Looking Back, Moving Forward, Inspiring plans for 2025
What are your plans for the coming new year?
Hello. I hope you had a wonderful festive holiday.
Looking Back
For many people with a Substack publication, 2024 may well have been their best year so far. Like many food writers, they only started publishing a few months ago and are having great success already. Not necesarily in monetary terms, but the fact that they are writing at all is something to be proud of.
My initial recipe-style substack publication, which I started in early 2024, had two iterations. I changed the name, then set up an additional publication called the ‘FoodStack Library’ and then pulled the plug on the original recipe Newsletter. I have no regrets.
Creating, testing and writing recipes while trying to grow a subscription base, following expert advice began to take the joy out of baking. Anyway, I’d previously had 10 years of Cake Clubs and recipe websites, so now my energy is redirected to the ‘FoodStack Library’ newsletter, where I want to do all I can to help and promote other Food Writers here on Substack. Give them a platform within a platform, if you like, where they can self-promote, contribute with a guest post, FoodStack Reads, be featured in the Other People’s Kitchen Q&A with…. series, and more.
Moving Forward
On 1st January 2025, the FoodStack Library is extending its Q&A series with Other People’s Bookshelves. Here’s the introduction to it. Have your notebook ready; you’ll want to buy so many more cookbooks when this series starts. A heads up:
is our first Other People’s Bookshelves guest, and you will want to hear about her mother’s Guinness Book of Records cookbook collection.As a result of a recent FSL survey,
FSL team member is looking into doing a Q&A with experts to be featured in the FoodStack Library. More about this later.Inspiring Plans for 2025 - from other Food Writers.
of Let’s Get Lost
Rebecca (also an FSL team member) is offering a Mastermind Meeting via the FoodStack Library, to all Food Writers. More details to follow.
She has also announced a new cookbook coming in early 2025; the date of publication has yet to be announced. ‘The book includes 143 recipes with full color photos spread throughout 325 pages and will be available in digital and print.’
And her new supper club, the Lost Supper Club is for everyone who...
of Cook and Tell
For most of their lives, both my mother and grandmother wrote about food. My grandmother, Barbara Webster, published ten books including Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge, co-authored with food-writer Gladys Taber, about cooking and farm life. My mother, Karyl Bannister, wrote and illustrated Cook & Tell, a monthly newsletter for more than thirty years, and later published a best-selling cookbook.
Ghosted by two generations of female food-writers, I am the last in the lineage.
To preserve the family legacy, I’m writing a book that explores my mother’s and grandmother’s lives and how their voices, words and recipes intertwine with my own newfound food-writing career. A hybrid blend of biography and memoir, the book will also include favorite family recipes.
of Seafood Savvy
Cynthia has just launched her second substack publication called ‘Long Live the Recipe Box’ and will be publishing her collection through the coming year.
In celebration of recipe boxes (or folders, journals, whatever form) and the treasures of connection, memories and family history they contain.
of Pure Fresh Daily
In January 2025, Lori will launch The Considerate Kitchen, ‘teaching a variety of creative, gluten-free, online cooking courses.’
of Betty Eatz Newsletter
Betty’s big plan for 2025 is to start the Betty Eatz podcast here on Substack.
It will be focused on real recipes by real people. There are a lot of terrible recipes floating around on social media that are untested, AI-generated, or just plain bad.
So I will be interviewing real people (food bloggers, recipe developers, FSL members!) to share:
* how they got started in the food industry
* their inspiration and processes in creating recipes
* any books, courses, subscriptions they are offering
* a link to one of their tried-and-true recipes
So, what are your plans for 2025? We’d love to hear them. Share them with us.
From me to you
Thank you each and everyone one of you for your incredible support and interest in the FoodStack Library; I hope it has brought you joy in discovering new food writers and enabled you to connect with like-minded people.
Here’s to good health, success and happiness in the coming new year.
Thank you for creating a community where all of us who love to talk about food can come
Excited and honored to be a part of the kick off for 2025!