Serendib Kitchen

Hm. Well, this is a semi-success. On the one hand, I needed curtains in the shed windows, because the sun coming in makes it too hot in the height of summer, and the lack of insulation makes it too cold in the depth of winter. And the curtains took 20 minutes to cut and sew, another 5 minutes to hang, and I do love the fabric I used for this, Robert Allen’s Folkworld pattern in the Aquatint color way, which I used a little under two yards of, at $15 / yard on remnant clearance at fabricguru.com.

BUT — I think maybe this isn’t what I want for this space long-term. I had waffled and waffled, thinking about map prints and space prints and finally settled on this one because I like it so. I do like it! We used the same print in his Admiral colorway for the backing cushions in our eat-in area, and it’s perfect there, we get so many compliments.

This is equally charming, and the animals are certainly appropriate to the garden. I particularly like how the gold thread I used picks up the gold of the flowers; I think it’s an interesting decorative element added to the curtains.

BUT, I think maybe I should’ve gone with my original plan and just stuck to off-white to match the interior monk-like paint job (or grey, the color of the chair and accent pieces). Because the star of the show in my shed really is the garden, and this fabric (which I bought 6 yards of, so enough to also do coordinating curtains for the long French doors AND probably the little single window on the opposite side) is sort of too pretty in its own right. It’s actually distracting me from the garden’s loveliness, rather than complementing it, I think.

Hm. I suppose I will leave these up until I have time and energy to go buy off-white fabric and re-do them, which may be a while. They can be functional, at least.

But that said, if any locals reading this has an interest in some 5′ long curtains (just covering a 4′ wide opening, without excess), let me know? I’d be happy to sell them to you for cost, so $25.

NOTE: They’re not perfectly sewn, because I was thinking it was just for my shed, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t perfect — one end is a little long on one, so you may want to re-sew the bottom hem, though if you use clips, it’s easy enough to just hang one a little higher to achieve an even hem at the bottom; that’s what I did. ALSO, I think I didn’t really have the tension set right on the machine, as the thread doesn’t seem to be laying quite right. I mean, it’s fine, but not if you’re someone who actually knows anything about sewing. 🙂

Or if anyone’s interested in the remaining yardage (a little over 4 yards, 54″ wide), I’d happy to sell you that at cost too ($60). I’m trying to think what I can do with it other than sell it. It’d make cute playroom cushions, but I don’t really need anymore of those. It’s upholstery fabric, so a little heavy for a dress. Maybe someone with little kids (or a daycare?) could use it.

(Non-locals, if you want it badly enough to pay for shipping, that’s fine too. 🙂 )

And hey, if any locals coming to upcoming Maram’s Tea and Textiles meet-ups (Aug 3, 24, 31) wants me to show you how to hem basic curtains like this, it’s SO EASY, and I’d be happy to. You do have to either use my machine, or bring one you know how to thread. I can try to thread another machine, but I’m no expert, so no guarantees.

#marammakerspace
#serendibhome
#blog

So, this was a big and scary step. I’ve just signed a contract with Mascot Books to publish Feast. Now, I’m still essentially self-publishing it. Mascot is what’s called a hybrid publisher, combining editorial, marketing, and printing services for indie authors. I’ve already done most of the editorial work and I have excellent proofreaders, so I won’t be taking advantage of that part.

What I do get out of this is a dramatically lower price point per unit than POD printing, a marketing team that will try to place the book in places like Costco, etc. (fingers crossed), and distribution services.

What will it cost me? Well, all the money from the Kickstarter and then some. Eep. Close to $20,000, to print 2000 hardcover copies, which is yes, very unnerving. I’m betting about $10K on being able to sell those books. I am not really a betting person!

A few hundred of those will go to Kickstarter fulfillment, leaving me with about 1750 copies (I’m being super-vague here, but Heather has the actual numbers, and I did go over them with Kevin before signing off on this) to sell. The cover price on the hardcover is $40. So selling them at full price, I need to sell 45 cookbooks to break even. I think I can do that. (Hopefully, we won’t end up with very many sad and dusty books in storage.)

Of course, that doesn’t take into account the other production costs (layout, cover design, original illustrations, indexing, advertising, book tour, etc.), and there will be sales and discounts for Amazon, etc., so the actual sale price will often be lower. So more realistically, maybe sell a few hundred to break even?

I’ll have at least a few hundred shipped to me (paying the shipping cost) for me to sell direct, keeping all the money from those, and Mascot will try to sell the rest, sending me the bulk of the money (I think 85%, if I’m remembering right, which is a big difference from a traditional publisher; I’m taking the main financial risk here, so my potential reward is commensurate). They’ll take care of shipping those out, which will make my life infinitely easier.

I know a lot of indie authors are doing this kind of thing these days, but I’m still enough of a traditional publishing person that I find it all kind of unnerving. But for this cookbook, at least, I think this is a pretty good approach.

My only hesitation is that I wish I’d spend a little more time talking to my publishing friends about other printer options; I’m still not sure I really understand that. But Mascot came highly recommended, and so far, our interactions have been very promising. Fingers crossed.

Again, huge thanks to the Kickstarter supporters. I don’t think there’s any way I would’ve bet the close to $30K it will take, in the end, to produce this book. So if the Kickstarter hadn’t funded, and funded well, I still might have created Feast, but it would have been a much simpler end result, and would likely have reached far fewer people.

Since my main hope with this is to share my love of Sri Lankan food with as many people as possible, I’m particularly grateful for your help.

Just a nice, everyday meal from a few days ago. Trying to eat a little healthier, and this is a great Sri Lankan combination — coconut mallung (which has no added fat beyond the coconut) with a slightly spicy ginger-garlic chicken.

You could serve this with a little rice, or in a bowl on a bed of kale salad. I had it with Sri Lankan red rice (similar nutritional content to brown rice, but I like the flavor better) mixed with white rice (1/2 and 1/2), some brinjal moju (a sweet-spicy cooked down eggplant condiment), and a little kale salad. Mmmm….

Shrimp and avocado on a bed of butter lettuce, with a tangerine dressing (no oil, no need), borage blossoms, and just-picked cucumber from Pam’s garden. Borage has a light cucumber flavor.

Fabulous for a fancy baby shower or bridal shower; I would even serve this at a fancy wedding with no hesitation. Though borage flowers don’t keep all that well; you can hold them for a little while in a fridge between layers of damp paper towels, but you still pretty much have to pick them that morning.

Probably best just to go out to the garden, pick some borage from the vegetable patch (remembering to remove the green fuzzy stem bit), and enjoy this for your summer dinner.

No need to share with anyone. 🙂

#serendibkitchen

I’m hiring a local friend with marketing background to serve as a publicist for Feast, but of course, I’m not a publicist, and she hasn’t worked as a book publicist. She asked me to put together a bullet-point list, and this is what I came up with — anything I’m missing? Thoughts?

We’ve started working on the hardcover interior design for Feast and it is just SO BEAUTIFUL, I am totally KVELLING right now.

Jeremy John Parker, I love, love, love it.

#serendibkitchen

Had a slightly frantic hour this evening because I’d promised to make and drop-off dinner for 16-20 for a non-profit thing, and I meant to start cooking at 3, but was in the groove on writing and lost track of time, so it was almost 4 by the time I started, and I was supposed to drop it off at 5:15, and all the chicken was frozen so I set it thawing in the microwave and made the veg. poriyal (yams and cauliflower, new combo, good), then checked, chicken still mostly frozen, set it to thawing some more, put the rice on (mixed red rice and basmati with butter, cashews, and sultanas), then sautéed some onions with cinnamon and cumin seed and mustard seed, etc. for the chicken and let those keep cooking on low, then made the kale sambol (kale, onion, coconut, lime juice, chopped tomatoes, salt, sugar; I was a little short on lime juice, but it was okay), and finally the chicken was thawed enough, so with twenty-five minutes to go, there was some speed chopping and frying and sautéing and covering with a lid to make sure it was definitely cooked through (because worse than being late would be serving people undercooked chicken!!!), and dumping in a can of coconut milk and somehow it all got done in time and packed up and I added some naan and samosas and a few bags of leftover Halloween chocolates from the freezer because I had completely failed to provide dessert, gah —

— and THEN I couldn’t find my damn keys for ten minutes, so I was late after all, and panicking a bit because I had originally planned to make lentils too, and just ran out of time and WHAT IF THERE WASN’T ENOUGH FOOD???

I dropped it all off full of apologies and told the staffers that they should just order more food if they needed to and I would pay for it. But they assured me that it would be plenty, and even were kind enough to drop a note just now to reassure me that there had been plenty; enough that their clients could even pack up some leftovers. So okay then.

NOTE TO SELF: USE A CLOCK, DAMMIT.

#cookingdoesnothavetobeaspeedsport

#serendibkitchen

Floral chocolate bark — white chocolate, candied violets from my garden, chopped cranberries and salted pistachios. The crisp of the candied violets adds a fun note to the salty, nutty tang of the pistachios and cranberries. Recommended! Would make again. 🙂

#serendibkitchen

One more floral bark for the road; now that the roses have started blooming, expect ALL the rose recipes — Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate, pistachio, sultanas, and rose. Luscious, with the slight bitterness of the chocolate balancing the sweetness of the sultanas, and that salty pistachio nuttiness….mmm…

When you’re trying to put the pieces of bark in a container for freezing (for a party to come), and you find that you keep surreptitiously eating them (they’re just *little* bits, not worth packing up, right?), you know it’s good.

In the interests of documenting the setbacks as well as the successes, we had a rough time with the cookbook last week. It was honestly pretty upsetting, and mostly my own fault, I think. I had one sleepless night, and a few very awkward conversations that I had to push myself to actually have (I wish I were less conflict-averse).

What happened was that I’d hired someone to do interior layout for the books, but he’d thought I was just hiring a formatter. Once we started working, and the e-mails started going back and forth, there was a lot of my wanting him to do things that he said would be too hard or too time-consuming, beyond the scope of what he did.

I did actually say in our original e-mail exchange that I wanted someone who could do beautiful design, rather than just someone who would run the file through a conversion program like Vellum (which I’ve done myself), but apparently something got lost in translation.

The short version is that we managed to get books formatted sufficiently that we could, in a bit of a mad rush, get rather ugly ARCs out to the book reviewers that we’d set up a blog tour with for late June. It hurt my soul to send those books out, but hopefully the reviewers will focus on the writing and recipes and not the aesthetics of the book.

What does that mean for now? Well, he and I have parted ways, and I’m out $1500 — which, once I looked around more thoroughly, I realized really wasn’t near enough for professional interior design for three versions of the book. If I’d done more research, I would’ve known that his bid was much too low, and I might’ve asked more questions about what exactly he was planning to do.

I am trying to treat all of this as a lesson in publishing, and thinking that if I’d paid $1500 for a course in how-to-publish and what-not-to-do, that would’ve been not unreasonable. Still. Ouch. I’ve now contracted with someone else (my cover designer, whose work I love) to do the actual design for the print books, at fair market rates, and have just sent him the files.

So that’s going to eat up…well, probably all of the immediate Kickstarter ‘profits,’ plus maybe a bit more, which is a bit painful. But I can still afford to do a print run for the hardcover, which gives me hope of some profit down the line, if more people actually buy the book.

Probably not a print run for the paperback (just POD), but I wasn’t sure I was going to do that anyway, because at least for the Kickstarter, a lot more folks were interested in the hardcover with its lovely color photos. Which kind of surprised me, given the higher cost of the hardcover, but I guess most budget-minded folks get the ebook, and the ones who go for print are more likely to be willing to spend a bit more for a beautiful object.

Anyway, live and learn. Now I go look at Pamudu Tennakoon‘s lovely pen and ink illustrations, and let her know if I have any revision requests, and then have her upload them to Google Drive to share with my designers.

Oh, and for the ebook, Jed is going to take a stab at the design and layout, which is very kind of him; he says he’s thinking of it as good practice for his own burgeoning Constellation Press, rather than just a favor for me. I’ll take it either way, gratefully.

If it ends up too time-consuming for him, though, I’ll either do it myself — I think I have the basic skills for what I want — or hire someone else. Whew.

I’ve slipped the delivery deadline a bit, as a result of all this — I had originally hoped to have books by mid-June, but that’s clearly not happening. Aiming for July 1 now; we’ll see.

Publishing beautiful, professional books is expensive.

And not easy!