Reddit reviews Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir, and More (Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Blogs,)

I have a book called Will Write For Food which has some interesting advice for a career in food writing.

When I shopped around my ecookbook The Gluten Free Low Carber to publishing companies and agents I got a LOT of rejections, and it still hasn't been picked up to publish in hard copy, even though it is doing really well on Amazon.com in kindle format. What they all told me they are looking for before they will take you on is a platform (established fans that will buy your book - apparently IBIH didn't have enough at the time), and an original concept that is on trend (sadly once it becomes popular it's already "old" to them so you have to be ahead of the trends). It also takes an average of 18 months from start to finish to get a hardcopy cookbook published the traditional way, and there are no guarantees that it will do well. Self-publishing on kindle is definitely easier, but it still takes a lot of work to meet the formatting guidelines, and get all of the text and photos complete - also there are no guarantees that amazon will accept it once it's finished. It took me over 300 manhours to get mine to the point of sale as an e-book. It was worth it to me because I loved doing it, and the sales have been good, but it could have tanked and in that case it would have been a lot of hard work for nothing. So if you're passionate about it, go for it - but don't do it if you just think it's going to be a huge moneymaker, because 9 times out of 10 it really isn't. If you're serious about doing more research and moving forward, you can get lots of great info in this book which was one of the most helpful to me.