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Editing and Pictures

24 Nov

Over the last few weeks I’ve spent all my free time editing and working on photos. I mean all my free time — plus a lot of time at work, where I’ve been hiding out in my office trying to get stuff done.

I keep telling myself that I just have to get this one section done, then I’ll have some free time. Ha! What I meant is that I have to get this section done so I can get to the next one.

Anyway . . . I decided to take the pictures myself for this book. By myself, I mean with the help of my mother and sister. Lisa (the sister) helped by building the ‘studio’ for me. We got some lumber and a roll of backdrop paper, and ended up with this ‘photo studio’.

It worked well, and while I cooked and cooked and cooked, Mom and Lisa took turns as stylists/photographers (though I couldn’t help but take a couple of pictures of each dish myself — can we say control freak?). Every Sunday for a month or so, I’d prep 6-8 recipes and we’d snap dozens of pictures.

There will be 16 colour pages in the book (for those of you who have Soup, it will be the same) and we took over 1200 pictures. Do you know how long it takes to go through 1200 pictures? A long time. But I’ve eliminated close to 1000, and now I’m trying to choose the best out of the ones that are left.

The pictures are getting done in between editing the book. So far I’ve had three people (and me) editing and proofing. We’re on edit #4 now, and we keep finding things to change. We’re in the middle of this round, and I think it will take just one more. I hope.

Next up: formatting.

The next step . . . and measurment problems.

16 Oct

It’s been a busy month. The holidays kept coming and there wasn’t much time to work on the book. Holiday season starts a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashana and (this year) ended with Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday. Each weekend was another holiday and it kept us hopping at the store.

Between holidays, I managed to squeak out enough time to finish testing all of the recipes. I even put everything together in a (really large) Word file. So we’ve moved on to the next step. Right now I have a couple of family members reading through the book doing a basic edit — the first of many. I’m spending my time working on some formatting and photos.

I’m trying to work out what to do with the formatting. When my first book was published I sent in the manuscript for the first round of edits and got a note back that all of the weight measurements needed to be converted to volumes. It’s not uncommon for North American publishers to say no to weights and insist on volumes — in fact, there’s a great discussion topic on this subject over at the eG Forums (click). You’ll see that many of the posts on this topic are strongly pro weight measurements.

Some of the arguments publishers give for going with volume are that most home cooks don’t have scales in their kitchens and that the North American public doesn’t want weights. I’d say the truth about what the public wants lies somewhere in the middle. Many cooks like to use weights because the results are more consistent. Many home cooks use volume. So I’m trying to include both.

The next question is metric vs. Imperial measurements. I plan on including both. The question is how do you include all of that information in a way that’s still easy to read and understand? It’s a lot of numbers to include for each ingredient and I’m trying to figure out the best way to present it.

Do you have a preference?

What’s in a name? Help name my book!

23 Sep

I’m not yet done writing my Passover cookbook, but with self-publishing comes a whole bunch of tasks that I didn’t have to worry about with the first book. I need to get an ISBN number, get it registered with certain sites and libraries and take a look at how I’m going to distribute it or get it sold.

As I look through guides that my printer sent and try to navigate Amazon’s Advantage program (it allows self-published authors to list their books), I’m beginning to realize that I have to figure out what I’m going to call this one. When I talk about it, I call it ‘the Passover (or Pesach) cookbook’. Not very catchy.

I’ve gone through a long list of titles, but nothing really seems right. This book has a real mix of traditional Ashkenazi recipes and what I would call non-traditional recipes. So “Passover Recipes From My Bubbe’s Table” isn’t an option; nor is “New Age Passover Cooking”.

So what I’m going to do is ask you to come up with some suggestions. Send me a title (or several) via email, a comment here, on twitter @pamreiss or Facebook. When I’ve chosen a title, the person who came up with it will get my gratitude and a copy of the book when it’s printed.

Cooking, Tweeting and the CBC

1 Sep

In April, I signed up with Twitter. As a soon-to-be self-published-writer, I thought that I had to take advantage of any and all marketing tools. Especially the free ones. I’ve since made some interesting connections and no longer think of it as just a marketing tool. But, it is a good one.

As I cook my way through the recipes for the upcoming Passover book, I tweet about it. Just little notes (under 140 characters) letting people know what I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll ask for some input (ie: Matzo Balls – Floaters or Sinkers?), sometimes I’ll complain about a failed attempt (ie: today there was a power failure while I was baking a pie crust — the oven and timer timer shut off — will have to try that one again.)

My account is set up so that whatever I tweet then gets posted on Facebook as my new status. So an interesting thing happened last week. I got a phone call from a CBC radio producer that I know and she asked me if I’d talk about my summer of cooking on the radio. She’s been reading my cooking updates all summer and thought it would be a good segment. Sounds a little like some other blog/movie that’s been getting a lot of press about a writer cooking her way through a book.

I’ve done a bit of radio and TV since my first book came out. And I feel more comfortable doing it now, but there’s still a bit of nerves each time. I think I overcompensate by talking a mile-a-minute. Have you ever listened to an interview and been annoyed because the interviewee didn’t answer a direct question? I have. But then I realized that when I do these interviews, I just ramble so much that by the time I’m done answering the question I have no idea of what the question actually was.

I don’t fully know what I said during the interview — but vaguely recall that I talked about my books and cooking. My mother was happy that something I said made the interviewer laugh. Many people who heard the segment contacted me to tell me they enjoyed it. So in the end, we decided it was a success.

Running out of time . . .

25 Aug

I’ve been working frantically to finish recipe testing. I’m at the point where I think I’m done with new recipes — though if something strikes me, I’ll have to give it a try. Now I’m going through my files and re-testing recipes I’ve developed over the last 3-4 years.

It’s interesting to see what I was doing back then. A couple of recipes were eliminated immediately after reading, a few were eliminated after trying. A few of them were gems. But even some of the gems needed a little tweaking and they all need good editing. I just spent an hour going through all of the recipes I tagged “Passover” and I have 30-35 recipes to cook through over then next couple of weeks.

The rush is because Rosh Hashanah will be here soon. I know most people won’t give it much thought for a couple of weeks, but I’ve got to be ahead of the game. My real job involves a lot of sourcing and ordering for our store. I spend hours going through product lists, on the internet looking for suppliers and on the phone trying to find out what is or isn’t available.

This year, for instance, I’ve been having a hard time finding Israeli honey. None of the kosher food suppliers that I use have any on their lists. It’s not imperative that the honey be from Israel, but I like to have a selection of honeys available and the Israel part is a nice bonus. (An assortment of honeys is a nice gift to take if you’re going to dinner for R.H.) So it took 2 days, but I think I found a source – not a food supplier but a Judaica company.

It’s not just about the honey. I spend a lot of time working on meat orders with my dad (he’s our meat department), guessing how many briskets and turkeys (and chickens and lamb, etc) we’ll sell out of the store and how many we’ll need for the prepared food part of the business. Then we need to put together an order form for prepared foods and somebody had to do an ad for the newspaper. And finally, I make sure the store is stocked with all of the essentials our customers might need for the holiday (kasha, noodles for kugel, yortzeit and Shabbat candles, etc).

So that’s all taken care of. Our first big order arrived late Friday and now we spend a couple of weeks getting more orders in and taking orders from customers. Before you know it, we’ll all have to be in the store helping customers and in the kitchen prepping food.

And that’s where the urgency is coming from. For the book to be ready to print in January, the recipes should be finished before Rosh Hashana. By finished, I mean tested and typed (hopefully). There will still be a lot to do after the recipes are done, so I’m giving myself a RH deadline. Besides, it’s kind of nice to think that the testing work will be done by the new year. The question is, will it?

Self-Publishing

29 Jul

For a variety of reasons I’m trying the self-publishing route with this book. There are a lot of pros and cons either way, but after giving it a lot of thought (read: sleepless nights), I decided that the potential pros outweighed the cons.

Doing this myself means that things are a lot different. First of all, I don’t have a publisher (two actually) giving me deadlines or telling me how they think the book should look. I get to decide if the book will have metric or Imperial measurments, if I spell things like a Canadian or American (lots of u’s being used), how many pictures will be included, etc.

It also means that I have to set my own deadlines and enforce them. This is much harder. If all goes well, the book will be completed in time to have it printed and available before Passover. If all doesn’t go well, I’ll have to rethink the plan.

Add the editing, photographing, printing, marketing, distributing, listings and anything else that I’ve forgotten to my list of responsibilities and doing it myself is a lot more work. Thankfully I have friends and family who are ready to pitch in.

The next few months should be interesting; learning as I go. It’s also exciting and nerve-racking. All sorts of questions keep coming up and I’m trying to find the answers.

New Book Coming

6 Jul

Wow. I can’t believe I posted in September of 2007 that I was working on a new book and it’s now July 2009 and there’s been no book.

Not long after posting, I got an interesting freelance job, working on dinners that were held across Canada. Add to that, the regular job gets busier and busier, I neglected the new book for quite a while.

But since Passover of this year, I’ve picked up the book work with a vengeance. When I was writing food columns, the ones that always got the largest response were the Passover recipes. Readers and customers always wanted new ideas for Passover. Newer cooks often asked how to make traditional recipes. So that’s what I’m doing for the next book. Passover. A great selection of traditional recipes with a lot of modern recipes thrown in.

It will be a push to get it ready and out in time for Passover 2010, but I’m going to do my best to get it done.

I’ll be sure to update this when I have a better idea of when it might be available.

Hope you’re having a wonderful summer,

Pam

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