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Six Secret Skills to Breakthrough to Food Writer Success

There are six secret skills every food writer needs to be not only successful but outstanding.

Food writers already have a long list of basic skills we need to master. We need to be able to write and edit. We have to know all about food, from cooking to eating to recipe development.

There’s also social media marketing, photography, and videography. And then there’s networking, accounting, WordPress, and graphic design.

And that’s not to mention keeping up with the latest food industry trends. Or knowing something about food history, and nutrition.

The thing is every food writer needs to have those basic skills to be ordinary. Here are six secret skills every food writer needs to be outstanding.

There’s going to be a time when we have to tell someone their food isn’t very good.

Say we’re reviewing a restaurant for a magazine or newspaper. It’s a small mom-and-pop operation where the staff is trying hard. Nonetheless, their food, their service, even the cleanliness of the place, are way below par.

These are good, hard-working people who are doing their best. But they’re failing to provide decent food or adequate service.

We know that a good review will boost business for the restaurant. A bad review would knock the restaurant’s reputation and chase away the few customers they do have.

What do we do? We have to be honest — not brutally honest, of course, but honest.

We start by remembering what we’re trying to do. In this situation, we’re writing a review to tell readers the truth about a restaurant. We’re giving your opinion to benefit our readers.

We’re not trying to drum up business for the restaurant. That’s what PR writers do. We’re food writers.

An ordinary food writer will write the review and burn their bridges with the restaurant.

An outstanding food writer will write the review and earn the restaurant’s respect.

Why do we want to keep the restaurant’s respect? Because the food industry is very, very small. The chef we crush in our review today is still going to be working in years to come. The owner we slam today is good friends with an owner we’ll need cooperation from in the future.

That chef and owner, still stinging from our bad review, will be happy to block our access for a future project.

Do you want food industry people to say, “She’s a horrible writer. She only writes about what’s wrong with a restaurant.”

Or do you want them to say, “She’s tough but fair. She writes about both the positives and negatives of a restaurant.”

First, cut the snark. Lots of restaurant reviewers use a good deal of snark in their writing. They never miss the opportunity to add a zinger to their reviews.

Snark and zingers might impress some readers but they don’t add to the value of our review. Snark and zingers show how clever and witty we are. They don’t tell readers what they need to know about the restaurant. And they do so at the expense of the restaurant.

Second, be fair. Include both positives and negatives in every review you write. (In both restaurant reviews and product reviews.)

Years ago food writers would eat at a restaurant three times before they wrote their review. That helped to weed out any “the kitchen’s having a bad day” experiences.

These days, publications don’t have that kind of budget. Neither do independent bloggers. One meal at a restaurant is the norm for most reviewers.

If we have a horrible experience at a restaurant, it’s good to make a second visit. It ensures that our experience wasn’t a fluke and gives us a more balanced view of the food and service.

And third, if our visit to the restaurant is being arranged by a PR person, talk to them before the visit. Be clear that the fact that the restaurant is hosting your meal won’t impact your opinion. If the food’s bad, you’re going to say so. You’re going to be fair and balanced. You’ll cover both the positive and negative.

We don’t trade our opinion for the price of a meal. We’re food writers, not PR reps.

Most people either work well alone or with others. Outstanding food writers do both.

Writing, researching, editing, and polishing are all tasks we do alone. But when working with publications, editors, photographers all come into the equation. The same is true when we work with sponsors. We have to be able to get along with teams of people.

Also, networking is crucial to be an outstanding food writer. We network with chefs, restaurant owners, or others. We have to keep them happy and get what we need from them at the same time.

First, we need to create a distraction-free work environment. We have to develop a system to deal with emails, phone calls, and other interruptions. To-Do lists help make sure we do what we need to do each day.

Taking breaks is also important. Eating at regular times can be helpful.

When we’re working with publications, we must recognize that we’re part of a team. Publishing is a collaborative effort. Work goes from writer to editor to fact-checker and proofreader. Then it goes to layout and another round of proofreading. Everyone has a deadline. If we’re late delivering our work, it jams everyone else up.

People like people who don’t jam them up. Being late or uncooperative will make us very unpopular.

The links in this article are not affiliate links. The Food Writing School earns no income if you take advantage of these free services.

This is one of the hardest secret skills for most food writers to develop.

Embracing failure seems counterintuitive. We’re trying to be successful. We’re trying to avoid failure. Why would we embrace it?

Because to be successful, standout successful, we need to take risks. And if we avoid failure to the point that we avoid risks, we actually limit ourselves.

Say we launch a social media marketing campaign. We’ve done the research, planning, and then put things in place. We launch and oops, we get mixed results. Some things worked; some things didn’t.

Of course, we wanted total, overwhelming success but that didn’t happen. It almost never does.

Take a good look at what worked and celebrate it.

Then take a good look at what didn’t work, and celebrate it, too!

If we’re willing to embrace failure, we’ll learn a lot more than if we only want to embrace success.

Failure teaches us what we don’t have to do next time. That’s great! We can take that off our “To Do” list.

So, the next social media campaign that we launch will have a better chance of success. We learned from what didn’t work last time and eliminated those strategies from our new launch.

The harsh truth is most of our efforts have mixed results. We don’t have overwhelming success with every article, campaign, or project, right?

If each failure disappoints and discourages us, that can be draining. And that’s going to lead to burnout. Burned-out food writers aren’t usually very successful.

We’re food writers. We write. We tell food stories with words.

Outstanding food writers also tell stories with pictures. That’s an important secret skill.

That means that our images match your text, our story exactly. This can be hard if we’re using stock images.

We should take our own photos whenever possible.

Yes, using stock photos is much easier, especially if we don’t have good photography skills. But stock photos mean we’re using images that lots and lots of other people are also using.

The obvious solution: improve your photography skills. There are tons of free resources online.

We don’t need any fancy equipment to get better shots. If we know what we’re doing, a $200 camera will give us good results.

We can also use a smartphone. The trick is to know how to use it. We should spend some time getting to know our smartphone’s settings. Find out what editing apps, filters, and gear we can use.

Learning how to tell a story with images can be difficult. We’re already storytellers. We should apply those skills to images.

Have an introduction. Make each individual point. Have a conclusion. Have a hook, something to make readers keep going.

One paragraph leads into the next. Photos should also lead from one to the next.

Make sure to have a consistent tone. Instead of vocabulary and sentence length, images use consistent colors, lighting, and composition.

Does all this seem like a lot of work? Wait until you see the byline Words and Images by (Your Name). That’s a satisfying feeling.

When we miss a deadline at an office job, something happens. Our boss comes to our desk, jumps up and down, and screams until we turn in our assignment.

As independent bloggers, when we miss a self-imposed deadline, nothing much happens. Even if we bother to feel bad, nobody comes to our desk, jumping up and down or screaming.

Deadlines are extremely helpful things. They help us stay on track, producing on a reasonable schedule. They help us avoid all-nighters, crunching out subpar content.

Deadlines help us deliver quality content to our readers on a regular basis.

So how do we stay self-motivated?

First, we need clear goals. Clear big goals and clear small goals.

The big goals are things like “I want to replace my day job income with my blogger income.” Or “I want 2,000 visitors to my blog this month.”

Small goals are things like “I want to post twice a week on my blog.” And “I want to outline my next blog post by Tuesday.”

If we focus on our small goals there’s very little motivation to complete the task on time. So what if I don’t outline my blog until Wednesday? No big deal, right?

If we connect our big goals to our small goals, there’s more urgency. “I want 2,000 visitors to my blog this month and to do that I need to outline my blog post by Tuesday.”

Another key to staying self-motivated is to be realistic in our expectations.

It’s easy to get carried away when writing a To-Do list or content schedule.

Sure, writing a blog post each day looks easy on a To-Do list. Actually writing a post a day isn’t easy at all. Especially not if we want to provide high-quality, well-researched content.

Maybe writing two blog posts a week would be a big stretch. If we already know that we’ll be able to do that most weeks but not each week, we shouldn’t schedule two. Schedule one and on the weeks that we can go beyond that and complete two blog posts, woohoo!

Since we can’t pay our rent with Monopoly money, we can’t afford to work for free. Publications and blogs are businesses, not charities. Never work for free.

We’re offering a skill, a talent. We deserve to get paid for our efforts.

Bring up the subject of payment somewhere at the beginning of the conversation. After establishing the length and deadline for the article, ask them about payment. Something like, “How much is the payment?” Straight and simple.

If they say, “Zero,” ask them if any payment is possible. Sometimes they’ll say a small payment might be possible. Like $10 or $20. If that’s okay with you, accept the payment but make it clear that you usually work for larger sums.

If that’s not okay with you, tell them you can’t take the assignment but appreciate them thinking of you. And if they ever do budget payments, you hope they think of you again.

Yes, we love food writing. Yes, we would do this for free. But no, we don’t for free.

The publications that want us to work for free might not call us back again if we ask for payment. That’s okay. Know why? The publications that do pay, know which ones don’t. They look at the writers that work for free as amateurs. Paying publications want professional writers, not amateurs.

The links in this article are not affiliate links. The Food Writing School earns no income if you take advantage of these free services.

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