Recording and Notes From The July Meeting
Changes to the Food Writers Business Lab, Substack Recipe Cards, the new Audience Specific Content Block, and more!
Hello everyone!
As always, thank you so much to those of you who were able to attend today’s Mastermind meeting. I learn something new in every single meeting and always love to see your faces on my screen.
At the start of today’s meeting, I made a very important and exciting announcement:
I’ve decided to move The Food Writers Business Lab here as a paid subscription tier to Mastermind for Food Writers.
I explained my reasons for making that decision in the meeting, which you can watch below. But the bottom line is this:
My goal for The Food Writers Business Lab is to create a robust program of hands-on workshops for food writers taught by food writers. I want the classes to be as accessible as possible (read: affordable), and I want the instructors who teach the classes to be compensated for their time and energy.
Figuring out how to do that has been a challenge. But I think I’ve come up with a good solution.
Think of it as a co-op model. The income generated through paid subscriptions directly supports the instructors who teach the classes. So, the number of classes we can offer is dependent on the number of paid subscriptions. Every new paid subscription directly supports a new class. New classes are added as funding is made available. All classes are taught by fellow food writers.
Learning from each other and supporting each other. That’s what this is about.
Very important: Mastermind meetings are free and always will be. A paid subscription gives you access to all the classes offered through The Food Writers Business Lab. Everyone is welcome to join the Mastermind meetings.
There are three classes on the schedule right now!
Upcoming classes that will be added as funding is made available:
Food Photography
Brand Management and Business Strategy for Food Writers
Cookbook Marketing
Organizational Strategies for Food Writers
Creative Recipe Writing
Self-publishing
Video for Food Writers
Creating Products & eBooks
Teaching Paid Cooking Classes
For $150 a year, which is the cost of an annual subscription, you can attend as many live classes as you’d like, or watch the recordings later if you can’t make it in real time.
Here’s where you can find out more and check out the class schedule:
We talked about a bunch of other interesting things in the meeting today including the best strategies for using Substack Recipe Cards, the new Audience Specific Content Block, and more. It was a really interesting discussion with a host of good ideas. If you missed it, it’s worth watching!
Here’s where you can watch the recording:
I have been thinking about a question that came up during the meeting about organizing Substack more like Wordpress.
Here is a helpful tip: when you tag your posts, you can go into Settings and find the link for each tag. You can then use those links in posts, your navigation, or a directory page so readers can easily browse topics like recipes, book reviews, or something more specific like chicken recipes. It is a simple feature that makes your archive much easier to navigate.
I have not done this yet, but am going to implement something on my recipe page.
I was able to watch the recording today. It was very helpful. I am still wondering, though, with all the changes to AI in Google Search, if recipe cards are still the best way to share recipes.