I don't know about you, but that cereal bar did not cut it for me for breakfast. A nice slice of quiche would have been better. Anyway, mb's seminar "Cookbook Writing 101" was held in August by Melissa Clark, author of over a dozen cookbooks, and the transcript is available for AG members. For you non-members, an excerpt:

Of course you need an idea. What do you want to write about? Now a lot of people come into these classes and say, 'I want to do a cookbook about the food that I cook at home.' I want to try to help you guys do that. Because in order to sell your cookbook, it can't just be amazing writing and amazing recipes. You have to have a hook and get a publisher to buy it. And unfortunately cookbook sales in the past decade, more in the past five years, have been decreasing. Well, I mean overall sales have been the same, but the pieces of the pie have been going towards food network personalities, and independent people have a lot of ... It's just a smaller piece of the pie divided among everybody. There are fewer publishers who are going to buy your book than there were, say, ten years ago, and there's less money there. So you really need to entice them with some sort of hook. See now, that's not to discourage you. That's not to say, oh well, your idea is just this fuzzy idea and you're not going to be able to figure it out. It's just a matter of … I'm going to try to get you guys to approach it in a way that really grabs people. I know that whatever idea you have, there is a way to sell it, 100 percent. There's a way to sell whatever cookbook it is that you want to write. It's just figuring out what that way is. I think that one of the most important things is, how do I sell this? How do I sharpen the idea? How do I make it really just so exciting that nobody's going to be able to turn me down? And then of course there's the hard work and patience. Patience, because when you publish a cookbook, it's not like publishing on line. It's not like publishing for a newspaper or magazine. It's a three-year process. It just is. It just takes three years. Maybe you can do the whole thing in 18 months if you bust your butt and you're publisher's like, [snaps] you know, totally fast. Most of the time the process takes three years from proposal to finished book. Because once you hand in the book, it takes a year. I know, it's crazy. It's like, what do we do for a year? I don't know what they do for a year. But it just takes a year.