We're back for our fall season of everything cookbooks, which means things may get a little pumpkin spicy. Welcome to everything cookbooks, the podcast for writers, readers, and cooks. I'm Kate Leahy and today I'm joined with everybody. We've got Andrea, Molly, and Kristen in the house. Hey, everyone. Hey, Kate, episode 101. We're here to stay. So I wanted to open it up with talking about what fall means for cookbooks. Fall means a lot of things for a lot of people, but in the cookbook world, it is the biggest book launch time ever. Is fall bigger than ever? Bigger and earlier. Earlier, yeah. The onslaught started in August, it feels like. Yes. I don't know, you guys. I feel like books are coming out year round. I mean, the only time when there seems to be a brief respite is January. But then it's all about like new year, new you, healthy books, you know? Yeah, I know. So it's nonstop now. I feel like they pop up, you know, there are new releases like mushrooms popping up. It's almost like real estate. I feel like real estate market used to feel like you had these distinctive seasons. And now I've heard agents say, "Oh, nope. You could sell year round now." But does fall still matter? Maybe not all publishers. I'd love if you're a publisher and you're listening to this, please, you know, DMS and tell us your take. But like what I see, I still feel like they sometimes reserve the big books for later in the year. And I'm not sure. Maybe. I mean, that's the old style of way of doing it. Is that still happening? It feels that way. It feels that way. And I mean, we talked to booksellers and they do still say that the holidays, the winter holidays, they move more books than any other time. So, you know, there's a logic to it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Gift-giving season. Right. Cookbooks are often sold as gifts or bought as gifts. Yeah. But then you also, if you're a spring release, you have several months to build up momentum so people remember you in the holiday shopping season. So I don't know. There's like pluses and minuses, I guess. Now, Andrea, you've had books that have been spring release and fall release, right? Yeah. Mostly like my first book back in 2006 into the Vietnamese kitchen was like late August, early September release. But again, you know, I didn't know anything about that. I was just like, hey, you know, time to release a book. But that's still, I guess, like a relatively long runway, you guys, into the holiday season, right? But spring releases have worked for me because honestly, with Asian topics, like people I was looking for things that have to do with Lunar New Year, even though like, I don't write that much about Lunar New Year. But for a long time, it was like, hey, you know, that's a great time. But nowadays, I think that with me being Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, that it's also like a nice time for spring books that have Asian as a topic. But that's not necessarily the case anymore, you guys. Yeah. And I mean, all the, you know, the roundups that newspapers and magazines do or bloggers or newsletter creators, the year round roundups or the fall books would be fresher in your mind, maybe. I don't know. They just feels like it gets more attention in the fall, but it's also, there are more books. Right. And less space in a bookstore to show off your book. I mean, true, you know, if you're coming out in the fall, I remember going back to that Matt Sartwell episode. If you haven't listened to it, do go back and listen to it. I think it's episode 52. You know, he talks about books have a relatively short lifespan of when they're cover out the rest of the time you're looking at a book from its spine. And then sometimes you get a season where you have five pie books that come out all at once. And then as a bookstore owner, people have to grapple with, well, do I carry all five pie books? Do I have to choose? And I have a feeling a pie book would be something you'd want out in fall. So it gets a little tricky. And that's just sometimes bad luck. I mean, if you're planning your book, you know, three, four years ahead, you're not going to know that all these other people are going to come out with the pie book, the same season. Yeah, totally. It's like, I mean, they all see the same trend, right, publishers, and they're like, this is the lasting trend. Let's get our pie book. And then next thing, you know, right, right. I mean, there's no like rhyme or reason. There's good and bad for any time your book comes out. I would say what about for people who it's their first book, or maybe it's their second book, but you know, there's something about a book coming out in the world for the first time. There's a lot of like, say, pre-publication anxiety that can build up. I don't think it's something that I've thought about enough for my own work, like what to do if there's any strategies to kind of like, because you always have all the pressure of like, oh, are you posting enough on social media? Are you talking about your book enough? Are you organizing enough things for your book? And you're getting the pre-orders. Yeah. But like, what about your emotional well-being? Like, do you all have like suggestions of things that say authors out there, if they're in this sort of like, you know, fall cookbook release season things that might help? If people do have the time to just start getting prepped really early with pitching and reaching out to everybody, and somebody gave advice in, I think, episode 100 that was like, clear your day, the day of publication. Paula Forbes, right? Such a smart one. Yeah. I thought that was great. Do you feel like there has to be almost like a little bit of like, like detachment from the results or something? It's like you do your best. Yeah. In the conversation, we said you clear your week, clear your week. But if we're talking about like emotional preparing yourself, in a way nothing happens too. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's not like there's this huge, I mean, it depends who you are, and you know, how big your platform is and how much. But for many of us, it's not always that noisy, you know, it's just pub day. Right. For everybody else in the world, it's just a Tuesday. Yeah. But you know, I think that you can and should celebrate 100 percent. Yes. Okay. Okay. Because you have officially crossed that mark. Yeah. It's huge. You have debuted leading up to that. If you're going to write and release a cookbook, you have an audience. So your audience, those are your people. Right. That's your community. Right. Celebrate with them. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank them. They're your supporters. They're the people who, you know, are doing the pre-ordering because if you don't have a community and audience, you probably didn't get that book sold or, you know, I mean, you know, it's like you need the audience before you can write a book really. I mean, some measure of audience. So I would say, you know, celebrate with that audience. Celebrate with yourself. Give a little cheer. Make a silly video, whatever. Yeah. Pop that cork, whatever works for you. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Because the day does go by, Molly. Yep. You know, and then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, all right. Tuesday's half over. What am I doing now? Do I feel different? Is money raining down on me?" Oh, man. I would feel different if money was raining down on me. If all the reviews were flooding in and they were five-star across the board. But it's also the thing where you, you know, you get a book early. You get one of the initial copies. Maybe you get two, but that's a huge day. And you see that if you follow authors on social media, they're, you know, if they opening up the package from FedEx or whatever, it's the first time they've seen their book, and that's super exciting. But then there's ship date, too, where the books are arriving in stores. But that's before pub date, because the books need to be available on pub date for people to go buy them in stores. So it's a funny, I remember being a little confused. I thought pub date was like suddenly they were just books everywhere. And of course, it's a little more complicated than that because of the logistics of shipping. So there are all these like small milestones as you are not small. They're big steps. But as you get to pub date, but pub date is when the book is officially on sale across the board, but absolutely celebrate every single one of those, enough so that if there's not a lot of noise and there's not a lot of, you know, you're not getting flowers from everyone or have a party. I mean, most people, like Kristen back to what you say, start early, organize a launch party. Yeah, I would say that the one thing to add is also, have your expectations and check. You come out with a book like Molly, you said like nothing might happen. Also, your life isn't probably not going to change. You're gonna still, you know, be living in the same place, probably doing the same thing on a daily basis. It's very rare. Some books, there's a book that comes out every once in a while that does change an author's life. They have a whole new career because that one book was such a breakout. But I would say that a lot of authors who already have that breakout career, they have that before they have this big book. So, it's very rare that that single book will just change your life overnight. And that can be sort of a relief for people, but it also might be a letdown if you're thinking, ah, this is my ticket out of Palucaville. I got a book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. That's it. I'm done. Like, the phone is going to be ringing off the hook. And guess what? It might not be ringing off the hook, and that's okay. I remember a friend reaching out and being like, nobody talks about the now what feeling. Like, you know, it's like, I did it. And maybe there was like two weeks after where it was super exciting. And then you're like, now what? Yeah, it's true that now what moment. So just know that everyone's experiencing those feelings. And you can feel all the feels. Also, just take yourself out if you need it. All right. So fall cookbook season, exciting times, good luck to all those, those people out there coming out with fall books. Now let's go on to a more nuts and bolts question. It's about the option clause. Anyone here want to tell our listeners what an option clause is in a book contract? I think we started talking about this after that conversation with Charlotte Druckman who said, don't sign the two book deal. And we had a long conversation about that back at episode 100, our last episode. But it made me think about the options clause. And it's something we don't, I don't know that we've actually talked about it. So I went and pulled up a couple of my old contracts. And in my contract, it's under future works. And it's a line where the publisher says, agrees to give the publish an option to publish his or her next book. When you sign your contract, you have then saying that your publisher has the option to look at your book first before anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. So well, I think it's something to be aware of if you don't have a great experience with your publisher and you're trying to write a second book and you think you could just go sell it to anybody, you have signed a contract that says your first publisher has a chance to look at that material. You can turn down the offer they make though. Well, they have the option for the first look and they have the option for the first writer refusal. You have the option to say, you know, I'm not ready to say yes, I'm going to shop this a little bit more and come back to you. So you have the option to say, maybe you have the option to say, yes, you have the option to say, no, right. And it's just something that I think it's worth mentioning that it's in most contracts. So you don't, I mean, obviously your agent will know this hopefully. But the other thing that I thought was interesting is when the contract initially came from my publisher, it said that the publisher has the right to look at my next book. We cross that out and said, my next cookbook. Because what if I decided to write up something else? Exactly. And then they also, they said they had 60 days to make an offer. We changed that to 30 days. And just sort of pointing out that you, you know, negotiate on these things. Oh, the other thing that the contract said is that you had to show them the full manuscript. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no, cross that out and said proposal and outline. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why when you get that first draft of a contract, it's not final at that point. Looking at that option clause, like, Molly, those are great suggestions of like, how do we shrink the expectations or the burdens that an author would have to fulfill all these kinds of things that make it just a little friendlier for the author? Yeah, friendlier and fair. Fair. That's a better word. When you're reading a contract, and most authors have to say this, but you know, they're not going to read the contract. But you're a contract there to protect both sides of the negotiations or all sides of the negotiations. As someone who's doing legal stuff, you're always like doing what ifs. So you want to do a few what ifs if that's your thing or ask your agent about it and give yourself some wiggle rooms so that you have a comfort level for your next project. And this is all assuming that you're going to have future plans for a next project. And you may or may not want to stay with this particular publisher. But you know, there's power in that option clause is not there to lock you in. Right. Just on a little aside on the option clause note, this is more about a non-compete clause, especially if you're a cookbook collaborator. All of us at some point have dabbled in collaboration. Sometimes a little, you know, non-compete clause gets snuck into the collaborator agreement. And I had one early on in my career that said that I was not permitted to write another California based restaurant cookbook or another Italian cookbook for like my entire career. Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. Wow. Whoa. That was the non-compete clause. I wasn't working with an agent. I had an uncle look at the contract and he was basically like, this, no, this is terrible. Why did I even try? So that's the thing, you know, even if I get people, I mean, these are nice people, whatnot, you know, but they're in the lawyers are going through their rigmarole. So be smart. Read your contract. I did not sign that, by the way. Yeah. And I mean, I've looked back at contracts that have gone to, you know, the agent has made their suggestions. Like the publisher said that I'll get 10 free copies of my cookbook. And they're like, no, you're going to get, you know, 25 or whatever it is. And I've seen the back and forth that sometimes, you know, we asked for 50 free copies and the publishers. No, no, no, that's too many. You can have 25, you know, so there is some back and forth and there's some things that are, nope, we're not going to do that. We're not going to move on that. But yeah, we'll move on this. So we had a really great listener question come in while we were on our break. And it's from Monique from hardcover cook. And essentially her question is, you know, what happens when there's printed errors in cookbooks? You want to know, are we seeing more printed errors than ever? And when it does happen, and you're reading a cookbook, you know, if you're a reader of a cookbook and you notice them, what should you do? And if you're a writer of the book, what should you do? If you're the writer of the book and you see it in front, you do a silent scream motion and maybe shriek. There's a book. Oh my gosh. I get so upset thinking about it. A book I collaborated on as a project manager, reading through a first recipe. And it talks about something being gluten free. And I'm like, these are not gluten free. And I was very careful about all of this. What the heck happened? Because I'm like, did I do this? You know, did I introduce this error? Or did I miss this error? And I reached out to the editor. And it was inserted like after I had seen everything. But I wasn't the last set of eyes. You know, my name's not on it. I'm not the author. But I just remember feeling like, I don't even want to promote this as something I worked on, because it's such a egregious error. And so how does it happen? Oh, man. Yeah. Like that. Let's talk about it. I mean, that's just so upsetting, like something being inserted rather than just missed. I remember thinking when I was younger, like, Oh, there must be this like automated thing that will catch all the errors. And it's a very human process. Yes. But then, Kristen, don't you wonder about the little elf who went into the InDesign and typed in those words? Yeah. Someone who was quite devilish. I don't even think it was that. I think they wanted it to be. And the main flower in it was gluten free, but there actually still was some all-purpose in it. And I think they just missed it, just a mistake. But I think that they wanted it to be gluten free. Well, and there's so many different levels of mistakes. I mean, there's, you know, I've had a recipe in a published cookbook that did not have an oven temperature. I mean, there was just no oven temperature. My gosh. Obviously, there was an oven temperature at some point in that recipe, and somehow in design, it fell off. Other mistakes, the oven temperature is wrong. I've seen mistakes where like I had one where just the typeface got weird halfway through a head note. So that's a kind of mistake that is upsetting because it's ugly on the page, but it doesn't change the content. So I'm sort of like, okay, but at least they can still follow the recipe. So when there are egregious errors, I've seen authors post them on their websites and in social media alerting their audience to it. On one occasion with a particular cookbook, there were a number of them that the publisher then inserted a piece of paper almost like a mark kind of situation and said, we're sorry, but here are the errors. I've seen that done. I'm not sure I feel about that though, because I don't know. I respect going to that book page and having a corrections page. I think that's really smart. I have one for Wine Style because there's one recipe where the metric and the volume measurements do not match and the metric is wrong and it drives me nuts and it's, you know, but I have it, you know, if you go, if you have that book and you look at the errata page, it's there. You know, you can you can cite, okay, she really meant the volume, not the metric in that situation. And in that case, I also then emailed my editor at 10 speed press so that when they reprint the book, they already have that mistake flagged so they can update it. Those kinds of errors are just so annoying. But I think like, I've seen it where a publisher will come out with like that bookmark of all those corrections. And as a consumer, as someone buying the book, it kind of makes you lose faith in the entire book, having like this whole long list. I'd rather have, I don't know, there's something I have like mixed feelings about it because it depends, I guess. It's a bookmark full of flaws. Yeah. And then you lose that bookmark and then you're like, I know all half these recipes probably don't even work. It might make it harder to just trust the book. But on the flip side, would you rather have a book that is flawed, you know, then then it's true. You know, in someone's kitchen, rather than just to own up to it, no, apologize. And then tell the reader, you know, just like go in there and write in your book. Write it. Yeah. So that you know, true. You know, thank you very much. We are so incredibly sorry. That is true. Do you think, I mean, Monique asks us in a question, do you think there are more errors, more mistakes now? I wonder about that, Molly. Sometimes I open up a book and oddly, like it just opens up to something I start reading and I'm like, that's not right. That's just wrong. That's a really hard thing to quantify whether there's more than ever. It's like, I guess there's things we know for sure, which is like a lot of editors are overstretched and underpaid. Copy editors underpaid. So there's a chance that there's more than ever, you know, with those two factors. I mean, I do think a lot of people put a lot of care into the work. So yeah, it's just hard. It's such a human process. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it could also be all right in the manuscript. And as you talked about, as it gets flowed into the design and things are maybe like trimmed for fit, something can happen and it's not caught. Once it's flowed into design and people look at it in their various passes, there are the proofreaders who are supposed to go back through and check that everything was entered properly. But oftentimes, the proofreaders are very junior people in publishing. So it depends on how busy they are, how sharp they are, you know. Yep. Yep. Yep. And also, there are so many expectations from readers and cooks nowadays. And I thought of this Kate with your remark about metric and volume. It's like, if we just had to provide things in metric and people would go down to the gram, I would be so happy. It would be so great for real leaders. May be less mistakes. Yeah. But if we do metric, then we have to do Imperial too or measurement somehow. So I feel like for cookbooks, there is so much expectations are so high to make things work for so many people in so many different situations and all these moving parts. You take one ingredient line. No recipe only has one ingredient line. If it did, you don't really need a recipe that much. I mean, you know. True. So I think that we need to understand, you know, like, from the reader's perspective, from an author and from a publisher's perspective, all of those things that go on to the page, that's very complicated. And maybe we also just need to kind of slow down. Yeah. We talked about how many books get published, but maybe, you know, not having so many of them so that we can really make good ones. But I know I'm like asking too much. I think what you're articulating much better, what's been in on my mind. And I think what we're faced with right now is, you know, we've lost a lot of, you know, people retire who have this like legacy experience and they're not necessarily getting replaced with people who also have been trained up into how to edit recipes. You also have a lot of recipes that for the first time are being put on the page in English. Right there, it just brings a level of complexity to recipes. And on top of that, then trying to explain like these ingredients, these quantities, how to do this, you know, it's not bolognese. I'm sorry, it's pretty easy to write a bolognese recipe. There's a million of them, you know, SEO crazy on the internet. But when you're trying to do something a little bit more sort of book worthy, I'm not that, of course, bolognese recipes in a book are lovely to not throw in shade that way. But you know what I mean? Like, there's like 50 years of tradition of writing good bolognese recipes and prints. And right now, we're trying a lot of new things with new ingredients. A lot of people have never cooked with before. But I will also say that I do think that the publication time authors have is shorter. I think the best way authors can avoid errors is to turn in a manuscript that is pretty damn tight before it even starts to go to that developmental editor. It's just that that's not always how it works. Yeah, it's funny. I was just thinking again about like, are there more errors than before? And there are a lot of older cookbooks that have recipes that by today's standards don't work, right? Because it's too big or the quantities are really off. And maybe they didn't put that much care into it. Because it's like, ah, people have this knowledge, like, ah, they'll figure it out. Yeah, I think today, maybe we have higher standards for recipes than we have before, but then just so much more quantity as we've all been saying. Like when we did our recipe title episode way back, and there were some fun recipe titles, but I don't think I'd try to make any of those recipes. And I sort of finish loading's question, what to do as a reader? If you find a mistake, you could certainly send a kind email, not scolding, but say, I love your book. I did find this one thing didn't know, you know, chances are the authors already found it, but maybe not. And then we have, we've talked about this before, as an author, if it is a mistake, email your editor, and hopefully you'll get a second edition, and they can correct it. On that note, since we've been talking about recipes, let's get into a little bit more about recipe developments. Kristen, anyone who hasn't subscribed to Kristen's newsletter, it's a great read, and we mine it shamelessly for content for our podcast. So thank you, Kristen. Thanks, Kristen. Happy Sunday morning, and you're in box. Sunday morning, and you're in box. And a few weeks ago, you put in a couple of pieces that were up on sub stack that talked about recipe writing and development. So just, I want to hear from you, like, what stood out, like, when you saw these. I mean, I like reading about recipe development and nerding out on it, and there were two very specific pieces that did that, but in different ways, and they were just different takes I hadn't heard before. So one was from Martin Sorge, friend of the podcast. He wrote a piece called The Science and Art of Recipe Development as part of his cookbook chronicle series. He's writing a cookbook about baking, but he focused on developing for baking, and it's just I've done recipe development for baking. I know we all have, but I've never done a full baking book. It was just a cool glimpse into it, and when I was reading it, I was like, oh, right, you cannot adjust as you go in the same way that you can with cooking. And most of the time you have to wait until something's cool. So your time to develop something, test it, and then potentially retest. It's just a long time. So I just found it to be fascinating and a good read. Was there anything in particular you liked from that one? The way he broke it down, like, I think it was started with vision, hypothesizing the recipe, which I think is a great term, yeah. And it's before he even starts to work on the recipe, maybe that was the vision part. They were two separate, like he really divided it up, but I thought that was really interesting. And I love that you mentioned the baking times, because something that he articulated that I've often thought, like, I'm working on, say, it's a, maybe it's a cake, but maybe it's a casserole, or maybe it's a roast chicken. I could roast it at 350, and it would take this long. I can roast at 375, it would take this long. I could roast it at four. And yes, if I go from 350 to 475, there'll be dramatic difference. But I'm just going 15 degrees. And again, it's always 25 degrees, which is like it's 325, 350. Yeah, 335, which I sometimes wanted to just like do, just 365 everybody. But then someone's gonna say, oh, she's made a mistake. Exactly, you know, the coffee at the rural flag, God, don't you mean 350? But it's funny, because it's one of the things that it doesn't matter is what I really want to say. Both are fine. And that will get us into our next essay we're talking about. Oh my gosh, this was so, this was great. So Joy Manning is a writer in Philadelphia, cookbook author. She's an old friend of mine too, but she wrote a piece called If Desired. And it was just about that term in, you know, recipe writing. We use it all the time, if desired, if desired. And a lot of times it's actually stylistically required. If you put in an ingredient as optional in the method, you're supposed to add, you know, add the parsley if desired. But she just turned it into this really great sort of like treatise about tapping into her own desire and, you know, whether or not she is in touch with those things. And when she does get in touch with them, her like inner monologue, and it was just such a fun, well written piece that also made me think again about some of these like things we write in recipes that it can be a little bit flippant. Right. I mean, the way that you quote it in your newsletter that was in her newsletter to get meta for a second, Joy writes, Hey, a minute ago, you told me it was optional. Now you seem to be asking me if I want it. Of course I want it. How dare you make me feel this cheese desire I have been trying to squash for seven years is optional. She was talking about this parmesan, like there was a recipe like add parmesan if desired and all of a sudden she's vegan. So she's like, wait, you know, maybe I do desire that, but I didn't know I desired that until you put that word in there. So we'll link to both pieces in our show notes. You can take a look, but they're just really smart and completely different ways to look at. She also acknowledges why ingredients become optional. Sometimes like the food stylist takes liberty. So maybe it wasn't in your original recipe, and then you have to add it into the, you know, that's where it becomes optional. Or maybe like as she says, you know, it's there, but it's not crucial. So you don't want somebody to not make the recipe because they don't have the ingredient, but she's like, isn't there a better way to say that whenever I use optional, there's like this weight, right? It's like, is that really necessary? Because I always feel like, oh my God, trying to make my recipes accessible or this recipe accessible, because I really want people to make it. So I'm like, pairing it down to the essential ingredients. And in a current Thai cookbook collaboration that I'm doing, there's like so many ingredients involved. And we get down to the bottom and I'm like, I asked him, the chef, I'm working with him, like, do we really need that? And she's like, no, but you know, it'd be great. So then I started saying optional, but ideal. Oh, I like that. It's mine. Don't, you know, you all can borrow it. Have you had the editor seen that and? No, I haven't, but I figure that fight for it. I'm going to fight for it because I've seen things like optional, but highly encouraged. Yeah. And so I'm like optional, but ideal, fewer letters. Yeah. On that ingredient line, fewer characters too. And then in the method, are you going to, if you're able to get to the market, if using is the one that I often use, so then it's not saying if desired. I actually started cutting all that out y'all. I was just like, let's say, you know, it's parsley, you know, for garnish or optional comma for garnish in parentheses. And as you get down to the end, you're like, garnish with parsley. And if they don't have it, they're not going to do it. When I was at Food and Wine, I think that that was our style actually, even if an ingredient was optional, we didn't address it in the method. It was kind of like, all of a sudden when you're reading and proofreading, you're like, God damn it, so many of like, if desired or if using. I have been cooking side by side with people who are following it word for word, and they've done their organization, their mise en place, whatever, they've got everything ready. And they're following along. And it says, now add the parmesan. And they're like, well, I don't have any parmesan, and then they, you know, to go back to the ingredient list, it says optional there. So I'm not in favor of one way or the other, but I do understand why people put the if using if desired in in the method. So you don't have this moment of like, Oh, shit, I forgot that. Ah, interesting. I'm just going back to the word desired. Do you think that the word desired came about because people were using optional and they just wanted another word to use? They're like, Oh, maybe they used optional earlier in the recipe. Now they're going to use if desired. Is that I think I see if using more than if desired, but for Joy's essay, which becomes an existential, you know, which is wonderful. The desire the word desire really works for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's much more lyrical, right? Yeah, if using is a good way to not spur a crisis, I guess. I love these two essays together because I think it was something that Martin said is hit in early in his recipe development process. He asks himself if he's adding something new to this world that's already has too many recipes. And then back to that idea that recipes often end up with too many ingredients because we're trying so hard to add something new. We wanted to be like really special. And so it's a salad and maybe the dressing is just lemon and oil and salt and pepper. And you're like, well, that's not special enough. So I'm going to add, you know, a splash of this or a handful of that. And then you're like, Oh, but now it's become precious. And as people might not have that, I still want them to make the dressing. So these are the like, our torture. I'm starting to have an existential crisis on whether I'll ever write a recipe again. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. But sometimes like the specialness or the uniqueness and what your contribution may be is a method. Yeah. Absolutely. Totally. True. Oh, yeah. And I feel like the genius recipes are the ones that are the simplest. Yeah. The fewest, you know, number of ingredients, but done in some particular manner that get a sense of like a certain enlightenment in the kitchen. You're like, Oh, my God. Yeah. And also, you know, we're talking cookbooks too, not just recipes. So there are places in cookbooks for some, you know, something that's just dead simple, maybe to balance out what else is going on in the cookbook. I mean, there is that curation aspect of cookbooks. So, you know, back to bolognese. But yeah, there are some books that will just need a bolognese. Exactly. Maybe it's an eggplant bolognese. Cacio Pepe. Yeah. Of course. So many Cacio Pepe recipes. I did hear this. This wasn't about cookbooks per se, but it was about books in general. And it was the notion that like not every single page of a book has to be like fireworks and so memorable that people are getting out their highlighter and highlighting every single word on the page. But if you have like a handful of those moments in your book, it's pretty special. All the parts of the book are important, but not every single. The book has to work as a whole too. So I think that's something, you know, sometimes you might just need that simple vinaigrette in a side note, just so people can take that book and cook from it and not have to like scramble to go online to see the ratio of a lemon, you know, vinaigrette or something like it belongs in your book. It doesn't have to be a highlighted recipe, but it's just part of the package. The beauty of a book is that it's not on the internet. It's a bound journey of recipes and stories. That is unique. And you're providing the cook with that experience. If you were googling vinaigrette online, yeah, you're going to get a lot of hits. But if you're in one cookbook and that's the vinaigrette recipe from that particular author, and it fits into the art of that recipe collection, it's beautiful. This is actually a good moment to pivot. We've gone deep into the weeds on a lot of subjects. And now that we're coming out of sort of going from launch to nitty gritty of recipe development and writing, I'm going to pivot and say what happens before you have the book deal. We're going to get back into one of our favorite or infamous topics on this podcast, which is platform. So we're going to wrap things up just talking about the truth about platform. Kristen also our newsletter, Maven sent us a post from a friend of the podcast, Kathleen Schmidt, who's been on our podcast. She shared an excerpt from a new book on nonfiction publishing. And it is called Hungry Authors, the indispensable guide to planning, writing, and publishing a nonfiction book. It's by Ariel Curry and Liz Morrow. So they're nonfiction experts. This is not specific to cookbooks. This is just nonfiction in general. The post was really interesting about how they frame the idea of platform, just, you know, throwing it out to the group. What sorts of things in this post affect potential cookbook authors? One of the things I really liked about this piece was that she took like the New York Times bestseller list. This was not for cookbooks, but still and went through and came up with all these examples of authors who had small social media followings. Tiny, tiny, like under 10,000. Yeah, some of them were under 5,000. A lot of the cookbooks that hit the New York Times bestseller list are coming from authors who do have large platforms. So it's not necessarily a great comparison. Like, I'm always telling people, like, look for the examples that are not within the norm or what people tell you because there are books from authors who don't necessarily have a large platform, but they hit on an idea and the zeitgeist and that book sells really well. That's what I liked about the piece. I loved how methodical it was. And I was like, oh, I feel like I want to do this for cookbooks. And there's books that like sell really well right up front. But then there's those like books that sell for years and years and there's got to be something interesting to mine there. Yeah, I mean, I think that the idea to begin with needs to be solid. And what I liked about the piece is that they ran through the numbers and you're like, oh my God, they don't have at least whatever 50,000 followers on Instagram and 5,000,000 on TikTok. You know, it's like not every author has those sorts of numbers, but an author that's published has a good idea, something that sells that's marketable. And yes, nonfiction is different. Cookbooks are nonfiction, right? But you know, we're not applying those the same ideas. But nevertheless, I think that it gives us hope for having, you know, more cookbook authors in the space that aren't necessarily going to be the people with huge followings because there aren't that many of them. I mean, it feels like there's more and more. But then I do feel like the depth of expertise sometimes is missing from some people who have very large followings. What I thought was so helpful or interesting about this article was the different definitions of platform because, you know, we say platform and immediately, I mean, I know I immediately think of social media followers or something. But the article, the authors went deep on like the various things that you may have, whether it's email mailing list, whether it's audiences who attend your lectures. And Andrea, you use the word expertise and in nonfiction, if you're writing, assuming you're writing from a place of expertise, you have an expertise in a field and you are writing a book about that. That is your platform. Are you a teacher? Are you a lecturer? Are you an author? You know, where have you been sharing this expertise to dig into that? I thought that was a really helpful thing. And there was also a part of the article where they talked about where to look for ideas that I thought was very interesting. And I'll have to go back and read it to remember that. But I'm just recommending the article. It had some helpful tips on that as well. And if you plan to write a memoir, it also had thoughts on that. In looking at these numbers, they found that actually, yes, they're celebrity memoirs, but best-selling memoirs outside of the celebrity realm, some of them had really small followings. So I think that this article kind of breaks it down. It did say that when you're doing sort of more of prescriptive nonfiction, like a cookbook, would I be considered, a platform is more important to sell your book. But it also talked about, you know, there was different expectations, depending if it's a big five publisher. The final note on this that we can take away is that there is no magic number. We still do not have a magic number. If you hit that hundred thousand mark on Instagram, that does not a magic number. It does not say someone's going to call your phone and say, you know what, we're going to give you a book deal. Might happen. Not guaranteed. So that's that. Also back to episode two, it said, "Just what Rico Alanik said. In addition to platform, you need idea and you need voice." In this article, they call it writing ability, but you need all three. Yeah. So I always think about platform as access to an audience, because I feel like that's where it's like social media is an access to an audience, but then if there's an existing audience around a certain topic foraging, for example. The Edgar Alan Poe. Oh, God. Yes. That was brilliant. How many Facebook followers does that crown poem? That was the example that this person gave, where this person decided to focus their book called Poe for your problems and common advice from history's least likely self-help guru, because Edgar Alan Poe has such a huge social media following like enthusiasm anyway for the work. She was able to access that audience. Genius. Brilliant. So there's some ideas within the piece. There might be a paywall on Kathleen's newsletter, but if you're super interested in publishing, I think it's worth paying for. Pay Kathleen a little bit. Yes. Or get the book and go even deeper into nonfiction publishing. Yeah, we'll put the book up in our book shop. So an Edgar Alan Poe cookbook, guys. Oh my gosh. I could see it. You're going to have to kill some birds and put them in a pie, I think. Do you think it exists already? No, I don't know. Let's check it out. Yeah, I know. We're onto something. So one thing in that post and things you might not consider a platform that are part of a platform are your email, newsletter list, your website, viewership, any users to your website, any organizations you're a part of that serve your audience, other influential people you are connected to. So Edgar Alan Poe, you know, they don't have to be alive, apparently. Speaking engagements and consulting businesses, articles you've written for both large and small publications online, all of that is part of that platform game. And it really doesn't matter what you're writing. All this is important. A publisher wants to see somebody who can sell books. And this all shows that you have access to people who potentially will buy your book. All right, so we're wrapping things up. I'm going to ask about pumpkin spice, your name, but first I wanted to see if there's any cookbook trends you're currently loving or wish would just go away. I think we're seeing more anniversary editions re-released. I guess I'm kind of loving that. You know, I'm all for the backless. I love these books that have been around and continue to sell and that they're getting attention from both the publisher and from new audiences and this notion that a book that came out 10, 15, even 20 years ago might find a new audience and that it tells me that people are just coming into adulthood now are maybe learning to cook and getting excited. But from a book that might have been written a long time ago, that's a great trend. I'm really enjoying checking out like these new cookbooks for young cooks. I don't have a cat. I'm not a childless cat lady, but I do, you know, love those books because they are culturally diverse. They tell interesting stories and they're the kind of books that I wish when I was young, I had them because they speak to me and my interests. And I think that it bodes so well for people in our society in the future. If more people know what to cook and cook a diversity of different kinds of flavors with global flavors. So that's very exciting. And also, I love all the illustrations in those books too. They're really fun. I mean, it's like bookmaking, you know, that's like so not driven by the need to style everything perfectly. And it's more imaginative to me. So it's very exciting. I love it. I'm really liking that I'm seeing cookbooks that don't hide the fact that cooking is a lot of work and you have to do dishes. Be Wilson, she nails that in the secret of cooking. And so does Amy Thelen in her book that came out last year and we have interviews with both of those authors. And I mean, Amy has a whole essay on doing the dishes and on how expensive things are and how you really do need all the equipment. So I just kind of love that realistic look, you know, pulling back the curtain of perfectionism and and showing us how things really are in the kitchen. A book I'm really looking forward to this fall is Banchan by Caroline Cho. It's coming out from Chronicle, subtitles 60 Korean American recipes for delicious, shareable sides. I just really like Caroline's work. It talked about smaller platform from an Instagram point of view. She is somebody with a smaller platform but who came with a really good single subject idea. I know it took her a while to find the publisher but it's a great little book and my family loves Korean food. So I'm very much looking forward to digging into it. I'll have to get a copy for sure. Same here. I'm really excited about the Chinese way. Betty the new book. She's coming on the podcast later this fall. But Andrea, you mentioned illustrations and she combines illustrations with photos that she's taken but it's this really cool. It should give you a traditional recipe, three traditional recipes using one method and then more contemporary recipes using the same method. So it's this it like teaches but also gives you recipes that are very approachable and it's like drop dead simple but then you're like, why does this taste so good? Just things that real keepers. I'm very excited about that. Oh, that sounds cool. I know. We got a lot of good eating to do this fall, I think. But on the subject of eating, who here likes pumpkin spice? Do you hate it? Do you just like you see like Starbucks rolling out their signs in August and you're like, no, it's too soon. To be honest, that's not my kind of food. I've never had one. Me neither. Me neither. I feel like my mouth just starts to automatically feel coated and sugar or something one night. I mean, I don't mind a pumpkin pie. Right. I hope it has a pervert spices in it. That's pumpkin spice, right? Yeah. Yeah. But there's something cloying, Kristen, just like what you said about this. I don't see pumpkin spice. I don't either. I hope we don't get haters for this because, well, actually, I'm curious if anyone loves pumpkin spice. Let us know when I see pumpkin spice things. I just know that it's, oh, we're going to start seeing Halloween decorations soon or advertised. I saw Halloween in August. I saw Halloween. God. Yeah. That's where we're at. I will say, if anyone here has ever seen the Bojan Gourmet's website, she is a gluten-free blogger based in the Bay Area. She actually has a really lovely pumpkin spice mix. We'll link to the recipe, but this is, I'll just quote her and we'll end up episode on this. She likes a more ginger forward pumpkin pie spice, which keeps desserts tasting bright and peppy and she adds turmeric to accentuate the golden hue of the baked good and add a little extra depth. She's a beautiful photographer, so you look at that and you think, oh, I get that kind of dabble like that. A little pumpkin spice. It just will sprinkle on something. A little turmeric in a pumpkin pie might be nice, too. I think so. Bring up the color. Yeah. Yeah. A little black pepper in it, too, just to give it that one. Yeah. That sounds like a masala blend. Yeah. Yeah. Please do not send us your free pumpkin spice latte making kits. We're probably not the market for you, but thanks for listening as we wrap up episode 101, basically a grab bag of topics we've wanted to talk to you all about for a while. So thanks, everyone. Thanks for hosting. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for listening to Everything Cookbooks. For more episodes and ways to contact us, go to our website, everythingcookbooks.com. This show is available wherever you get your audio. If you haven't yet, leave us a review. We want to hit 100 reviews before the end of the year. Any book mentioned on the show can be found on our affiliate page at bookshop.org. Thanks, as always, to our editor, Abby Serk-Watella. And until next time, keep on writing, reading, and cooking.
We're back and starting off Season 6 with grab bag of topics with all our hosts. Kristin, Molly, Kate and Andrea discuss the pros and cons of the (potentially overfull) Fall cookbook season and how to emotionally prepare but keep expectations realistic on pub day while prioritizing celebration. We share our insights and experiences on contracts, printed errors, correction pages and wade into some existential territory as we discuss optional ingredients in recipe writing before diving back into one of our favorite topics, platform. Finally, we talk about the the current cookbook trends we're loving, upcoming releases we're looking forward to and court some potential controversy with our thoughts on pumpkin spice.
