At Family Cookbook Project, we have been helping people create custom cookbooks for more than 15 years. We have learned a lot in that time and we wanted to point out some of the things not to do to make your personal cookbook a success.

Mistake #1 -Thinking that everyone in the family will be interested in participating. While it is always a good thing to invite as many people as possible to contribute to your family cookbook, expecting everyone to participate is simply unrealistic. There’s a lot of people in every family that just don’t like to cook, think they are too busy or simply forget and miss the deadline.

It’s important that once you invite your contributors that you keep them motivated by sending messages using family cookbook project reminder tool on a regular basis. You also can have them contacted when new recipes are added to the cookbook.

Mistake #2 – Making the One Final Perfect Family Cookbook. let’s face it, family cookbooks are living documents that are currently evolving just like the families themselves. my family is already on its third volume of recipes. A lot of people also add and use recipes online.

So the bottom line is don’t hold up the entire cookbook waiting for one or two specific recipes or contributors.

Mistake #3 – Making the Family Recipe Book Only About Recipes. Sure the cookbook will have great recipes, however what people really like to read are the personal notes about the recipes and why they are important to the people who contributed them. Family photos are another great way to make your cookbook truly your family cookbook.

Mistake #4 – Bad Proof Reading. One of the most important jobs as editor is reading all of the recipes activate been submitted to make sure the format is consistent and any miss spelled words are corrected.

Luckily Family Cookbook Project has created an “editor edit mode” which allows you to go through each recipe and make changes to them quickly and efficiently. You browser’s spell check will also point out questionably spelled words.

We would add a fifth mistake – not using Family Cookbook Project to organize and print your family cookbook!

 

 

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

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