Southern Review offers tips on publishing recipes in cookbook form

The May issue of the South’s premiere free online newsletter on books, the Southern Review of Books, includes an article about publishing recipes as cookbooks. According to the editors at the Southern Review of Books, to publish a successful cookbook, you need to start with a unique selling point or “angle.” For Atlanta’s Joe Dabney, whose Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine was a James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award winner (the paperback version is published by Cumberland House), the angle was the unique recipes of the Southern Appalachians and background on the

mountaineers who favored the recipes. His cookbook is laced with Appalachian folklore and history – the sort of lore that made the Foxfire books best sellers.

For Eva McCall and Emma Edsall in Lucy's Recipes for Mountain Living (Bright Mountain Books) the unique angle is that the authors have collected the favorite recipes of their grandmother, who kept a large family fed in the rural South before the days of electric refrigeration. Now, if you’ve heeded the advice to find a unique theme for your cookbook, where do you go next? It is difficult to impossible for home cooks to score cookbook publishing deals.

If all you want are nice-looking, bound volumes that you can give (or sell) to friends and family, you might get in touch with one of the subsidy presses. There are a bevy of books out there that will tell you how to go about self-publishing a book on your own, without using the vanity presses. Trouble is, most of them unrealistically promise a lot. A company called The Cook's Palate specializes in self-published cookbooks. Other subsidy publishers include iUniverse, Xlibris, Authorhouse, Booksurge and Lulu. A Google search will turn up more.