It’s Family Reunion and Summer Planning Time!

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June seems to be one of the busiest months for families. It also is the gateway to summer family reunions, picnics and vacations.

Planning Ahead
If you are using your family cookbooks as part of a celebration, either a family reunion, Mother’s Day gift, Christmas gift, wedding favor, or other specific event, it is important that you plan ahead and give yourself plenty of time to have your cookbooks printed and shipped for the event.

Family Cookbooks uses the latest in high speed digital printing to produce your family heirlooms. Generally it takes 2-3 weeks to get the files ready for the presses, print, bind and package to ship directly to you. However, during our busiest seasons – right before Mother’s Day and Christmas – it can take much longer.

Another thing to consider is shipping. We use UPS and USPS to ship our family cookbooks all over the USA and Canada. Shipping can take an additional week to have your cookbooks reach you.

Since personalized family cookbooks can make such great Christmas gifts, editors rush to get their print orders submitted in November in order to receive them in time for Christmas time gift giving. Normally, we have a November 30th deadline for delivery in time for Christmas. Save yourself (and us) the danger of not having your cookbooks ready and submit your holiday cookbook orders in October and beat the November rush.

When setting your deadline for recipe contributions, leave enough time for you to review all of the recipes and finalize formatting before you can submit your order for printing. In just 2-3 weeks, your cookbooks should be in your hands!

Wedding Season!

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There is no better way to get wedding guests involved prior to the event than asking them to contribute recipes for a wedding cookbook. Once the recipes are preserved online, they can be shared with other family members by email, individual printed recipes or provide a valuable lasting gift for attendees at the wedding reception.

“I just received our box of ‘Jake and Julia’s Friends and Family Cookbooks’ today! They turned out fabulous! I am so pleased, and so excited to give it to them at their wedding! Thanks so much for the wonderful website! This was just what we wanted, and we received such a great response from our family members who contributed.”
–Rita Flatz, Jake and Julia’s Friends and Family Cookbooks

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How Profitable is a Cookbook Fundraiser?

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One of the hardest things about creating a cookbook fundraiser is planing for how big your cookbook needs to be to generate the profit you wish to raise. Our new Cookbook Fundraiser Profit Calculator at CookbookFundraiser.com lets you change variables to help you determine the scope of your project.

Cookbook Fundraiser Profit Calculator

Click on the Green bars and enter the details for your Cookbook Fundraising project and see how much potential profit your fundraiser. Click the link above and give it a try.

 

Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher of Family Cookbook Project and it’s sister site CookbookFundraiser.com,  websites that helps people create personalized cookbooks for families, friends and fundraising efforts.

Earn Money with Recipe Contests

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We published a post about Making Money with Your Recipes that provided hints on how to enter recipe contests. Here is a list of recipe contests with deadline in August  that you might want to consider entering.

Hellmann’s Taste of America Challenge – create barbecue dishes that represent your state, region, home town, or culture. This could be Louisiana Barbecue Brisket slathered in a spicy Hellmann’s Real Ketchup sauce or Street-Style Corn Elotes with a tangy, creamy Hellmann’s sauce, or a new creation. It is entirely up to you. All that we ask is that you include a condiment from the Hellmann’s range and it belongs at a barbecue.
Prize: $1,000
Deadline: June 23, 2019 at 23:00 EST

Sutter Home Build A Better Burger Recipe Contest – 2019 –
Prize Details: The Grand-Prize Winner will receive $25,000 cash. Five (5) National Finalist Prizes: Trip to finals cook-off at Sutter Home Winery in St. Helena, CA. Twenty (20) Semi-Finalist Prizes: Trip to regional cook-off.
Deadline: July 31, 2019

California Strawberry Commission #GetSnackingChallenge – Share your original strawberry snack ideas on Instagram. Your post must include: A photo of your snack, The name of your snack, for example “Strawberry Toasties”, Include in the caption: #GetSnackingChallenge and @castrawberries
Prize: $1,000
Deadline: August 31, 2019 (with monthly winners as well)

Pasta Pioneer Challenge – Create and post a delicious, Italian-inspired recipe using Explore Cuisine pasta products on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Prize: Trip for 2 to Italy
Deadline: November 28, 2019

 

 

Family Cookbook Project Launches 4 new Pinterest Boards

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Family Cookbook Project Pinterest Account

Many of our cookbook editors and contributors are frequent users of the social media sharing site Pinterest and one of the biggest categories are recipes. Who doesn’t like looking at photos of food and having access to the recipe to boot!

Family Cookbook Project is launching four new collections of recipes, known on Pinterest as “Boards”. Each one will focus on a different category of recipes contributed by our cookbook community.

These new Pinterest boards join our existing 11 boards:

If you are a Pinterest user, please follow Family Cookbook Project or any of the boards of interest.

If you are not yet a Pinterest user, what are you waiting for! You can click on any of the links above to see what it is like and then create a free account to save pins to your own board. And be sure to follow Family Cookbook Project!

 

Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher of FamilyCookbookProject, a website that helps people create personalized cookbooks for families, friends and fundraising efforts.

What they are saying about Family Cookbook Project.

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“The 5 cookbooks I ordered arrived today!! All I can say is: WOW!!! I’m so impressed how it turned out. My prayer is that my adult daughters will love and treasure it! Thanks again— and thanks for putting up with all my calls and emails! It’s rare to get such gracious, efficient service these days. I commend you and your endeavors. Best wishes for Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year!!”
–Glenda W., GRANDMA AND ME AND YOU


“Dear Friends. It’s the old guy again. My two daughters and I waited yesterday evening because we knew our first book was out for delivery. It was near 7pm when the UPS truck came. We opened a box to view the books and we were overwhelmed with their beauty. We actually cried to see how great they were. Our own new and very old recipes in a beautiful book. Your software is so nice and you are so great in answering questions that an 86 year old guy like me could use the program. These are going to be our Christmas presents for our family and friends, how great is that? Merry Christmas you you and your families.”
–Lloyd Cyr, The Cyr Family Favorites


“I received my cookbooks several weeks ago. Not only am I extremely pleased with the published book but everyone that I have given one to has been thrilled. The cookbook looks very professional and your software made it very easy to create. Thank you.”
–June Ledet, Favorite Family Recipes of the Ledets and Blocks


“This has been a very good experience for me. My order is a very small, humble one, but please know how very important it is for my family. My mom passed away a few months ago and the 2 year anniversary of my dad’s death is next week. They were married for over 60 years. I feel their absence most acutely. However, my mom was a wonderful cook, and working on this project has really helped me feel closer to her. And my older son is really following in her footsteps. At 26, he is already becoming a very good cook. This cookbook is really for him and me. So, although the project is a small one for you, it is a very big one for us. It has already made a profound impact on my life, one that I know will only be increased as he and I begin using the cookbook to make my mom’s long lost recipes. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
–Barbara Pauly, In the Kitchen with Nana

Organizing your recipes in your Personal cookbook

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Over the past 15 years, Family Cookbook Project has continually updated its software to meet the needs of you, our cookbook editors. One of the things that we have done is make it easy to organize your recipes as much as you’d like. This blog post will go over some of the ways you can organize how your recipes appear in your personal cookbook.

Recipe categories

Recipe categories are general classifications that allow similar recipes to be placed together. For example, appetizers or desserts. Here are some of your options for categories in the Family Cookbook Project:

Default categories – when you first start your cookbook, these are the categories that are assigned to every cookbook. They are well thought out and can cover just about every type of recipe you may want to add to your cookbook.

Custom categories – whether you want to add just a single new category or completely redo the categories to best meet your needs, you can use the custom category tool to accomplish this.

Subcategories – One of the newer additions to the software is the ability to add subcategories to your cat. This allows you to group recipes of a specific category under the main, or top-level, category. For example in the default category appetizers and beverages, you may want to create a subcategory for appetizers and a sub category for beverages. That way each type of recipe appears with like recipes.

Recipe sorting

Recipe sorting determines in which order the recipes appear within a category. Here are your options for recipe sorting:

Shortest to longest – this is the default sorting option. It places the shortest recipes upfront so more recipes can appear on a single page. Usually it is the most cost-effective way to organize your recipes.

Alphabetical – this is a very popular way to sort your recipes. The titles are organized alphabetically so that As come before the Bs and so on.

Custom Sort – One of the coolest additions to the software is the ability to sort your recipes anywhere you want. This tool will show you a list of all your recipes and you can move them to the location and it makes sense to you.

How you sort your recipes is completely up to you. Family Cookbook Project just wants to make sure you have the tools you need to create the perfect personalized cookbook.

Sample of the custom sort tool




Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher at Family Cookbook Project which helps individuals and fundraising groups create cherished personalized cookbooks using the power of the Internet. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest.

Got a great burger recipe? You could win $25,000!

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In 1990, Sutter Home set out on a mission to pair their wines with America’s favorite food – the burger, and uncorked the wine industry’s first major recipe contest: Build a Better Burger®.  

Their expert panel of judges will review and select the top four competitors in each of the five regions.  These Semi-Finalists will each participate in a live cook-off event and the winners will go on to compete at the National Finals at the beautiful Sutter Home Winery in Napa Valley, California.

Burgers will be scored on Taste, Creativity, Ease of Preparation & Wine Pairing, and the Grand-Prize Winner will take home a $25,000 cash prize.

See last year’s winning recipes and grab the latest copy of your family Cookbook Project for your best burger recipe and go here to submit your own recipe!

Big Changes for Cookbook Fundraising

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Cookbook Fundraiser Homepage

Creating a community cookbook has long been a great way to help raise money for worthwhile causes and Family Cookbook Project has create a version of our popular Family Cookbook Project Website just for fundraising efforts. It’s called Cookbook Fundraiser.com.

While the site has been successful for many years, we decide to begin a major upgrade to offer better tools and make it easier to navigate the process of creating a fundraising cookbook.

Here are some of the new things we are instituted:

Color scheme – You might not think it’s important but updating the color of the site makes it easier on the eyes when working to create your cookbook. It’s one of the things that you might not think about, but we do.

Profit Calculator – One of the hardest things about creating a cookbook fundraiser is planing for how big your cookbook needs to be to generate the profit you wish to raise. Our new Cookbook Fundraiser Profit Calculator lets you change variables to help you determine the scope of your project, including the impact of selling advertising.

Internal navigation – We have updated the layout of the editor’s homepage to be consistent with the popular update to the FamilyCookbookProject.com site. This update takes all the links and tools needed to create a cookbook and organizes them into six sections

  • Recipes Center
  • Layout & Design Center
  • Cookbook and Account Info
  • Communications Center
  • Ads and Marketing Center
  • Cookbook Publishing Center

5 Step Process – There are a lot to think about when running a successful fundraiser. We have made it much easier for the editor by listing the steps in a logical order, so editors can start of the top and get everything accomplished in a timely manner.

Cookbook Sales Flyer – We have designed a color 8.5”x11” poster that can be used to promote your fundraising cookbooks for sale and let the public know where to find them.

Sample Press Release – Promoting the sale of your fundraising cookbook in the local newspaper and radio stations is easy with this sample press release. Just fill in the blanks and you are ready to go.

Advertising Sales Tool – One of the features we are most proud of is our new Interactive Advertising Sales Tool. This tool walks you through all the steps necessary to sell enough advertising in your cookbook to cover the cost of printing! We even are willing to buy the first ad!

If you, or someone you know, are looking for a great idea for a successful fundraiser, please check out CookbookFundraiser.com and create a community cookbook that will be treasured forever.

All types of community groups hold profitable cookbook projects, such as: Church fundraisers, School Fundraiser, Sports Team Fundraiser, Scouting Fundraiser, and Cancer Fundraiser, just to name a few.


Copyrighting Recipes

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One issue that comes up regularly for family cookbook project editors is the topic of copy-writing recipes and proper usage. While we at the FamilyCookbookProject.com are not lawyers and do not give legal advice, our research shows that recipes cannot generally be copyrighted. At the same time, it does not make it right to simply take credit for other people’s work. One way to avoid this is to give credit where credit is due. If your contributor submits a recipe that they originally found in a magazine or cookbook, it is appropriate to list the source in the notes section of the recipe.

A few articles of interest in this topic

Copyright Office flyer on recipes
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.pdf

Copyrighting Recipes
http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/copyright/copyright-realworld/recipe-copyrighting.html

Questions & Answers – Copyrighting Recipes
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/CookbookAdvice.htm


Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher at Family Cookbook Project which helps individuals and fundraising groups create cherished personalized cookbooks using the power of the Internet. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest.