British Inquiry

Time does fly when one is having fun. Much progress has been made since the last entry. The writer’s bibles, “Writer’s Handbook” and the “Writer’s and Artists Year Book” have been put to good use.

Based on these two reference books, I called all of the British publishers that indicated an interest in food titles to find out how their proposal submission process works. There were very few who indicated an “agents only” submissions process, Hodder Headline and Dorling Kindersley being two of these.

I identified nine mid-sized UK publishers or imprints who indicated an interest in food related titles. British publishing is a professional business! Phones get answered within rings by a person! I spoke with the person to whom I submitted my proposal in the majority of cases.

For the larger publishers about half accepted submissions via email – two replied in less than two weeks with thoughtful declining notes. They included suggestions regarding other potentially interesting publishers and specific imprints within the larger publishers. Imprints do have specific mandates for their business but being a little smaller, they may have more degrees of freedom regarding the type of material they consider. I will call to follow up this week on two other email submissions. There are also two hard copy submissions that I will leave for another couple of weeks.

I identified ten smaller publishers who have a potential interest in food related titles. Five of these publishers accepted an electronic submission. Two wrote back immediately to thank me for the proposal, to say that they have a Spanish food title on the way for this year. This is a good sign! A third considered the proposal and within two weeks wrote to suggested that it was not quite a fit for their list. This week I will follow up with the remaining electronic proposals. There is hard copy proposal that will take a little bit more time.

Throughout this process I continue to look for indications regarding how the book is being seen by editors. Comments have suggested that the writing and subject are interesting and of publishable quality. In one case, ananalogy was made between the book’s structure and that of a recipe, with each chapter forming part of the overall recipe. Elsewhere it was suggested that the book is more akin to a best selling health title (as opposed to food) – such as French Women Don’t Get Fat.

I find myself hesitating before sending the proposal to two very well respected British cookbook publishers – Grub Street Press – whose mission includes helping people enjoy food and eat better, and Kyle Cathie - the prestigious publishers of glossy cookbooks, presumably for those who buy a lot of cookbooks. Can Slim Spaniards find a place in such publishers, if in my humble opinion it is produced as an intimate book for people who are:

- Worried about the place of food in their lives
- Interested about Spain because of the way people live and eat there.
- Willing to go onto the internet to find inspiring pictures of the recipes they want to try

Grub Street has set a visionary mandate for itself – to change the way people eat. Perhaps they would be interested in the fact that whereas in the UK, forty percent of household spending on food is for prepared food (imagine more than the grocery cart filled with plastic and high gloss cardboard), in Spain the figure is less than one tenth the UK's at three percent (imagine a shopping cart with one item of prepared food very occasionally). Maybe this week, I will screw up my courage and send the editor of Grub Street a proposal.

Throughout all this I am waiting on replies from two very large North American publishers. Both acknowledged the submission very quickly and have yet to reply definitely. As the optimist one has to be to be undertaking this process, I take this delay as a good sign.

I hear through friends that the Spanish Ambassador continues to ask about Slim Spaniards. I would love to be able to call with good news soon. We could have a bash and invite Pepito.

Music's up!

I know, I know, that took a long time. Apologies for taking way too long to get an MP3 file uploaded onto the site. I am sorry about this but am all the more pleased by the fact that “Colombiana” one of my favourite songs is now available for you to click on and listen to. The lyrics will be up in Spanish and English in the coming days for anyone who wants to read along while they are listening.

www.slimspaniards.com/index.php/pages/the-smoked-paprika-cafe

No news yet from my proposals but I will keep the blog readers posted as soon as I hear anything. It is a slow process as one would expect.

I will be rotating the quotations on the homepage of www.slimspaniards.com . Have a look today for a new review. If have a view on the book that you would like to share, please sent it along to me and it will be posted as well without reference to your name.

If you have been thinking of making truffles for your beloved, try rolling them in a combination of 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder with ½ teaspoon of hot Spanish Pimentón or Cayenne Pepper. The effect is wonderful, I tried it last night.

That is all for now. Happy Valentines!

The Business of Publishing

My best self is almost back so I am celebrating with an entry to this blog!

A wonderful person at a large publishing company has become a coach – she has taken the time to read my proposal and to provide fast and extremely helpful feedback. I met her through another wonderful woman who generously took the time to dig up contact details and send them to me. Through this chain of generosity, I have arrived at a place where my proposal to a larger publisher is quite solid.

The proposal contains material that you would expect to find in a document destined to convince someone to invest in a project of this type:

- An analysis of the market including factors that will work in favour of the book
- An analysis of the risks presented by the project including plans to address these risks
- A proposed go to market strategy that describes how publishing the book in the US and the UK would be connect to publishing the book in Spain and elsewhere in Europe
- A brief on why I am the best person to write this book
- An analysis of the manuscript – what is written and what remains to be written
- A sample of the prose – I included Chapters 6 and 4. I decided to include chapter 6 first because I believe it is the best example of a personal narrative that is highlighted by more general references. I included chapter 4 because it contains such interesting historical references that I believe reinforce the timelessness of the book overall
- A sample of recipes

The coach who has helped me make the proposal just that much better, made one important suggestion. She recommended the inclusion of quotes from people who have read the manuscript to date. I made this addition and feel that the proposal has a lively and engaging quality that will result in progress either with this publisher or another for whom this project may be a better fit.

This progress makes up for the proposal that I sent out in December and for whom I have received zero feedback despite countless attempts to engage in the most brief of conversations. I understand the editor I am trying to speak with is very busy with a thesaurus. Perhaps this would not have been the best place for me.

The key is to have confidence and to keep digging. Who knows, maybe the Spring will be when I get to speak to an editor.

In the mean time, I continue to lay the ground work for the process of reconstructing the book into the Six Times a Day structure. I have identified eight heading under which to classify the 30,000 or so words of prose. These are:

1. Spain: General society
2. Spain: Medieval history and Modern History
3. Spain: Twentieth Century history
4. Nutrition and health
5. Eating principles
6. Ingredient profiles
7. Personal anecdotes: poignant
8. Personal anecdotes: funny

My objective is to reconsider this prose as material to frame the personal narrative based on a day and the six eating occasions.

Today I created a new section on the web site called The Smoked Paprika Café. I started to upload MP3 files of my father-in-law singing but ran into a technical glitch with my web software. Hopefully that will be solved later today. Apologies for the long delay in getting this done.

Thank you for reading this blog, and as always, if the spirit moves you, let me know what you think.

Erratum

The "squid went skidding" of the counter top as I prepared it for my father-in-law’s medieval recipe.

Spaniards elect healthy and hearty "mid-morning breakfast smacks"…or rather snacks.

These are but two of the many errors that have been found during the detailed copy editing process that is underway for Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day.

Jane and Paulette are lovingly going through the manuscript and the website and fixing hundreds of those little things that I seem incapable of seeing.

At the same time, I used the past 5 weeks to think hard about Slim Spaniards and to reconsider its structure entirely. The current framework for the book is thematic based on my experiences and observations of life in Spain and then backed up with both anecdotes and research.

This structure is functional – in that it helps to organize the information, but I have felt for some time that it made it difficult for me to integrate the personal and funny elements that I believe are tremendously important to reader’s experience of this book.

If you have been reading previous entries to this blog and have had a look at www.slimspaniards.com, you know that this book is not being written as a cookbook but rather as a cross between food anthropology and a family food biography, which also contains recipes.

After much thought, I will soon embark on the process of restructuring the book so that its content (narrative, recipes etc...) flows through the course of a day.

I will use the "six times a day" as a way to introduce the people such my family and friends and with them, introduce recipes, songs and funny stories.

From this microcosm, I will bring in both supporting and dissenting views from Spanish society and from history both recent and much less so.

I am excited about this new way forward, and feel it will enable me to make the book a more intimate and engaging experience for the reader.

My hope is that the reader will enjoy feeling that through food we connect to others at many levels.

Through reconsidering the place of food in our lives, we connected one family in North America and Spain and to Spanish society more generally.

Through ways we may never have imagined, we connected to others through hundreds of years of history, religion and again through food.

This feeling of connection is what I most seek to accomplish.

In future entry to this blog, I will touch on why making these connections is so important to me in a world of podcasting and customization of so much of the media we interact with.

For now I will say, that during many years traveling constantly for my work, I craved this feeling of connection.

---------


On an entirely different note, I must also let you know that over the past number of weeks, a number of stumbling blocks have made it very difficult for me to continue writing work on Slim Spaniards.

These difficulties have also forced me to stop communicating through this blog. I am saddened by this. It is plain to me, that none of this work can be done unless with “my best self”.

Hopefully, I will have “my best self” back very soon and will move from thinking intensely about this project, to sitting down and writing.

Again, thanks for reading. If the spirit moves you, do let me know what you think.

The Singular Importance of Design

This week the tremendous importance of design was confirmed once again. Malcolm Gladwell is right about Blink.

Some weeks ago I met with a book designer who kindly gave me some of his time to speak about publishing in Canada. I brought one of the Slim Spaniards cards to offer him. The card contains words that describe the book and that explain that I am looking to publish this book in a number of countries. The card is in the form of a post-card. It contains the book’s logo – a Miro-esque woman, who appears to be dancing and whose form would suggest she enjoys the pleasures of life.

I handed this post-card to the Book Designer, who turned it around, looking at it from side to side and who then very generously offered an introduction to a respected Canadian publisher with whom he has worked for a number of years. He had not read any writing from the book but said in an understated way – “Everything about this card is very nice”. He then encouraged me to make my way in the process of finding a publisher myself without looking for an agent – suggesting that I would be much happier this way.

This week, my husband met a high ranking government official and handed him the same post-card. In an instant, the official promised support for the book and its launch in ways that I could not have hoped or imagined. The official looked at the card and its design, and was inspired to make a tremendously generous offer on the basis of what the book promised from the card's design.

So today I want to thank the tremendously talented people who have been associated with Slim Spaniards’s design.

My cousin Alex Bak and his partner in life Laura Payne took time out from an extremely busy life as proprietors of www.spacefurniture.ca to conceive of and create the book’s logo - the
Miro-esque lady who graces the web site.

Gabriel Abrudan of www.thewire.ca designed www.slimspaniards.com. She chose the font, designed the “swoosh” at the top and bottom of the page and gave the website is playful and upbeat look and feel.

Christian Hanson-Kearn senior student at the Ontario College of Art, took the logo and the website’s font and created a wonderful post-card – 5000 of which were printed and half of which have been given to people in small numbers. The card is not perfect because of an oversight on my part in the French text – but with such great design, that hardly matters.

Thank you also to the two women who introduced me to these talented designers: Sarah Morgenstern of www.savvymom.ca and Cathy Richards of www.wellnessfoods.ca.


A postscript about music on the website.

The website will soon have its 1000th visitor. This boggles my mind – the website has only been fully functional for 6 weeks. So as a celebration of this milestone, I am going to put aside my “techno-peasant” hat, and figure out how to load up onto the website a recorded track of my father-in-law singing one of my favorite flamenco songs. Some time ago, we locked him up in a top-notch recording studio and he sang a number of flamenco songs. He could have been a professional singer, but the stars never aligned to make that happen. Perhaps he will have a career late in life like some of the Cuban legands.

It may be a while before I figure out how to make the song downloadable but that might be next.

The Next Wave of Writing

“Markets For This Book” was updated today. It is now shorter and more focused. It makes more sense and is easier to read. So that was today’s bit of housekeeping. It feels like the thinking around the book is now more focused, the writing about why the book should be published is tighter. This is good. I now need to develop a contact list of potential publishers in the UK. The Writer’s Handbook (UK) and The Writer’s Market (US) are on their way – I should have ordered these some time ago but such is life.

I think it is time to go back to the book. The website is current if not perfect. The marketing materials are more solid than they were two weeks ago. “About The Book” now feels right. “Markets for This Book” is also improved. The Business Case for the book is in good shape. The web site’s traffic is steady and is trending to hitting 1000 visitors soon enough. The current manuscript is being copy edited.

If writing the book is 30% of the work and selling it is 70% of the work – it certainly feels like I have put in the requisite 70% over the last month.

So can I now turn my attention to the book itself? As though I needed to ask someone for permission!

Most of my writing efforts to date have been building up the parts of the book. These parts include narrative to explain both the particular and the general, anecdotes to illustrate what is remarkable, flamenco poetry and song to add richness, character development and description to bring humanity, historical descriptions to explain deep connections, recipes to illustrate how it all comes down to the people and what they choose to eat. Eventually there will be photography (at least some of which will be from photo essays I taken on very the years) and funny caricature drawing.

It now feels time to take these many pieces and set them next to each other in a way that really shows each of them in their most exquisite light. Some pieces should be placed next to others for harmony, others for contrast.

Deciding how to do this is my next task.

I am still thinking of the conversation I had with The Cheese Maker. She suggested that the book could be sold with a small CD of my father-in-law singing flamenco. I haven’t said this to him yet but I know he would love it. When I booked the recording studio for him some time ago, there was much complaining about his voice not being in shape but in the end, the rest of us were done in before he was. The idea of his voice making its way into many people’s homes would make him glow with pleasure.

Ode to the Cheese Maker

My goodness two posts in one day! It feels like there is flow today.

A wonderful woman who spent years in publishing took time out of her start-up crazy day to offer some ideas and advice.

She confirmed, there is no need to allow this book be squished into the "cookbook" category. Culinary Anthropology is the hottest trend. There are plenty of pages filled with pictures and recipes, so there is no need for this book to be added to that class.

We talked about this book being a Family Culinary Autobiography. This makes a good deal of sense to me. The early readers of the book have all commented about the fact that they love the personal stories, the introductions to people such as my in-laws, children and husband. I love writing these parts of the book. They are the warm, genuine and funny parts.

Now that I have done the research and that I know that my Spanish family is not an anachronism, but is typical of Spanish families in its dedication to food as a core principle of life, it feels absolutely right to tell their story in the context of the larger Spanish story about food.

So I have added an About The Book section to the web site. I have taken away the table of contents that felt way too much like a cookbook. Here is the new section added in About The Book. Thanks to the Entrepreneurial Cheese Maker for her tremendous help. You can see her wonderful work at www.fifthtown.ca

Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day invites the reader to be immersed in the culinary traditions of a Spanish home. There is a place in the living room for the reader to eavesdrop on both the gentle flamenco singing and the arguing about food preparation in the kitchen. There is a place at the table for the reader to see the table plainly set, to hear the chairs scraping the floor, to feel the fierce and brief silence when everyone lifts a spoon or fork and begins to eat the main meal of the day mid-afternoon. There is a place in the kitchen for the reader to taste the food by preparing the family and traditional recipes, some of which appear only slightly varied in a 13th century Moorish cookbook. Be warned though; this is not a romantic tale of landed gentry who don costumes to dance flamenco after lunch in the worst of the mid-day heat.

This is the story of a family from the poorest part of Andalusia who moved to a home with indoor plumbing in the 70’s, whose living depended for 40 years on Antonio as the captain of an inshore fishing boat to catch fish in the Mediterranean, and Maria’s wages as a cleaner. It is the story of a family who very nearly had to emigrate to work in the German factories but who somehow managed to hang on and stay. Through this family we learn that in Spain, food eaten at home, where it comes from and how it is prepared is the bedrock of dignity every day.

In Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day, Celine Bak with her husband Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez set out a family culinary autobiography. They take this personal point of departure to write a food anthropology of Spain. She is a North American business person who has worked internationally. He is a professor of Spanish Twentieth Century History who has come from Andalusia to North American academia. Celine explains what she sees by looking at underlying statistics about economics, health and household spending. She takes this information and with Antonio sets it in the rich context of the 3,000 years of history on Iberian Peninsula, of the Franco dictatorship and the last 27 years of democracy.

Spanish food is fashionable; there is a reason for that. It is fabulous. But that does not change the relationship between Spaniards and the singular place of food in their lives. Food comes only second to family for Spaniards be they richer, poorer, educated or less so. Readers of Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day will be all the richer when they read just why nothing comes between Spaniards and the time and care they dedicate to food and to their family.

Publishers are returning my calls!

The phone isn’t ringing off the hook yet but publishers ARE returning my calls

Things are going well. Publishers are returning my calls. Editors are replying to my emails. So why do I feel a sense of dread.

I feel that I am steeling myself should the publishers’ answers not be the one I am hoping for. Out on this limb of would-be writers, I’m not sure I am as equipped I would like to be regardless of my years of experience consulting to global Fortune 50 companies and then working in smaller software ventures who succeeded in prosecuting their global plans.

It is by definition lonely on this limb. That I now understand is the writer’s lot. Glory and acclaim with success, and anonymity and bitterness with failure. And of course the indignity of having to depend on other’s for the means of production to make and distribute these little parcels of thoughts and words.

I can’t remember when I last felt quite so exposed. After all, it is my name that sits on the rejected manuscript. Where I come from in business, particularly in start up businesses, there is plenty of opportunity to take chances and to make mistakes (there I go again sounding like Miss Frizzle) but when it is failure that strikes; it is lived by more than one person and it can be a surprisingly uplifting experience.

When bad news comes in, there is an awful feeling that sits in the stomach, and things get achingly still. But soon after, things swing into action once more. With failure (even the worst kind – failing to attain a conservative forecast) comes the responsibility of making sure the team’s confidence and ability are not compromised by this bump on the road. So for a leader, a time of failure is when a leader’s talent is most put to the test. It is ironically, when a good leader can feel most capable and competent because getting the team refocused and inspired can be harder to do than making sure that the team delivers according to plan when the customer says yes. The obvious exception to this is when a company is just starting out and everyone is still figuring out what their job is!


The good news is the publisher has agreed to review the manuscript excerpts. This means that the business case was meaningful. What scares me to death is that if the answer is no, it is because regardless of the business case, the writing is not compelling enough to inspire the general public to buy a book. This would mean that although I can recognize a market for a book, I would be better off finding someone else to actually write the words. Which I suppose is an option.

I stepped a little farther out on the limb last week when I wrote to a number of people who write for a living and whose writing I enjoy. I sent them a note to thank them for their writing and to ask them, if the spirit moved them, to have a look at what I have written. I sent along a small gift, some Spanish Smoked Paprika as well as a recipe. So far no one has written to complain, so that’s a start!

Even though I feel quite naked out here on the limb of would-be authors, it is important to remember that there is a team working on this project. Most are all volunteers. All of them have put more of themselves into this project than I could have imagined or hoped. Perhaps I need to think about what happens to us all if next week, I get a call from a publisher that says that this book is not for them.

But then again, they may say yes and all heck breaks out then!