ATLANTA, Ga. – The Southern Review of Books, a free online newsletter covering the book business, has some helpful advice in its May Issue for home chefs interested in publishing their recipes as cookbooks.
According to the editors, to publish a successful cookbook, start with a unique selling point or “angle.”
For Atlanta’s Joe Dabney, whose Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine was a James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award winner (paperback, Cumberland House), the angle was the unique recipes of the Southern Appalachians and background on the mountaineers who favored the recipes. His cookbook is laced with Appalachian folklore and history – the sort of lore that made the Foxfire books best sellers.
The unique selling point for What's New in Wedding Food, with Recipes You Won't Find Anywhere Else by bride Marigold P. Sparks and mother of the bride Beth Tartan (paperback, Tarpar) is recipes for food the bride and mother of the bride can prepare to cut down the expense of wedding catering. The author of this popular guide was for many years the food section editor of the Winston-Salem, N.C., Journal and Sentinel whose columns on food and gracious entertaining were collected worldwide.
For Eva McCall and Emma Edsall in Lucy's Recipes for Mountain Living (paperback, Bright Mountain Books) the unique angle is that the authors have collected the favorite recipes of their grandmother, who kept a large family fed in the rural South before the days of electric refrigeration.
Now, if you’ve heeded the advice to find a unique theme for your cookbook, where do you go next?
It is difficult to impossible for home cooks to score cookbook publishing deals.
If all you want are nice-looking bound volumes that you can give (or sell) to friends and family, you might get in touch with one of the subsidy presses.
There are a bevy of books out there that will tell you how to go about self-publishing a book on your own. Most of them unrealistically promise a lot.
A company called The Cook's Palate specializes in self-published cookbooks. A Google search will turn up hundreds of generic subsidy publishers eager for business.
These firms will provide editorial, production and marketing guidance, but despite their assurances to the contrary, it is very difficult for subsidy-published or self-published books to cross over into the world of mainstream books – and subsidy-publishing, especially if you buy into the bells and whistles offered, can be costly.
If you want to enter the hypercompetitive fray of commercial book publishing, start spending a lot of time in bookstores looking at what's already published. Make a note of the publishers whose work you particularly like and look in the acknowledgments sections of those books to discover the names of the editors and agents involved.
