Category: Editor Tips

So you’ve collected your recipes, entered them in the cookbook, written your introduction and made all of you are design selections. Now you’re ready to print your cookbook.

Here are the steps you need to take to get your custom cookbook ready to be printed.

Lock Your Cookbook

The first step in getting ready to publish a cookbook is to go to the publishing center in your editors account and lock your cookbook. There are three levels of luck in your cookbook:

• Level one locks contributors for new recipes.
• Level two stops all changes by contributors. – Once you start editing, you don’t want people adding new recipes or changing things that you’ve already edited. Checking this box prevents this.
• Level three locks the cookbook completely and now you’re ready to submit to print.

Once you locked your cookbook from contributor changes (Level two), now is the time to read everything and check for typos.

Proofread your introduction

Print out your narrative and give it to someone else to read. Often it is difficult to proofread your own work and allowing someone else to do it will find things that you would mess.

Review all of the recipes

Look for ingredients that are listed but not included in the directions or ingredients in the directions that are not included in the ingredients list.

Make sure the directions seem complete.

Check the layout

Go to the box that says preview your cookbook in the black navigation bar in your editors account. Here you can either download a PDF of your cookbook or use our 3-D preview tool.

Here you are checking for how pages break. If you find a page with only a word or two, maybe you can shorten version directions to make that recipe just a little shorter.

The changes you make here will determine how your cookbook will be printed. However it looks in your final PDF preview, is how it will look when your cookbook is printed.

Place your order

Now that your cookbook looks exactly the way you want it, it’s time to order.

On the ordering page you’ll see the number of recipes you’ve entered, and the number of pages in your cookbook. This is what will determine the cost of your cookbook along with the number of color photos.

Remember that the more copies of your cookbook you are order, the less the price per book will be. This is because the set up charges are spread out over more copies of the cookbook.

Once you’ve calculated your price, you need to enter your shipping address and click submit. This places your order with our publishing system. You then will be directed to a link that will allow you to pay online or you can send a check drawn on a US bank for payment.

One frequent question is can cookbooks be sent to more than one address. Currently you would need to place an order for each delivery address.

Once you’ve placed your order you can expect your cookbooks to arrive in 2 to 3 weeks. However during our busiest times of the year, it could take longer. if you want your cookbooks in time for Christmas, the deadline for ordering is November 30, however do not wait until the last minute if you can.

 

 

Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

 

FamilyCookbookProject.com answers hundreds of emails a week with basic questions on how to do various aspects of creating a family cookbook. So we came up with the idea to put all of those answers in one place.

Welcome to the Family Cookbook Project Editor Education Center. Here you will find the answer that age-old question “How do I…”.

When you don’t know how to do something, start here and get specific instructions on how to accomplish most aspects of creating the perfect family cookbook.

You will find a link to the How To Center in the black navigation bar on every page of FamilyCookbookProject.com.

 

 

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

There is a reason why 90% of the cookbooks FamilyCookbookProject.com prints are submitted in late November and early December. Everyone knows that family cookbook‘s make great Christmas gifts! Everyone wants something personal and special to give to love ones at the holidays and a family cookbook is makes the perfect gift.

Why are we telling you this in July? Well cookbooks don’t just happen by themselves, they need to be have recipes at it, professionally design covers selected and everything proofread before they are submitted for printing.

The time it takes to have your cookbook printed and shipped also more than doubles just before the holidays because of the sheer volume. So now is the time to put your efforts into your cookbook and have it completed and submitted for printing by the time September rolls around.

 

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

How to Take Great Food Photos for Your Recipes
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and with recipes that is especially true.

It’s wonderful to read a list of ingredients and see the potential in a recipe, but to look at the finished product can make your mouth water!

Family Cookbook Project highly recommends adding a photo to every recipe you can in your online cookbook. It helps people to see what to expect when they follow your recipe and gives them a standard to meet when comparing their finished dish to the original.

With the advent of digital camera built into cell phones, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to take good food photos.

Here are some pointers to help improve your recipe photos:

Use Natural Light – Make sure that the light is right – shoot the food either next to a bright window or under a pendant light in the restaurant. Don’t use your camera’s flash! Set your dish near a window and turn off any artificial lights that might be on nearby. Try to photograph with the light at your back or to the side of a dish, so that the shadows are to the side or behind it. 

Hold Still – Taking photos inside, even with ample natural light, often means you have to hold the camera very still to keep it from registering hand shake. If you have a tripod, that’s ideal. If you don’t, you can duplicate the tripod effect by resting your elbows on the table or counter and using them to stabilize the camera. Moving the camera when taking a photo will only lead to blurry unusable photos. 

Get close to the food! – Don’t stand back three feet and get the food with the stove, the dirty dishes, and all the condiments around it. Move in and get up close and personal, and let the pan…or the plate…or the cutting board fill the frame.  

Stage the shot – The food isn’t the only thing in the photo. Using plates, silverware and linens in complementary colors can help your dish come alive. Shoot food on a beautiful plate or on a table with texture and character. The more appetizing the ingredients, the better your photo will be. Plates that contain colored vegetables and/or meat, preferably in light-colored sauces, are often the most appealing to the eye in photos. Also Don’t be Afraid of a mess. A few crumbs or a smear of dressing can be beautiful, if you let them. 

Focus on the food –  If you are using a DSLR, stop down your lens to f/1.8 or f/2.0 that limits your depth of field to one part of the image only, blurring out everything around the subject, simulating a shot taken with a macro lens. If you are using an iPhone, there are apps, such as Camera+ or VSCO Cam, that will create the same effect. Remember, you want the food to be the main focus, not the background. 

Try different angles –  Get up over the food and shoot straight down on it. When shooting overheads, if appropriate, try filling up the frame with what’s already on the table such as cups, wine glasses, utensils and moving hands. You can also  think in three dimensions, You might not usually serve brownies piled in a vertical column, but stacking any flat food, like pancakes, cookies, or even onion rings, is a great way to show off texture and make the photo more appealing. You can also add dimension to your food photos by showing the dish right after the that first bite is taken, or the second and third. These are little details that make a viewer feel like they’ve sat down and are enjoying the meal. 

Get Close to Ugly Foods  – Some foods, no matter how good they taste, just don’t make good photos. But the closer you get to your subject, the more the visual story becomes about texture and color, rather than pure mouth-watering beauty. Avoid foods that are white and gloppy, such as congealed gravy on white pasty mashed potatoes. 

Size Matters –  Make sure your camera settings are set for a good sized photo. Small photos look blurry when they are enlarged on line. A photo viewed online only has to be 72 dpi (dots per inch, the measure for quality), but if you are going to print your photo, you want it to be at least 300 dpi. 600 pixels wide (a measurement for size) is a good target for minimum photo size.

Using other’s photos – It is important to note that the Internet makes it easy to find photos of recipes already taken. While this might be much easier, the photo still is the property of whomever holds the rights. Don’t always assume that because a photo is on the Internet you can simply use it for your recipe. Make sure you ask permission from the owner before you use it.

 

Bill Rice takes more than 20,000 photos a year and is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

At Family Cookbook Project, we have been helping people create custom cookbooks for more than 15 years. We have learned a lot in that time and we wanted to point out some of the things not to do to make your personal cookbook a success.

Mistake #1 -Thinking that everyone in the family will be interested in participating. While it is always a good thing to invite as many people as possible to contribute to your family cookbook, expecting everyone to participate is simply unrealistic. There’s a lot of people in every family that just don’t like to cook, think they are too busy or simply forget and miss the deadline.

It’s important that once you invite your contributors that you keep them motivated by sending messages using family cookbook project reminder tool on a regular basis. You also can have them contacted when new recipes are added to the cookbook.

Mistake #2 – Making the One Final Perfect Family Cookbook. let’s face it, family cookbooks are living documents that are currently evolving just like the families themselves. my family is already on its third volume of recipes. A lot of people also add and use recipes online.

So the bottom line is don’t hold up the entire cookbook waiting for one or two specific recipes or contributors.

Mistake #3 – Making the Family Recipe Book Only About Recipes. Sure the cookbook will have great recipes, however what people really like to read are the personal notes about the recipes and why they are important to the people who contributed them. Family photos are another great way to make your cookbook truly your family cookbook.

Mistake #4 – Bad Proof Reading. One of the most important jobs as editor is reading all of the recipes activate been submitted to make sure the format is consistent and any miss spelled words are corrected.

Luckily Family Cookbook Project has created an “editor edit mode” which allows you to go through each recipe and make changes to them quickly and efficiently. You browser’s spell check will also point out questionably spelled words.

We would add a fifth mistake – not using Family Cookbook Project to organize and print your family cookbook!

 

 

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!