Over the past three years, Quarto Publishing Group, USA has focused on growing its cookbook list. In 2012, it had 35 food and cooking titles, many on what were then considered niche subjects like vegan cooking and low-sodium food. Today, the press has tripled the number of titles on its list to more than 100.
Quarto v-p, marketing director Amy Yodanis said that Quarto has also broadened its list with books like Michelle Cordero’s recently released Jelly Shots (Race Point), as well as series like Kids Cook French (Quarry Books) by Claudine Pépin, illustrated by her chef father, Jacques Pepin. And it launched a new initiative, This Is Your Cookbook, to allow consumers to produce and print high-quality hardcover cookbooks with their own or favorite Quarto recipes.
The ability to let consumers create personalized cookbooks that can be delivered in a week via This Is Your Cookbook could be one of the press’s biggest cookbook game changers. The website for the program recently launched in the U.K., and will launch in the U.S. this fall.
“Everyone has a few cookbooks that they turn to again and again. But every cookbook also has recipes you don’t want and never use. This is Your Cookbook disrupts what we think of as a cookbook and creates something truly useful,” said Quarto CEO Marcus Leaver.
Website users can draw from a database of 3,000 Quarto recipes or upload their own recipes and photos to create a 96-page perfect-bound hardcover with a matte laminated cover. “It’s going to look more like the cookbook you would buy from Quarto,” said Yodanis, who emphasized the fact that users will be able to mix their own content with Quarto’s to have the book they want.
While Quarto imprints Fair Winds Press and Quarry Books, which publishes the Pépin series, have long published cookbooks, other imprints have only recently started a cookbook program. Among those is three-year-old Race Point Publishing, which will publish Sally’s Candy Addiction by food blogger Sally McKenney later this month. “Race Point cookbooks have a unique author voice, expert advice, and easy-to-follow recipes for people who love to cook and entertain, but don’t always have hours to spend in the kitchen,” said v-p and publisher Jeff McLaughlin.
Older imprints, like 38-year-old Voyageur Press in Minneapolis, have also added cookbooks. Two Voyageur spring 2015 releases that are off to a strong start are Bryan and Angela King’s 12 Bones Smokehouse, which is in its four printing, and The CSA Cookbook by Linda Ly, the blogger behind gardenbetty.com, which sold out its first printing. This fall, the press has high hopes for several cooking titles, including Bread by Mother Earth News (Oct.), the first cookbook in several decades from the sustainable living magazine.
Two of Quarto’s U.K. client lines, Jacqui Small and Frances Lincoln, are contributing to the press’s cookbook boom as well. The former specializes in books on emerging trends like Vicki Edgson and Adam Palmer’s Gut Gastronomy, published in January this year, and Edgson and Heather Thomas’s Broths (Jan. 2016). Frances Lincoln publishes books by international chefs like this spring’s paperback edition of Alain Passard’s The Art of Cooking with Vegetables or the newly released A Year in Cheese by Leo Guarneri and Alex Guarneri, the team behind the London artisan cheese shop Androuet.
