Episode 350: Reenergize your Creativity for Blogging (+ the Process of Writing a Cookbook)with Alyssa Brantley

EBT350 – Alyssa Brantley

Alyssa Brantley: Hi, this is Alyssa Brantley from Everyday Maven, and you are listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

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Carrie Tyler: I just would tell people to take the leap because the motivation and the support that I’ve gotten from the women in the group has been invaluable and has just re-energized me. But run the numbers, because I think if anybody actually took the time to just take the price tag outta their head, but put it on paper and look at when they could get a return on that investment, they would see that it’s not such a crazy number. At least if that was their hold back. And if their hold back was just the fear factor of it, then again, it’s that if you don’t put yourself out there, you’re never gonna grow. You have to get uncomfortable. If we stay comfortable, then we’re never gonna change. 

Megan Porta: Hello food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in their businesses. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode number 350. I have Alyssa Brantley with me today. I’m so excited to chat with her. This is her second time on Eat Blog Talk. It was one of the first interviews I ever had on this podcast, but today we’re gonna talk about the process of writing a cookbook and how it can re-energize your creativity for blogging.

Alyssa’s cooking philosophy is whole food half the time. Just because you’re busy, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat great. The creator of the popular food blog everydaymaven.com. Alyssa focuses on seasonal whole food recipes that are packed with flavor, but made in minutes with easy shortcuts. Her work has been featured in Real Simple, Today, Self Magazine, HuffPost, Gourmet Magazine, Prevention, and many more. Alyssa lives with her family in Seattle. Alyssa. Hi, how are you today? So happy to have you here. 

Alyssa Brantley: So happy to be here. Thank you for having me. This was the 350th episode. I couldn’t believe it because I remember the beginning. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. We’ve come a long way and it’s funny because my son who’s in the room with me right now, He just remembers names. He always asked me, Who are you interviewing today? I said, Alyssa. And he was like, Oh, Alyssa Brantley? I was like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you remember her name. He is like, of course I do.

Alyssa Brantley: I love it. That’s awesome. 

Megan Porta: So funny. Okay, we want to know before we get into talking about cookbooks, if you have a second fun fact to share with us.

Alyssa Brantley: I do have a fun fact. This is a very big week. So I just wrote this cookbook. It’s called the I Don’t Want to Cook book, which we’ll talk about in a minute. My fun fact is that a recipe from the book and my face and a quote is actually gonna be in this week’s People magazine. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. That is the coolest ever. I’m so happy for you. 

Alyssa Brantley: Thank you. 

Megan Porta: That is, that’s huge. People magazine is huge and I’m totally gonna buy a copy. I don’t usually but which issue is it? Do you have the details? 

Alyssa Brantley: It is the August 15th issue, but they go to press a week earlier, so I know it’s on stands in some places because my mom found a copy and bought them all, right? But I went yesterday to a local store and they didn’t have it yet, and they said it comes in today. So I’m gonna go back. 

Megan Porta: Okay. I’m gonna go look later this week too. So congratulations. 

Alyssa Brantley: Thank you so much. I know, it’s very exciting. 

Megan Porta: Congratulations also about your book. I want to hear how this book came to be like, how did you conceive it, and can you just talk through the journey of how it was created? 

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, definitely. So this book really happened as a result of the Pandemic and during the pandemic, during the lockdown. I live in Seattle, which was a hardcore lockdown place. In the beginning, like most people, we didn’t really know what we were dealing with and everybody started cooking and restaurants were closed and no takeout and no convenience foods of any kind. It was like, I think within the first month I was like, Whoa. I think the MVP of this is our dishwasher because we were running it twice a day and I was like, didn’t we use to run the dishwasher like every other day? It never seemed like it ever stopped cooking and every single person working from home, schooling from home. I’m sure you had the same experience. It was so monotonous and it was such a burnout. Then the thing started where certain things became out of stock. You remember that? Where every couple weeks it was like you couldn’t get beans or you couldn’t get toilet paper or whatever it was where you lived. I felt so burnt out when we started to come out of that. I would talk to friends and readers and social followers and everybody seemed to feel this intense just drudge and burnout. I was thinking like, I feel like this and I literally enjoy cooking. All of these other people feel like this. There has to be a way to reinvigorate what it means to prepare meals for ourselves and for the people we care about that isn’t so taxing. That’s where the idea came from. While I personally do actually love to cook, I don’t always feel like cooking. And you know, who does? Sometimes you just don’t wanna deal with it, but you really have to. Whether it’s that, you can’t get takeout because it’s expensive or because it’s not convenient or you don’t want the quality of the ingredients or whatever it is. So it came from that place. So it’s the, I Don’t Want To Cook Book. So let’s keep simplifying down to make this as easy as possible, but still really delicious.

Megan Porta: I love simplifying. We talked a little bit about this before pressing the record. I just am such a minimalist with my recipes. I don’t think people like huge ingredient lists. Sometimes it’s nice, right? If you’re doing an extravagant dinner, but that’s the exception. For me, I love minimalism. I remove things from my ingredient list all the time if they’re not necessary. Because simpler is better, in my opinion. 

Alyssa Brantley: Absolutely. And I mean there’s a time and a place for those complicated recipes and I’m all about that once a quarter project, right? Where you make a cake that has 27 steps to it. But that is not my daily life.

Megan Porta: Yeah. This is not real life. 

Alyssa Brantley: I do not aspire for it to be with kids and work and responsibilities and sports. We wanna eat good food and the book is based all around whole food ingredients, which is also how I cook on my website. There’s been, I think, a long disconnect between fast and real food. You don’t have to use sauce packets and seasonings and all of this kind of other stuff that’s processed in order to make quick meals. So I wanted to dispel that a bit with these recipes.

Megan Porta: I love it. So you came up with the concept, so tell us how it went after that.

Alyssa Brantley: Yes. Because I’ve been in the industry for a long time, I do have a fair amount of connections from, whether it’s conferences or retreats or just being in the industry for 10 years. So I had some conversations with a few friends of mine who wrote a bunch of different cookbooks and have had a lot of success and talked about it. Then I talked to one of their publishers and it wasn’t really the right fit. Then it was like a circle of conversations just happening around me, and I was actually approached by Simon and Schuster to have a conversation. 

Megan Porta: Okay. I didn’t know it was Simon and Schuster. Wow.

Alyssa Brantley: Yes. So Adam’s Media is an imprint of Simon and Schuster that does a lot of their titles in this category and Simon in is the distribution and the parent company. So anyway, so the point is, we ended up having this conversation and we went back and forth about this concept and how timely it was and what people were experiencing and how my Whole Foods half the time concept so easily fits in with speaking about this topic.

Megan Porta: Yeah. So then it just went pretty fast from there once you guys decided? 

Alyssa Brantley: No.

Megan Porta: Oh. 

Alyssa Brantley: It didn’t. I have to be honest and tell you I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do it. When I started to really lay out everything it would entail, I was really hesitant. I thought, this is gonna be so much time and I don’t know if I want to take it on when I really think about it. After I started to think, okay, what are the parts of this that I really don’t want to do and what part is this exciting to me? It became clear that as much as I’m capable and competent of doing my own photography, that doing the photography for the book felt like the biggest sort of dark cloud. I think one of the reasons is that I live in Seattle and I do natural light photography, and it’s really tricky to do that on a regular consistent basis through the fall and the winter here because the light is not predictable and it can get really heavy and really gray. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to just switch to artificial light photography overnight. That’s a process. So when we finally got to the point where it was like, Okay, I’m not gonna do the photography, then I felt okay. Just getting creative with these recipes, it’s starting to sound exciting to me.

Megan Porta: That’s awesome. Yeah. So getting rid of the pieces that you aren’t necessarily excited about is huge. That opened up doors for you. 

Alyssa Brantley: Yes, and I like writing. I like putting ideas onto paper. So the writing part and the recipe development part started to become more and more attractive and exciting. One of the concepts for this book from the publisher was having a graphic designer who would design the cover and then get really involved on the interior of the book to make it really fun, which I love. I think it turned out amazing. It’s a little different looking than a lot of the books out there. There’s so many more graphics, which I really appreciate. So I started to just focus on the parts that were really energizing for me. 

Megan Porta: That’s awesome. I have a copy of your book and I love the graphics on the cover and throughout. It is such a unique but beautiful book. It’s different from anything I’ve ever seen, and I’m guessing that’s what you’re referring to when you say that it’s just a little unique.

Alyssa Brantley: It has a different feel to it, right? It’s fun and Yeah. I really appreciate that because it feels right for the moment. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. There’s so many books out there that look the same. Mine included. They’re published by the same people and they have the same size and the same paper. Yours. I opened it and I was like, Oh wow, this is so fun. I don’t have anything on my cookbook shelf like it.

Alyssa Brantley: Thank you so much.

Megan Porta: Which is great. 

Alyssa Brantley: What a compliment. There’s so many amazing cookbooks in our space, but I do feel like it does hit a little different, and I love that. It feels different. It feels fresh and it feels something that I really feel like is answering what we’re going through, which is we need more fun right now. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh, that’s so true. It is like a reflection of what we need. It’s funny that it was also born from the pandemic. 

Alyssa Brantley: Yes, totally. Because the burnout was real. 

Megan Porta: Oh gosh. I don’t think there’s a human in the world who didn’t feel kitchen burnout on some level during that time. 

Alyssa Brantley: I thought it was funny. There was a point in time that I think it was like Kim Kardashian was stuck at her house with her kids and they all had covid so they couldn’t have their normal staff because yeah, she probably has a staff of who knows how many people around her at any time, She did like a video of her making Annie’s Mac and Cheese. She was losing her mind cause she didn’t, Oh my gosh. I think she doesn’t even usually do that. She has a chef. But she was like, Oh my God, this is so hard. I remember being like, this is like every meal and snack for all of us. You know what I mean?

Megan Porta: Welcome to our world.

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah. This is really hard. We’re doing this around the clock. 

Megan Porta: So you let go of the photography, which felt amazing. Is there anything else that you let go of in order to focus on the writing and the fun parts? 

Alyssa Brantley: It was hard though for me to let go of the photography because I know that I could do it. As I was creating recipes, there were certain recipes where I’m like, I know exactly how I would style this, right? So it was a challenge, but I knew it was the right decision in order for me to continue with a consistent workflow. I also really just let go trying to do it all. Because I think that it’s easy to get into that hustle mindset and then drive yourself to insanity of never really doing anything good because you’re doing everything. I just focused on the content for the book and the writing and tried to really make it my main priority in terms of my workflow and share about it on social media when it felt appropriate and just really hone in on each recipe and get creative until I was satisfied with the result. So I took off some of that pressure, that valve that is usually there and was like, You know what? It’s fine. It’s fine to not do these other things.

Megan Porta: Relinquishing a little bit of control actually feels really good, sometimes. 

Alyssa Brantley: I haven’t even gone back to the old schedule that I had because I think it’s not even necessary. It’s not healthy and I think that there’s this desire to do too much since our business has transformed into a social and SEO business. Everybody wants to wear every single hat. I can’t wear every single hat. I just can’t do it. 

Megan Porta: Yes, it’s not normal. 

Alyssa Brantley: Taking off some of those hats.

Megan Porta: Good for you. I love hearing that because there are so many pressures to do it all, and I feel like that is evolving. Like literally weekly, there’s a new thing you’re supposed to do and oh, you’re supposed to do this too. It just gets to be so dang much. So I love talking to bloggers who are like, Nope, drawing the line, making boundaries. I’m not gonna do it all. 

Alyssa Brantley: Also everybody starts to copy each other. It’s like everybody’s doing the same exact thing and the same cadence. It’s an army of people copying each other, and that’s why everything keeps changing so quickly, because as soon as that happens, it becomes not as good of a strategy anymore.

Megan Porta: Oh, I totally agree. 

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Megan Porta: I want to hear more about your streamlining of the recipes. So you talked earlier about how you love having minimalist kinds of ingredient lists. How did you implement that into your cookbook?

Alyssa Brantley: What I did was I came up with a collection of recipes and then I went back and forth with the editorial team for the book who it was amazing to work with. They really, honestly gave me such creative license over it. I just, I think, was self auditing and refining what I thought would be a good mix of recipes for the audience. I just kept refining it until I felt really good about the mix. Then once that recipe collection was settled on, I tested my recipes from my own recipes. There were a few that I used from my website and even made them more simple than they are there. Then I backed into every single recipe by testing it in such a way that I would say, Okay, if I make this recipe, what can I take away from the ingredient list or the instruction list? Meaning take away some steps that would still leave me with a recipe that tastes as close to the original with a lot less effort and a lot less work. Then another thing I did was this concept of overlapping ingredients, which is one of the themes of the book. So that I use a lot of very similar ingredients across recipes intentionally, so that you don’t have to have those one off ingredients where you’re like, Oh, I’m missing the one thing I need. You probably already have those things because it’s in the shopping list or that it’s in so many different recipes. Like for instance, bagged, cleaned baby spinach. I consider that fast food. It’s a convenience food because it cooks in 30 seconds. So that is one of my favorite fallback vegetables when I’m really short on time or effort or motivation to get in the kitchen because I know that I can create something in literally less than 60 seconds with something like baby spinach. So I use it a lot in the book, intentionally, so that there’s less prep work. There’s less time at the stove. So those overlapping ingredients by swapping and subbing those around, then you could make more recipes from the book. If you buy the ingredients for say the bruschetta chicken, but you’re like, Oh, you know what? I don’t actually feel like that. You probably can make another recipe from the book with the same ingredients.

Megan Porta: Oh, I love that. You’re taking pressure off for the readers, and this is already a book about, streamlining dinner, but you’re taking additional pressure off by going through and thinking about those ingredients, which is super cool. I don’t know that many other cookbooks do the same. 

Alyssa Brantley: It doesn’t have to be as complicated. You and I talk about that, like we both agree, it needs to be easier. Anybody who’s familiar with your recipes knows that you care about making it simple but delicious. So this is really relatable for you. I feel like people want this and they really understand that you know what, sometimes things are more overcomplicated than they have to be. So let’s just take it back down. What are the basics you need to create this delicious chili or you can make a chicken noodle soup from scratch in less than 30 minutes. Recipe is in the book. Like it’s actually easy. But if you don’t feel like doing that? There’s a 10 minute soup recipe there. You know what I mean?

Megan Porta: Yeah. There’s nothing worse for me than going to a recipe and seeing ingredients that I think, there’s no way I’m ever going to buy that. Why is that here? 

Alyssa Brantley: So my take on that is that yes, I agree with you. My take on that is that if it’s something like shredded mozzarella cheese, I know that you’re probably gonna use that in other places in your life. So I don’t have a problem saying, use two cups of shredded mozzarella cheese, and you’re gonna buy a Costco size bag or something. But if it’s a specific ingredient, then what I tried to do, or what I made sure that I did for the cookbook, is use the entire amount that I would ask you to buy. So I wouldn’t say Hey, Go buy a can of diced chiles, and then only use a tablespoon of it. It uses the entire amount. I don’t even know that I used diced chilies in the book. I’m just giving that as an example. But if you had an ingredient that was like a one off, it would be for the entire recipe.

Megan Porta: Yeah. So smart. 

Alyssa Brantley: So that you wouldn’t wind up right with extras that you’re like, What am I supposed to do with this? 

Megan Porta: Yeah, or half a can of something and then you put the can in the fridge and it sits there for six months and you’re like, great. That’s awesome. 

Alyssa Brantley: Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. So in chapter one, you have a bunch of tips for things like back to school. Talk about those because that helps people even further. 

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, totally. So I have a bunch of tips. Chapter one is dedicated to different tips and tricks and secrets that save you time and also help you shop more efficiently so you can save time preparing your food. When I say preparing your food, I wanna preface by saying I am not asking anybody to spend an hour or a day doing food prep for this book. That is not on the table. That is very cumbersome and it works for a certain period of your life, but I have a busy life. If you have work or family or responsibilities or sports or kids or other people you have to take care of, spending a big chunk of time prepping is really hard. So I’m not saying to do that. I just wanna be clear. What I am saying is that if you cook with things like carrots or onions or shredded cabbage, let me tell you and teach you the ways to save even more time with those ingredients. You may not have to sit and chop them. So I give options for that in chapter one of how you could buy certain things fresh, buy certain things frozen, buy it already prepared and then if you wanted to do it yourself, here’s how you could chop onions once a month and freeze them in specific portions. But you don’t have to do any of that but there’s options there for the ultimate ways to save time. 

Megan Porta: Oh, you’re just giving us all permission to create delicious, healthy-ish recipes and not wasting our lives. Which is, I think, what we all want, Alyssa. 

Alyssa Brantley: I hope so. I hope my whole goal here is just to make it easier and the most satisfying comments come from people who are messaging me, saying I just made the most delicious meal from your cookbook, and it was legitimately so easy. Or my 12 year old made it. Or my 15 year old picked up this book and I just got a copy for my child who just moved out. It’s so satisfying because I feel like people are energized about making good food. 

Megan Porta: For sure. So if somebody else who is listening is considering this as a project, what would you tell them? Do you have any nuggets of wisdom after having just gone through this? 

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, so I really got energized and energized creatively by the process. I have felt over the years that as the business of recipe development and photography and food blogging has changed, I’ve really been disenchanted with the sit in your chair and do spreadsheets aspect of it. I am a much more visual and creative person, and so I like to say that our business used to be 90/10, 90% creative, 10% promotions, and now it’s 10/90, right? It’s 10% creative. 90% spreadsheets, seo, computer, and promotion and social. I don’t enjoy that dynamic. So it’s something I’ve really had to be honest with myself about. The process of writing this book has really energized me creatively. I feel so inspired about the recipes and like the way that I was able to create this body of work that really genuinely helps solve a great real problem that people have right this second. Also like sharing so many tips and tricks and writing the text and the copy. So I feel like I would say, really think about what it is that you want. Is it that you really want a place to be creative? Do you really care about photography? What part of it is the most important for you? Get in touch with that. There’s a lot of different reasons to write a cookbook and not everybody has the same agenda or goal.

Megan Porta: It’s super refreshing to me to hear from you that this reenergized you and reinvigorated you and your love for creating food, because so often I hear people just get burnt out through this process of creating a cookbook. It’s more tedious and just a pain, to be honest. So this is great. This is really encouraging to hear this perspective. 

Alyssa Brantley: I think taking the photography off the table helped me because I didn’t feel that pressure. I wasn’t like, Oh my God, if I don’t capture this chicken noodle soup at that exact one 15 window of lightness on Tuesday, I’m screwed in my timeline right? Because, When you work on a project like that, you usually have a pretty aggressive timeline of workflow. So for me, taking the photography away really helped me not feel that extra pressure and allowed me to stay creative. So that was really helpful. 

Megan Porta: For some people it might not be photography, right? It might be part of the writing or some other aspect of it. 

Alyssa Brantley: That’s right. That’s why it’s so important to tune into what is this about for you? What do you need right now? For me it feels I love to be creative and I felt really drained from the pandemic, from the constant drudge of cooking. Then also not being able to really go to restaurants. That’s a place where I used to get inspired. Whether it was my husband and I would go out on a date or take our kids to a new place and try a dish with new flavors. You get inspired and you get ideas about techniques or flavor combinations. So taking all of that off the table, it was like, whatever we could get delivered to our house from the grocery stores that were delivering during this period of time. I feel like this was a reawakening. 

Megan Porta: Sometimes what got delivered isn’t what you actually wanted.

Alyssa Brantley: Like all the time.

Megan Porta: Oh, look what I got today. That’s interesting. 

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, it was weird. You’re like, I didn’t ask for 150 lemons. I asked for one pound.

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. It was an interesting time. I like that you brought up the restaurant thing too, because we don’t always think of that. Those restaurants are where we get a lot of our inspiration for food, and when that’s removed from the equation, it really does affect us as food buggers and creators. 

Alyssa Brantley: The travel. Traveling and restaurants are so important for inspiration for me. Everybody’s different. For some people it’s reading a magazine. But I find that’s really inspiring. I love to taste other people’s creations. Even dinner parties, right? Like other people barbecue. Somebody has a technique of making barbecue chicken that you’ve never tried. You’re like, what is that flavor that I’m smelling or tasting, and those are inspiring moments. It really became clear with every single one of them wiped away, I was like, Wow, this is like very much a blank canvas. Even now, I don’t know, everybody’s different in terms of where they live, but one of the things that we’ve noticed here, we live in a major city and Seattle’s a pretty good food city. Restaurants are having a really hard time coming back from this and staffing is an issue and all of these things.We’ve been noticing that some of our favorite takeout places are closing at eight o’clock at night. Literally. Also some of them are like, Oh, you didn’t call in advance to schedule your order. Were booked. We don’t have enough staff. We’re like, Gil wasn’t the whole point of takeout to do it last minute? But I understand the pain and the suffering that the restaurants are going through. So I don’t begrudge them in any way, but even now it’s not fully easy to go back to what it was.

Megan Porta: That’s so true. Even Chipotle, oh my gosh. It’s hit or miss. Sometimes there’s a sign on our door down the street that says, Sorry, we don’t have over half of our ingredients so we are closed. That is crazy. Like you, like I get it. 

Alyssa Brantley: We were taking the kids after a tournament for sports and they had a sign on the door that was like, We don’t have avocados, chicken, cilantro, tortillas, cheese.

Megan Porta: Okay, why are you operating? 

Alyssa Brantley: We were in the middle of nowhere and we were so excited to sign the Chipotle, so we were like, Oh, okay. We’re gonna have to figure this one out. You know what I mean? 

Megan Porta: What can we have? You can have beans. 

Alyssa Brantley: No. They were like, We’re gonna close. It’s really been interesting. 

Megan Porta: It has been, It’s been such a weird, crazy journey. So I can see where this book is going to save people and add flavor to their lives, but simplicity as well. Yes. So speaking about just the process, is there anything else you would leave food bloggers with as far as anything involved, whether it’s finding a topic or finding a publishing place or anything else.

Alyssa Brantley: So I would say the topic should be something you’re really excited about. Don’t do a cookbook just to do it. For me. I never wanted to do the Everyday Maven cookbook, right? I just wasn’t excited about that. Not that I don’t love my website, I just want to do something that is more of a niche, like really specific. So I would say, take what you’re really good at and go even further. Niche down even further, unless you already are in that space. If you already are a vegan barbecue chef, you’re pretty good. You’re in the good niche, right? But if you have a more generalist site like I do, then I would say really hone in on one thing. So for me, one of my absolute favorite things to do, Is to create soup recipes. I would love to do a soup book, but apparently publishers are not super interested in that because it’s so seasonal. It’s harder to sell, And it’s not like a dessert where you need a dessert for every holiday or a date night or a weekend or a family gathering. There’s more fluidity there with sweets. So look at what you’re really interested in and then get real about, could this book sell? Is it mass market enough? Is there a big enough audience? Those kinds of things really matter. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s great advice. I feel like everything you’re saying too relates to blogging. Literally it’s, It could be a conversation about blogging, but we’re talking about cookbooks, so that just really stood out to me. 

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, and from a blogging standpoint, I’ve long held the belief that my website could probably serve by being niched down. I haven’t done it because it doesn’t really fit my recipe collection. But I think that niching down is very useful for the market. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, totally agree. Okay, so a big part of finding success with a cookbook, because a cookbook is a labor of love. It takes a lot of energy. Even if you enjoy it, it’s a lot of time and a lot of energy. So you want to be rewarded a little bit by Amazon. So I would just encourage people to go rate and review Alyssa’s book because that will be huge for her. So Alyssa, why don’t you tell us all again the name of the cookbook and if they can go to other places besides Amazon or would you rather have them rate and review on Amazon?

Alyssa Brantley: So the book is called the, I Don’t Want to Cook Book. So it’s a play on Words by Alyssa Brandley. You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target. Really? Where everywhere books are sold. Chapters in Canada, and then all of the independent bookstores. Amazon reviews, when you have purchased the book or you’ve made the recipes and you have an authentic review, are so helpful. If you do get the book and you wind up making a recipe and loving it, I would so appreciate a rating and review on Amazon. It really helps with the algorithm and also with getting really good press. So that is a great place to go and you don’t have to buy the book there to read it there. If you buy it at Target or Barnes and Noble or wherever and you would rather rate it on Amazon, that’s fine. I just definitely want authentic ratings of people who really have experience with the book because it’s so helpful to hear people’s real experiences.

Megan Porta: I’m going to do that this week and I’m also going to grab a copy of People Magazine. So, here to support you. Yes. Is there anything else you want to mention before we start saying goodbye? 

Alyssa Brantley: No. If anybody wants to find me, you can find me on social media. All my handles are at Everyday Maven. If you have any questions about the book or anything else, you can always reach out to me and that’s really it. I’m really excited to get the book into more people’s hands and hopefully hear the stories about how it’s saving them time and effort. 

Megan Porta: Yes, I’m excited for you. Congratulations again, Alyssa. 

Alyssa Brantley: Thank you. 

Megan Porta: Do you have a quote or words of inspiration to leave us with?

Alyssa Brantley: I do have a quote. I have a little post up on my desk that I have had there for three years. It’s gray and dirty, and it’s got this quote on it that I saw a few years ago that I just stare at all the time. It says, Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it. By Salvador Dali. It’s like a reminder to stay in your lane and be authentic. Because the more you put fake boxes over yourself of what has to be and what is perfection, I think the farther you get away from your authenticity.

Megan Porta: That is beautiful and that relates to everything you create and the way you live as well. It all leads into each other. So that is perfect. It is perfect to talk about perfection. 

Alyssa Brantley: I should redo it on a new post. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Get rid of the…

Alyssa Brantley: Get a pen, a marker. Fancy. 

Megan Porta: I dunno. I kinda like authentic old weathered notes, that they have meaning. Thank you Alyssa, so much for being here. Everybody go support Alyssa in any way that you feel led, and then we will put together a show notes page for you. If anyone wants to go peek at those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/everydaymaven. Thanks Alyssa again for being here and so great to talk to you again.

Alyssa Brantley: Yeah, and I just wanna say really quick, if any food bloggers have a specific question I didn’t answer about the process, feel free to shoot me a message. 

Megan Porta: Super generous of you. Thank you so much for being here today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see next time.