From Writing Blogs to Books and Beyond

Once, when I pitched my Filipino food cookbook idea to an editor of a big-time publishing company, he curtly cut me off and arrogantly said “You’re a niche market. Ethnic food is a hard sell.” I felt awful and humiliated. I felt unworthy and unsure of myself. It hurt like hell to be rejected.

But I mustered enough determination to get over the hurt and got back on track with my writing. If anyone I now pitch to ever tells me again that I’m a niche market and my ethnic topics are a hard sell, then I have the right answers for them.

Whether you write for markets that are mainstream or a specialty, it is not a disadvantage. In fact, as a writer, where you come from makes you unique.

You can stand out with topics that are uncommon that only you know about.

You can bring your culture, history, country, and your life to your readers with stories that no one else has heard about. You can create pictures and images with your narrations as only you have witnessed.

And most of all, nobody else knows your target audience the way you do. You know what your readers are thinking, feeling, desiring, or loving. You know what makes your readers wake up in the morning or what makes them shudder in fear. You even know what can make them laugh or cry. Your readers are drawn to your writing because they are like you.

Before I lived in America, I worked as a copywriter at a global ad agency in Manila. I wrote copy for international brands. I was trained in the disciplines of marketing, creative writing and art direction all rolled into one to create ad campaigns for clients. I wrote ad copy for television, radio and print commercials. My writing credentials qualified me to teach, too. I was a college professor for the Mass Communications department of a top private university in Makati, the financial district of the Philippines.

The experience taught me how to sell my writing. When we moved to America, my children were babies and I chose to spend more time as a full-time mother and a part time writer. It was okay. You never forget how to be a writer. You continue observing, learning, and taking in the world from a different perspective so you can write about it someday. I was a contributor for several publications. I took on part time jobs at research companies. And I was tri-lingual, so I taught at international language learning schools. The desire to write continuously never left me though.

When my sons were getting ready for college, I taught them how to cook because I didn’t want them to eat junk food. So, I wrote down recipes for them on a yellow pad paper. My sons preferred digital recipes, so they created a blog for me and told me “The writing will be up to you, Mom.”

On my blog Asian in America (www.AsianInAmericaMag.com), I share Filipino and Asian home cooking recipes which I developed or cooked for dinner. Most dishes are traditional recipes my late mother taught me. With the weekly recipes, I write 500-word introductory stories about the anthropology of the ingredients, the history of the dish, and describe the flavors, textures and aromas.

Blogging has opened many doors for me. I made many friends in the culinary and writing industry. I got to know my readers who engaged with me on social media. I also won a few food writing and journalism awards when I wrote about my mother and her cooking. Honoring my mother through my blog recipes made me realize it was time to write a cookbook. I wrote and produced two cookbooks dedicated to my mother in the last two years. This October, I am launching a third cookbook, a follow up to the first two and to celebrate my mother’s birthday month.

While writing about my mother Lourdes Reyes Besa often on my blog, feature articles as a correspondent and in my cookbooks, I revealed many times that she was a Filipina civilian who was twice the recipient of the United States Medal of Freedom, for her heroic efforts to save American POWs during World War II. During the war, my mother was an unmarried, young girl in her twenties living in Manila with her widowed mama.

When war broke out in the Pacific, Lourdes was forced to search for her missing brother Willie, who was captured and had to endure the Bataan Death March in 1942. The experiences Lourdes had to endure, the danger she faced daily were harrowing to learn about. She never talked much about the agonies of war to me.

My mother Lourdes met and married my father, Gualberto Besa, after WWII. By the time they had me and my sister, life in the Philippines and in the rural town where I was raised had assumed normalcy. She never spoke about war again. After my mother died, I was approached by friends and even strangers who told me the many things Lourdes did during the war to help them and even saved their lives. These stories were eye-openers. It was like I had only known half of who my mother really was.

Recently, I was invited to speak about my mother’s life story at a history conference in California. The focus of the academic presentations was to include more factual data about World War II in the Pacific in history curriculums here in America. It was an honor to be invited and talk about my mother, Lourdes.

While writing my speech, I realized I lacked facts and data on my mother Lourdes’ experiences during the war. So, I searched for more books about war in the Pacific. Many were now out of print. In my research, I found books that mentioned how my mother, Lourdes Reyes aided American POWs incarcerated in prison camps in the Philippines. This led me to interviewing history book authors, one of them a Pulitzer prize nominee.

It hit me that I found an avenue to explore. Testimonials from POWs who knew her work in aiding American prisoners have opened a whole new world to write about.

I found memoirs and journals. It was incredible to find out how my mother, then a young girl bravely entered prison camps to help prisoners – even if she knew the risks of getting caught meant torture, rape and death.

I have more stories to write about my mother’s life and her wartime experiences. There are more books I want to write. The themes will be more compelling. The lessons learned will be universally thought-provoking. I have untapped more genres and bigger possibilities for my writing. Thanks to the memory of my beautiful mother who found it in her heart to give so much to the world and make a difference.

Now who said my writing was a niche market and wouldn’t sell?

—

Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino is a multi-awarded winner of the Plaridel Writing Awards for best in journalism, given by the Philippine-American Press Club in San Francisco, California. Her food essay “A Hundred Mangoes in a Bottle” has won a Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award. She was an awardee of the FWN Filipina Women’s Network 100 Most Influential Women of the World in 2013.

Betty Ann, as she is fondly called is a journalist, author, food writer, correspondent and blogs about Filipino home cooking recipes on her popular site Asian in America (www.AsianInAmericaMag.com).

Her third cookbook Instant Filipino Recipes: My Mother’s Traditional Philippine Food in a Multicooker Pot, will launch this October. This is a follow up to the success of My Mother’s Philippine Recipes, a collection of her late mother’s favorite Filipino traditional dishes which Betty Ann transformed to everyday cooking in her American kitchen. Other books she has written are How to Cook Philippine Desserts, Cakes and Snacks; Statesman and Survivor Elpidio Quirino, 6thPresident of the Philippines; and she illustrated Color and Cook Food Coloring Book, an adult coloring book of Filipino food. All books are sold on Amazon.com.

Her writing has been published on Positively Filipino, where she is a correspondent; FOOD Magazine by ABS-CBN Publishing Inc.; Rustan’s Sans Rival Magalogue; and QuirkDIY, Quirk Books Community Blog (Philadelphia, PA). She has made a guest appearance on the TV network KACL-LA 18’s Halo-Halo with Kat Iniba, which aired in California and Hawaii.

Betty Ann is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (NYC) and the Association of Culinary Historians of the Philippines. She is also on the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation Board of Advisors.

Based in New Jersey, USA, Betty Ann travels often to the Philippines and throughout Asia in search of traditional recipes and stories about culture and personalities.

Follow her on Twitter @BettyAnnQuirino

Find out more about her on her website https://www.asianinamericamag.com/

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips