Need Advice for Homemade Recipe Book

As a holiday gift this year, I'm making a homemade recipe book of all of my grandmother's recipes. My master-plan is to create the book using Adobe CS4. Does anyone have any suggestions as far as creating the book and/or getting it printed? I was planning on going to Kinkos for the printing, but haven't looked into it too much since the book is not done yet.

Thanks for the help!

-Samantha
BunchBite Marketing Intern
http://BunchBite.com

Have you considered bound photobooks? I prefer Apple's product that you can order through iPhoto, but there are plenty of places to order from online. Costco does them as well. Apple can do a wirebound or paperback with 20 pages for $10 and about 50 cents per additional page. They have a variety of sizes and options (hardcover too for about $30). You can enter text directly on the pages or upload a .jpg if you're doing a custom layout. The nice thing about these is that you can then throw in family photos to personalize the book.

If you have access to iPhoto you should check it out - there are a number of templates available.

Thanks for the awesome suggestion! I will definitely look into it!

-Sam

Can you do a virtual cookbook on-line with many people having access to it? I know this doesn't answer the original question.

We did a family cookbook about 20 years ago, and Volume 2 is coming out by Christmas (hopefully). I just think it would be good to have an ever-changing/growing cache of family recipes that could be accessed by everyone whenever they wanted. Except for those without computers, of course.

Thanks!

If you want a real bound book, you can do it on CafePress. You can make a .pdf file with whatever you want in it, photos, drawings, whatever, and upload it. Once it's loaded, you can order however many you want at any time. (There are discounts for ordering in quantity, but you can order a single copy.)

I have edited some memoirs for somebody who self-published this way and bought copies for all her family. She was very pleased.

I have published a number of books with lulu.com The process is pretty easy (you can upload Word documents or .pdf files for everything inside the book) and their cover design process is pretty easy. You can do hardbacks and softcovers in a variety of binding options. I've been happy with everything I've done with them and find their prices quite reasonable. Feel free to pm me if you have particular question or want to discuss the process. Good luck!

I have found Apple the easiest option of the book-making sites I've tried. The results with photos, text and custom layout were great (but I wasn't making a cookbook). I would suggest looking at their site as you're comparing offerings. Sounds like a wonderful gift.

I looked into this last year and thought that I had gotten some recs here but can't find the thread.

I haven't done this yet, only because I haven't been able to document all of the family's recipes but one of the websites I looked at was TasteBook - http://www.tastebook.com/

It's specifically for self-made cookbooks. I'm sure there are other competitors, like iPhoto's books on Mac, by now but this is the one that I looked into.

Please post your experiences with the service you use. Thanks.

Here is a prior thread re TasteBook.

I thought I had already posted on this...and perhaps I have but it was awhile back. My sister did the Tastebook for the whole family one year and I have really loved mine. You get to input your recipes as you choose, you get to upload your own photos and you can make arrangements for your gifted ones to go back to Tastebook and contribute recipes of their own and create new pages for their own books or as presents for everyone else. It's a cherished item in my cookbook collection and it was sent to me one year when I couldn't join my family and it completely had me in tears going through it.

I've had it for maybe 4 or 5 years and it's in perfect condition.

But doing your own book is cool too. I just don't have the creativity!

Happy Christmas!

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I'm quite behind on the production of this book, but I'll be sure to let you all know how I choose to go about it. You've all really helped! Thanks again!

-Samantha
BunchBite Marketing Intern
http://BunchBite.com

Hey all! I promised I would share my book story with you, so here it goes:

I procrastinated a bit on the book, and I am quite busy, so it was a rush to the finish. I DID complete the book in time using photoshop and indesign to create the document. My original plan was to get it bound by CafePress because it seemed reasonable and they gave color printing options. Some of the sites would only do the cover in color and the rest had to be in black and white. Tastebook looks like an interesting site, but I wanted to design my own book, so I did not want to use them.

Because I wanted the book done for the holidays, I could not use CafePress. I then looked into options at Kinkos and OfficeMax. OfficeMax was a very viable option and ALMOST had my book printed in time (the PDF was not finalized until 12/24... whoops ). A few things happened with the file and they could not guarantee that the books would be done in time, so I decided against printing them. I "gave" my family members the book by showing them the PDF on the computer and promising to have it printed. One family member has a hook-up with a printer, so I am going through them. I do not know who the printer is, probably just someone local who has the ability to print and bind documents.

So, that's my long story. Thank you all for the advice! It was very helpful, and had I not been so rushed, the suggestions would have definitely been utilized.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday season!

Cheers,

Samantha
http://bunchbite.com