Customer Reviews

Recipe For A Cookbook: How To Write, Publish, And Promote Your Cookbook

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This book is a great resource for people who want to self-publish a cookbook. It is especially helpful for self-publishers who want to get into bookstores, libraries and major book distribution channels. I always thought this was nearly impossible, but Chadwick's specific, detailed advice convinces me it is doable.

Opening chapters reveal a mixture of hubris and sound advice based on experience. Gloria Chadwick is not a lawyer, but gives legal advice. She is not an accountant, but gives tax advice. She overgeneralizes from her own experience. For example, she advises self-publishers to get an "Assumed Name Certificate" from their city or county. Does she know for a fact that these certificates exist under the laws of every state? She does not include the warning to check with a lawyer or tax advisor.

She thinks when bookstores fail to pay their invoices for your books, it's called "depreciation"! No it isn't! It's called bad debt. Depreciation is the gradual reduction in the value of capital equipment as it ages.

Most of this legal and tax info is for self-publishers. She also helpfully includes advice for disguising the fact that a book is self-published. She tells how to copyright the book and how to get bar codes and ISBNs. She gives some advice on naming the "publisher" of a self-published book. All this is helpful, as book stores and distributors generally avoid dealing in self-published books.

She has deceptively named her "publisher" Copper Canyon Books, which should raise eyebrows at the Copper Canyon Press, a prolific publisher in the state of Washington, founded in 1972, which publishes only poetry. This looks like an intentional deception, designed to ease her book into markets where self-published books are snubbed.

As is often the case with self-published books, some of the typography is not quite up to snuff. But she is a self-publishing veteran (more than two dozen books on such topics as "Discovering Your Past Lives"). At least one of her six cookbooks was issued by a commercial publisher. She gives detailed advice on typography, which is useless if you are submitting a book to a professional publisher, but invaluable to someone typesetting their own book. She is not a professional typographer herself and conflates the terms "pitch" and "point." She doesn't understand leading, and instead speaks of single-spacing and double spacing. She needs to read the book, "The PC is Not a Typewriter."

She seems not to be aware that the state of the art in cookbooks is not to abbreviate teaspoon and tablespoon. She does practice what she preaches and the formatting of the book makes it almost indistinguishable from a book issued by a commercial publisher. The tight leading on the back cover and the amateurish outline font for the title of the book are the only design flaws I noticed.

The final chapter offers 101 ways to promote your cookbook, such as selling it at farmer's markets.

If you are a self-publishing newbie and want to make a cookbook, you can learn a lot from what this self-taught author has written. If you want your cookbook to be commercially published, there are other books that go into far more detail about wording, formatting and testing your recipes.

Great, easy to read book on how to write a cookbook. In the middle of writing a company cookbook, this has become a very handy missive with lots of great contacts and ideas.

If you are interesting in or are writing your own cookbook, this is such a helpful book! It outlines the important items to include in your cookbook as well as how to get the ball rolling with its publication.

Truly a wonderful resource!

This books lays out a lot of information about what a person needs to do to write and publish a cookbook successfully. If you are planning to do that, this is a must read.