There’s No Yellow Brick Road to Cookbook Land
A food blogger’s journey to publication
I recently had my first cookbook published—an honest-to- goodness, richly photographed hardcover book by a respected publishing house.
It did not come easy.
I'd heard the stories of bloggers who had publishers beating down their doors to offer them book contracts, tales of tense bidding wars at the auction block. This was not even remotely the case for me.
Rather, it took years of spamming the entire publishing industry with my half-baked ideas before anyone took notice. Even then, the reactions ranged from ambivalence to mild disgust. Persistence is part of a writer's job, it's true, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that what you're peddling isn't what anyone wants—to know when to cut your losses and start again. From scratch.
For non-fiction writers, the process of selling a book idea requires writing a proposal. A book proposal is like a business plan for your book. You write a snappy one-page cover letter to hook potential publishers, summarizing your background and teasing them into flipping to the actual proposal. Then, in 10 to 15 pages, you explain the book's concept in greater detail, provide an outline of how it will be organized, and describe who your target audience is and how you plan to get them to buy your book. Perhaps most importantly, you need to persuade prospective publishers that you're the very best person—nay, the only person—to write this book. Then you provide some sample material for review, whether it's several completed chapters of the memoir you’re writing or a dozen finished recipes for a cookbook. This is quite unlike a fiction book proposal where you submit the entire completed manuscript for review. Still, it's a major undertaking.
It took me three months to write my first book proposal. The idea was to write an American immigrant cookbook based on the recipes and stories passed down through my family for generations. While I was able to formulate the proposal well enough, I found myself struggling to write cohesive sample chapters. Most of my best sources were relatives long dead, and it slowly dawned on me that the project would require a lot more genealogical research and in-depth interviews than I was really prepared to do. If I couldn't even finish the first chapter, how would I write a whole book? This is why writing a proposal is a beneficial exercise. Just because something seems like a good idea doesn't mean it's the right idea. I put the recipes and stories up on my blog instead, where anyone can access them through the wonders of the internet.
Several years passed before I wrote my next book proposal: a collection of humorous essays about my struggle with breast cancer. It wasn't exactly my first choice for a topic, but they say write what you know and that was all I knew for a long time. Needless to say, I didn’t win anyone over with the material no matter how darkly comic I thought it was. It just made everyone uncomfortable. Well, not everyone. Not the person who responded that the market was saturated with breast cancer memoirs and that I should resubmit when I got a more obscure, deadlier disease. Sure thing, I replied. Fingers crossed! (If you think rejection is hard when you're feeling healthy, try rejection when you think you'll be dead in a year.)
It took many months to realize my book was going nowhere and that I was just looking for a way to combine writing with therapy. I didn't need an audience for that. I also didn't need to be mired in the past when what I really needed to do was get on with my life. That idea, too, was shelved.
Luckily, I had just come up with a great new idea for my third book proposal: a humorous puzzle book with a social media twist. Within a month, I managed to get a big-name publisher interested. The only caveat was that the social media company in question needed to endorse the book in order for the deal to proceed. Despite weeks of wrangling with the legal department of said company, it became clear that no endorsement would be forthcoming. The deal eventually died a quiet death. The other bad news was that my husband had just been laid off and things weren't going so well in the financial department. The good news, however, was that I was getting pretty good at writing book proposals. I was also getting mad. And anger gives you remarkable focus.
My fourth book proposal saw me returning to cookbooks. I'm a food writer after all. My idea: a cookbook based on simple meals and desserts organized by the seasons. This was exactly what I'd been writing about on my blog for the past five years. It made sense, it was close to my heart, and some of the work was already done. Meanwhile, a friend of mine confided that the local publisher she worked for was actively looking for a dessert cookbook author. She urged me to drop everything and write a dessert cookbook proposal right now. She would deliver it to the head honcho herself.
You don't get that kind of access everyday, so I immediately pulled the dessert section out of the cookbook proposal I was working on and made it stand alone. I submitted it and then waited, breathless, for the call to come. And it did come…a rejection!
What?? I thought selling someone something they already wanted would be easier, especially with an inside connection. I was not correct.
Nevertheless, I fell madly in love with my own book proposal. Unlike all of my other ideas, this dessert cookbook became the only thing I wanted to write about. So I decided to try to get a literary agent on my side to help me shop it around to some larger publishers. Going straight to a publisher may seem more direct, but getting an agent allows you to be more strategic in your queries. The agents already know which publishers are looking for certain subjects and themes. They know the biases and predilections of the editors. Plus, more publishers will actually read a proposal when they know a respected agent has done the screening for them.
The problem is this: finding an agent is just as hard as finding a publisher. I tried once before and was unsuccessful. But this time, my ideas were better. I decided to try again.
As it happened, another friend who was looking for representation passed on some agents’ names to me. I started my queries there. To my surprise, one of these agents responded right away. Together we tweaked my idea and polished the proposal to a glossy shine. Within a matter of months, I had a contract with Running Press to write a cookbook on winter desserts.
See? Easy as pie! It only took 10 years, five book proposals, and the threat of looming death to drive me. Was it painful? Of course. Was it worth it? Absolutely!
Tammy Donroe Inman is a Boston-area blogger and author of the book WINTERSWEET: Seasonal Desserts to Warm the Home. Her kitchen is a disaster.
