After the pitch, the sale, the offer, the writing, photography, recipe testing and editing, there is still more work to be done. The book is completed, but it’s not a success until it sells. That’s where marketing and promotions come into play. Timberlake and the team at Ten Speed got to work, essentially pitching the book to the sales team, so that they could pitch it to booksellers who could in turn, sell it to consumers.
One of the bigger surprises for most cookbook authors is that the publisher has the final say in picking the book’s title and cover. That said, publishers want their authors to be happy about the end result, so are motivated to collaborate with them. For a book like this, where the authors had very strong opinions about every detail, especially design, it had to be a group decision.
In the end, the title decision was a fairly easy one; they went with what the Fat Rice team proposed in the beginning.
Once the manuscript was in draft form, and the photography was completed, it was time for Plikaitis to pull all the various elements together and design the book, and do it well. She wanted the book to be as important design-wise as it was food-wise.
“There was this New York Times article about how graphic novels were becoming the new cookbooks, so that was in our favor,” she says. “I wanted it to be this thing you want on your coffee table, so it had to have beautiful design.”
Back in Chicago, they had to focus on recipe testing and photographing the food. As most chefs know, even in the (unlikely) case that you have recipes written down, they probably aren’t ready for prime time. Even when they are cleaned up, they aren’t ready. Restaurant recipes are in proportions too large for the home cook, they don’t include much if any information on the method and assume you know how to cook at a pretty high level. Even if they have a lot of detail, they don’t have the kind of detail a home cook requires.
The apprehension they felt was justified. There is a lot more to putting a book together than just selling a publisher on the idea. They had to figure out how long the book would be, the schedule for when they would turn in various drafts of the book, what the resulting book would cost ($35 is the norm for hardcover restaurant cookbooks, Timberlake says) and a million other details, not the least of which was the book’s design.
The cover of The Adventures of Fat Rice is not a food porn-y image of a dish that has been styled within an inch of its life. It’s a drawing of a giant fire-breathing chilli clam emerging from the sea to attack the city of Macau, on whose beachfront sits a small rooster (aka the galo)—looking as alarmed as anyone would at the prospect of death-by-chilli-clam. It’s a comic book cover that vibes a lot more skater than serious chef-historian, and that’s not by accident: Conlon and Lo don’t take themselves too seriously.
