9 x 12: The Culinary Adventure Continues

Chapter 1 - Building The Narrative

9 x 12 – The Culinary Adventure Continues.

Chapter 1 - Building the Narrative

Good cookbooks are those that can convey their raison d’être through their recipes. Well-written, researched, and developed cookbooks that can transport you into a regional cuisine, such as Persian or Hungarian cooking, or make you want to delve deeper into a specific subject, such as bread making or preserving, will have you running to the kitchen and pulling out your pots and pans to try the recipes. That is my goal every time I start working on a new book. 

My falling apart, well-used, stained and annotated copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook and post it festooned cookbooks that have resonated with me. These are some of the books that have made me pull out pots and pans.

For the books to be successful, readers must know that the recipes are reliable and doable and that the book captures the essence of its topic. Open any page of Falastin by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigly, for example, and you are transported into the fragrant world of Palestinian food culture. The chapter-opening stories and head notes are so evocative that you can feel the heat of the Mediterranean sun emanating from the pages and smell the aromas of spices sizzling in hot pans. I stood in my local bookshop salivating as I read this book making a mental note of how many recipes I wanted to make, ten at least. I went home with the book and tried a few. They lived up to my imagination. My copy of The Silver Palate cookbook is falling apart and covered in splatters and tick marks against all the recipes I tried in the index, 60 plus at last count. Good cookbooks make you want to cook. That being said, I read an article in The Guardian that says most people makes an average of only two (!) recipes from any cookbook they own, yet cookbooks continue to sell well (up more than 20% a year since the pandemic, and the excellent ones can make you dream.

So, that is my goal when I first sit down to work on a new book. I want the recipes and stories in my books make people want to cook, and hopefully more than two of the dishes! 

It all begins with an idea and then an outline…

Producing cookbooks is a long and expensive process. It can also be daunting, from the first percolations of an idea to testing recipes, writing and retesting, photo shoots and food styling, production timetables, rounds of editing, proofreading, and dreaded indexing. I’m unsure if I knew before what I know now that I would have launched into this process! I certainly didn’t know about book promotions and all the publicity that the author must do. You are essentially selling a product that is an extension of yourself. It can be very personal and unnerving. It is a challenging and very competitive world out there!

There are multiple ways to produce books: conventional publishers, producing an eBook through an Amazon imprint, and self-published books. Each has its pros and cons. In traditional publishing, an author usually has an agent who will submit their book to a publisher. The submission, aka the book proposal (60-100 pages long), begins with a synopsis and has chapter summaries, recipe lists and sample recipes (sometimes a chapter or two), your bio and credentials, a competitive market analysis, and your promotion plans. Unless you are Ina Garten, Deb Perlman, or one or two other very well-known authors, publishers rely on the author to promote their books and want to see how you will do that. The proposal is a comprehensive review of everything to do with your book. Who is the target market? Why are you the right person to write this book? What is your competition? How big is your platform? What is your social media reach? Etc. I highly recommend reading Dianne Jacob’s Will Write for Food for anyone exploring cookbook writing. It is a comprehensive guide to the food writing world. She also has an excellent newsletter hosted on Substack with invaluable resources for anyone contemplating getting into this field. I defer to Dianne for all these details.

I use a production calendar to schedule writing days and photo shoots. It evolves on a daily basis. I try and block out time to write which can be challenging when so many other events, classes, meetings etc pull on my time.

Cookbook proposals are a guidebook for the future book. If you like, a road map of where this book will take you. As my new book will be my tenth (print book), I use my book summary/outline as my working template. I create a production timeline from this road map, working backward from the manuscript delivery date (the date the book goes to the printer) to plan the photo shoots and my writing schedule, building in time for editing, proofing, and so on. Sometimes, life intervenes in the form of unforeseen circumstances, and one’s schedule is thrown out the window. I am currently on track with the photo shoots and recipe development, but the writing part, not so much. Getting behind schedule creates self-inflicted stress, at least in my case. I may have to squirrel myself away and hibernate to write, lest I get distracted by all the other things going on around me.

Now to the crux of the matter…