A recipe book is comparatively easy to create than other genres of books. But that does not mean that you don’t have to invest in them. Whether you are creating a recipe book for yourself or for your friend or for publishing and selling, you need to ensure that it has a structure and consistency.
You are creating a cookbook to share your favorite food recipe with the world. It is a rewarding experience if you love experimenting with food. That is why you need to make sure that your cookbook has a flow, that binds the recipes together. A framework that guides people to each recipe is important to inspire people to cook your recipe and make your book a success.
In this blog, we will share nine innovative tips with you that will help you create a perfect recipe book.
- Decide on the table of contents
You want a method to your cookbook, so have a table of content that divides your recipe. You can have breakfast, lunch or dinner or go for Indian, Continental or Italian, or vegan and gluten free and so on.
- Choose the right trim sizes
If you are designing your cookbook, keep in mind trim sizes. They are the size of the book that will hold the recipes and photos related to it. For instance, if your book is small with over 20 recipes of cupcakes or muffins, you don’t have to go for the whole portrait book. But if your book has complex dinner or lunch recipes that require you to explain a lot of steps and the ingredient list is big too, you need a big book. Also, keep in mind how many photos and what size do you want them to have when finalizing the size of the book.
- Know your layout and sections in advance
We already talked about this in the first point. You need to know the content of your book. What chapters or sections it will have, outline it. It will help you decide the layout of the book and then do the rest of the book. For instance, your book is divided into dinner and dessert recipes. Now, keeping this in mind, you can create a layout of the book and then it becomes easy to gather recipes and shoot photos for the same. If you choose to go with a portrait layout, you need to shoot the pictures in that mode too. Outlining in advance will help with all this.
- Cook the recipes that you have written in the book
I know that they are your recipes, and you know them by heart. And that is exactly the point. When we know something by heart, we follow our intuition, and sometimes we don’t notice that we have merged two steps or omitted one. It’s because we know what we are doing. But your readers don’t, if you want them to cook the dish, you need them to follow each step without missing anything. When you cook your recipe step by step, you check your writing. You might have missed putting down an ingredient, or you may have missed one step or so on. It will help you check your recipes which is important for it to be successful.
- Be consistent with the language, writing, and measurement
The English language has three versions- American, Australian, and British. Now, you have to decide which version suits best with your target market and stick with that. It is because from pronunciation to spelling to meaning, a lot is different. One cup is 250ml in the USA, but 284 ml in British. Also, keep in mind that food names vary.
Also, you have to be consistent with the way you write the names of food and ingredients. If you have written unsalted butter in one recipe and butter in another, it will never work.
- Photos
A cookbook needs photos, as it makes it look special. Keep some tips in mind though:
- For ingredient photos, don’t let people see your brand. Show them in utensils like a cup to show 1 cup flour.
- Click the photos in natural light. If you can’t, make sure you only use a single source of light.
- Don’t take a photo of a plate that is full of food. Leave some white space as it looks more appealing.
- Extras
If you want, you can add a little note in your recipe. It is a bonus and people love them. Your personal notes like you can make this recipe vegan, by substituting ingredients and so on.
If you love food and always wanted a cookbook in your name, go for it. You can realize your dreams by being systematic and following these tips
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