Another great self-publishing resource: www.blurb.com (currently in beta).

Thanks Nancy! Someone sent me that link a while back, but I couldn't remember the name. I can't wait to see what people do with these tools. Maybe a contest of some sort is in order? -h

Fun ideas -- thanks Heidi!

Hi Heidi...I read your site regularly though I rarely try any recipes (I'm a bad cook) The funny thing is, I'm making a recipe book for my sister. She doesn't read Bengali (that's our mother tongue, we live in India) so I'm translating this Bengali cookbook written in 1910 for her. You wouldn't believe it, but each recipe tastes delicious! Anyway, thats for your post. All the links really helped!

Thanks Heidi for that inspirational post!!

Hi Heidi - This post has such useful information. Thank you. As my sons went off to college, I created a recipe blog for them with the old favourites from home. Now when they want to know how to cook something, they send the request and I post the recipe. What makes this even more fun is that they are in the US and I am in London. Using your great ideas and links, I am inspired to make the blog into a book so that we will have a more permanent way to remember how we used the internet o take the food we ate at home together out into the world.
Again, many thanks
Kate

Heidi, I love the del.icio.us cookbook concept - much more organized than my list of a million (or so) favorites. Thanks for the link ...

These are such incredible ideas. thank you fr incredible posts even if if you consider them "spotty."

Inspiring others, giving people the tools, sharing knowledge-- these are traits you have and it's inspiring.

In the prof. cooking world there are so many fearful cooks and chefs who would never dream of sharing a secret, a hint, a purveyor! Thank you for reminding us all that we are all as great as the shoulders of great people we stand on.

Heidi, what a great, helpful post! I have to admit that I underuse all these tools that we have at hand. This is really encouraging me to look more into the matter!
Many thanks for all this information.

Great post, Heidi. I'm so inspired to try my hand at putting together a cookbook now. At least, other than the one divided across a hundred word documents on my hard drive!

Hi Heidi - A terrific post!

Your readers might also like http://www.heritagecookbook.com/. I haven't used it but love the way they easily incorporate family photos and stories.

When my family published a family cookbook four years ago, we used Walters Publishing. The end product is a "church-style" cookbook but the Web entries allowed family from all over the world to insert their own recipes.

And doing a family cookbook is something I really do recommend -- we've all gotten to know each other again, as adults. At family gatherings now, someone will say, "I made your such-n-such from the cookbook." (Note: "the" cookbook.) And someone else overhears and soon there's a group of us comparing recent notes! "Reality comments"!

I've long been a lurker but much appreciate your work here ...

very interisting and useful post, Thanks:)

What a wonderful & informative post. Hope it inspires many to publish. My favorite cookbook is one my Mother wrote out by hand. Wish she had had these tools. Thank you Heidi!

Heidi, another great tool for publishing your own book is www.cafepress.com - they give you the ability to upload your PDF document into either book format or a spiral-bound notebook. Anyone can then order one book, or you can order bulk from yourself. CafePress even allows you to create your own "store" and sell various other items. I love them for a variety of reasons - other than the fact that you can make a bit of money by just adding a few dollars to any items you create. It's a wonderful method for people to get their creativity out there in a variety of formats.

Wow, to publish seems scary, but fun at the same time!

Thank you thank you for this perfectly timed post! I've just embarked on writing a cookbook as a gift for my mother, who has been catering for 25 years now. These resources will be invaluable in seeing this project come to fruition.

Another dream come true...
Thank you, Heidi, for sharing your sources and giving us the hope and inspiration to follow our dreams...

"A dream is a wish your heart makes..."

Tootles.

Thanks for your ideas, it's a great collection of ways to do a recipe book for someone to get started.

I've done what you are talking about with InDesign. I posted it on my website, you can see the link, but also had it printed with a local printer on thick stock and then put the hole-punched pages into binders. I gave them to family members one Christmas. It was a fun gift to do and not very expensive (just time-consuming). Binders allow room for people to add more recipes. Right now I am a recipezaar.com addict and have been thinking of soliciting family members to contribute online.

Thanks for sharing these great resources and for providing lots of inspiration!

Last year my partner and I produced a cookbook using iPhoto. We found their templating a bit restrictive, though, so I ended up doing all the page layouts in Photoshop and importing the JPGs from there. Still it turned out quite lovely!

Thank you for the info! I read your posts daily and enjoy them very much.
I have already checked into a couple of the resources you listed to create a cookbook of my grandma recipes who passed away last August. Thank you again.

Heidi,
Congrats on the cookbook and conference.
Great write up, loved learning about some of the newer ways to publish.
Also congrats on the Guardian mention.
FJK
ps - I flipped when I saw the photo. I recognized the books immediately from a library in Prague (or at least they looked similar), in a monastery. Amazing place.

You usually post other peoples recipes, I had no idea you create your own. That is great. I love your blog. Cant wait to see the original recipes now.

you can use Openoffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org) a free/open source software which is equivalent to MS Office. In fact, better than MS Word when it comes to creating books and other publications.

Openoffice.org comes with in-built PDF export facility too.

Hi Heidi,
Thanks for sharing the information... I think the cook book idea would be a nice present for my sister and her new home... recipes from our grandmothers and things we loved doing together as kids.
Congrats on the cookbook and conference! I'm rooting for you.

What a cool post.

You are doing so great! You should be so proud of yourself. I think all of what you are doing sounds just so amazing.

I have three lifestyles, SF Work, Travel (backpack-y) and Cruising (boat)
and major organizational issues.

I have lost a lot of my favorite recipes - so...I'm solving it this way:

1. I have several Filofax 5 x 8 inches for easy carrying and put everything
portable in these divided into general categories.

2. I have one for recipes - so...I set up a computer template for the Filofax page
size and enter recipes into this template...then, when convenient, I print
each recipe off and cut and paste it into my CookBook Filofax, easy to use and can enlarge the print font. Of course these are only recipes I used and liked.

BUT I stil have the file on my computer to print off the entire bunch and
cut down for small size for more rigorous travel.

This is also allowing me to cut back on the number of cookbooks on the boat. Also because I have a lot of cookbooks, I forget where I get a good recipe later, this solves that problem.

This also allows me more cooking possibilities when we travel to hostels.

Also I am trying to remember old favorites and keep track of new good
recipes and techniques.

While it sounds like more work, it is helpful to me.

Also someone else on a boat just uses regular three ring binders with
plastic sheets and inserts recipes and notes into each sheet.

I've done a few "bridal cookbooks" as budget conscious bridal shower gifts.

I've bought 4x6 bridal photo albums and sent 4x6 recipie cards to all the attendees for a bridal shower asking them to bring "sacred family recipies" including a letter I wrote about my own expeirence realizing that my mother-in-law thought a spinach salad with strawberries was a fruit salad. I eventually realized that EVERYONE has a different expectation of what fruit salad is. My dad's family makes it with jello. My mom's family coats fruit salad in whipped cream. My husbands' family likes fruit with greens. I prefer more obscure fruit salads (I know a good one with oranges and green olives).

This is great for new brides who need to know when the mother-in-law asks them to bring the "stuffing" for Thanksgiving, if that's a dressing, bread stuffing, rice stuffing or sausage stuffing or whatever else might be out there.

I also intermix in the album bridal shower photos, scrapbook mementos or other items to make it fun. It's nothing more than a glorified index card file but the merging of two families' recipe card files can be quite a magical event! It's also fun to preserve the recipies in the handwriting of the relatives they came from.

Jessica

I am an avid watcher of the BBC/UKTV food programmes which are excellent for the most part. However, why is it, when we are all being told that the English and Americans are too fat, which is true, that the presenters are so large? Jenny Barnett, Sophie Grigson, Olly Smith, Sylvana Franco etc. are enormous. So is Nigella but at least she looks nice. Any comments?

What great advice! I'd love to do a yoga-vegetarian cookbook, or maybe a cookbook for teens. As a lawyer though, I've always wondered about using recipes I've found in other places. How legal would that be? Do I need to modify the recipe to use it in my own cookbook? Credit the original source? It seems to me that you could end up in a lot of trouble with copyrighted material if you are self publishing and don't have anyone to check into that for you. Sadly, intellectual property isn't my area of expertise, so I have no idea what you need to be on the lookout for.

I want you to try this...take a gallon of koshel dill pickles, drain off liguid, slice pickles(size of your choice)in a large container, pour a 4-lb. bag of sugar over them and a bottle of louisiana hot sauce. Let stand overnight, then return to jar. These are delicious if you like hot & sweet pickles. Thank you...

First off, sorry for the recent rash of spam here, they seem to know when I sleep.

For any of you who end up making your own cookbooks, please post pictures in the forums - I'm sure everyone else would love to see examples!

Peter, that is a question I think best discussed on the forums, I try to keep this comment area relatively post-specific.

And Jen I remember posting a bit about recipes here: http://www.101cookbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=16#16
mid-way through the post...

Thanks barbara A.Bruce! This is really delicious!

Nice informational piece. As someone who self published about 14 years ago, its nice to see how things have changed. I'm currently looking at the possiblity of re-publishing a second edition of the cheesecake cookbook that I wrote back then, now that global reach is possible, thru lulu.com.

Thanks for the tips!

A wonderful and inspiring post. Mostly, though, I am smitten with the lovliness of the books in the photo.They are splendid.

Another great idea for self-published cookbooks is zines. I've put out a few cookzines, old fashioned cut-and-paste zines, that I give to my friends and send out to zine libraries and distros.

I've been a professional food writer for many years, but my very first food writing was a cookbook called Orts that I put together as a holiday gift for a baker's dozen (13) friends in the late 1980s. I included recipes I'd made for each of the recipients during that year, with a story about the occasions we shared. Now I use my blogs as a way to organize bits and pieces for future cookbooks. Thanks for the publishing suggestions and inspiration.

If I get a recipe from cooks.com how do I go about putting it in my own cookbook legally?

My family and I recently ordered two cookbooks from www.TheSecretIngredients.com as gifts, one for my mother-in-law and one for my aunt-in-law in celebration of their birthdays. We had an excellent time customizing the books and contributing our favorite recipes. The website is very interactive and makes an otherwise overwhelming process very, very simple.

I also have a Secret Ingredients cookbook (www.thesecretingredients.com) that is just gorgeous. It was given to my husband and I from our entire, collective families for our wedding. It really is special to have a book that has every single secret family recipe, and tons of old photos and notes. I would encourage anyone out there thinking about making a family cookbook to start the process... it's very, very worth your time.

I've been wanting to put a cookbook together for a long time, so these are some great resources! One of the things I'd like to do is add nutritional information to my recipes. I've tried searching the web for a tool that will allow you to enter the ingredients and measurements from the recipe and it will generate the nutrition info for you. However, I haven't had much luck. I've seen some software out there, but it seems expensive. Does anyone have any suggestions?