Authoring Vegan Cookbook in Slovakia

[Guest guest]

A vegan cookbooks COULD be an outstanding and effective project

to bring together your beginning community of vegetarians,

to share how they look at food.

 

I have been in food service in the past and have managed restaurants.

 

Here's how I think about cookbooks and about READING cookbooks:

 

1 - Read every cookbook three times

a - Once - very quickly - skim it - to get the gist of how

the author looks at food, thinks about food, feels about food,

works with food, and what KINDS of recipes, spices, flavors,

and techniques he or she uses.

b - The second time - to enjoy each particular recipe,

as if you're reading a book, like a novel. OK?

That gives you a good sense of what the cookbook

author really HAS done with the foods in the book.

c - The third time is time to work through the book in order

to get recipes for yourself, to try the recipes, and to

think critically about those recipes.

 

My opinion about cookbook authoring -

and I can forward your request to several dozen

authors of vegetarian cookbooks -

is that distributing vegetarian cookbooks is very difficult

and that one needs a great marketer who knows

the various audiences that are friendly to this kind of cookbook.

The market is NOT limited to vegetarians only,

and thinking that it is limited only to vegetarians would

be a serious mistake, if one wants to distribute the cookbook widely.

 

I've also seen a number of EARLY vegetarian cookbooks which

had come from Europe and were so " culturally-bound " to the

foods that the Britons for instance, used that an American

vegetarian would not be able to find many of the ingredients.

Today that doesn't seem to be the case.

I think that the European experience in publishing is probably

very different from the experience in the USA or North America,

where most people speak English. (I know that this is not

the case with everyone - and, oh, how I do know it -

but in Europe where many people speak English,

but there are many DIFFERENT national languages,

marketing your cookbook profitably

(or at least without losing money)

could be much more difficult.

 

 

 

 

 

At 08:42 AM 6/15/00 +0100, Linda_Csulikova wrote:

>I just want to justify myself -- I am trying to get in touch with

>already-established organisations and get help from them.

>yet it seems they in return want my help. I still think that

>at least I am working on a good thing. I might be making

>a mistake but currently I am doing my best to find the right

>people around me who could be part of the organisation.