The Cookbook is Finished!

It is such a wonderful feeling to have this cookbook in my hands! Two years of work went into this and I think the book is superb, considering I had no experience making a photo book/cookbook/history book. It ended up being over $50 once you pay for taxes and shipping, but I had no control over how the site prices their books. I chose not to add any profit for myself, since I didn't expect to sell many books and I wanted to keep the price as low as I could for family and friends.

As of today, 3 people have bought my book and a few more intend to do so soon. I'm happy just knowing my creation is bringing other people pleasure. Profit would be nice, but not for this book. I'll make oodles of profit from my fiction novels.

Now I can head into National Novel Writing Month without the cookbook distracting me. Just 7 more days until I write 50,000 words in one month!

Adding More to the Cookbook

My mom was a big help with the editing of my cookbook, but now I need to add more pages to it to make it worth the higher price point it fell into. So far I've added seven pages, but I think I can add at least five more, possibly ten more. I guess this is draft number 2, which I will hopefully have finished before September. I need to come up with a few more anecdotes, photograph a few more of the recipe results (if only this heat wave will end so I can use the oven!), and revise the Recipe Index and Table of Contents to accommodate my new pages. I can't wait to have this book published!

I did start editing my novel - I got up to page 77. But then I got the cookbook back and all other projects had to pause while I finish this. I was so into reading my novel that I didn't want to stop to go to bed - that means something good, right?

Memories and Recipes

Working through Blurb dot com, I am creating a book I hope will be passed down through the generations. It could even be a series of books, but I have to finish this one first. I have quite a few photos going back through the 1950s and further, even some as far back as the early 1900s, of my mother’s side of the family. I also have many handwritten recipes from my grandmother and her mother. And then there are those stories that family members have shared over the kitchen table. I am combing all of these into a book tentatively titled, Memories and Recipes.

Over the weekend I finally figured out a layout that will work for just about all of the recipe/story pages. Creating those pages will go much quicker now. The time-consuming part will be in testing the recipes and photographing the results. So far, I have only photographed one outcome. Winter is the best time to get all this cooking done, though. My goal is to have the rough draft completed by April. If I do at least one page a day, that will be no problem.

I’ve been trying to find a book similar to mine that has already been published, but they aren’t set up just like mine. Most focus on much more of the storytelling than mine does, only throwing in a recipe every few pages. None of them combine a family photo, recipe, and story all on one page as I’m doing. Most of the stories I have are just anecdotes, slices of life, not fully fleshed stories, which I think is more indicative of what people know of their families anyway. But my book will be something my daughters can hold in their hands and say, wow, I would have loved to have known my great-grandmother - she seemed feisty, like me.