Available for Pre-Orders on Amazon.com

I almost forgot the most exciting news of the day!

I went to Amazon.com to order something and as I do occasionally, I checked in to see how Soup was doing. What came up? A listing for the Passover book! It's now available for pre-orders on Amazon - click!

This is getting exciting.

I think I'll go work on some edits and get that book done.

What's in a name? Brand recognition for one . . .

A while back I put out a call for names for the Passover cookbook. There were lots of great suggestions and my advisory team (mom and dad plus friends on Facebook ad Twitter) and I debated titles for weeks. We were looking for humour, for creativity, and for the best descriptions; we let each title stand alone, then we tried mixing and matching. There were a few finalists. And then, finally, we realized that we were over-thinking it.

We finally decided on: Passover - A Kosher Collection.

It's simple and to the point. Hopefully it will let those who enjoyed Soup - A Kosher Collection know that this book is from the same author. And finally, when I started writing Soup, I hoped that it would be the first in a series. I planned on Salads, Mains, Desserts, etc. -- all with "A Kosher Collection" attached. Passover deviated from the plan. It wasn't a course. But I realized it didn't have to be a course -- this holiday book is still a kosher collection.

I would like to thank everybody who contributed suggestions. They were all appreciated and given consideration before we realized we shouldn't fix what wasn't broken.

Editing and Pictures

Over the last few weeks I've spent all my free time editing and working on photos. I mean all my free time -- plus a lot of time at work, where I've been hiding out in my office trying to get stuff done.

I keep telling myself that I just have to get this one section done, then I'll have some free time. Ha! What I meant is that I have to get this section done so I can get to the next one.

Anyway . . . I decided to take the pictures myself for this book. By myself, I mean with the help of my mother and sister. Lisa (the sister) helped by building the 'studio' for me. We got some lumber and a roll of backdrop paper, and ended up with this 'photo studio'.



It worked well, and while I cooked and cooked and cooked, Mom and Lisa took turns as stylists/photographers (though I couldn't help but take a couple of pictures of each dish myself -- can we say control freak?). Every Sunday for a month or so, I'd prep 6-8 recipes and we'd snap dozens of pictures.

There will be 16 colour pages in the book (for those of you who have Soup, it will be the same) and we took over 1200 pictures. Do you know how long it takes to go through 1200 pictures? A long time. But I've eliminated close to 1000, and now I'm trying to choose the best out of the ones that are left.

The pictures are getting done in between editing the book. So far I've had three people (and me) editing and proofing. We're on edit #4 now, and we keep finding things to change. We're in the middle of this round, and I think it will take just one more. I hope.

Next up: formatting.

The next step . . . and measurment problems.

It's been a busy month. The holidays kept coming and there wasn't much time to work on the book. Holiday season starts a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashana and (this year) ended with Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday. Each weekend was another holiday and it kept us hopping at the store.

Between holidays, I managed to squeak out enough time to finish testing all of the recipes. I even put everything together in a (really large) Word file. So we've moved on to the next step. Right now I have a couple of family members reading through the book doing a basic edit -- the first of many. I'm spending my time working on some formatting and photos.

I'm trying to work out what to do with the formatting. When my first book was published I sent in the manuscript for the first round of edits and got a note back that all of the weight measurements needed to be converted to volumes. It's not uncommon for North American publishers to say no to weights and insist on volumes -- in fact, there's a great discussion topic on this subject over at the eG Forums (click). You'll see that many of the posts on this topic are strongly pro weight measurements.

Some of the arguments publishers give for going with volume are that most home cooks don't have scales in their kitchens and that the North American public doesn't want weights. I'd say the truth about what the public wants lies somewhere in the middle. Many cooks like to use weights because the results are more consistent. Many home cooks use volume. So I'm trying to include both.

The next question is metric vs. Imperial measurements. I plan on including both. The question is how do you include all of that information in a way that's still easy to read and understand? It's a lot of numbers to include for each ingredient and I'm trying to figure out the best way to present it.

Do you have a preference?

What's in a name? Help name my book!

I'm not yet done writing my Passover cookbook, but with self-publishing comes a whole bunch of tasks that I didn't have to worry about with the first book. I need to get an ISBN number, get it registered with certain sites and libraries and take a look at how I'm going to distribute it or get it sold.

As I look through guides that my printer sent and try to navigate Amazon's Advantage program (it allows self-published authors to list their books), I'm beginning to realize that I have to figure out what I'm going to call this one. When I talk about it, I call it 'the Passover (or Pesach) cookbook'. Not very catchy.

I've gone through a long list of titles, but nothing really seems right. This book has a real mix of traditional Ashkenazi recipes and what I would call non-traditional recipes. So "Passover Recipes From My Bubbe's Table" isn't an option; nor is "New Age Passover Cooking".

So what I'm going to do is ask you to come up with some suggestions. Send me a title (or several) via email, a comment here, on twitter @pamreiss or Facebook. When I've chosen a title, the person who came up with it will get my gratitude and a copy of the book when it's printed.

Shana tova u'metukah!

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks because we've been swamped at work. When I'm not working on my cookbook, I work in the family business. For the last two weeks it's been non-stop -- helping customers do their holiday shopping and then preparing food for hundreds.

With only a couple of orders left to be picked up and a few more to be delivered, I just wanted to take a moment to wish everybody a happy, healthy, peaceful, prosperous and sweet new year. I hope 5770 turns out to be a wonderful year for all.

Shabbat shalom and shana tova,

Pam

Cooking, Tweeting and the CBC

In April, I signed up with Twitter. As a soon-to-be self-published-writer, I thought that I had to take advantage of any and all marketing tools. Especially the free ones. I've since made some interesting connections and no longer think of it as just a marketing tool. But, it is a good one.

As I cook my way through the recipes for the upcoming Passover book, I tweet about it. Just little notes (under 140 characters) letting people know what I'm working on. Sometimes I'll ask for some input (ie: Matzo Balls - Floaters or Sinkers?), sometimes I'll complain about a failed attempt (ie: today there was a power failure while I was baking a pie crust -- the oven and timer timer shut off -- will have to try that one again.)

My account is set up so that whatever I tweet then gets posted on Facebook as my new status. So an interesting thing happened last week. I got a phone call from a CBC radio producer that I know and she asked me if I'd talk about my summer of cooking on the radio. She's been reading my cooking updates all summer and thought it would be a good segment. Sounds a little like some other blog/movie that's been getting a lot of press about a writer cooking her way through a book.

I've done a bit of radio and TV since my first book came out. And I feel more comfortable doing it now, but there's still a bit of nerves each time. I think I overcompensate by talking a mile-a-minute. Have you ever listened to an interview and been annoyed because the interviewee didn't answer a direct question? I have. But then I realized that when I do these interviews, I just ramble so much that by the time I'm done answering the question I have no idea of what the question actually was.

I don't fully know what I said during the interview -- but vaguely recall that I talked about my books and cooking. My mother was happy that something I said made the interviewer laugh. Many people who heard the segment contacted me to tell me they enjoyed it. So in the end, we decided it was a success.

Newspaper reviews . .

Not for the book. This morning I woke up to find a nice write-up about our business in the Winnipeg Free Press. You can read it here. No time to get any book work done today - the phone won't stop ringing.

Shabbat shalom!

Running out of time . . .

I've been working frantically to finish recipe testing. I'm at the point where I think I'm done with new recipes -- though if something strikes me, I'll have to give it a try. Now I'm going through my files and re-testing recipes I've developed over the last 3-4 years.

It's interesting to see what I was doing back then. A couple of recipes were eliminated immediately after reading, a few were eliminated after trying. A few of them were gems. But even some of the gems needed a little tweaking and they all need good editing. I just spent an hour going through all of the recipes I tagged "Passover" and I have 30-35 recipes to cook through over then next couple of weeks.

The rush is because Rosh Hashanah will be here soon. I know most people won't give it much thought for a couple of weeks, but I've got to be ahead of the game. My real job involves a lot of sourcing and ordering for our store. I spend hours going through product lists, on the internet looking for suppliers and on the phone trying to find out what is or isn't available.

This year, for instance, I've been having a hard time finding Israeli honey. None of the kosher food suppliers that I use have any on their lists. It's not imperative that the honey be from Israel, but I like to have a selection of honeys available and the Israel part is a nice bonus. (An assortment of honeys is a nice gift to take if you're going to dinner for R.H.) So it took 2 days, but I think I found a source - not a food supplier but a Judaica company.

It's not just about the honey. I spend a lot of time working on meat orders with my dad (he's our meat department), guessing how many briskets and turkeys (and chickens and lamb, etc) we'll sell out of the store and how many we'll need for the prepared food part of the business. Then we need to put together an order form for prepared foods and somebody had to do an ad for the newspaper. And finally, I make sure the store is stocked with all of the essentials our customers might need for the holiday (kasha, noodles for kugel, yortzeit and Shabbat candles, etc).

So that's all taken care of. Our first big order arrived late Friday and now we spend a couple of weeks getting more orders in and taking orders from customers. Before you know it, we'll all have to be in the store helping customers and in the kitchen prepping food.

And that's where the urgency is coming from. For the book to be ready to print in January, the recipes should be finished before Rosh Hashana. By finished, I mean tested and typed (hopefully). There will still be a lot to do after the recipes are done, so I'm giving myself a RH deadline. Besides, it's kind of nice to think that the testing work will be done by the new year. The question is, will it?

Supurfluous U's and Different Names

I'm Canadian. I'm telling you this because the target market for kosher cookbooks would be the USA, not Canada.

When I wrote the first draft of my first book, I didn't give a lot of thought to my spelling. If it was spelled correctly, that's what mattered. I also used names for produce that I have always used. It didn't even occur to me that this would be an issue. So when the US rights to my book were bought by an American publisher, it surprised me when I got a request to do a major edit of the whole book before it went to press.

See, there were a number of things that were fine for my Canadian editor, but for the American public, they had to be changed. At first I questioned the request. I thought then, and continue to think, that Americans wouldn't have a problem with an extra u in flavour or colour. But then I realized that if that little issue would make it a 'better' book for my target market, it wasn't too much to ask for. Just time on my part.

With the spelling changed and dozens of u's deleted, we moved on to food names. The first one to go was "English cucumber". Nope, it had to be "long seedless cucumber". "Roma tomato" needed to be "plum tomato". Etc. Now I find myself asking questions like "do more people say green onions or scallions?". A little poll I took today was no help. The respondents were almost split in half.

So what do you do when you're writing a book? Do you do what is natural for you and correct or do you tailor the book for another country (which is also correct -- but different)? And how do you decide what to do when there's no clear answer?

Next question to ponder: Metric or Imperial? Probably both.