The Public Domain, Grandma’s Kitchen, and Bringing Out the Food Writer In You

Opportunities to profit from include compiling early recipes in book or report form or for contributing as readers’ letters and articles to worldwide magazines and newspapers.  These ideas will help you get started:

#  Recipes are a particular favourite in women’s magazines; the more unusual the recipe the better your chances of being published.  And recipes and menus of interest to specific groups can often find an easy route to special interest magazines.  Publications geared towards vegetarians, allergy sufferers, weight watchers, and so on, will usually need contributions of specific rather than general interest.  The trick is to clip recipes and store them into categories, before deciding reorganising and rewriting them and deciding where to send them.

#  Recipes don’t need to be popular today; you might research and write up on some of the far less appetising dishes your ancestors might have ‘enjoyed’ centuries before.

#  Get to ‘know’ your readership before you consider submitting recipes.  Find out what you can about your readers’ likes and dislikes.  This means knowing whether they have high or limited budgets and whether there are any obvious preferences for health and diet foods, low- or no-meat cooking, and so on.

#  Try producing seasonal and celebration dishes and submit your work in time for the appropriate publishing deadlines.  Think about recipes for unusual Christmas dinners, Halloween cuisine, sandwiches and other cold buffet menus for summer picnics, and so on.

#  Try concentrating on regional dishes, not necessarily for local newspapers, and for others all over the world whose readers might be interested in trying unusual recipes.

#  When you have enough recipes for one specific category, think about compiling a book or report to market yourself or offer to traditional publishers.