In an American economy uncertain of its footing, pundits and seers wrangle over what the future holds and even over the significance of today's events. However, although many prognosticators continue to sing the blues, most cookbook publishers and retailers are not among them.
James Connolly, publisher of Bay/Soma Books, says, "I think the cookbook market is as vital as ever, but still, we're doing fewer now." He echoes other participants in the genre who suggest that new cookbooks are not as numerous as in the past. "We're picking and choosing with more care," adds Connolly, "acquiring books with a fuller dimension, books like The American Boulangerie by [San Francisco baker and restaurateur] Pascal Rigo."
"I've always been pretty selective," says Susan Friedland, HarperCollins's executive editor, director of cookbook publishing. "We can't just keep throwing books out there. You want to buy books that actually contribute." She cites Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know by Raymond Sokolov as an exemplar.
"We try to be very selective," says Jennifer Josephy, executive editor, Broadway cookbooks. "We're mindful of the size of stores' cookbook sections, but we're not cutting back in any way." Coming in October is chef/restaurateur Pino Luongo's La Mia Cucina Toscana, a follow-up to Simply Tuscan, which has sold 53,000 copies for Doubleday since 2000.
Still, whether or not the cookbook population is declining or steady in real numbers, a significant batch of publishers are intently expanding their lines.
More = Better
"The fall is unusually large for us," remarks Stewart, Tabori & Chang publisher Leslie Stoker, reviewing 13 cookbooks on her list. "Of course, it's hard to find something new, but we do have one in The Duck Cookbook by Jim Peterson. There isn't another cookbook like it. I don't know that we'll have this many new books every season, but we will be growing, in part because cookbooks backlist so well." Virtually every publisher declares that the backlist is responsible for a generous percentage of revenues.
"This is our strongest cookbook list in some time," says Clarkson Potter editorial director Pam Krauss. "We've built the size of our entire list to 50—60 titles, and nearly half are about cooking. We've been doing well, too: all of our spring color cookbooks have gone back to press." Krauss expects similar responses to such fall releases as From My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients by Diana Kennedy and Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates.
Rux Martin, executive editor at Houghton Mifflin, reports, "We're having an amazing year. Even our high-end books are doing well, but this wouldn't be the first time that a down economy is good for cookbooks. People are staying home and cooking. Aquavit by Marcus Samuelsson is a big, beautiful book for dedicated home cooks. We priced it at $45, and we haven't met the price resistance we thought might be there." Martin anticipates a rousing reception for Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating at a lower price point ($19.95, cloth $30), a guide with recipes to choosing the best breads, olive oils and more.
"We've got a particularly large list this fall," says Paul Feldstein, Trafalgar Square managing director, "partially because we've added BBC books to our distributed lines. I expect that, going forward, we'll have even bigger lists. We're also cranking up cookbook promotions. The Savoy Cookbook, a joint venture with Pavilion, has a $50,000 advertising campaign, the biggest budget we've ever had by far."
"Good Housekeeping is such a known brand that its potential is enormous, but it hasn't been fully developed," reports Hearst Books publisher Jacqueline Deval. "When we ran Hearst Books by ourselves, we did about 30 titles at our peak. With Sterling licensing our magazine brand names, we're up to 65. For Good Housekeeping books, we're exploring a greater variety of subjects, pricings and formats. We've always done well with the $25 or $30 basic cookbook, but we didn't vary much from that model. Now we've hit upon a single subject, smaller book priced at $14.95." Good Housekeeping Blend It! launches the new look in September.
Instead of seeking less pricey titles, Harvard Common Press is going the other way. "We've radically changed our program in the last three or four years, and our fall list is as large as any we've ever had," says publisher Bruce Shaw. "Our traditional cookbook was 7¼"× 9¼", a 400-page paperback priced at $16.95. We realized that to reach a larger audience we had to broaden what we do, to publish books in different formats and different sizes. We started experimenting with four-colors in 2002, and now [the $27.95 hardcover] Around the Table has 215 four-color photos throughout." Shaw adds, "Our sales were up 20% in the last year."
Changes Are Afoot
Changing traditional approaches to attract a wider readership gains momentum at other publishers as well. "Our fall list represents a new direction with trade cookbooks," says Margot Schupf, executive editor, lifestyle books at Rodale. "The Metropolitan Bakery Cookbook is an example of a more standard trade title for us. We won't do chef-driven, complicated books, but this one comes from the premier bakery in Philadelphia. It's not an organic food, health-specific book as the recipes call for lots of butter, sugar and eggs. On the other hand, healthy cooking is the goal of Canyon Ranch Cooks," a four-color $29.95 book with 200 recipes by the health resort's chefs.
After acquiring Hungry Mind nearly two years ago, Wiley owns the mass-merchandised For Dummies and Betty Crocker lines, but even the Wiley cookbooks, known for their strong professional bent, are taking a turn toward the home cook. "Our cookbooks have been doing very well," says Natalie Chapman, Wiley's publisher, cooking and gardening. "We're doing better than plan, and this spring we had more IACP nominations and awards than any other publisher. Now we're expanding the ongoing program we have with the C.I.A. We're starting to do books that are clearly for the trade market. Cooking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America is aimed at the aspirational home cook—it's a means of learning from the professionals. People will also be able to learn from Paula Wolfert, the queen of Mediterranean cooking, whose next book is The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen."
First, Boil the Water...
This business of teaching, while long a component of serious cookbooks, is emerging stronger than ever this fall. "For any cookbook to succeed, it has to have a strong teaching element," says Clarkson Potter's Krauss. "It's really necessary because parents aren't teaching children to cook as they did in the past."
"In some ways, home cooks are diminishing in numbers," says Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor at Norton, whose Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers won this spring's James Beard cookbook of the year award (and has the words "cooking lessons" in its subtitle). "The cookbook buyers my books appeal to are those who really do like to cook or who cook as a hobby, people who will go to the trouble of making recipes that you think you couldn't do at home. I'm always looking to learn something new, even if it's about a familiar subject."
"I see an increasing interest among those people who are really, really active in cooking," says Nach Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York. "These are the people looking for new cuisines and tastes. I think cozy, cocooning cooking had its miniclimax a few years ago. About a third of our business is in imported books, due primarily to the fact that publishers abroad are more adventurous. There is more eagerness to explore what's new. We're active importers in both English and foreign languages. One of our top English sellers has been Good-Tempered Food, imaginative, high-level home cooking by Tamasin Day-Lewis. It has no color and we sell it at $55."
"The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard, who's Spago's pastry chef, is not a beauty book or a chef book. It's a teaching book," asserts Houghton Mifflin's Martin. "We're always committed to cookbooks," says Simon & Schuster senior editor Sydny Miner, "and one of our important books this spring is The Tante Marie's Cooking School Cookbook by Mary Risley. That really is a teaching book. It's like taking a course at Mary's cooking school in San Francisco."
Will Schwalbe, Hyperion's editor-in-chief, observes, "Cookbooks are very strong across the board. With our books by Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver, $35 books filled with color pictures, the sales are extraordinarily strong." Oliver's lead cookbook this fall is—guess what?—a teaching book. Jamie's Kitchen: A Cooking Course for Everyone is "technique-based," says Schwalbe. "Jamie takes 15 kids and teaches them how to cook. It's going to launch a Food Network marathon: six one-hour shows on consecutive nights in October." Hyperion's other lead cookbook is Flavor by Rocco Dispirito, chef/owner of New York's Union Pacific restaurant. The way for this book is being paved by a unique NBC reality program debuting this week. "That show, The Restaurant, chronicles the actual opening of his new restaurant," says Schwalbe. "One of the interesting things about both Jamie's and Rocco's books is that as TV gets more excited about food, more opportunities arise to do shows that don't merely put the cook behind the island where the cooking takes place."
Television, we all know, has sold cookbooks vigorously ever since Julia Child burst upon the scene. With PBS, QVC and the Food Network proving that cookbook authors can become celebrities, it helps now more than ever to have a media presence. Bill LeBlond, editorial director of Chronicle's cookbooks, relates what happened when Michel Nischan, author of Taste: Pure and Simple, appeared with Oprah Winfrey. "We were going to release the book in August," he says, "but he was booked for the June 23 show. We learned just the week before, so we released the book on June 19. After Oprah said this could be her new favorite cookbook, it shot up to number two on Amazon.com, with only Harry Potter outselling it. We originally printed 20,000, and within days we had to go back to press twice."
Gerald Davis, cookbook buyer at The Tattered Cover in Denver, saw a decided spike of interest in Taste: Pure and Simple post-Oprah and, he says, that book promoter extraordinaire had a similar effect on Conscious Cuisine, from Sourcebooks. "You do need a—unfortunate word—platform," says Harriet Bell, editorial director at William Morrow cookbooks. "I see books from regional bakeries and inns, and while they're lovely, we just wouldn't be able to sell enough copies to make it happen." It's not, she adds, for lack of effort. "The one theme of all our fall titles is a promotional commitment for each of them. There's From Emeril's Kitchens—he's doing a 15-city tour and we've got licensing deals with Fetzer, B&G Foods, All-Clad cookware. Tom Douglas [Tom's Big Dinners] is going on a 12-city tour. His Seattle Kitchen has more than 50,000 in print, and we want to break him out to a wider audience. The [Perennial] reprint of Joanne Harris's novel Coastliners will have an accompanying reading group guide, which will include recipes from her September cookbook, My French Kitchen. We're bringing Donna Hay in from Australia to make appearances." Hay's next book is Modern Classics Book 2, set for October, and Morrow is re-releasing four of Hay's backlist titles a month before. All five are $24.95 trade paperbacks. "We're being price-sensitive," says Bell.
Cost-Conscious Cooks
Price matters, says Nach Waxman: "I'm watching people watch their pocketbooks. For the first time, people are looking at a nice book and asking, 'Do you have it used?' "
Then again, sometimes price doesn't seem to matter. Ellen Rose, owner of Cook's Library in L.A., tells PW, "We haven't felt the effects of the soft economy. We have $175 and $200 books that we import, and we've got waiting lists for them. We've developed a large Spanish shelf and order huge numbers of books from Spain."
"We don't have any $50 books on our fall list," says Artisan publisher Ann Bramson, "but $50 books can sell. The French Laundry Cookbook just went into its 16th printing and has 236,000 in print. This fall we're doing something of a departure with GranitaMagic by Nadia Roden. We think there will be an impulse-buying quality to this [$15] book. We priced Kitchen of Light by Andreas Viestad at $35, and because it's Scandinavian food, I thought sales would be an uphill battle. However, we've already gone back to press. One thing we have started to do is put some of our expensive hardcovers into paper when price seems an issue. We've done it with Essentials of Cooking, Seductions of Rice and in September, A New Way to Cook, all 756 pages of it." This lowers the $35 and $40 books to $24.95, "and we can get them into places such as Costco that we couldn't before," says Bramson.
"We advanced the full print run of Foods of Naples by Giuliano Bugialli, which is a $50 book, but we're also planning nonillustrated trade paperback original titles," says ST&C's Stoker. "These will have graphic appeal, but they'll be books that are playful and fun and don't need our full four-color treatment." The house, incidentally, did produce its first four-color catalogue of front- and backlist cookbooks this fall.
Keep It Simple, Simon
If price is, or is not, an issue, what about contents? "Simplicity sells," says HM's Martin. "There's a continuing trend toward books that give great results with recipes that have just a few excellent ingredients or a simple, well-honed technique." These ingredients no longer need to be prepared from scratch. An eye-opening batch of new titles exploit upscale convenience foods available from several purveyors of quality goods. (See sidebar, p. 24). "I think Rotisserie Chickens to the Rescue! [from Hyperion] is just a brilliant book," says Ellen Rose. "Quick and easy cookbooks like those by Rachel Ray [30 Minute Meals 2, Lake Isle Press] are really popular," says Tattered Cover's Davis.
"Our series of four-step cookbooks are for cooks like me who lose interest after a recipe's fourth step," says Sterling CEO Charles Nurnberg. "I wouldn't do gourmet or chef cookbooks at Sterling. Our Good Housekeeping books are for more serious cooks, and the books we do with Food & Wine are for gourmet-aspiring cooks."
"Simplicity is key these days," says Krauss at Clarkson Potter. "People are not really interested in investing time in very demanding recipes." She sees Ming Tsai's next book, Simply Ming, as "the next step in the evolution of that trend. He tells how to create convenience foods by making 25 flavor bases when you have the time."
Simplicity is a word with a range of meanings. The definition for some is the slow cooker. "Who would have thought that people would start digging out their crockpots?" asks 10 Speed's publisher Kirsty Melville, who is publishing The Gourmet Slow Cooker by Lynn Alley in October, a book that joins many others utilizing that homey appliance. "We just published a book that got a lot of attention," says Running Press publisher Buz Teacher. "It's The Easy-Bake Oven Gourmet cookbook by David Hoffman. That's the toy oven, a Hasbro product, that a lot of people started out with. People like Bobby Flay, Mark Bittman and Mary Sue Milliken contributed recipes." These well-known figures helped the book win publicity on Today, CNN and elsewhere. Teacher volunteers what can happen if a publisher doesn't have a personality who can sell books. "We entered into a partnership with James Beard's estate to republish his classic books," he says. "We felt there would be a core audience, but we had no spokesperson. A lot of people didn't know much about James Beard, and the books didn't do well. That shows how publicity-driven cookbooks are. For our Palm Restaurant Cookbook, we're going to have a party in every city where there's a Palm Restaurant. That's more than 20 cities."
Toques Redux?
While restaurant and chef books continue to serve as mainstays on many publishers' lists, the toque may not be standing quite as tall these days. "We have fewer chef books on our list," says Artisan's Bramson. "I'm more reluctant to take on a chef's cookbook," says Chronicle's Bill LeBlond. "They tend to be expensive and, in down times, celebrity chefs are less a sure thing. The one niche that doesn't make me nervous is Italian. That's the one area that I never worry about being overpublished." New to Chronicle's list this fall is Veneto by Julia della Croce.
Nach Waxman says, on the other hand, "Italian cookbooks have definitely flattened out." "I'm not seeing as many Italian cookbooks," says Morrow's Bell. "I don't have any Italian books on my list," says Norton's Guarnaschelli. Demonstrating how far Italian has morphed into something utterly domestic, Peter Reinhart presents American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza from 10 Speed. "American Pie is text-driven and not illustrated as most of our books are," says Melville at Ten Speed. "So many cookbooks are published with color now that it's hard to make one stand out."
"Asian cooking is very, very strong," notes Waxman. "We even have a little Malaysian section now." Feldstein at Trafalgar Square reports that Thai books have found their audience. "Thai Food by David Thompson, which won a James Beard award for international cuisine, might not have sold a couple of years ago," says Melville. "It's a big reference book with hundreds of recipes, and people do want to delve deeply into food they're interested in." Guarnaschelli mentions this month's Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop, a collection of personally gathered Sichuan recipes.
"We need more books on Central and South America," says Ellen Rose, "and Ecuador, Argentina, Peru." "Cookbooks on Mexico and the Southwest sell well here," says Tattered Cover's Davis. "I think the war in Iraq has affected French cookbooks."
"We publish books on 70 different cuisines," says Anne McBride, editor-in-chief at Hippocrene Books, "and we're adding 15 more next year. I believe we have the only Icelandic cookbook and the only Haitian cookbook in English. The Latin-American books are the most popular. We want to introduce cuisines to a vast audience, so we price books accordingly, hardcovers at $24.95, because $40 might be too much to spend on, say, a Burmese cookbook."
Low-carb cookbooks continue apace, says John Duff, publisher of HP and Perigee Books. "That's a trend that shows no signs of letting up. Sales of health-oriented books are very solid and perhaps even gaining over last year. We're not breaking new ground here. We're deepening what we already do."
Vegetarian books are important on Duff's lists, and at Cook's Library, Rose notes the local triumph of vegan cookbooks. "When I opened the store 14 years ago, I think I had two vegan titles. Now we've got two packed shelves."
Summing up the prevailing attitude about the genre, Shaw of Harvard Common Press observes, "The world of cookbooks is a very safe harbor these days." Krauss at Clarkson Potter adds, "There's always room for a good new cookbook." And how does an editor find it? "You can't let conventional wisdom stand in your way," says Artisan's Bramson. "If you do, you'll never do anything fresh."
