Rux Martin in her kitchen with some of the books she’s edited. (Photo by Barry Estabrook.)
I met cookbook editor Rux Martin years ago, before she got an imprint in her own name. Now she is Editorial Director of Rux Martin Books at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
She specializes in cookbooks, narrative nonfiction on food, and diet books. She has worked with Dorie Greenspan, Mollie Katzen, Jacques Pépin, and Ruth Reichl, to name just a few, and has edited New York Times bestsellers including The Gourmet Cookbook; Hello, Cupcake!; Around My French Table; and As Always, Julia.
An industry veteran, Rux is a multiple award-winning editor. Here are her thoughts about the cookbook market and trends, why photography is critical, how food blogging has changed the industry, and on writing a “truly great” recipe:
Q. What does it mean to have your own imprint?
A. It’s a bit like a brand, in that it’s supposed to signify the sort of books I edit.
Q. What kinds of books do you look for?
Jaques Pepin not only writes his books but photographs and illustrates them, and styles the food for shoots. He is always “reinventing and simplifying,” says Martin.
A. I’m looking for authors who have a lifetime of experience and have something fresh to say.
I also feel it’s important to look for wild cards, for something that’s new and maybe a little bit wacko, but in a good way. I’m never prouder than when my daughter, who’s kind of a hippy, says, “Wow mom, that doesn’t look like something you would publish.”
This past fall I published a funny little book that came in designed, called The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert. It’s written by a master sommelier and it’s genuinely funny and smart. I learned a lot from it and hoped others would too. I thought it would be a good gift item, and it spent a significant amount of time on the bestseller list.
Q. You have a range of authors, many of which are not wild cards.
A. True. And I have other authors who pull their weight on the backlist, like Pati Jinich, who wrote Pati’s Mexican Table. She has a PBS show about making Mexican food at home for her three boys, that is suited to American family life.
Natasha Case wrote Coolhaus Ice Cream Book, based on her ice cream truck. The recipes are named after various architects, and there are sidebars on famous architects, great line drawings of the buildings and little factoids. It’s a really serious book for cooks, but it brings something new to the table and makes you want to read it.
Q. What’s new for cookbooks visually?
A. I see eclectic photography, hand-drawn calligraphy and type, embellishments on covers such as a cloth spine and paper over board, where it’s clearly more of a keepsake or art approach. Everyone is doing it. Before a cookbook was supposed to be attractive, but you never forgot you were supposed to cook out of it. Now, design has been paramount.
Maybe the extreme focus on design has to do with needing to reinvent. I think it has to do with younger designers and photographers. People are not content with a cookbook that, by today’s standards, would look boring. Some sort of design intervention is needed.
Q. What about food bloggers who have become photographers? Do you like their work?
A. I do, when it’s good. And it’s an amazing package for a publisher. There’s a huge economic advantage to the publisher, and it gives authors full control, which they often don’t have when someone else is shooting.
Q. Some would say publishers take advantage of food bloggers. They’re not going to give $25,000 to a food blogger who shoots her own photos, but they’d give it to a photographer.
A. Yes, but major publishers are giving bigger advances to food bloggers, six figure sums. Some people you’ve never heard of have gotten a pre-empt for a huge sum.
From my side of the desk, it’s never been a more exciting time to be in the world of food. As a publisher, it’s never been a more challenging time, because there are so many outlets for people’s creativity: blogs, e-magazines, small limited print magazines like Cherry Bombe and Sweet Paul. That’s the other reason food is so exciting: before you had to fit into the magazine’s voice, or you couldn’t get published. Now you have a greater authorial integrity. With so many outlets, you get to test ideas, you get to show them to the world, and sometimes you get to make a little money.
Q. Some people believe cookbooks don’t sell without color photography. Do you think that’s true?
A. It’s truer than ever before. If you want to sell to a big box store — which account for up to half of all cookbook sales — or gourmet stores like Anthropologie and Williams-Sonoma, color photography throughout is essential. On the level that I need to do cookbook, meaning the highest sales possible, I haven’t done one in years that didn’t have full color throughout.
I can think of two exceptions, but they are kind of wild cards: Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, and The Drunken Botanist, which has a gorgeous art feeling because of its illustration and embellishments.
Q. Are food bloggers changing the way books are acquired and marketed?
A. They have the built in audience. They can market and shoot their own books. Because they have their own brand, they have to be connected visually to the book. The book has to visually reflect the sensibility of the blog.
Q. Are bloggers a bargain then, compared to other authors?
A. I guess if their books sell!
Q. What should authors know about today’s cookbook market?
A. That there is a hugely shrinking space at all of the major retailers, that independent booksellers are still going out of business, that more cookbooks are being sold every day, and that in big box stores, they give less and less space to cookbooks. So you’re competing fiercely, and your publisher is competing fiercely. Places like Amazon order a little bit at a time and keep ordering as demand requires. Everything is tighter. But manufacturing costs and the costs of marketing don’t go down.
And in the big leagues, advances are becoming far larger. That can be great for publishers if the book sells. A huge number of the books a publisher publishes are supported by a few titles.
Q. When a good book proposal lands on your desk, what excites you most about it?
A. Everything! The food, the names of the recipes, the way the author writes, and if there’s a huge emphasis on an idea that, just by tweaking something we know is in the air, can feel totally new. And that an author’s resume is incredibly impressive. They may not have ever done a book on their own before, but they’ve done so many things that make you know they are so ready. I think you know instantly. You don’t even need to get to page two.
Q. I’m glad you didn’t say ”We could make a lot of money if we bought this book!”
A. If you think you could make a lot of money by writing this book,that could be a trouble sign. Your book needs to be heartfelt. A book on bubblegum donuts has not been published before. There might be a reason. We have to do these spreadsheets before we buy these books, but that’s an artificial construct. The real meat of the thing is the editor’s feeling about the book and why it’s going to work, and intuition.
Q. Is there anything new in the area of recipe writing?
A. Yes. The world of the bloggers has perhaps resulted in more borrowing of recipes. In the past they would be considered stolen.
Martin acquired this cookbook, which spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
You’re supposed to be doing genuinely original work, giving full attribution as to how your recipe came into being. If you used a crust from so and so and a filling from so and so and put them together, and you say so, that’s honest. To me, a good headnote is part of the pleasure of reading about how amazing cooks came up with their ideas, even when they’re borrowing from people.
As an editor, I want to know that the author I’m giving an advance to has recipes that are sufficiently original, and in the cases that they’re not, the headnote will reflect that.
Anyone who is a really successful cookbook author makes recipe development look gloriously easy. But if they’re the real deal, it’s really hard work, even if it’s something you’ve integrated it into their own life and they’re serving the food to friends and family. There are a small number of people who are truly great. For the others, just be honest if you’re not doing original food. That’s not a high bar to set.
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(Disclosure: This post includes Amazon Affiliate links.)
Thank you so much, Dianne! This interview is so educational to me.
I am glad to see an editor addresses the originality issue so explicitly.
Thank you and have a good weekend.
All the best, m.
You are welcome! Yes, Rux is tactful but also quite direct about it, eh?
Love these insights. It’s always really helpful to get the perspective of a veteran, especially one on the other side of the desk, especially for those of us just embarking on cookbook writing journeys. And I love what she says about borrowing recipes. Many bloggers don’t have etiquette, even those with the best of intentions. An acquaintance of mine recently had a recipe published that was a direct riff (very few alterations or additions) of something from another cookbook I know very well–and she knows, too, because I shared the recipe with her and the author–and never attributed it or said it was adapted from it. The general public may not care as much as the serious, hard-core food community does, but time will tell. I have to believe that great work rises to the top and it takes time.
So she basically ripped off the recipe and didn’t tell the publisher? Wow. And you know about it. I’m wondering if you’re planning to talk with her about it. You could be doing a service.
Hi Dianne, it’s interesting to read what the publishers think of food bloggers as authors or photographers. And how probably they might influence to make changes in the cook book category. Think, recipe writing or developing is a huge task – it’s more like a scientist who is experimenting and noting down each inference and step. Would also love to read *tips of writing* books with food as the main protagonist, not necessarily recipes.
Have you read Will Write for Food? I covered food as the main protagonist in my fiction chapter. And yes, it is a huge task to develop recipes. A lot harder than adapting them, that’s for sure.
Thanks for this great interview. I gained a lot of insight from it. I do wonder, though, how many bloggers are getting six-figure advances for their cookbooks. I’d guess some of the big names, but from what I heard at FBC2013 that’s not the norm. That said, I think there are other motivations for writing a cookbook than money (but hey, the money’s nice too!).
It’s my pleasure, Marlene. Re how many food bloggers are getting six figure advances — very few. It is definitely not the norm. But since Rux pays big advances to big authors, it’s something that interests her.
Thank you for this refreshingly candid interview on cookbook publishing! It’s great to get the inside scoop on timely issues that many editors won’t discuss. Your questions were perfect and Rux Martin’s answers very honestly described today’s market without being mysterious. I also liked to hear that she values lifelong experience and original work.
You are most welcome, Deborah. Rux answered my questions with insight and poise. It was a pleasure.
Dianne,
I just love these interviews.There is so much to learn about the business. Timely for me for sure. Keep ’em coming. And special thanks to Rux Martin for sharing her wisdom and insight.
Thanks Maureen. I love doing them too, and Rux was nice enough to let me ask lots of questions.
What a terrific (and timely!) interview. Great tips and insight from Rux Martin. This is one I will bookmark for reference. It’s encouraging for a chef/blogger/author who wants to do their own cookbook. She sounds like she would be wonderful to work with as an editor. “They may not have ever done a book on their own before, but they’ve done so many things that make you know they are so ready.” Yes!
I think it would be thrilling to have Rux as your editor, Sally. Something to aspire to, anyway.
Exciting, interesting and educational post. I agree on originality, if it’s not uniquely yours give credit where credit is due.
Thank you Susan! Yes, this is a hard concept for people, apparently!
I take major exception to the statement that bloggers have resulted in more “borrowing” of recipes. I submit nothing has changed in that regard with the advent of the net. What has changed is the ease in which it is possible to find so called “borrowed” recipes. When a cookbook author “borrows” from a 1950s out of print cookbook it is extremely difficult to prove, but a blogger that adapts a recipe from a recent book with credit, that’s pretty easy to find with Google. That is why some are now asking for so called “nods” in my opinion. Because it makes it easy to Google their names. We have 1000s of cookbooks in our home dated back to the 1800s and we are constantly noticing how amazing similar cookbook recipes are to some of these old recipes. We also notice that there is rarely attribution in these cookbooks. A double standard? You bet! Some authors write in their blogs how many cookbooks they have yet they often don’t post attribution themselves in their books. You mean to say they never cracked a book during the whole cookbook development? Ya right!
Interesting, frank interview, Dianne. Just a couple comments about photography and advances.
I would much, much rather get a photography allowance for a great photographer (even if I have to add some of the advance to the amount to make it happen) than to photograph it myself, even though I suspect I might be able to competently photograph a book on my own at this point. I benefit enormously from having the photographer and food stylist immerse themselves in the recipes and the book with me, which I think is reflected in a richer book beyond the photography, as the photo shoot (at least for me) takes place before I have written the headnotes and other text.
Beyond that, in general I am never very focused on getting an enormous advance in a cookbook deal (and would definitely rather get some sort of photography budget than a bigger advance)—although I’m not sure how my agent feels about that! I am not expecting to make an absolute killing on any one book. I want to keep writing more books, and sustaining myself with royalties from my books on the backlist seems much more realistic to me. I tend to think of an advance like a loan. I know it’s better than a loan since if you don’t earn out, you don’t pay it back, but since I want to keep writing new books, my backlist books need to keep selling! Perhaps I’d feel differently if I expected to sell 100,000 copies of one book in a year. Instead, it’s more likely to take me 3+ years to sell that many of any one book.
Nicole
Nicole, the thing is, if you are a competent photographer and a blogger, many publishers are saving money by having you do all the photos too. They aren’t willing to up your advance to help you pay for a professional photographer (and these days, it seems to be mostly up to the author to hire the photographer).
Like you, I want my book to keep selling for years. Publishers are dependent on back list authors like us. I would think agents are fine with getting royalty checks – it’s not just about the big advance check.