Cookbook Update: Four Months Until Launch

For this week’s Five Ingredient Friday, I’m giving an update of what is happening with my cookbook titled Fast & Easy Five-Ingredient Recipes: A Cookbook for Busy People, which is available for pre-sale on Amazon, Barns & Noble and IndieBound!!!

Right now is crunch time for me behind the scenes, so I thought I’d share a cookbook update: four months until launch! It’s happening! OMG, it’s really happening! Someone pinch me, because it is all still so surreal (but not so surreal with all the work that’s involved).

Writing this amazing cookbook isn’t something that I just wished up and happened over night. This has been hours/days/months/years in the works. Here’s a little timeline of how my book came to be:

• October 2014: I came out with an ecookbook for my newsletter centered around five-ingredient recipes. Received amazing feedback.
• November 2014: made the decision to put out an ecookbook that would be available for sale.
• December 2014: was contacted by an assistant editor about being the author of a print cookbook, because of the holidays we decided to touch base in the new year.
• January 2015: tried following up with the assistant editor who presented her ideas, which I declined (not a good fit and I didn’t want to write someone else’s book), pitched my idea to her instead. Assistant editor was very interested in my idea and said she’d get back to me.
• February 2015: tried following up with the assistant editor and with no got so response. I decided I wanted to self-publish and announced via this instagram that I was working on a cookbook behind the scenes.
• March 2015: early March I did a little photoshoot with my bff Lynn at a retreat we were on together for the cookbook since we don’t live in the same city, I was moving full steam ahead.
• March 2015: late March after radio silence for months, assistant-editor writes me a super weird email asking what the status of the manuscript is. Considering we had never even spoken on the phone, had no contract or had had zero communication since January, you can imagine how weird the whole situation was. Decided to tell them I had moved on to other projects (dodged a huge bullet there).
• April 2015: was busy writing the outline for the book that was going to be called Five Ingredient Fridays with Friends and Family (each chapter was going to have 5-five-ingredient recipes revolving around a friend/family).
• May-August 2015: took photos of recipes, did recipe testing, set up photoshoots with friends and family (here is peak into one that didn’t make it into the final cookbook) and was busy putting together the ebook, I had a goal of publishing by Sept 1, 2015 and was done with all the recipes. I could not seem to wrap up the project though, something was stopping me.
• September 2015: was contacted by an editor/publisher who asked if I was interested in having a conversation about getting a publisher on board for my book. Thought she was joking, but after having an awesome phone conversation realized it was real! Put together a book proposal for review (I’m over-simplifying this a lot, this part took a while, but since I had an entire ebook almost complete it was a lot easier than starting from scratch and took a month versus months.)
• October 2015: signed a contract for a cookbook! We structured the cookbook to have chapters and came up with the recipe list. The cover was designed and approved, and the cookbook was announced and was available for presale!
• October-December 2015: feverishly worked on finishing recipes and photographing everything and writing the manuscript. Manuscript was turned in December 26!
• January 2016: manuscript edited by editor and revisions done by yours truly (editor mentioned my overzealous use of exclamation points!!!! <- love them!)
• February 2016: manuscript edited by copy editor and sent for revisions by yours truly (this entails answering lots of questions and and feeling like your grammar suuuucks lol)
• March 2016: first draft of cookbook design (pictures and text laid out) sent to me for editing, I’m super old school and like seeing how it all looks on paper so I printed it out and had it bound and am now editing it!! That is where I’m at right now – editing editing editing. Oh, and something super cool is that a blad (book layout and design) was created – it’s a small promotional booklet version of my book in rough draft form that is distributed to possible interested media (know anyone in the media? I’m all ears and am so appreciative of any promotional help, if you have any ideas or feedback email me at sweetphiblog@gmail.com)

So if you need me in the next few weeks, you will most likely find me editing, and in need of a lot of coffee (you can follow along the #sweetphicookbook hashtag on instagram!) This is all so exciting, THANK YOU (I’m talking to you amazing reader) for all your feedback and support, none of this would be possible without you!