A Resourceful Mom Writes an eBook Bestseller

 

This is a story about how an intrepid Greek-American mom in Alaska tackled economic problems caused by a family health crisis that forced her to quit her job.  She did it by pouring her family recipes and her memories of her mother and grandmothers into a cookbook that she self-published on the internet as an eBook.  Within less than a month, she had an internet best-seller.

This is also a story about how the internet has made it possible for us to reach out to people around the world to find support, friendship and a marketplace for things that we create with our own hands and talents, no matter how physically isolated we may be. 

The first I heard of Demetra Nerantzini was an e-mail from her on Jan. 9 saying that she would like permission to use a photograph of mine – a view of  Santorini that appeared on my blog in 2010-- for the cover of a Greek cookbook she was writing. She told me what impacted her final decision to publish the book:  The last few years had brought an overwhelming sequence of health emergencies affecting her children and her husband, all of whom had surgeries requiring a great deal of home care while recuperating.  During that time Demetra had no option other than to leave her job.

It was her daughter Marina who pointed out that this would be an ideal time for  Demetra to consolidate all the family recipes into one place.  People were always asking for the Greek recipes she had learned from watching her mother and two grandmothers—recipes that were stored in her mind and on scraps of paper tucked into cookbooks.  And once the recipes were gathered into a manuscript, along with the  cherished memories of the women who created them, then Demetra could self-publish an on-line cookbook that would be available not just to family and friends, but to the whole world.  Marina begged her mother to make the book her single New Year’s resolution for 2012 and kept insisting until  Demetra agreed.

                                                       Demetra & daughter Marina

In her introductory letter to me, Demetra said, “This book will be my most requested family recipes.  I don’t know if it will sell 5 copies or 5,000. I’m not an author and I’ve never published anything before, so my apologies for being very green about this.” She offered to pay for the use of my photo, but I told her she was welcome to use it;  I was delighted that she liked it so much.    

It turns out that Demetra was not green at all about internet publishing.  In her second letter to me she wrote “It appears that Smashwords is really the only aggregator that can help me get this first book out into iBooks and Kindle without a lot of up-front charges. My deadline is to have this book submitted to Smashwords on/before January 25^th since my New Year’s Resolution …is to have this in the eBook stores by February 1^st.”

Demetra kept me posted on the ups and downs of finishing the book by her self-set deadline.  “It’s amazing how hard sticking to a schedule can be at times, having lost my Mother and Grandmothers not too too long ago. (Lost all three between March 2001-Halloween 2006). Some recipes/stories I can sit and smile through typing, while others feel like they’re ripping my heart out…Sometimes I can’t see the screen through tears and need to step away.…Even if this book only sells 10 copies it’s done me a wonder of a soul cleansing”

She finished it by her deadline of Jan. 25,  and the next day wrote me: “A Google search for “Demetra’s Kitchen” already brings up the Smashwords page….  Before the book can be submitted to iTunes,/iBooks/Sony/Kobo, I have to wait until Smashwords does a visual review and then they will assign it to their premium catalog. At that point I can obtain an ISBN through them where I am noted as the publisher.“

Despite getting the book done on time, Demetra was soon disillusioned with Smashwords,  “It is driving me absolutely batty every time I see their screen about the ISBN number. It should say, “Click here to give up your publishing rights…or wait an eternity for us to get to your book so you can keep them!”

By Feb. 3, she was more optimistic:  “Everything is good now. The book has been distributed to Apple and all the other vendors, so I ‘m just sitting on pins and needles waiting for them to update their sites!... It, for sure, is going to be on all the Apple stores (available both in iTunes and iBooks), Barnes & Noble’s e-site, Sony, Kobo, Nook, and then somewhere along the line Amazon too. .. If you happen to be on Facebook, I have made a page for the book itself www.facebook.com/DemetrasKitchen.  There’s already 55 “Likes” on it, and according to the exposure statistics…it’s been viewed and translated for countries from Greece to UAE, to Germany, Switzerland and numerous others.”

On Feb. 11 Demetra gave me the high points of the previous week: On Monday she learned from the Facebook Reach Insight Report that people from  21 countries have been “poking around the Facebook page for the book.”

Tuesday she found out that a chef in Mombasa, Kenya wants to feature a couple of her recipes on his weekly show.

“Thurs—we finally appeared on iTunes/iBooks! (note no sign of it still on Sony, Kobo,  Barnes & Noble, Diesel or Kindle as of today.)”

“Friday—some one at Apple read the book and made it one of 20 categorized as “New and Noteworthy”.

On Saturday she went to the Smashwords home page, clicked on “Cooking” and then clicked on “Best Sellers” and found that “It’s Smashwords #1 cookbook. This is amazing.  I’m honestly floored at all the attention this is getting.  I’ve said more thank-you prayers in this last week than I think I have in the last few months…I’m a housewife in Alaska – I must be dreaming.”

By Monday, Feb. 13—“We’ve hit more milestones today.  We made the front page of iTunes cookbooks page and also, when you click through the recent releases (which are default sorted by sales, not release date) I AM #7 AND MARTHA STEWART’S COOKBOOK FROM DECEMBER IS #8!!!  HOLY COW!!!  This is all just so humbling.  It’s very surreal seeing this little thing that I consider my heart on paper being rated well enough to be sold on the same pages as the likes of Martha Stewart, Julia Child and Mario Batali….

“How very humbling this year has been ever since Marina decided this was my New Year’s Resolution.  Thanking God every step of the way for what a miracle this is turning into for our family.”

Feb. 18—“This is just amazing. God’s hand truly is in all this…For days now, when you go to the iTunes cookbooks page there sits the book cover (with your beautiful picture on the cover) interspersed with the likes of Martha Stewart, Mario Batali and Julia Child…God’s hands combined with the power of the Internet.”

Feb. 20—“Your beautiful cover now graces the first spot on the iTunes main cookbooks page and the first spot on the iTunes Regional & Ethnic Cookbooks page.  I couldn’t sleep tonight and thought I’d see where the book was and now I’m just sitting here in a dark and quiet house shaking (also wishing I could wake everyone…except it’s 3:02 a.m. in Alaska.)”

Clearly it’s too soon to write the ending to Demetra’s story of how she used the internet, her family’s recipes and her computer and cooking knowhow to help her family get over a rocky patch in the road.   But whatever the ultimate monetary rewards of “Demetra’s Kitchen”, its success so far has her looking for a hardback publisher.  And she’s now working hard on “Demetra’s Kitchen Volume 2”.

“I’m going to have to set myself a short deadline for Volume 2 and just bury myself in it” she wrote me.  “ Heck, my birthday is April 27^th –why don’t we make that the official “upload to Smashwords” date.  I wrote the first one straight from my heart and out through my fingers (in a hurry).  Might as well try that again, right?”

A Great Pumpkin Carved by Woodchucks

Every year when I realize it’s really Fall, I head over to Houlden Farms on Old Westboro Road in North Grafton to get an assortment of pumpkins, gourds,  squashes and mums to decorate our front yard.

They always have a variety of colors and shapes that would make Martha Stewart swoon.  

One year I scored a pair of “Swan” squashes that were  joined at the stem, so they looked like two birds kissing.  Houlden Farms had white pumpkins before they became fashionable with great names like “Cinderella” and “Gray Ghost.”

But this year, as I came around the farm stand, headed for the greenhouse in back, this is what I saw in a place of honor:

It was a frowning Jack’o’Lantern carved, as Ruth Houlden told me, by a “very artistic” woodchuck.  She said the talented  groundhog nibbled on the pumpkin when it was green and it healed over and grew into a good-sized orange pumpkin with a ready-made face.

This struck me as a bit of a miracle, sort of on a par with the proverbial infinite number of monkeys tapping away on typewriters until one of them writes the complete works of Shakespeare.

After admiring the work of the groundhog (and another pumpkin which he had decorated with “maple leaves”) I headed into the greenhouse to pick out my prizes for this year’s display.

Ruth told me the names of each one—there was a “Fairytale Pumpkin” (the green one) and the flat peach-colored  “Cheese Squash”, which she said is the tastiest squash of all. “Just cook it like a baked potato”.  I also got one Swan Squash this year and a purple Kale.

My orange pumpkin weighed nearly 35 pounds. Ruth’s grandson Nicholas helped me carry the heavy load to the car, towing it on  a dolly.   

By Halloween I’m going to carve the biggest pumpkin in a design incorporating our family name—I got the idea in a pattern that came with my new pumpkin-carving kit.  Then we’ll toast the pumpkin seeds and eat them, and maybe I’ll bake the Cheese Squash to see how it tastes.

Sneaky Shortcuts for Thanksgiving

For 39 years I’ve been doing Thanksgiving for an ever-growing group and as the years passed, I’ve streamlined the process so much that it’s embarrassing. I’m sort of a nut about holidays—especially the decorating part—and while I’m pretty good at baking (Scandinavian background) I’m not a serious Martha Stewart-type cook, as all my friends know. I did work for several years for Ladies’ Home Journal’s food department back in the sixties, but that definitely did not turn me into a master chef.

Nowadays magazines and ads on TV make much of the young wife and mother terrified by the complexities of roasting a turkey and serving Thanksgiving dinner to a crowd. I think the whole thing has been vastly over-complicated by the media.

So I’m going to share with you my sneaky shortcuts for a super-easy Thanksgiving, including how to keep children amused (although my children are all grown up now—but still coming home for the holiday.)

But you have to promise not to tell anyone how lazy I am –especially my Greek relatives who spend a whole day making a stuffing out of pine nuts, chestnuts, sausage, and everything but the kitchen sink. My corn bread stuffing takes about five minutes and every year they marvel at it. (Evidently no one has ever told them about packaged stuffing.)

The Turkey—don’t stuff it! A turkey roasted with the stuffing inside takes much longer and then you have all those risks of food poisoning if you leave the turkey & stuffing un-refrigerated long after taking it out of the oven. Stuffing baked in the turkey comes out soggy. I prepare my stuffing on top of the stove and serve it in a covered casserole. And if you have vegetarian guests, as I often do, you can serve them vegetarian stuffing.

The directions are on the back of the Pepperidge Farm Corn Bread Stuffing package—Melt 6 TBSP butter in a saucepan, add a cup of chopped celery and a cup of chopped onions, cook for 3 minutes. (Then I throw in sliced mushrooms and maybe this year chopped apples and cook some more. You could also add chopped chestnuts or pecans and crumbled bacon or sausage.)

When everything is softened, you throw in 2 1/2 cups water or broth (if you’re not going for vegetarian) and stir and you’re all done.

As for the turkey—I always get a fresh turkey, even though it costs more, so as not to have to defrost it for days and then find it still frozen in the middle on Turkey Day. I generally cut an onion in half and a couple oranges in half and put them in the cavity before putting the turkey in the oven. Put a tent of aluminum foil over it as soon as it gets brown. Every half hour you should baste it with pan juices (You poured broth into the roasting pan at the beginning.) . For the last 15 minutes I baste it with Maple Bourbon Glaze which also gives a nice color.

Green Bean Casserole and Candied Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows: I don’t make them. I came to realize that nobody eats them. What I do make is: Parmesan Potato Casserole which is mashed potatoes in a casserole dish with a lot of butter and cheese, cream and eggs stirred in and then you bake it with some cheese and parsley on top. I cook Wild Rice mix straight out of the Uncle Ben box. Artichoke hearts alla Polita with peas and dill. Corn and red pepper casserole. Brown and serve rolls –cook them in the oven after the turkey comes out. (Don’t forget, the turkey needs to sit for a half hour to soak up the juices.) Stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer.

Gravy—open a can. I’ve tried about a million “No fail turkey gravy” recipes over the years and I manage to fail every time. Gravy is a big nuisance right at the end of the cooking while everyone’s waiting to eat. What I do is open a couple cans of store-bought turkey gravy, chop up some of the neck and liver of the turkey (which have cooked in the roasting pan alongside the turkey), add a nice splash of some liquor—like sherry—or you can throw in some of the pan juices. Who’s going to know that it came out of a can?

Orange-cranberry relish—you can make this up to a month ahead and keep it in the refrigerator. Everybody loves it and it makes even the driest turkey taste better. Pick over and grind in the blender a one pound bag of cranberries. Grind up a couple oranges—pulp and rind. Mix together with two cups sugar or more. Chill in the refrigerator. I always make a double recipe.

When the kids were little I would have them cut with scissors a jagged edge for hollowed-out orange halves to make little baskets to hold the cranberry relish—I’d put the baskets surrounding the turkey. Or nowadays I surround the turkey on its platter with green and purple bunches of grapes.

Desserts: Everything made ahead. Always some kind of apple pie (I keep trying to find the perfect recipe.) A pumpkin ricotta roll—it looks like a jellyroll and you can make it and freeze it way ahead, then slice it and sprinkle powdered sugar on top when it’s time to serve. Somehow a fabulous Chocolate-Kahlua pie has become a staple of our Thanksgiving. It, too, can be made way ahead. Last year I made a blackberry swirl cheesecake pie as the fourth dessert, but when I make a pumpkin pie—which is really fast and easy…(just take the recipe off the pumpkin can)—I decorate the top with a circle of candy corn left from Halloween. Or Cinnamon Praline Pecans.

Pie dough—Pillsbury refrigerated. I don’t have the magic touch for “from scratch” pie crust that grandmas always brag about, and I’ve never had any complaints. When I do some clever crimping around the edge, the pie crust looks completely homemade and tastes fine.

Placecards and menus—Making the placecards or favors is a great way to keep children busy and out of your hair. I used to have them make favors/place cards that were turkeys fashioned out of (store bought) popcorn balls with a ladyfinger for the head and neck, three toothpick legs to stand, red or orange cellophane tied around the popcorn ball and gathered for a tail.—The three-legged turkey was then stuck in a large flat cookie, where the name would be written using those cake-decorating tubes. The kids really got into making these “resemble’ the person it was for.

Just today on Facebook I saw the Oreo Cookie Turkey above which was created by a clever artist named Shane Donnelly. It’s probably too complicated for any but older children, but would make a nice alternative to the popcorn-ball turkey.

The centerpiece is always the same—I have a basket shaped like a cornucopia, filled with various fruits, nuts and some fall flowers that have survived in the garden. Couldn’t be easier. Candles in candleholders.

I always print out on the computer a small decorative menu for each plate so people know what they’re eating. What they won’t know is how easy it was, unless you tell them.

Those Fabulous Magazine Divas –A Memoir

(A trip to Manhattan last weekend and a week on the West Coast starting tomorrow have played havoc with my plan to post the third part of my Ghost Extravaganza —but it is coming soon—a summary, based on 100 letters from people who live in haunted houses, of what a ghost really is and how you know there’s one around. Meanwhile, I’m going to post –in three parts--something I wrote as an homage to the legendary magazine editors I worked for long before Meryl Streep took on the role of Anna Wintour avatar Miranda Priestly)

I’ve read the book The Devil Wears Prada and seen the film—two rather different stories, but both about abused and self-pitying young female editorial assistants—and I want to tell any fledgling fashionistas struggling on the mastheads of glossy magazines: it used to be worse. In my day, we editorial assistants found ourselves serving cocktails, ironing our bosses’ linens and even collecting their spit. And in those days, it didn’t occur to us to complain, much less write a get-rich-quick tell-all.

When I set out to find a magazine job in New York, armed with a B.A., a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I, like Andrea Sachs in TDWP, considered myself a Serious Journalist. So naturally I applied at the Time/Life empire. A nice, not-at-all haughty woman in Human Resources told me in confidence, “If you really want to write—to be a reporter—then you shouldn’t apply for a job at Time/Life because women here cannot get higher on the masthead than researcher.”

I did not protest in outrage nor hunt for a lawyer, because this was 1964. I gathered up my resumé and my portfolio and thanked her for her honesty and went to look elsewhere. Eventually I ended up in the Food Department of Ladies’ Home Journal although, also like Andrea, I always thought The New Yorker was more my speed.

My first glimpse of the heady world of women’s magazines was in June of 1961 when I won Mademoiselle magazine’s Guest Editor Contest and was transported, along with 19 other coeds from around the country, to the Barbizon Hotel (no men allowed above the ground floor), where we found a red rose on the bed in our tiny rooms with a month-long schedule of events that bore no relation to a real job.

The editor of MLLE was the legendary Betsy Talbot Blackwell, the mother of the makeover. She was one of the last of what I call the Pleistocene Era of magazine editors--a group of eminent women who, early in the 20th century, ruled their kingdoms with the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove. (I suspect that very few of these early triple-named lady editors would fit into a size six, much less size zero dress.) They dictated to the women of America what to wear and cook and how to behave, and the women of America took their word as gospel. (I have a very early issue of Ladies Home Journal magazine that warns its readers sternly: if they dye their hair they will go insane.)

After our arrival at MLLE, each guest editor was given a personal welcome by BTB in her cavernous office. We were warned, before we entered for our few moments of personal face time, that if BTB should suddenly be seized by a fit of apparently terminal coughing, we should simply keep on talking as if nothing was happening. I did as I was told, but it was BTB who keep asking me if I was all right. Evidently the strain of having to take my final exams a week early, cramming all night while living on cigarettes, coffee, Mars bars and Dexedrine (a kind of speed, children, but it was legal) had saved my straight-A average but taken its toll on my gray complexion and stick-thin body.

Every year BTB threw a cocktail party for the guest editors in her magnificent apartment. All I remember is that she had champagne and caviar (I had grown to hate the sight of it), a strolling accordion player, a view of Central Park, a side chair once owned by Lincoln that no one was allowed to sit on and a cork floor that was badly scarred by the spike heels we wore. In her bedroom, free books sent for BTB’s perusal were in three-foot high stacks on the floor. That really impressed me—all those free books!

We stood in a receiving line at the cocktail party and my jaw dropped as the guest ed next to me suddenly decided to introduce herself with a French name. This same fiercely ambitious young woman also set her cap for BTB’s divorced son—something that evidently was as much a guest editor tradition as the strolling accordion player (who the following year, I’m told, accidentally sat on the Lincoln chair, reducing it to kindling.)

The great and, I would soon learn, totally anomalous thing about the Guest Editor contest was that you were chosen for your talent in various fields (writing, photography, art, cartooning, poetry, etc.) rather than for your physical beauty and fashion sense. This was the opposite of Glamour’s “Best Dressed College Girls” contest, which Martha Stewart won. Some now-famous women who were guest editors at the beginning of their career include: Betsey Johnson, Ali McGraw, Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Carol Brightman and of course Sylvia Plath in 1955. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the protagonist’s month as a guest editor drives her to throw all her stylish clothes off the roof of the Barbizon (Sylvia called it “the Amazon”). Then she goes home and tries to commit suicide.

Like Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada, most guest editors were dramatically changed by their exposure to a glamorized, surreal world. It can spoil you forever. Or it can traumatize you to learn that there are people smarter and more sophisticated than yourself, who speak three languages and went to finishing school. “Every time someone would start talking French, I’d dig my heel a little harder into her cork floor,” one guest ed confided.

Every morning some company threw a fancy breakfast for us, often featuring caviar. which I had never seen before. During the day we each were assigned to an editor at MLLE, but we never had to do any real work. Instead, we lived as if life was a movie montage. We got makeovers and were dressed alike to be photographed in locations around Manhattan. There were dinners and theater, a movie premiere, a bird’s-eye-view flight over Manhattan at dusk, and the chance to interview VIPs in our field of special interest (I got to interview artist Larry Rivers – who said I reminded him of his sister! Others met with Edward Albee, Oleg Cassini, Edward D. Stone, Philip Roth and Walter Kerr).

There was a formal dinner dance. The Lester Lanin orchestra played, and we were each provided with an escort scrounged for us by the staff of the magazine. Mine was very nice—stockbroker, lived in the Village. He asked me to the country on a weekend to visit his parents. I put on khakis, but the fashion Nazi in the lobby of the Barbizon would not let me cross from the elevator, seven yards to the front entrance, while wearing pants. She made me turn around and go upstairs and put on a skirt.


Next: From Mlle Guest Editor to Real Life Magazine Jobs—the party’s over!