I Hated my First Cookbook. Here's what I Learned from it.

And some words of encouragement for those who have a hard time loving their work, whatever it may be.

If you wanna check out my first book, Naturally Vegetarian, here it is.

Leafing through some amazing cookbooks at Kate Hill’s house.

When I went to Cyrille’s concert a couple of months ago, I brought along my favorite CD of his for him to sign.
The idea did not come to me until I saw someone else pull out a pen and cd for another artist, one evening I went dancing. After all, it would be cool if what I call my emotional support album bore his signature. 
(Bear with me. I swear I’m going somewhere with this introduction. I need it to prove a point at the beginning and at the end).

Cyrille, My Favorite Musician, talked to me the first time we saw each other, when I still couldn’t really speak French. Then I took his picture during his next concert and we connected.
I already owned (almost) every single album he had ever put out in the world but, due to my still limited level of French, I wasn’t able to tell him that, of all his albums, it was the very first one he published that I loved the most. The one that he made in his 20’s, when one is still crudely processing all the information and feelings the world discharges on us in heavy bucketfuls. 

Then, as I was driving to the concert, I thought:
What will he feel like seeing it?
Artists are particular with their first works. Most can’t bear to see their first stuff again, even those who loved it when they did it. What if it makes him upset? I have no possible way of knowing what this album means for him - the very first work he ever produced, before his career really took off.
What if he hates his first cd as much as I hate my first book?
He might not even have this at home anymore. Or maybe it’s been long enough that he’d find it endearing, like your children’s drawings that you keep in a closet and look at them again when they’re grown up. 

I decided I’d still do it.
At first, he was surprised that I asked him to sign a cd.
‘You don’t really need it, do you?’ he said. ‘We know each other!’
I thought of his name popping up in my contacts. It’s not an everyday occurrence that your favorite musician asks you to work together on a project and take his picture. He had invited me to go to that concert, I’ll put you on my invitées list, he said. I speak great French now. We did, by then, indeed know each other.

But, when I presented him the cd and he saw the green cover, his eyes lit up and he burst into laughter. He took it in his hands as he blasted out a putain!
‘I can’t believe you have this,’ he said as he turned it in his hands. It looked like he hadn’t seen the thing in ages. I was probably right in thinking he didn’t even have a copy at home.
‘It’s twenty years old, this thing, you know?’ He shook his head, eyebrows raised. ‘I couldn’t listen to it now.’
‘It’s still my favorite CD,’ I replied. ‘I still cry every time I listen to your waltz.’
He looked at it for a while, tenderly turning it in his hands. Putain, he whispered again, as he opened it to sign it with a smile. 

I couldn’t listen to it now, he had said. Just like I have a hard time leafing through my first book.

One very wise person once said that you need to get rid of your first book (or album) to finally write all the others. 

All artists struggle with having to come face to face with their first work. It’s the nature of constant evolving: the further down you walk the path, the more distant your point of beginning blurs behind the horizon. 
While this is definitely not true for everyone, sometimes, the only way to start is to accept that you might have to put immature work into the world - especially when you start young.
It is not only part of the process, but the only way to kickstart it. I feel like almost every one looks back at their first work and feel like it would need at least a little tweak.

I am now at a point in my career where I can look at my work and actually mostly like it.
It feels like me and I can celebrate it. It feels like me even when it’s not perfect, and honestly I don’t know if there’s a better feeling an artist can aspire to.
The ‘I feel like me’ thing is probably one that comes with age, though not in a bucketfuls, but rather in thinner or stronger trickles and streams as we work on growing (with) our things. 

I really don’t love my first book. It is, for starters, very difficult to look at those pictures now, ten years later. It also reminds me all the things I didn’t think of or know when I was writing a cookbook alone when I was 23: The way recipes must be structured, the fact that ingredients don’t match throughout countries (most of the recipes I made with Italian flours don’t translate well into American flours, for example), or the process of collecting + testing.

I had received a great offer by a great publisher, after my wonderful agent Berta spent months helping me put together a proposal, in a market that still had lots of space for Italian cookbooks and vegetarian/vegan sales were at an all time high. They somehow thought that a fully vegetarian Italian cookbook would have been a hit. Today, the style of the photos feels quite stale and, all in all, I am aware that the book did not, and will not age well. While I am happy with the recipes in the book, I’d fully re-make it if I could. 

One spread of photos from my proposal for my next book.

Instead of focusing on how I outgrew my first cookbook ever, I decided to get to work on a proposal for a second one, again with Berta’s help, who was enthusiastic about the idea. 
I was able to put together a proposal that I truly love. It’s beautiful, really. My proposal is effing great: from the idea and concept to the photos, I am sure I put together something that truly represents the true Italian culture and mood.
This was not, at all, the feeling I had while I was writing my first proposal. Being able to say that about your own work is really something, isn’t it? This finally felt like me. This, I thought, is truly something that I want the world to see.
So I presented it to my editor, after spending at least a full year curating it with my agent. 

It was turned down. Partly because the first book didn’t perform as well as they thought it would, and partly because times have changed and they now want someone with a larger Instagram following, or a larger mailing list.

I can, now, say things the way they are. I still think the problem with my book was my inexperience, but there is so much all the people I worked with failed to tell me.
Whether you’re preparing a proposal, contemplating writing an ebook, or just approaching the idea of publishing, I hope these series of things I would have told 23 year old me can get you through the process and have you skip stupid issues that can very easily be avoided.

Surround yourself with people who have done it or share a similar process. A lot of people came and still come to me asking for advice about writing their proposal or how to go about the process. I’m always happy to talk about it. The writing community is really nice, and people need each other’s support. Everyone worked better when we all used to collaborate in the early IG days. You need other artists and creators to really thrive. 

Get actual help from professionals. If you think you have a good project but are lacking photography/marketing/editing skills, get someone who will do it for you and factor their cost into your advance money. I know that keeping it all is tempting (because that’s what makes your pay, too), but once your book is out in the world, it’s out. Done. The publishing house will usually be responsible for graphics and editing, but that is not always the case. If there’s someone you trust, you can still tell the publisher you’d prefer working with them rather than their in-house person. 
Try to not get overly attached to the money. This will be more of a marketing stunt than a stand-alone way of making money.

Publicity will be a major point. Don’t skip it. This is something that not all publishing houses will be willing to take care of and something you should investigate immediately when talking to publishing houses. Creating a book means promoting it - you can’t just put it into the shelves and think it will do the work on its own by just existing. You might want to think of a book tour, maybe some pop-up dinners, cooking classes, maybe even a trip for people to explore the topic of your book in real life.
You might think that of course big editors will take care of this stuff, but they might be more likely to throw your book into the heap with the others, as they have so many books to deal with and will mostly focus on the big hits. This is why…

An editor who can invest less advance money but is committed to being more involved is your most valuable option. Even though books with heftier advances will get more attention from publishers, you need to see what a ‘big advance’ is par rapport to which editor. 50k for the biggest publishing house in the US is nothing, but might be an attention-worthy sum for a medium company.

When writing recipes, keep everything into factor. I still get messages from people asking me what flour works best with a certain recipe because I didn’t specify it, ovens are wildly different, and nothing can be taken for granted. You will need to specify things like ‘remove the seed from dates’. There are recipe writing courses out there, you might consider taking one.

Your agent, if you find/get one, should demand around 15% of your book income. My agent is amazing. She also agent-ed many other authors out there who published some very successful lifestyle/cook books and she’s been there throughout the process (have you had a look at Betty Liu’s new book??)

There are things you will not have a choice over. The title, to an extent, might be tweaked to suit commercial needs. The cover largely depends on the publishing country and style of the editor. This is where the philosophy of your editor comes into play: you might want to pursue editors whose work you really feel attuned to.

Take your time to grow into it. Bulding a proposal and, consequently, a book, needs to be a calling and might take several years. I put together my first proposal in a year and it was not nearly enough. I started working on my second proposal in 2020, the refusal came in 2023 and, after letting it rest for a full year, I still love it to bits but I am definitely aware that it needs a few tweaks before I can start the process of pursuing editors again.

Producing a paper thing is a legacy. It’s been years, and people still buy and use my book, and they tell me about it. I am extremely grateful for it. While you can always publish your work as an ebook, I still think there is much value in creating a physical item.
A book is a legacy for better and for worse: if you do rushed work, or add something you might regret, it’s forever there to look back at you. this proves the previous point.

Useful links - here is a set of links you might find helpful:
~ How to Write a Cookbook Proposal and Finding your Voice by my friend

Saghar Setareh

. I worked on the shooting of her book and that is one book I truly love.
~ Cookbook Proposal Guidelines by

Sally Ekus (she/her)

;
~ What Sells a Book? by

Kathleen Schmidt

~ Eva Kosmas Flores is the greatest teacher I’ve ever personally seen at work, and she has a series of courses up on her website. Check out this Cookbook Writing + Recipe Creation Guide.
~ Possibly my favorite Cookbook Proposal guide on 101 Cookbooks, complete with more links for further reading.

If you wrote about this topic and want to chip in, leave a link or mention in the comments!

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And now, here’s your biggest takeaway from the conversation I had with Cyrille, that made me think of this article in the first place. These words I mostly wrote for myself, but, if you’re an artist struggling with self doubt, or are in the process of producing what to you feels like a piece of major work (like a book), I hope they can be of some comfort to you as well. 

‘I changed a lot since then,’ said Cyrille, as he turned his cd in his hands. ‘Done other things. This is really something young.’
‘I know how you’d feel,’ I replied. ‘I love this album because it has that kind of raw feelings you only have when you’re 20. Twenty years later and someone still cries to it. Your work is mature now, but this has that sort of innocence that you inevitably lose when you’re older.’
‘Indeed it does.’
He closed the cd, looking at it tenderly one more time.
He smiled wide.
Putain, he whispered.

As I drove back, I thought again of what he told me. Of that ‘you don’t need my signature, right? We know each other!’ As if to say, you don’t need a reminder of me, because I am here with you. I am present in your life. We can write to each other and I’ll hug you if I see you. We know each other.
But do we? 
Sure, he talked to me that first time when I couldn’t even really speak French and we saw each other at concerts and now, because life is absolutely weird, we share some of the same friends, his band mate is my neighbor and we exchange conversations about making art.
But how deep can you get to know someone through their work?

Artists spread bits of their soul into the world, and then others can pick them up, and sometimes they’re great and sometimes they need work, but it’s always parts of their soul they spread around them, like in the fairytale where Gretel drops breadcrumbs on their way away from home, looking for something on a path hopefully traced well enough that they’ll be able to circle back to the start if they needed to, with everything they collected along the road. 
So I don’t just know Cyrille for what he is now, but I know all he sowed, all his crumbs, all his moods, his struggles, his growth. So that, from the first track he’s ever written to the last one, I can recognize him everywhere and surely, unmistakably say ‘damn, that’s clearly him playing’. And I know people can say the same about my photos.
Sometimes I wish I’d known him earlier, wish I had gotten to see his development, grow alongside him. But I don’t just know him now. I know all the versions of him that he was up until now, and I get to love all he is and was up until this point. I think that when you find a matching soul for your own, some form of art that you truly connect to, time becomes a bubble rather than a line, expanding into the past as much as into the next thing, with a feeling that resembles faith rather than expectation. Much as people who meet a partner or friend they truly love, or mothers who have a child, might feel like they already loved them well before they saw them for the first time.
He could, I am sure, see the same in my work.
So, in a way, yes, we know each other very well. 

This is the power of putting something out into the world. those who love your work will give you this kind of grace. And, no matter what kind of work you do, your biggest feat will be trying to give yourself the same kindness. Accepting that the amount of soul you breadcrumb into this world is needed to circle back towards yourself with stuff you collected along the way. Accepting that you’ll have to look yourself in the eye for every breadcrumb that you left, giving yourself grace for the ones that got scattered too far out and celebrating the fact that each one still led you to the next.
And, hopefully at some point, back to your own soul. 
Call it ‘finding your voice’ if you will.

I am extremely grateful that I got the chance to do it, even though I’m not in love with the final work. I am also extremely grateful to all the people who bought it, wrote to me enthusiastically about it, emailed me with questions, and keep cooking from it (a special shoutout goes to Danielle and Jessica and the super conversations we have!)
Getting to publish something yours is a huge accomplishment, big or small that your work might be. Ungrateful as this post might sound, I feel like some kind of blessing has been imparted on me when I got the chance to publish that first little thing and, most of all, grow into it afterwards.
Even though I needed to truly love somebody else’s first work to see what this all means. 

The countryside of the Haute-Garonne spread along the road, its pointy church towers and blue window shutters flashing beside me on my way back.
I still have so much to write about.
Putain, I whispered.

---

Post scriptum, 2 months later:

Now that we have a photo project together, shared a few beers and many many conversations, Cyrille and I talked intensely about this: our first work, how it makes us feel, how it serves us as the artists we are to day. He confirmed that he indeed went a bit ‘ew’ inside when I showed him the CD, and that yet he was so happy to see it. He asked wether I wouldn’t have felt the same if someone presented me with my frist book (as people still do). Now that we’re grown, we agreed, we can give some love to our baby selves, who were just trying their best. We said to each other that it’s okay, that we’re experienced enough to know what didn’t work, that we’ll always see something that doesn’t even though others don’t notice.
He re-did several of his first songs, and are even more incredible than the first versions I fell in love with. I wonder if I shouldn’t be doing the same with my old recipes.
’You know, there is a thing I made that I actually really like,’ he said. ‘That it finally feels like me. It has yet to come out. But I’d love you to hear it.’
And he made me listen to it. I cried.
’It’s the best thing you’ve done so far,’ I said.
’I agree.’ He smiled. ‘But we need to stop this business that you cry when you listen to my music.’