Cookbook News
Publisher’s Weekly shares regular and reliable information about the publishing industry. Here is there recent Preview of Cookbooks: March 2017 from Publisher’s Weekly
According to Publisher’s Weekly “It was a good year for cookbooks all around—unit print sales in the category were up 6% in 2016 over 2015.” Ina Garten’s cookbook was the best selling print cookbook in 2016 selling >400K copies since October. Bestselling Cookbooks of 2016 included: *cookbooks featuring kitchen appliances: an Instant Pot electric pressure cooker, an air fryer, and a spiralizer,
*cookbooks from authors/celebrities with robust platforms: Chrissy Teigen, Ina Garten, Anthony Bourdain, and Ree Drummond
*cookbooks for diet/health: Skinnytaste Fast and Slow.
Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks got her start blogging about what she cooked from her collection of cookbooks. She added photography and her goal was that she “would learn a lot and gradually improve my writing, cooking, and photography; it would be a personal, creative outlet.” Read more about How Heidi Swanson made 101 Cookbooks.
Bowls are the new plate? Lots of bowl cookbooks being written.
We are obsessed with food. In Australia, four of the five bestselling books related to food and nutrition. This in an interesting article, from Huff Post Australia that claims Cookbooks Aren’t Going To Solve Our Health Problems.
Lucky Peach’s list of cookbooks you need when you must create an “impressive feast”.
Productivity
If you’re anything like me, you write lists, maintain ongoing lists, and refer to lists that pertain to both business and personal life. Examples of lists I write or refer to regularly include shopping, errands, phone calls, grocery, gratitude, tasks to complete, recipes to test, recipes to develop, people/situations to pray for, goals, projects, bills to pay, passwords, and birthdays. In the management of these lists, I vacillate between lists maintained in my daily planner (handwritten), a notebook (handwritten), as well as Scrivener, Drafts, Dashlane, WorkFlowy, and Excel (electronic).
So far, my mixed system of handwritten lists and electronically maintained lists works for me. I measure my success with the ability to find what I need when I need it, and the ability to access the list in a cross-platform way, especially with the electronic lists.
Despite these systems functioning well, I always tend to go back to handwritten for certain tasks or when I need to make a brain dump and sort and organize the things I have on my mind.
This is an interesting article about how hand-writing to-do lists helps your brain, and who does’t need a boost in brain power?
Cookbook author and culinary dietitian Maggie Green coaches aspiring cookbook authors in the process of writing cookbooks, cookbook proposals, and building their author platform. Download her checklist “Am I Ready to Write A Cookbook?”