Author Interview with Daniel Shumski: Obsession x Voice + Project Management = Formula for Success
When I started this series of posts, my goal was getting real about how cookbooks are created, not only by talking about my own experiences but also by compiling stories from successful cookbook authors. In this interview, Daniel Shumski generously shares how he went from working full-time as a journalist covering hard news in Chicago to writing cookbooks in Montreal. He now has more than 400,000 books in print.
I really appreciate Daniel’s honesty. In this Q/A carried out over email, he gets real about deadlines, recipe revision, and project management. While these are never the shiny, glossy parts of cookbook creation that get the most attention (like photo shoots and cover reveals), I think they’re even more interesting—and valuable.
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In this interview, we’ll talk about:
How it’s hard to sell a publisher on something that hasn’t been done before
The nuts-and-bolts steps of putting together and testing through a recipe list
The importance of spreadsheets to get you to the finish line
Can you get sick of cake?
Q. What was it about waffle irons that grabbed you enough to start blogging about all the things you could cook in one in 2010?
I had done a few blogs before and found modest success — like, well-ish known locally or popular-ish among friends and extended acquaintances. And doing those turned me on to the notion that the formula for a good blog is “obsession times voice.” (That’s something I picked up from Merlin Mann and John Gruber.) If you have those, you won’t appeal to everyone, but you’ll appeal to the people to whom you ought to appeal. I was really happy connecting with people who liked my blogs. That was incredibly rewarding. It just so happened that Waffleizer was the blog that — I think because of the visuals — caught on most widely. It is both easily explicable and completely ridiculous and fun. And with the visuals, you instantly knew what you were looking at, even though it was totally unfamiliar. Like, I know what a waffle is and I know what a hamburger is and this image is somehow both!
And then for anybody who read the text that went with that image — we’re narrowing the numbers considerably here — I’m not going to say they were blown away by my prose, but you could at least tell that I could string together a sentence. Maybe an overly long sentence, but a sentence.
That blog and that book — as fun as they both are — are sort of on the edge of my personality. I mean, I did them. It was all me and friends/collaborators. So it’s certainly a part of me. But most of me is far more mundane than that. That blog and that book are a little kooky. I am mostly not kooky.
Q. How did your former blog, Waffleizer, become your first book?
So, this is a fun story. With TikTok and YouTube and Instagram etc. it may also be a very dated story, but: I had finished the blog. It was 2012. The blog was still online but it was always designed to be a limited-time project and I wasn’t updating it. It had an amazing run; I was ready to move on. I had a bit on the blog that encouraged people to get in touch with me if they were an agent or an eccentric millionaire. And I did not hear from either of those. But I did hear from an editor at Workman Publishing who told me she wanted to talk about making a book based on my blog. And I thought, “You know, that could be fun.”
(As an aside, I was at a casino in Las Vegas when I got that very first email from my editor and the mind boggles at the parallels between gambling and publishing a book.)
So from there I got an agent and hammered out a book deal while I was working full time as a digital news editor at the Chicago Tribune and teaching at Northwestern University as an adjunct journalism lecturer. So, by early morning, I was helping to cover the big city and all of its crime and corruption. And on one of my days off, I was teaching university students about ethics and punctuation. And then, you know, I was finding time to stuff things in a waffle iron. It was quite the rich tapestry.
While the book was in progress, I moved to Montreal to be with my partner, who was finishing up a music degree here. And I took the book project with me; it’s eminently portable. Because this is a mostly French-language media market and because the financial health of news organizations is at best complicated, I just stuck with the book thing and moved away from journalism. (My French is OK but I’m not going to sit down and edit anyone in French.)
That is the short version both of how the book happened and how I became Canadian.
Q. After Will it Waffle? came out (and was a huge success!), had you already been thinking about writing another book—or even a series of books? How did your second book deal come about?
The publisher approached me with the idea. And I liked it, so I went with it. It was not part of a master plan on my part. And, honestly, that second book did not sell well! So maybe it’s just as well that I could tell myself it wasn’t my idea. It was a bummer for me, but it has helped bring into focus the success of my other books. It has given me a glimpse of the importance of timing and subject matter and promotion and all sorts of things. Like, I worked just as hard on that second book as I did on my third book, which sold …. maybe 250 times as many copies? Two hundred fifty times! These things do not sink or swim on merit or dedication.
Also, I have become sensitized to what the publishing industry does and does not like, at least my corner of it. And I would summarize that as: “different, but not too different.” Or: “different, but also done before.”
It can be really hard to sell a publisher on something that hasn’t been done before. I have a pretty good public track record of books. I also have a less good private track record when you take into account the rejected ideas that my publisher has passed on. Now, they may have been lousy ideas. But one in particular I think was a good idea that was just too different. That is what I tell myself anyway.
Q. How has your background as a journalist affected how you write cookbooks?
The journalism skills helped immensely when the time came to write a cookbook. You know what possibly the No. 1 thing is? Meeting deadlines. I have never missed a deadline. I get the sense from my publisher that they treasure that. Ditto for producing clean, accurate copy. That is not to say I don’t need editing. Because I really, really do. But I am a decent self-editor (to the extent that’s possible) and I really care about things like punctuation and phrasing and grammar and accuracy and consistency. Probably to a surprising extent for the “waffle iron dude.”
Q. How do you come up with your recipe list? Do you create a contents page and then think, oh, I need to come up with recipes for mains, sides, etc., or do you have recipes in mind and you’re looking for a structure that makes sense to organize them?
It’s more the first one. The publisher will basically say: “This book needs so many recipes, whatcha got?” And from there I organize it the way it makes sense to me and then slot recipes into those categories. This is always a back-and-forth with my editor because what makes sense to me… doesn’t always make sense! So we have discussions about how to organize the recipes, what needs beefing up, what seems redundant or weird or missing.
My editor and the publisher have done so many books. And I have done four. So they have a much better sense of how a recipe list will translate into a full-blown book at the end of the process. That perspective is really valuable to me.
Q. One thing that’s easy to take for granted is the amount of time it takes to test (and retest) recipes for a cookbook. Take us through your process in developing recipes. What steps do you go through? Is it more complicated when you’re writing about certain appliances? Does it take extra time to cross-test on various models?
So it depends on the book, and even within the book. But I’ll describe one model that crops up frequently: I will write down a recipe the way I think it will go. And then I’ll print it out and take it to the kitchen and usually scribble changes on it as I’m making it. (“Oh, 1 teaspoon of salt sounded right, but that’s not enough.” “You actually need to do this to the pasta first.”) And then taste it. And then scribble more notes about what I should have done differently. And then I go back to the computer and update the recipe to reflect my scribbles and then I make it again. And assuming it’s good, then I give it to someone else to make, and they almost always have things that need to be incorporated into the recipe or things that were in my head that didn’t translate or make it onto the paper.
This takes place over several days, usually. Or weeks, sometimes. And not necessarily linearly because in between these steps I may have started working on another recipe that is at a different point in the process.
That’s for a recipe that turns out well rather quickly. It’s the abbreviated version. There can be many more iterations.
One other thing I’ll try to do is, for example, dedicate a week to tackling both a main course and a dessert. Because if you try to handle all the desserts in a row, it’s not ideal. I’m sure you know this, but if you can find a way to intersperse eleventy million iterations of, say, a cake with something more savory, then that’s a win. It’s probably not good to do those cake iterations separated by months or years. But days or even a week could be really helpful. Because at some point it’s like, is this cake not good or… am I just sick of cake?
I am also maniacal about not wasting food, which makes the whole process harder on myself and creates another level of labor. So beyond the recipe list, I have a “freezer list” and “fridge list” to help me keep track of what needs to be eaten.
Q. Has one of your books taken longer to test out all the recipes than others because of the subject matter?
Well, I had to really, extra mega-plan for the slow-cooking function of the Instant Pot. I sometimes did those recipes in parallel with other things because I just couldn’t let the rest of the book grind to a halt while I waited for some of those recipes. And for this How to Sous Vide book, there are a handful of recipes that take maybe 36 hours. It’s passive cooking time. I do not stay awake and watch these things cook. But I usually work on some other aspect of the book while those are chugging away.
Because I find that there is a surprising amount of cookbook writing that is not cooking. So, for example, writing about food safety. Or talking a tiny bit about the history of a dish. Or writing down a funny memory in the headnote. Or talking about equipment and setup. Those are all examples of the things I do to give myself a break from the kitchen while still moving the book ahead. Well, I say “a break from the kitchen” but what I really mean is a break from the recipe list. Because I probably still cook for me and my partner. But cooking is so, so different when I’m just winging it and/or cooking for pleasure.
Q. After writing Cookie Love with Mindy Segal and baking a lot of cookies, let's just say my oven needed a break (or at least a deep clean). After you finish one of your deep dives into waffle irons, skillets, Instant Pots, and the like, what do you cook after? Do you need to take a bit of a break, or do you find certain recipes become permanent parts of your regular cooking repertoire?
Ha! Yes. I need a break. I mean, do I use my waffle iron? Sure. Mostly for waffles. I use my Instant Pot sometimes for beans or pork shoulder, mostly just winging it rather than using specific recipes because that is how I cook almost everything except when I’m developing a recipe. You know, when you’re doing one of these books, you’re all in on whatever it is, and then you just want to … cook something because it sounds good or is in season even if it — gasp! — doesn’t use a particular appliance. I am so controlled by the recipe list when I’m working on a book. There is always something to be made or re-made. It’s a great gig writing these books, but it is work. It requires concentration and focus and it often requires sacrificing something that is a great pleasure in my life — deciding what’s for dinner. If I’m writing a book, I sometimes don’t quite get to decide; it’s decided for me by the recipe list.
Q. What’s one tip for aspiring cookbook authors that you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Writing a cookbook brings together a lot of skills, but the one that sometimes goes unappreciated is project management. Of course you need to be able to cook and to write. But you really have to be able to plan and project-manage. It doesn’t show up on the page, per se, but it does show up in the book overall. For the last book, I had a spreadsheet taped to my wall of the roughly 100 recipes with maybe six columns for each with boxes to tick off for the status. And then notes scribbled in besides because inevitably some recipes did not fit neatly in the boxes. It was both terrifying and satisfying. For me, it would have been more anxiety-producing without the spreadsheet.
Bottom line: Writing cookbooks isn’t only about coming up with a great idea or being a talented cook. Past successes don’t guarantee future successes, but grit and organization can keep you in the game for the long haul. And yes, you can have too much cake.
Thanks, Daniel!
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And for anyone who has missed earlier posts, you may like my guide on How to Write a Cookbook Proposal and 5 Cookbook Writing and Publishing Resources.