Ann Bramson Great Expectations
Assessing today's market for cookbooks, Artisan Books publisher Ann Bramson observes, "There are progressively more informed and mature cookbook buyers out there, and their expectations are higher than ever. They're looking for books by authors who are, I don't want to say spiritual, but who are somewhat reflective, because what's important to these people is the act of sitting down and sharing meals with friends and family. That desire has become more potent as people get older. I'm not ignoring the younger audience coming up, but there is a larger baby boomer audience."
The ongoing plethora of chef cookbooks prompts her to add, "I don't think the chef aspect of a book is as important as the author's knowledge and experience. It's the access to the informed years and experience of those who know." In fact, despite the fact that the author of A Return to Cooking (Nov.) is Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of New York's four-star Le Bernardin, she says, "This is the antithesis of a restaurant cookbook because it has nothing to do with the restaurant. The more Eric became a chef, the less he was a cook. This book is a journey of going back, of reconnecting with the fire. He pays respect to ingredients and homage to the people who influenced him."
Similarly, she notes, The Anatomy of a Dish (Nov.) by Diane Forley is "a collection of recipes that look at food through a botanical prism. She has a more observant and cerebral way of looking at what you eat and at the connectedness of things. Beets, Swiss chard and quinoa are all in the same family. So are horseradish, Brussels sprouts and kale. What comes into season first? There is an extra layer of information in these books."
Much has been made of a slow economy, but Bramson expresses few worries, even for higher ticket releases. "If you do something magical, people will find it," she says. "We haven't found the market to be a problem, although it does get harder to advance books in quantity because of the policy of reordering as needed."
Reordering does, however, supply ample proof of cookbook viability. "About a third to a half of Artisan's list is food. We usually do two books a season," Bramson says. "But cookbooks are the most powerful part of Artisan's backlist." As an example of its vitality, she points to The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller, named the IACP Book of the Year upon its 1999 publication. A new printing takes the $50 work to 201,000 copies in print.
Artisan's books commonly issue a strong visual statement with their physical presence. The French Laundry Cookbook is an unusual 11¼" x 11¼". Last year's Recipes from Home by David Page and Barbara Shinn is 5¾" wide, 10½" tall, and has a spine nearly 2" thick. "They would be simple to produce if every book looked alike," says Bramson, "but we try to find each one's voice, while intriguing and doable recipes are a given."
In conclusion, Bramson says, "The definitive books on single subjects will continue to recur. There will always be another big book on vegetables, for example. Comprehensiveness is good, but I do think that people primarily want to return to a simpler kind of cooking. In the '80s and into the '90s, we cooked much too ambitiously. The meaning of preparing food is changing for us as we get older. We earlier found our confidence in the kitchen, and now there's less need to be showy. What we want is to be together."—Robert Dahlin
John Duff Staying Under $20
When it comes to trends, "all of us are trying to guess what people want," says John Duff, publisher of Perigee and HP Books, part of the Berkley Publishing Group. "For the most part, the cookbook program tends not to publish into 'what's hot and what's not' fads, since we try to appeal to a broad general market. The trends may influence down the line, but I don't jump on them. Frankly, I take my cues from the authors in the trenches."
One of the authors Duff singles out is Joanna Lund, whose heartland-oriented cookbooks have sold more than three million copies over the past decade. Lund began publishing and dieting in earnest, losing close to 130 pounds, after she sent her third child off to serve in the Gulf War. "She didn't want them to have to worry about her back home," says Duff, who finds that Lund's commonsense approach to cooking—"If it takes longer to cook it than eat it, then forget it"—appeals to busy city folks, as well. "Lund's recipes all have to pass the test of her truck-driving husband, Cliff," explains Duff. "Men won't eat diet 'slop,' Cliff's word. And all the ingredients have to be available from your local supermarket, which in Lund's case is in DeWitt, Iowa."
For Duff, one of the biggest changes in cookbooks has come about because of the variety of foods and spices now stocked in grocery stores. "What I see as a trend," he says, "is that supermarkets have specialty items and organics and kosher and Mexican sections in the smallest towns. A lot of the major food companies are diversifying and marketing under other names more exotic or natural products. That enables us to do more things." In Cooking Healthy with a Man in Mind (Perigee, June), for example, Lund mixes longtime favorites, such as He-Man's Gravy and Biscuits and Ham Lasagna Toss, with more ethnic recipes like Mexican Cheese Soup.
Of course, part of Lund's appeal and that of heartland cook Jyl Steinback, author of Cook Once, Eat for a Week (Perigee, Jan.), who, like Lund, published her early cookbooks herself, is a reliance on mashed potatoes, gravy and other comfort foods. "Food trendies are just starting to discover comfort food. Lund and Steinback are part of the underground that sprung out of the community cookbook or Junior League school," Duff tells PW. "People cook from them because the recipes are real, and they're made by real people. The anecdotal information is often as appealing as the recipes themselves."
Given that HP and Perigee publish into the low end of the cookbook market, "price is a consideration," says Duff. Even so, HP has begun doing more comb-bound books, which adds as much as two or three dollars to the cost of a regular paperback. "It's the binding of choice for self-published authors," says Duff. "Our customers know that the comb-bound book is better. The perceived value is that this is how I want my cookbook. There will always be a market for the $35-on-up titles. We try to stay under $20." —Judith Rosen
Jennifer Josephy 86 the Chef Books
"People are getting more realistic about what they want to do in cooking," says Jennifer Josephy, executive editor of cookbooks at Broadway Books. "What's not hot are chef books, in terms of restaurant recipes. That's a category where we certainly are not looking to expand." First of all, she explains, "they're expensive and they're in the top end of the market—the area that's naturally been most affected by the economy. Also, there's the sheer inaccessibility of those recipes—the daunting quality of having multiple elements going into a dish, with very time-consuming recipes that people aren't interested in making at home."
So what is today's cookbook buyer looking for? "Chef's recipes that they can make at home—those are the kinds of books that we're doing, and that we're looking to do more of in the future." Josephy has high hopes for a book out last month, Deborah Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets. "There's been a tremendous amount of interest in it," Josephy reports. "Farmers' markets are such a growing part of the national food landscape. People really love going to them, getting organic food and food that they know is really fresh. There are about 3,000 farmers' markets in the U.S., says Josephy, "and Deborah visited 100—it's a huge trend."
Besides, adds the editor, "The low-fat books are on the wane. People know they have to use olive oil to be healthy, and people know they have to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and they want to eat ones that aren't sprayed, so I think Deborah's book is really well-timed."
It's important, Josephy believes, to publish a variety of cookbook styles. "We're not trying to limit ourselves in any way. We're trying to cast a wide net and do all different kinds of things." She notes that currently Broadway is represented by Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood; a lemon cookbook, Lemon Zest; and Mark Bittman's Minimalist series. Coming in October, she adds, is Sara Moulton Cooks at Home, a book she says "is going to have a very broad appeal and really strike the right nerve. Home, family—nothing too exotic that you can't do fairly easily—that, in general, is what people are looking for."
Josephy doesn't feel that Broadway is trying to carve out a specific niche in the cookbook genre. "You really couldn't put any of the books I just mentioned in any one category. The idea is to appeal to a broad audience." In general, Josephy calls cookbook publishing "a very resilient category. I think overall it's held up very well because it's an area that is almost a necessity for people. Everyone has to put food on the table, and they're always looking for new ways to do that." —Hilary S. Kayle
Dianne M. Cutillo No Big, Beautiful Titles
Even in the face of a weakened economy, Dianne M. Cutillo, cooking acquisitions editor for Storey Publishing, remains positive: "Storey will remain strong as long as we stay true to what we're good at." Of course, the North Adams, Mass., publisher inhabits a niche that tends to flourish during times of economic uncertainty. The six to eight cooking titles Storey publishes annually (out of 38 to 40 titles total) focus on self-sufficiency. As a result, "We tend to benefit from a weaker economy," Cutillo admits. For example, she posits that when earnings are depressed, placing expensive gourmet cheeses out of reach of many consumers, readers are more likely to purchase titles such as Ricki Carroll's Cheesemaking Made Easy (100,000 copies sold since 1982) and make their own cheeses at home.
Self-sufficiency also strikes a chord with today's consumers because it allows them to determine the healthfulness of what they are eating. "If there's a trend that stands out today, it's that people want to be in control of their food and its wholesomeness," says Cutillo, citing the 63% growth in farmers' markets between 1994 and 2000, the more than 1,000 community-supported agriculture farms in the U.S. and the increasing popularity of home vegetable gardening. Storey finds anecdotal support for such statistics in the information it gleans from the postage-paid "We Love Your Thoughts" cards bound into each book.
Storey aims to help readers make use of all that produce, whether it's home-grown or purchased elsewhere, with single-subject cookbooks such as this year's Corn by Olwen Woodier. The first printing will be 15,000 copies, and Storey hopes eventually to repeat the success that it's had with The Classic Zucchini Cookbook—500,000 copies sold since 1977.
Four Storey techniques titles will be published in updated editions this year: The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest; A Guide to Canning, Freezing, Curing and Smoking Meat, Fish and Game; Home Cheese Making; and Home Sausage Making. Preserving the Harvest has been updated by well-known author and former Country Living magazine food editor Joanne Lamb Hayes (original author Carol W. Costenbader is deceased) and this new edition will have a printing of 15,000 copies, with 64,000 copies of the first edition already in print. This will be the third edition of A Guide to Canning, Freezing, Curing and Smoking, and the prior two editions have sold more than 100,000 copies.
Workman has distributed Storey books since 1999, and through a recently developed special sales force Storey innovatively makes use of other outlets in addition to traditional booksellers, including large chains such as Home Depot and Lowe's.
This year, the Good Cook Book Club, part of the Book of the Month Club, has selected five Storey titles, a source of great satisfaction for Cutillo, although she doesn't foresee Storey budging from its well-established niche. The house has no plans to expand the number of titles it offers, nor does it intend to seek a different audience. "We're never going to be one of the major cookbook players up there with the large houses that do big, beautiful cookbooks," says Cutillo. "Our strength is in garden centers and tractor stores and places like that."—Natalie Danford
Will Schwalbe Butter Is Better
Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe isn't overly concerned about cookbook publishing vis-à-vis today's softened economy. "They're doing very nicely," he reports. "People are staying home and eating with their families as opposed to eating every meal in a restaurant." Also, cookbooks become an attractive gift, he adds, "because even a relatively expensive cookbook is more affordable than most things in a boutique."
According to Schwalbe, the strength of cookbook publishing can be seen in the range of books that are succeeding. "There seems to be strength across the market," he tells PW. The fact that a wide variety of titles is selling, he says, is an excellent indicator of a strong genre. "It's exciting because it means you can have success with books for very different markets and very different purposes."
Cookbooks authored by well-known culinary personalities are doing especially well, asserts Schwalbe. He mentions two October Hyperion titles—Nigella Bites from well-known Brit Nigella Lawson, who stars on the Style Network, and Happy Days with the Naked Chef by bestselling author and Food Network personality Jamie Oliver—as potential bestsellers for the house. Authors, he says, "get popular from TV exposure and usually their books are highly illustrated and buyers have a strong affection for and identity with these people."
Schwalbe points out books from famous restaurateurs and those about foods from different regions of the world as other examples of types that are selling. However, there is one exception, he notes. "It's proving very difficult to get Americans to cook Asian or fusion food at home. I don't know why, because I think people love to eat it, but it's been more difficult than I'd like. It's a shame because I think it's some of the most exciting food out there."
With families eating home more, Schwalbe says, "there are some great books to solve the daily problem of what to make for dinner. It's a classic and I see it working well. Most nights of the week, people want to throw something together at home and they need ideas." He adds that Laura Karr's The Can Opener Gourmet, due in September, fits nicely into this help-at-home category; Hyperion has already received advance orders for 90,000 copies.
Schwalbe believes that one of the newer ideas in cookbooks follows, not surprisingly, the healthy eating trends of today. "The idea is no longer weight loss. It's not taking every single recipe, trying to do it without butter and pretending it tastes good," he says. "It's more sophisticated. It's showing people healthy food that isn't a compromise." One example of this trend is Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café, due in September. The Moosewood Cookbook author centers her latest book on ways for people to add protein to their daily diets without adding a lot of meat.
"I see more strength in the genre than I have in previous years," says Schwalbe. "When the economy recovers, I don't see it dipping either. I think it will hold its place and continue to do well." —Michael Archer
Jennifer Darling The Brand's the Thing
When it comes to cookbooks, which account for about 20% of its titles, Meredith Books focuses on a single brand: the Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks. These include both the general Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and more tightly focused titles such as Better Homes and Gardens 500 Five Ingredient Recipes. "We're always looking for opportunities to add brands to our portfolio," says Jennifer Darling, executive editor for food and crafts, "but for now our cookbooks are primarily that one brand."
The books are conceived in a unique way. With a staff of five food editors and two registered dietitians, recipe development is handled in-house, and recipes are tested in the Better Homes and Gardens test kitchen. "We have people develop a concept on paper and then we run it through our test kitchen to make sure it meets our standards of quality," explains Darling.
Meredith has taken some steps to deal with the softened economy, although Darling, who has worked at Meredith for 18 years, cautions against overestimating the recent downturn. "Books don't always feel a huge impact from trouble in advertising," she says, "and cookbook sales remain the same for us. They certainly haven't been any different in performance from our other categories, such as shelter, do-it-yourself, gardening and crafts."
Meredith has, however, shifted the price points for its cookbooks so that now the list is heavily weighted with books under $20, whereas prior to this year it featured an even mix of books above and below that price. "Even before September 11," Darling tells PW, "we had seen evidence that consumers were more interested in cookbooks under $20, so we changed our publishing plan to reflect that." And while the economy undeniably slowed overall last fall, Darling believes that the same subjects that have been popular in recent years continue to thrive. "For four to five years we've found, as has our competition, that diet and weight loss are strong, and grilling keeps coming around every year, seasonally," she reports.
In September, Meredith will publish the 12th edition (and third under Darling) of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. While the familiar red-and-white-checkered cover will remain in place, the contents continue to evolve to reflect not only the growing interest in health, but also trends such as the popularity of crock-pot cooking, with an entire chapter now devoted to it. Recipes (more than 1,200 total, 900 of them new) are accompanied by diabetic exchanges and symbols indicating nonfat and low-fat recipes.
Some dishes, however, have been plumped up. "In testing every recipe and evaluating them, we found that after three years of looking to streamline and make things healthier, we'd lost a lot of what makes comfort foods comforting—the flavor," says Darling. "We put some salt back in and some butter back in. By no means were we doing this willy-nilly, but when a dish needed the flavor boost, we decided to go for it." First-print numbers for a cookbook that has sold 34 million copies since it was first published in 1930 are predictably enormous: 750,000 ring-bound copies and 250,000 paperbacks.
—Natalie Danford
James Connolly Global's the Way to Go
It's refreshing when a publisher compliments his competitors. According to James Connolly, publisher of Bay/SOMA Books in San Francisco, the variety and excellence of the cookbooks issued in the last year or so meet a sterling standard. That said, he thinks "there are a lot of people hungering for a different approach," which he tries to provide in his cookbook line.
Connolly's success with two genre specialties defines his ideas about what's going to be hot. The marriage of low-carb recipes that can be made quickly was an idea proposed to him by Linda Gassenheimer. Her Low-Carb Meals in Minutes was doing well but not spectacularly until she appeared on the Sarah Moulton show on the Food Network. "The book flew out the window," he says, citing the kind of synthesis that makes the cookbook market healthy. Rights were sold in the U.K., Australia and Norway, a rarity for the small press. Riding the rising tide, SOMA is issuing a sequel, More Low-Carb Meals in Minutes, in December.
Meanwhile, Connolly feels that the market is especially receptive to books with ethnic cuisine. Because SOMA's home base is San Francisco ("and what city is more ethnic, except maybe New York?") he's in a good place to discover local cooks like Chris and Carolyn Caldicott, whose World Food Café provides the recipes for their eponymous cookbook. Though people are eating out more, they're also getting acquainted with new cuisines that they'd like to try at home, Connolly feels. Hence his conviction that "global" is the way to go.
Such companions to TV shows as Jacques Pépin's Kitchen will also continue to do well, he feels.
His biggest challenge in a soft economy is getting the chains to carry enough copies of his books. PGW does a great job for small publishers, he says, "but you're constantly fighting the midlist battle with bookstore managers." His sales in the current economy "vary from title to title." Last year's Spice Routes: Chronicles and Recipes from Around the World, by the Caldicotts, didn't fulfill expectations. "It's all about timing. I think we were ahead of the market on that one," he says.
Connolly's own expectations for the market focus on specialization—"You can't just have a book on salmon or chicken." Cookbooks that do well, he predicts, will be those for people who are looking "a little deeper" at a particular cuisine. "And it's all about covers, too; they really have to grab you," Connolly says. —Sybil Steinberg
Harriet Bell Finicky About Food?
The best news about today's cookbook market, reports Harriet Bell, editorial director of William Morrow cookbooks, is the increasing and diverse number of outlets now selling cookbooks of all shapes, formats and ethnicities. But markets, like people, she adds, can be finicky about their food.
According to Bell, "Retailers want authors with a great track record; big names with big publicity plans and national television exposure." One author who fits this bill perfectly is Martin Yan, whose Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking will be hitting the stores in November, just in time for the debut of Martin Yan's Chinatown, a 26-part PBS series. In addition, says Bell, specialty gourmet shops, such as the Central Market stores in Texas, want books whose authors are available for personal appearances and cooking classes. Discount chains, she adds, "want series, three or more books with the same format, topic or author."
As far as topics go, Bell definitely sees a return of interest in French cooking. November's French Food at Home: Fairly Fast, Slightly Slower is a first cookbook from Laura Calder, who Bell believes is "an exceptional new talent who makes French food truly accessible." And while there are rumors of the demise of single-subject cookbooks, Bell reports that Morrow's Ultimate series by Bruce Weinstein(The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, ...Shrimp Book, etc.) "is doing incredibly well." Despite these positive prognostications, Bell does see two categories for which the future may not be as bright. "I think it would be very hard to do another Italian cookbook—the market is saturated with so many good ones. And baking is difficult unless it's someone very well-known."
One of Morrow's newest chefs, Australian Donna Hay, was a hit with U.S. photographers before she was even a blip on the radar screens of American cooks or publishers. "In 2000," Bell recalls, "almost every photographer's studio I went into had her books. Food stylists were crazy about her and the 'Australian look'—that it's okay to have sauce dripping down the side of a bowl, that everything doesn't have to be absolutely perfect." When HarperCollins Australia asked Bell if she'd be interested in co-publishing Hay, the answer was a resounding yes. Off the Shelf sold 50,000 copies in 2001 and Bell has no doubt that Modern Classics I, due in November, will be as big a hit.
While trends may come and go, Bell says that there is one irreplaceable ingredient for success in this category: "authors who are authorities in their field; top-notch writers with recipes that make you want to run home and start cooking." And as Bell knows all too well, you never know where you might discover that next superstar author. In 1991, she was judging a pie-baking contest in New Orleans. A local chef named Emeril had been invited to do an empanada demo. The rest, as they say...
Like most publishers, Bell saw an upswing in cookbook sales late last fall as Americans made plans to stay home and cook for the holidays. "For those who had never cooked a turkey or baked a pumpkin pie before, cookbook purchases were a real necessity. And I can't remember a time when I shared more recipes or recommended more cookbooks." —Lucinda Dyer
Maria Guarnaschelli Yes, Chicago Has a Market!
Norton senior editor Maria Guarnaschelli is especially excited about the climate surrounding today's cookbook market—as she puts it, "America has discovered food."
Brought on board two years ago to help make Norton a major player in the cookbook field, Guarnaschelli is the guiding force behind such enduring modern classics as The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum and The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper. Reflecting on the state of this category today, she turns first to the past.
"When Julia's first book came out in 1961, nobody knew what a quiche was," she says. And change came slowly at first. "When I started editing cookbooks in 1980, you couldn't get anything but packaged ricotta in the stores. People looked at you funny if you asked for fresh."
Over the past two decades, however, Guarnaschelli says she's witnessed a radical shift in attitudes, something she attributes largely to the fact that travel and the whole subject of food have become, in her words, "not an impulse or an occasional diversion, but an essential part of American life." Through travel, for instance, "you discover things you never would have discovered at home. Perhaps you go to Thailand and visit a market, then wonder, 'Does Chicago have a market?' And it does!"
Too, when Guarnaschelli began her publishing career, she says it wasn't that common to hear people talk about food or even spend that much time in restaurants. "Kids today go out to restaurants in high school and college," she notes. "Going out to eat is part of the scene, and people spend a considerable portion of their income on dining out. Young professionals who work on Wall Street or who are aspiring orthodontists watch the Food Network, they travel and they go to restaurants. We are finally beginning to learn about food in this country, about the pleasures of conversation and wine."
This awakening doesn't surprise Guarnaschelli, who quips that after all, as French culinary legend Joel Robuchon once said, food is "the promise of short-term happiness three times a day."
Nor has a soft economy dampened this trend. "You hear that people don't have jobs, but then you go to these restaurants and you can't get in," she says. Guarnaschelli has also witnessed numerous changes within the publishing industry, from the fact that the cookbook market has become "ferociously competitive" to the elevation of food writing to an art form. She points to such superstars as Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl ("a dazzling presence") and ascendant newcomers Matt and Ted Lee, the Charleston, S.C., natives whose The Lee Bros. Cookbook Guarnaschelli just won in a spirited auction.
All of these trends are "very good for cookbooks," and for Guarnaschelli, who is just launching her first list. "I hope the gods are still with me," she quips, noting that many of the titles she edited at Morrow and Scribner are still in print in hardcover. "I'm hoping to establish an enduring library of cookbooks at Norton that will teach serious cooks what they need to know. So much is happening in terms of technique and ingredients and places to discover, and I try to keep aware of all these new things. People don't want homogenized life in the mall. We have such a vast array of ingredients available to us, and such an influx of ethnic cultures—it's a very exciting time." —Heather Vogel Frederick
Click here to see "Dinner Is Served!", a listing of cooking titles published through December.
