Profiting From Your Family History

If you look deep enough, you will be able to find tons of hidden golden nuggets within most peoples family history,and believe it or not there are loads of people that are willing to pay a pretty penny to find out about these little gems.

Nearly everybody is still talking about Aunt Gertrude’s famous good old apple pie, even though she’s been six feet under for the past several years. Mom makes the world’s best brownies and no one can beat Dad’s meatball recipe. Sound familiar? Even if you are the only chef in your family, you can use those coveted recipes to earn cash.

If you walk into any large bookstore, you will find hundreds of cookbooks. They might follow a theme or be full of general cooking instructions, but they’re popular just the same. Everyone wants to be able to follow a simple recipe and end up with a masterpiece. Your family favorites can fill that need if you know how to turn them into a book.

First, select the best recipes you own or can get from others. Test each one and write the ingredients and instructions down clearly and thoroughly. The reason for this is that, although you may make the same thing every week, your personal method is probably different from the original recipe. Some recipes might not even be written, just memorized. And still others, particularly older ones, won’t have the proper measurements. The general public can’t usually cook with a recipe that calls for ‘some flour’ or ‘enough sugar’. Your job is to translate Great-Grandma’s spidery and sketchy notes into full blown, easy to follow recipes. In order to have a book, you will need a minimum of 50-100 recipes.

Type up the recipes and don’t forget to make backups! Before you go any further, give several friends a handful of the completed recipes and have them test them out in their own kitchens to double check your accuracy and the clarity of your instructions. If everything goes well, you are on your way to having a cookbook.

When you write a cookbook, you have the option of just doing recipes or turning it into an interesting story as well. The best way to do this is to include family anecdotes  surrounding the history of the recipes or stories about occasions that the recipes were made. Anecdotes that make your readers feel connected to generations of women at the heart of their families will add to the personality of your book.

For example, folks will be more interested in trying Uncle Burt’s Egg Nog if they first read a funny anecdote telling the story of how the dog got drunk on it one year at Christmas. You don’t have to come up with these anecdotes on your own. Ask family members for their recollections having to do with food. They don’t have to be funny. Great Aunt Ruth’s story about how she ate only potato soup during the Depression could be a good way to start off a recipe for the same soup.

Once you have compiled all of the recipes into a book, you will need to find a publisher and discuss a format with them. Nowadays, you also have the option of publishing e-books online. You could do either or both.

Now that you have a completed book in hand, what do you do? Well, sell it of course! There are plenty of options for this. If you opted to self publish, start pumping them to friends and family, advertise in newspapers, magazines, put up flyers, and start a website to promote your book. Then start hitting smaller and larger bookstores with samples in hand.

Don’t forget that even if your family isn’t terribly creative in the kitchen, you can use any recipe that you have changed from the original version. Good luck!

Tags: family history, writing