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The making of my own cookbook


gfron1

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Who knew?! Thanks so much for documenting this process; it's very different than I (and, I'll warrant, many others) had expected.

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Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
HosteG Forumsnsmith@egstaff.org

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"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

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I asked a question about photo requirements, and the larger question of - when do we talk to designers...

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We don’t have any direct back and forth between designers and authors/photographers, typically. Instead, any of your concerns (or theirs) would come to me and I’d forward it to the appropriate person.

 

If we have the time to take this step-by-step, that’d be best, but if you guys aren’t going to be able to work together/changing seasons make it difficult for certain pictures and we need to rush to get you answers, please let me know.

 

From here, we’ll be putting together our sample materials (5 spreads, max) and I’ll be able to show you an example of the interior of the book. It won’t be final, and you’ll have time to give me your thoughts on it and we can make revisions.

 

Then in February, I’ll start editing the text and we’ll indicate where the photos should be placed. In those notes, we can include instructions such as “do not crop” or “make half page” or “crop so that X is the focus at the center of the page” —anything like that. Then we’ll see how the typesetters and production editors put the pages together, and we’ll see which photos are issues for us and which may need to be reshot, edited, etc. At this point it’s too early to tell how anything will look on the page, so all I can really give you is info on trim, file size, and format.

 

PS: I got approval to do a half jacket today, so I’ll be sitting down with my creative director next week to see how we can communicate everything we want to the designers and the printers! :)

 

 

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The PS on the bottom refers to my requesting a 1/3 or 1/2 dust jack ala North and many other books that have come out recently. I don't know what the financial impact is, but she approved it so we're going to have it. The other design ideas I've requested that are not too mainstream 1) Photo reference in the index and 2) 2 page photospreads with with text/recipe overlay. Haven't heard on those yet.

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and from my agent:

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I'm surprise they sent part of the photography amount before photography is fully delivered (usually they pay when the book is final and accepted). Any new updates on how the editorial process has been?  We haven't received our check just yet, but I'm sure it's en route and we will confirm accuracy.
 
Although you are working directly with the team (as all authors do), we're still here for questions as they come up, whether about the process or the writing itself, or to help handle any issues that arise (it sometimes helps to have that buffer). Although I hope you won't have conflict with your publisher, if you do, we'd typically step in and try to help mediate, speaking for the business side of things (advocating) so you can really stay focused on a good, collaborative process with your editor and so on.
 
Have you received any early feedback? Do you have any questions or concerns? While I don't want to be all up in your business (technical term, ha!) time to time reports will help us track the progress and catch issues before they arise (once in a while we'll have an author who is working so well with the publisher that they don't think to bring us in or even update us until things have gotten way out of hand). 
 
I know your location is changing, but the biggest thing I can encourage you to do right now is to simultaneously work on building a platform that isn't anchored to your location. Build up your twitter following by posting on popular hashtags and so on. I know you know your way around that, but if you'd like any pointers, let us know. For example, if you start posting a lot of #foraging posts, you'll start to build a new following that won't have had to be at your restaurant to be fans and ready for the book. It would also be worth setting up a RobConnoley.com page so you reserve the domain if it isn't already taken and even just putting a one page bio and book coming soon notice with a mailing list capture. 
 
I know you're juggling a million other things, but if you can keep these in the back of your head, they will prove to be extremely helpful down the line and will be as important as the writing and editing you're doing.

 

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That's interesting advice about the Twitter feed with a foraging hashtag bringing in new people, and reserving your domain now. It sounds sensible.

Nancy Smith, aka "Smithy"
HosteG Forumsnsmith@egstaff.org

Follow us on social media! Facebook; instagram.com/egulletx; twitter.com/egullet

"Every day should be filled with something delicious, because life is too short not to spoil yourself. " -- Ling (with permission)
"There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and start production." -- author unknown

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14 hours ago, Tri2Cook said:

Looks good. I'm looking forward to that pre-order button going live.

I was able to pre-order today (order #10001)... Was that a fluke, or did it go live?

-drew

www.drewvogel.com

"Now I'll tell you what, there's never been a baby born, at least never one come into the Firehouse, who won't stop fussing if you stick a cherry in its face." -- Jack McDavid, Jack's Firehouse restaurant

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Ha! Not a fluke but I wasn't going to advertise it til the publisher tells me its sent to the printer. I emailed you just now with the same message. I'm still working on the site but I'm super glad to know it worked! And note the small incentives I included with the purchase :) Congratulations purchaser #1! 

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I want to say again - holy cow is Wix.com easy. I've had a long standing fear/hesitance to do web design because of the early days of having to code. Now its so logical and easy. I added ecommerce functions, newsletter email grab, navigating buttons that weren't part of the original template. So friggin' easy! 

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Russian olives don't grow where I now live, but once upon a time, they made me sneeze for a couple of weeks each year. Hands off, if you're able to reduce their numbers!

MelissaH

Oswego, NY

Chemist, writer, hired gun

Say this five times fast: "A big blue bucket of blue blueberries."

foodblog1 | kitchen reno | foodblog2

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1 hour ago, gfron1 said:

BTW, the substitution on the recipe is kalamata which are really great in that cake too. Every recipe has substitutions for every foraged ingredient.


I like that you're including the substitutions. It's one of the features of your book that I'm excited about because I doubt I could forage much where I live that you can forage where you live. I'll definitely be trying that cake. I started looking at olives in a different light after making Sam Mason's kalamata cobbler with almond ice cream many years ago. I went into that one extremely skeptical and was pleasantly surprised that they could work so well as a major component in a sweet setting.

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It's kinda like wrestling a gorilla... you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is tired.

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On 12/27/2015 at 5:16 PM, gfron1 said:

I'm spending my day working on more savory recipes. The book is heavy on pastry right now, so I need to put all of my new stuff on. Just finished my rolled root osso bucco.

 

I hope there are a decent number of recipes that do not need an oven, and which are done simply on the stove top!

(I'm one person who rarely uses the oven, and can't really remember the last time I did any baking of any sort – probably a pie/tart shell for a chocolate ganache tart maybe a few years ago)

Edited by huiray (log)
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5 hours ago, huiray said:

 

I hope there are a decent number of recipes that do not need an oven, and which are done simply on the stove top!

(I'm one person who rarely uses the oven, and can't really remember the last time I did any baking of any sort – probably a pie/tart shell for a chocolate ganache tart maybe a few years ago)

I've not thought of my recipes through that lens yet but my kitchen is so small that my survival revolves around dispersing the workload between the oven, the stove top, etc.  Just added Orlando to my tour!

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