 6pm-10.30pm; Mon-Fri 12pm-2.30pm; Sat-Sun 1pm-10.30pm
Devotees of chicken tikka masala will be disappointed by Chai Pani’s menu, which proves that India brings more to the table than fried samosas and korma curries. Chai Pani is the only restaurant in London to serve the vegetarian cuisine of Marwar, a desert region in west India. With dishes like Bhindi Subzi Vg (okra in “a sauce”) and Ker Saangri (a “concoction of desert berries and desert beans”), the vast menu leaves everything to the imagination.
Times like these, it’s usually best to let the kitchen decide, so I ordered a vegan thaali (another tough choice as Chai Pani offers a staggering 16 thaalis, including wheat-free, low GI and ayurvedic). Everything arrived hot and on time, and the waiter was only too happy to decipher the mysterious array of dishes before me. I now know that “dessert berries” look and taste more like shriveled twigs than actual food, and “sauce” is Chai Pani’s code word for “oil”. Fortunately, other dishes were more inspiring. The veganized raita was good enough to eat with a spoon thanks to a liberal dose of salt and chili. The daal was the best I’ve had in London - simple, fresh and very spicy, just begging to be sopped up with Bajra roti, a traditional Rathasthan millet bread. The chilled Ghugri salad of wheat berries, tomatoes and tangy lemon dressing was a refreshing accompaniment. When it came to endings, however, Chai Pani pushed the envelope of simple cooking a little too far, with bowls of jaggery (sugar) passing for dessert. This was a poor lead-in to the bill, which came to nearly £40 a head (including drinks).
Adventurous diners will go giddy over the eclectic offerings of Chai Pani, and the dietarily-challenged will find comfort in their meatless and wheatless offerings. But others will be confused. Chai Pani means well, but they need to come to terms with the palate (and pocketbook) of its western audience.
Dinner for two with drinks and dessert: £66
Latest Comments