Cookbook Ingredients

What goes into writing and publishing your cookbook? There are so many ways to create a cookbook; your choices are practically unlimited. Here's an essential ingredient list for writing and publishing a cookbook.

• 1 cookbook idea
• 200 or more kitchen-tested recipes
• Sprinkling of title ideas
• Dash of vision
• Plenty of creativity
• 6 months - 1 year of time
• Lots of publishing know-how

Combine your cookbook idea with an original theme and story line. Add delicious, home-tested recipes, stirred into a desktop publishing format. Sprinkle title ideas liberally through your mind. Mix in with a do-able dash of vision and clarity, and lots of optimistic expectations tempered with realistic goals. Simmer with plenty of creativity. Let cook for as much time as it takes. Add lots of publishing know-how to the mix.

Yield: One cookbook

These are just the basic ingredients; there's so much more to put into the mix depending on the kind of cookbook you're writing, what you want to achieve with it, and the decisions you make about how to publish and market it. I wrote my first cookbook, Really Good Recipes, ten years ago because I love to cook, wanted to share my recipes, and thought it would be an easy and fun thing to do. Creating a cookbook is an experience unto itself. I was totally wrong about the easy part; there's a lot of attention and detail that goes into creating a cookbook. But it is a really fun thing to write and publish a cookbook!