Mishaps–like melting cakes–are part of the cookbook production process!

Have you heard? I self-published my first e-cookbook last week! It’s called Sweet Spot: Modern, Better-for-You Dessert Recipes, with Clever Tips to Bake (Mostly) Dairy Free, and it is full of sweet treats that are leaner and more nutritious than regular desserts, but still taste sumptuously indulgent. If you want to learn more, check out the book’s page (it’s on sale right now!). But today, I want to share a little about the behind-the-scenes process.

The idea of writing a cookbook came to me in the spring of this year. To learn more about the book’s backstory, take a look at the post I wrote for Food Bloggers of Canada. The idea of writing and publishing a cookbook probably wasn’t too daunting for me because I knew I could do pretty much of it myself. I’m a graphic designer, and I have handled magazine layouts on my own before, so I knew what I was getting into. I was most worried about the food photography. I could take pictures I liked enough to publish on my blog, but could I pull off shooting photos for an entire book? When I shared my cookbook idea with my talented food photographer friend, Catherine Côté, she immediately offered to shoot the book. Working with a pro was a huge relief! It all suddenly sounded totally doable. I would create recipes, have my friend photograph them, execute the book’s layout, and voilà: it would be out in the world.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, let me tell you, it was a ton of work. The timeline went like this:

• Over the summer: General brainstorming
  This mostly means I thought about the book during my off hours, for example, while I was taking a walk. During that period, I also polished up my book’s theme, did research online and at the library, took notes when recipes came to me, and jotted down title ideas. I used Evernote to keep all my notes in one place. I snapped pictures of dairy-free products at the grocery store, restaurant menus, or dessert displays and sent them to my Evernote notebook with a caption so I could remember where I found them or what idea a photo sparked. I filed away articles about e-book writing and publishing so I could remember which key steps and tools to use. Finally, I bookmarked informative sources about nutrition, lactose intolerance, and dairy-free baking.

• Early August: Recipe development and testing
  I started by deciding on chapters (special occasion cakes, cookies, and so on) and how many recipes would go in each. I made a list of my favorite baking ingredients to make sure I used them all. I reviewed my personal recipe notebook and blog to choose classic recipes I wanted to revisit in my book. Then I made a list of my favorite dessert types so I could be sure to cover them in the book, either in classic or reinvented form (carrot cake or lemon meringue pie, for example). I came up with a long list of recipe titles with notes for each, sorted them into chapters, and weeded out the ones that felt redundant. I researched the recipes I wanted to expand and wrote drafts that I later used to test them. I tested the recipes once and made my final pick of the 20 main recipes for the book.

• First week of September (4.5 days total): Styling and photographing the final products
  My friend Catherine had a full fall schedule, so I booked the week she was free, even though I hadn’t finished writing and testing the recipes. It was important that each dessert’s general idea was set and that the result looked like the final product. I saw making the recipes for the shoot as another recipe-testing opportunity, and I noted what I still needed to improve. The crust was too chewy; the cream too liquid; the frosting too sweet. I fixed all that after the shoot, but you can’t notice my mishaps in the pictures—I’m so grateful for that! Shooting 20 recipes in less than 5 days meant my oven was probably on 24 hours a day: I spent all night baking, then all day at Catherine’s shooting the desserts I made the night before. Did I mention there was a heat wave the week we photographed the book? Let’s just say the whole process was a workout.

Choosing props was one of my favorite tasks during the food photography process.

I like textured backgrounds and my friend has plenty of those, but for one shot, we even ended up using her dining room bench as a background! Be creative, they say.

Sometimes, we shot outside on the photographer’s balcony, to catch the best light–and a refreshing breeze!

• Late September: More recipe testing, tasting, and fixing
  By now, I knew almost all my recipes by heart, and I had overextended my friends’ and family’s bellies by handing off desserts to everyone who said yes to a taste. But I was proud of all my desserts and excited to start working on the book’s layout.

• October: Writing the recipe headnotes and all the remaining cookbook content
  Before anything else, I needed to finish the writing. I wrote all the headnotes one after the other. One cookbook author recommended this to me, and I found it very productive, rather than writing them at the same time as the recipes. Then I drafted long-form chapters, saving shorter assignments for the very end of the project (table of contents, acknowledgments).

Our feline “assistant”.

Creating a scene.

Looking over the pro’s shoulder.

• Late October: Copyediting
  I sent all 25,000 words to a trusted editor I’m used to working with for review. I took a break while I waited for the text to come back (but I should have started the layout instead!).

• Early November: Graphic layout of the book and additional photography
  I did some visual research to identify what kind of cookbook layouts I liked (answer: simple and minimalist). I then opened InDesign and spent the next two weeks immersed in it. My only breaks were to shoot basic recipes and variations. I didn’t ask my food photographer friend to take those pictures because they needed very little styling, and I preferred to use her time on the visuals that were crucial to the book’s overall feel. I usually spent the morning on the computer, made the recipes during lunchtime, shot them in the early afternoon, processed the pictures, and integrated them into the book as they were ready.

• Mid-November: Cookbook release
  I first scheduled the book’s release for November 16, but there was still so much to do that I had to push it back a week. The details I needed to handle at the very end of the project seemed insurmountable. I spent all my available time on the book. I didn’t go out at all that week, and I may have even forgotten to shower a few times. I wanted to finish and release the book before Thanksgiving in the United States so it wouldn’t get drowned out by the upcoming wave of holiday-themed publications. At midnight on November 24—the release date—I was generating the final e-book files. On release morning, I tested my e-commerce solution, which I was thankfully already using to sell other e-books, so there were no last-minute surprises. With a sigh of relief (and disbelief), at 11:30 am on the release date, I published the book’s page and shared it on social media—it was finally out!

While I feel like I laid out a pretty realistic timeline and things went pretty smoothly, I underestimated how much time I’d spend on projects with other clients (you know, those who pay the bills!). I also had outings planned in the fall—such as a trip to Portugal—that pulled me away from my cookbook project. Thus, I didn’t work full time on it, and as a result, the last few weeks ended up feeling like a mad rush to getting the book out. Surprisingly, I wasn’t bored by the book by then. I loved it even more now that it existed physically, and I was impatient to finish and eager to share it with the world.

The fact that I published a digital book had two major advantages, production-wise:

• I could still fix things until the very last minute before publication; and
• I can and will easily keep on updating the files if I catch more typos and mishaps (which, of course, I will).

Publishing an e-book also limited the production costs because I didn’t have to advance printing fees. However, I underestimated another aspect of the project: the total cost of writing a cookbook —grocery bills ran much higher than I expected, and I am not even willing to calculate the total cost in working hours. I stopped logging time after hitting 150 hours, and that was before the rush at the end of the project (I’m probably close to 300 hours by now). This directly affected my freelance workload, and I could never have dedicated most of my time to getting the book done without E’s emotional and, especially, financial support.

This cookbook project is far from done. I usually develop a marketing strategy before a book’s release, but I had no time to do that before I released mine. This might sound like a terrible oversight, but I figured this was my first book, so I would take my time to get the word out. I am currently contacting friends and bloggers I admire to try to get Sweet Spot into the spotlight. At the same time, I’m working on a book proposal because I hope to find an editor to publish an extended print version of Sweet Spot. I already have 40 more recipes in mind and lots more information about dairy-free baking to share. Fingers crossed I can carry this project even further. I’ll keep you posted!