The other night Walt sent me an Instagram reel of a Korean American woman making army stew while she told a story about her father, as a teenager, running for his life from police who’d just gunned down student protesters in 1960. Her dad’s takeaway from a near-death experience: “Don’t forget to vote.” Walt sent it without comment, which is Walt-speak for you need to see this. (BTW, we’ve been gathering the documents that justify my name changes so I can continue to vote. Won’t get into that here.)
I watched it. Then I watched it again. Then I fell into a two-hour Joanne Lee Molinaro hole, surfacing only when I realized I had a deadline to meet.
I’m guessing some of you have no idea who Joanne Lee Molinaro is, and there’s no reason you should — unless you’re plugged into vegan TikTok or you happen to spend a lot of time watching strangers make food on the internet. (No judgment. I am one of you now.) She goes by The Korean Vegan. Over a million Instagram followers. Roughly six million across her platforms. A James Beard Award. Two cookbooks with Penguin Random House. A K-beauty brand. A podcast. A Substack. The Chicago Sun-Times recently called her a leading example of how to single-handedly turn your life story into a multidimensional brand, and they were not wrong.
Now, before you click away thinking I’m not writing a cookbook, Ann, what the hell are you on about — stand down for a hot minute. What Joanne is actually doing has very little to do with food. She’s selling what every nonfiction author with a brain is trying to sell: an identity that other people want a piece of. The recipes are the trojan horse. The story is what’s inside. And the mechanics of how she pulled it off — including the part where she had 20,000 followers when she got an agent and 35,000 when she signed her book deal, not the million you’d assume — are the most useful case study I’ve stumbled into in months.
So here’s what I learned. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable, particularly the part where you realize this is a five-year project and not an eighteen-month one. But you signed up for honesty when you came to me, and honesty is what you’re getting.
The format she invented (and why you should steal it)
Joanne’s structural innovation is so simple it’s almost annoying. A 60-second video. Her hands doing something competent and beautiful in the kitchen — chopping, stirring, plating. Over that footage, in a quiet voiceover, she tells a story that has nothing to do with the recipe and everything to do with her. The food is the vehicle. The story is the cargo. The viewer came for cooking and stayed for something they didn’t know they were looking for.
That budae chigae video Walt sent me? It’s a cooking video. It’s also a story about her father running for his life from a violent regime, with a punchline of “don’t forget to vote.” A Washington Post blurb on her first cookbook said her sixty-second videos somehow manage to be funny, devastating, politically rousing, and food-porn-worthy all at once. I’d argue that’s underselling it.
The reason this works is mechanical, not magical. The food gives the audience something to do with their eyeballs while the audio does the emotional labor. The cooking is permission to slow down. Without the food, an immigrant family memoir told by a former bankruptcy attorney would feel like a TED Talk. With the food, it feels like being in her kitchen.
Now, you, my expert/coach/consultant reader — you do not have a kitchen routine to film. Probably. (If you do, my apologies. I take it back.) But you have something analogous, and this is the part most authors miss: you need a vehicle. Not because you’re trying to be cute. Because the vehicle is what gives your story room to do its work.
A morning journaling shot. A walk. The act of pouring coffee. A whiteboard. The drive to the office. Something visually steady and emotionally neutral so the audio can carry the weight. When my clients film themselves talking to camera with no vehicle, they almost always come across as pleading. (OK, you can throw me in this category too. I confess!) Add a vehicle and they read as sharing. The format does most of that work; you just have to pick one and stick with it.
The six themes she returns to (none of which are food)
When you look across Joanne’s body of work — TikTok, Instagram, the cookbook essays, her podcast, her Substack — there are roughly six recurring themes she returns to. Recipes are only one of them. This is important. Take notes.
Family lore, especially her parents’ escape from what is now North Korea. Her parents were born there, escaped young, and immigrated to the U.S. This is the deepest well she draws from, and it functions as both personal memoir and a window into a specific Korean American experience that her audience finds revelatory.
Her own body and self-image. She’s open about her past weight, her cellulite, her menopause, her marathon training. Not in a “look how much I overcame” way. In a “this is the body I’m in today and this is what’s true about it” way. There’s a difference, and your audience knows the difference even when they can’t name it.
Her abusive first marriage and divorce shame. This one’s significant because it’s not a one-time confessional — it’s a node she returns to with new angles, year after year.
Leaving law for a creative life. She made partner at a big firm and walked away. Her audience watches her continue to metabolize this in real time — not as a triumphant “I quit my soul-sucking job” influencer narrative, but as something more textured. There are still days she misses being a lawyer. She says so. People love her for it.
Politics and identity. She is openly anti-Trump, pro-BLM, pro-LGBTQ, and pro-women’s rights. She does not sand off the edges. Her audience grew, in part, because of that.
Veganism as an identity question, not a diet. Her opening line in the first cookbook is that she was terrified going vegan would mean losing her Koreanness. Her tagline isn’t about food; it’s about being a hyphenated American: “I veganize Korean food. I Koreanize everything else.”
What ties all six together is that none of them are food. The food is what gets people in the door. The themes are what make them stay, share, and eventually shell out forty bucks for a cookbook because they feel like they owe her something.
Now go sit with this for a hot second. Can you name your six themes? Not topics. Themes. A topic is “my divorce.” A theme is “what I learned about my own complicity in my divorce.” A topic is “my drinking.” A theme is “the part of me that liked drinking and what I had to put in its place.” A topic is “leadership.” A theme is “the version of leadership I was sold versus the version that actually works.”
If you can’t name yours, you don’t have a platform problem. You have a clarity problem. And it’ll keep eating your time and your weekends until you fix it.
Why people keep coming back (the psychology)
Three things are doing the heavy lifting here. All three are replicable.
Identity recognition. Joanne’s audience isn’t primarily Korean American, but a meaningful slice is, and for them she’s articulating things they’ve felt and never seen reflected. The non-Korean part of her audience gets the universal human content (a difficult father, a bad first marriage, a body you’ve fought with) wrapped in cultural specificity that feels like a privilege to be invited into. Specificity is what makes the universal land. Always has been. Always will be.
Vulnerability with craft, not vulnerability as confession. This is the part most “personal brand” influencers miss completely. Joanne is a former trial lawyer with an English degree. She knows how to write a sentence and structure a story. When she shares something personal, it has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a turn. It earns its emotion. Compare that to the raw oversharing that floods most personal-brand social media — the “you’ll never believe what happened to me at the Costco” trauma-dump. Joanne’s stories are built. That’s the difference.
Persistent disclosure across years. She didn’t drop her trauma in one viral confessional and move on. She returns to her father, her mother, her divorce, her body, her career change — again and again, each time at a new angle. That’s what builds what feels like a relationship. Followers think they know her. The Sun-Times calls her an open book. That openness, sustained over a decade, is the moat. It cannot be replicated by a competitor in six months. It cannot be replicated by you in six months either, which is why I’m telling you now and not in eighteen months when you’re frustrated and ready to quit.
How the cookbook deal actually went down
Here’s the part you’ll want to read multiple times. Because the timeline does not match the myth most aspiring authors carry around in their heads.
(I tracked down Joanne’s own first-person account of how this went, written for her Substack in 2023. So this isn’t me speculating. This is her, telling on herself.)
She started The Korean Vegan in 2016 — YouTube and Facebook. By 2017 she made the pivotal shift: she stopped writing recipes in her Instagram captions and started writing stories there instead. By 2018 she had about 20,000 Instagram followers. Substantial but not massive. Not viral. Not “you’ve made it” numbers. She got introduced to her literary agent through another vegan blogger. Her agent wasn’t even sure she should write a cookbook — he asked if she might want to write a novel or a memoir instead. She picked a cookbook because she thought that’s what she had time for.
(Which, by the way: the format you start with is often determined by your bandwidth, not your purest creative ambition. Welcome to professional writing.)
She submitted her proposal in April 2018. Within nine days, an editor at Avery (a Penguin Random House imprint) wanted a call. She signed in December 2018, by which point she had around 35,000 Instagram followers. The advance, in her own words, was a “very healthy 5-figure number” — meaningfully more than she’d expected. She also reports, based on conversations with other cookbook authors, that the current market for a first-time author with 100,000+ social media followers is in the low six figures.
(Different math for your genre, by the way. Different category, different advance norms. But the platform-to-advance relationship is the same.)
Now here’s the kicker, and I want you to read this twice: her original cookbook contract was for two essays only. An introduction and a conclusion. Her editor’s initial feedback was too much writing, not enough recipes. She wasn’t allowed to write the cookbook she actually wanted to write. It wasn’t until July 2020, when her TikTok went viral and she gained roughly a million followers in six months, that she and her editor renegotiated to put a substantial essay at the front of every chapter.
The viral storytelling on TikTok rescued the format she’d originally pitched.
So the actual sequence was: platform first, deal second, virality third, full creative latitude fourth.
She didn’t get to write the foodoir she wanted until she’d proven the audience was there for the writing.
That’s a slightly deflating fact, I know. The book deal is not the validation event you’ve been picturing. The book deal is the entry ticket. The platform you build after the deal is what makes the book sell. The platform you build after the book is what makes the second deal better. Round and round it goes.
What’s transferable to you (and what isn’t)
I want to be honest about this, because the temptation is always to take a unicorn case and say “do this.” Most of what made Joanne work is Joanne — the writing chops from law school and an English degree, the partner-track discipline, the specific family history, the photogenic kitchen presence, a husband who plays piano in the background and turns out to be charming on camera. (Wait! Walt’s always going on about how he used to teach piano as a teenager.)
What is genuinely transferable, especially for the experts and coaches and consultants I work with:
The vehicle-and-cargo structure. You don’t need a kitchen. You need a steady, visually neutral activity that gives your story room to land. Pick one and stick with it.
The theme inventory. Sit down this week and identify your five or six recurring themes. Not topics. Themes. If you can’t, you’re not ready to build a platform — you’re still ready to figure out what you have to say. (That’s not a failing. It’s a step. Most people skip it and pay for it later.)
The specificity-makes-universal principle. Joanne does not say “immigrant families are misunderstood.” She tells you about her mother packing fermented perilla leaves in her lunch box. The specificity is the point. For a relationship author, “communication is hard” is dead on arrival. “The moment my husband said the wrong thing at my mother’s funeral and I knew I had to choose how to remember it” — that is alive.
Persistence over years, not months. Joanne started in 2016. The breakout cookbook came in 2021. Five years of consistent work before the bestselling moment. Most of you come to me wanting the platform-to-deal pipeline to take twelve to eighteen months. I am not going to lie to you about that. The lie is what keeps people quitting in month nine, three months before the thing they planted starts to bloom.
What’s not easily transferable: the cooking-video format itself, her specific aesthetic, the tone she’s developed. Authors who try to imitate her register usually sound like they’re cosplaying. The structural lessons travel; the surface ones don’t. Your job is to find your own vehicle and your own register, not to be a slightly less interesting Joanne.
So no, you’re probably not going to put on an apron and start filming dumplings at midnight. But you can sit down today and ask yourself: What’s my vehicle? What are my six themes? What’s the most specific scene I have that points to the most universal truth?
That’s the whole game. The rest is just doing it for five years.
