Forum

I came across EYB in a mention in, I think, Delicious magazine.  I've not seen any recent publicity for the site in any of the magazines I get; I try to recommend it to others where I know they are cookery nuts, and have recommended it in discussions on cookbooks vs internet, but the letters don't always get published, of course. I think it is in all our interests to get more members (=more cookbooks indexed?).

What can we do to help?

RaySadler

That is so nice of you Ray.  Word of mouth is hugely important for a website like ours, which is small, without outside funding and so no huge publicity budgets.  We do promote ourselves regularly to food magazines and the food pages of newspapers but there are so many recipe search engine sites popping up (it feels like one a week sometimes) that it is hard to get noticed.  Of course Eat Your Books is completely different to all the other recipe sites that just scrape recipes from the web.  There is no other website in the world where you can search recipes in cookbooks, magazines, online and your personal recipes.  So you would think the journalists would be clamoring to write about us, wouldn't you?

The discussion forums are actually very important for us as a source of referrals.  Until recently our top referral site was ChowHound - it is now Food52 since we were recently listed in their top food finds of 2011.  But any forum where "cookery nuts" as you call us (I like it) assemble is a good place to get the word out.  Even just adding a post about EYB to a topic on a blog that is related to recipe search, recipe management, etc can result in a big uplift in site visits.

So please just carry on doing what you are doing.  Yes, more members, equals more revenue, equals more cookbooks getting indexed.  So it's in all members' interests to get the word out!

If all the food bloggers here posted about EYB, that might generate a bit of extra buzz! I will work it into my next post :)

I have to agree that EYB is unique among all the other sites out there and I do wish more journalists were writing about it. I will never forget what led me to EYB... A year and a half ago, I read a small blurb in Eating Well magazine (I think it was in a "what's new" type of section) and ran to my computer to check it out. I signed up for a free trial, took about a day to realize this site was EXACTLY what I needed and didn't even bother to let the free trial run out before becoming a paid member. Ever since then, I kept hoping I'd see more press in other cooking magazines (and I subscribe to a good many of them), but I haven't seen much. I can't help but wonder if more cooking magazines ran blurbs such as the one I saw, if membership would increase. I'm sure many fellow "cookery nuts" read these magazines and would recognize the incredible value of this service (especially with all of the improvements that have been made). In the meantime, I'll continue to spread the word the best I can :)

I too was so excited when I found EYB and wanted to tell everyone about it. I usually post something on food forums or blogs visited. I was thinking it would be great if  Jane or Fiona could talk about EYB on a food podcast like The Splendid Table or KCRW Good Food. A lot of chefs and "cookery nuts"  probably listen to those shows and they probably have loads of cookbooks. It seems like something I can just hear Lynne Rossetto Kasper talking about on her show.