0123, Box It...

... and you get 2013 in lottery parlance. Happy New Year! 2012 was quite a year here at Vanishingfeast.com. The travelling I did in 2012 to find my voice, and to build an audience, opened up so many possibilities. I'm overwhelmed really. The future looks good. For example, I have my first book signing on January 31, 2013. It will be at a local library. I will give a talk before the signing, and the subject will be pure seeds, and their value in the heirloom gardening and food movement. More details to come about this.

Now that I have one lined up, I can pitch the concept to other libraries or community groups. I state on the back cover of my book that the book is available for fund raising. Self-publishing offers me the opportunity to buy quantities of books at a wholesale price. For a fund-raising event the book gets marked up, the organization gets a percentage of the profit, and so do I. I'm trying this out as a model for a socially responsible business for the some of the products I create.

Along the same line, I'll be an author at a Meet Our Authors event in April 2013, which is a book show of local authors.

I have an interview this month, January 2013, with Matthew Dillon, the director of www.seedmatters.org, a new initiative funded by the Clif Bar Family Foundation. Check out their website, specifically the Community Seed Tool Kits.

I'm working on my next book. It will be similar to Future Tomatoes. It will be a picture book with stories, quotes or references about sunflowers. I hope to have it ready for the 3rd Annual Heirloom Expo, September 10-13, 2013 in Santa Rosa, CA. I will be back there as a vendor.

I'm going to push my t-shirt awareness program Tasty T-shirt Tales this year. Since the goal is to add new varieties to the t-shirt catalogue on the Spring Equinox, that will be a goal for me to launch a bigger push on this.

I hope to get to Italy to explore some of the interesting possibilities offered up at Salone del Gusto Terra Madre. I'm waiting on my dual citizenship with Italy. Once I get that confirmation, I can work out the details of what I have in mind. Don't be surprised if you see culinary tours pop into the mix here.

I'm also going to get more aggressive with marketing my photography. You can see some of my work here, they are photos from my trip to Italy. These are for viewing now, but I will set up a store this year where you could order directly from bayphoto.com. They offer a wide range of mounting services, and I'm impressed with their quality.

And finally, there's the possible new tomato variety that I'm growing out.

That's what I see sitting here on New Year's Day. I'll be doing some behind the scenes work. The blog will be moving to a different hosting company, and I will continue to build my audience using search engine optimization. Social media will play a part, but since my audience is information seekers who are looking for benefits, not features, search engines is the way for me to go. Social media tools are great for trends, breaking news, and focus groups to see what kind of information people seek, however for now, I don't see it as a major part of  building my audience.