Julia
3 min readMar 3, 2016

--

Sorry if I sound harsh, but at the moment I don’t see this working at all. However I do see the potential. I’ll try to make clear why and offer constructive criticism. Please note that I’m just judging from the free recipe on Patreon.

  1. What is your target audience? From what I gathered people who can’t cook and are intimidated by recipes that throw around too many technical terms. However the problem is that there are already many text and video blogs that offer help to those people for free in a similar tongue-in-cheek tone as you. There are of course people who fall into yor target group and aren’t as internet-savvy, but you should be aware a) this makes the target group rather small and b) you will need to advertise your cookbook in conventional media to reach them (which is expensive). Also be aware that there are already cook books that attempt to teach cooking to complete beginners, albeit in a more professional tone.
  2. Unfortunately the biggest problem I see with your book is also its selling point: The literary style. But in my opinion that is easily fixable. You want to make cooking accesible by using every day language. That is a good idea. However in your writing, you coflate easy language with something else: word clutter.
    When a person is reading a recipe, they don’t sit down, read it and then cook. They read it once, then put it on the kitchen counter or table to be able to look something up quickly,then cook, look at the cookbook, cook, etc… And noone’s kitchen is organized perfectly, so they’ll probably have to walk to the cookbook look something up and walk back. Sometimes they’ll have forgotten what they wanted to look up once they reach it, sometimes they’ll have forgotten what they just looked up just when they want to continue cooking.
    You see that what is vital for a cookbook in a realistic cooking situation is being able to find information quickly. Every word not needed, every “well”, every “okay”, every information that is nice to know, but unimportant for the actual cooking process (like that you can use fresh onions and garlic), will be distracting and annoying, only makig it harder to find the information the reader actually needs at the moment.
  3. The content itself can be confusing to a beginner. Sometimes you provide too little information. For example you say that the potatoes should be boiled… but an absolute beginner might not know that this includes turning down the heat to avoid overboiling. Research the absolute rookie mistakes that can occur during the recipes you provide and offer counter measures. I also reccomend a “How To” on different kinds of stoves and ovens, so you don’t have to go into the differences between gas/induction/… in every single recipe.
    On other occasion you provide too much information. I already mentioned that explaining that fresh nions and garlic is an option falls into the category “nice to now” and would be better off in a side bar or “fun fact” box than the actual text
    You also give the readers too much choice. From personal experience a sentence like “You can use salt if you really want to” only serves to make an absolute beginner nervous and uncertain about what to do. However this is easily the most subjective of my criticism.

I hope my criticism is understable. The idea has great potential, just the execution needs somerevision in my opinion.

--

--