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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Whip up a cookbook

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Illustration by Martha Hernandez • The Honolulu Advertiser
They beckon from the bookshelves with brightly colored covers and the promise of another couple hundred recipes you'll never have the time to try. We buy them anyway because no one who loves to cook has ever had enough cookbooks.

And in the backs of our minds, many of us harbor a little, flickering dream: I should write a cookbook.

Perhaps the goal is fame and fortune on the Food Network. Perhaps just a recipe collection to hand out at the family reunion, or to use as a fund-raiser for your church or temple.

Before you drift off into those dreams, here's a reality check from those who've been there.

"A lot of writing a cookbook has nothing to do with cooking," says Bev Gannon, chef/restaurateur on Maui and the latest of the Hawai'i Regional Cuisine chefs to publish a cookbook. After she finished "The Hali'imaile General Store Cookbook" (Ten Speed Press, hardback, $35) with co-author Bonnie Friedman, she said, "I swore I'd never do another cookbook again in my life. It was so not what I do. You want to be cooking, and you're sitting looking at numbers all day."

"It's like starting a small business," said Joan Namkoong, former Advertiser food editor and the self-published author of "Go Home, Cook Rice," (Namkoong Publishing, paper, $20) released late last year. "It's a gamble, a risk and a steep learning curve."

"It was a LOT of work," said Rachel Horikawa, who with her husband, Walter, co-chaired the cookbook fund-raiser committee for Mililani High School's Class of 2002 Project Graduation, "The Dragon Cookbook." "In the end, it was worth it. But you really have to spend some time figuring out what you want."

"By the time you're done with a book, you never want to eat any of the food again because you've labored over these recipes. Between testing, writing, researching, reading and proof-reading, you could actually go over a recipe 50 times before you're done," said Ui Goldsberry, who has served as project coordinator for two of Sam Choy's cookbooks.

"If people think they're going to make a pile of money by doing a cookbook, it's not going to happen," said writer and publicist Friedman, who will aid chef DK Kodama of Sansei Seafood Restaurant & Sushi Bar on his upcoming book from Ten Speed, tentatively scheduled to come out at Christmas.

"It's got to be a labor of love because for the publisher, it's all about cash," said Goldsberry, who is well acquainted with the publishing world. The margin of profit on books is small and the sales potential for all but the most high-profile of celebrity authors is limited, so publishers are looking for authors who come with a ready market (such as a celebrity chef) and aren't generous with advances, money for recipe testing and photos, or marketing support, she said.

"Sam Choy's Sampler" by Sam Choy, Booklines, $12.95
None of this is to say don't write your own cookbook.

Without exception, the authors and cookbook coordinators we talked to were proud of their work and enjoy the feedback from readers. None regrets doing the project.

Gannon admits having felt rather insecure and daunted while doing a cookbook, but the task had an unexpected payoff: It convinced her for once and for all that "I really do know what I'm doing."

One mark of a true chef is the ability to think a dish through and sense how it will turn out without actually preparing it. Gannon learned that she has that knack when she made a big mistake: She sent her recipes to the publisher without testing them, having incorrectly understood that the publisher would do that task. (Of course, these were all recipes that had been used at the restaurant or in her catering business, but Gannon had redrafted them for the home cook using her own sketchy notes.) When the error was discovered, Gannon recruited a small team, including some nonprofessionals, to spend eight 10-hour days preparing the recipes. When the dishes turned out well for these folks, needing very little revision, Gannon said, she was immensely gratified.

Namkoong is happy because self-publishing allowed her to design her book exactly as she wanted it. Gannon and Friedman, in contrast, were forced to redo their recipes to fit the Ten Speed Press style. And Goldsberry found herself being scolded in a nasty e-mail from an editor after she sent recipes the editor considered imprecise.

Furthermore, self-publishing meant Namkoong could meet her own deadline of having a book to sell during the Christmas holidays; she was able to pull the book together in six months. A publisher's time line is often 15 months to two years. And projects can be held up at the publisher's whim, as has occurred with several books since the present economic downturn, Gannon said.

"My vision was that I would have a publisher and they would do all the work," Namkoong said. The reality was that Namkoong revised her book at the direction of a publisher who elected not to accept the revision. Another interested publishing house said it would take more than year to put the book out. So she ran with it herself, meaning she has a garage full of books and spends a lot of time schlepping boxes.

The economics of working with a publisher can be pretty depressing, Namkoong said. The usual cut for a writer is 10 percent of wholesale; these meager royalties are paid twice a year. Advances may be given to cover research, recipe-testing, photography or food styling, but the money comes out of the writer's cut.

San Francisco-based Ten Speed, the publisher with which a number of Hawai'i chefs have worked (Gannon, Kodama, Roy Yamaguchi, Alan Wong), is different in that it's a small company, co-owner Phil Wood (who loves Hawai'i and comes here frequently) is approachable and involved in decisions, and photography and food styling costs are covered.

For nonprofit groups, and for individuals who choose publishing houses that specialize in cookbooks, the road is much smoother. These firms provide a step-by-step process and the books are inexpensive and sell readily even if they don't get much media attention or make anybody famous.

Horikawa said the Mililani Project Graduation committee worked with the press of the Hawai'i Correctional Facilities system, which has done previous books and knows how to work with the uninitiated. They wanted a fund-raiser that would be something different than the usual chili or sweeetbread sale, would provide a keepsake for the graduates and could raise sufficient money with one big effort. They've been able to realize considerably more profit than they expected (about half of the $12 cover price on each book) and, although gathering, editing and typing 300 recipes was a huge task, "we feel good about it," she said.

The real stars of the cookbook world are the books done by celebrity chefs; Sam Choy has his name on nine cookbooks. But because Choy has more commitments than a he'e has arms, these are produced in collaboration with project coordinators such as Goldsberry, who worked on his "Choy of Seafood" (Mutual, 1999), "Sam Choy's Sampler" (Booklines, 2000) and "Sam Choy's Polynesian Kitchen" (Hyperion, coming in July).

Without telling too many tales, Goldsberry says picking up the pieces for a celebrity chef is not the glamorous work it might seem.

She and her husband, Steve, who partners with her on these projects, have had to catch Sam between Costco appearances, in a waiting room at the airport, via long distance. She's had to decipher recipes that were mere scribblings. "He'll hand me this tiny piece of paper and say, 'Here, this is a sauteed 'ahi with mushrooms.'" Another time, she had to cut down a cheesecake recipe that had an ingredient list that included 27 cups of this and 15 cups of that. She was giving away cheesecakes for a week until she got it proportioned for a home kitchen.

Shoots on the Big Island with photographer Doug Peebles and food stylist Faith Ogawa require intense planning. First, they choose the dishes to be shot, then they run all over Honolulu to stores and artists' studios, picking out props (which are borrowed and must be insured and then returned in good condition), all of which have to be packed up, shipped to Kona, unpacked and arranged around the test kitchen. Ogawa cooks like crazy and they knock off 10 or 11 pictures a day (the usual food-shoot quota is three or four a day, but time is money).

Said Goldsberry: "My suggestion for people who want to do a cookbook is to self-publish and put it on the net, because unless they can afford to hire someone to do all this stuff for them, they're just going to give themselves a lot of frustration."