Live from Cookbook Week
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What is Cookbook Week and why was this live episode recorded?
We're nearly ready to launch season ten of Everything Cookbooks, but before we do, we wanted to share a very special live conversation recorded in April at Civic Kitchen in San Francisco. Welcome to Everything Cookbooks, the podcast for writers, readers, and cooks. I'm Kate Leahy, and I am so excited to share this episode with publisher Jenny Wapner and book packager Leslie Jonath. The event was part of Cookbook Week, which was a festival celebrating cookbooks for a whole week all throughout the city. You might know Brian Hogan Stewart from his popular podcast, Salt and Spine. He's a former guest of Everything Cookbooks as well. He joined up with Jodi Leano and Leslie Jonath to launch Cookbook Week, and we're really hoping it becomes an annual event.
Leslie comes up a lot on our podcast, and in In the following chat, she leads the conversation and she introduces me and Jenny. We've had a lot of Jenny's authors on the podcast in the past, so it's fun to hear her side of the process of how she gets books to market. Hopefully, we'll see you all live in San Francisco this coming spring. I hope you enjoy it.
Hello everyone. I'm very excited to have you all join us today for a discussion about cookbooks. Excited to be joined by two of my favorite colleagues, Jenny Wappner, who is the publisher at Hardy Grant, North America. Before she was a publisher at Hardy Grant, she was an executive editor at 10 Speed Press for nine years. You acquired or worked on 15 books that won James Beard and IACP Award. Mm.
That's my tally.
Very impressive. But mostly she's just a really insightful, smart person. And then Kate Lahey. Kate writes um is also runs a podcast called Everything Cookbooks. She knows so much about cookbooks. You've written twelve cookbooks? Fifteen? Hundred? Uh 102. Uh including my Egypt, which was something we worked on briefly together. So we're here to talk about cookbooks. First of all Jenny, what do you do? What does a publisher
do? That is a good question. Um, I think a publisher does different things um depending on the size of the house that they work for. Um Hardy Grant is, I would consider, a startup at this point. We are an Australian publisher. We've been around for a long time in Australia, but um I started the US imprint uh almost five years ago, um, and we've only had about three and So For me, a publisher takes out the trash, pays the electricity bill, and then also I acquire almost all of the books that we publish. We do have another editor, Carolyn Insley, who has acquired some really fantastic books, but I'm really acquiring the bulk of our list. And then I'm doing things like balancing the list, making sure that we don't have four baking books on one season.
I'm making sure that That we have a variety of price points, so we have a mix. Balancing also means making sure that all the books are not publishing in the same month. And then I'm still functioning as an editor. So I do developmental edits for authors, and then I usually hand it over to other editors to do like copy editing and proofreading and taking in corrections. But it's a pretty like start-to-finish process. And then I oversee our marketing and publicity team. So, you know, working with them to craft the campaign, and then also kind of managing the Sales, so making sure that the book is getting into outlets where it belongs. So if it's really destined for anthropology, making sure that that that buyer is aware of the book.
So it's a long process. And then, you know, like someone pops up from two years ago and they have a couple questions. And so you're back in fall of 2023, making sure that we still have stock and everyone is happy. There's a lot of like making sure everyone is happy. That is sort of like job description. And Kate, tell us what you do.
It really depends on the year probably. If anyone listens to Everything Cookbooks, that's something that I do with three other great cookbook writers, um Andrea Nguyen, Molly Stevens, and Kristen Donnelly. That is something we just do as as the side. We don't make any money on it.
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