Meet the Editor (and Author!)

It is me.

I have trouble explaining my work to anyone who asks. Friends who have known me for years continue to learn new layers of my competencies that shape the past and future of my career. There’s a good chance my mom still tells people I “make recipes.” And my husband might be the only person who has seen the 90% chunk of my work that I cannot find the eloquence I’d need to market it on the internet. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the few thousand of you could also use a refresher.

I am a chef, recipe developer, and as of May 13th, a published cookbook author and editor. Here’s what I’d like you to understand about this latest installment of my job.

…every published book you’ve ever read was probably thrown into multiple washer-dryer machine cycles of edits, re-writes, and pages of trashed words.

How did I start freelancing as a cookbook writer and editor?

I was 1.5 years into my editorial role at Bon Appètit by the summer of 2022 when I was selected to compete on Season 2 of Next Level Chef. While it would have been ideal to feel supported by my workplace to take temporary leave, it was not an option. And I ultimately quit what felt like the safest path to becoming the food writer I had originally planned to be. From this risk onward, I daydreamed of some idyllic freelancing world in which I could grow as a writer and recipe developer, but with more freedom to explore the ideas that didn’t make it through the bureaucracy of a corporate food magazine.

Before leaving for the set of Next Level Chef, I met and acquainted myself with a talented literary agent who is responsible for producing a majority of the cookbooks I own. We started plotting a game plan for creating a series of mini, approachable, plant-based cookbooks that non-vegan people like myself would find useful in making their home cooking easier when they don’t have meat around.

I returned from filming the show, and by October of 2022, I was working with a publisher and agent as the Series Editor for three plant-based cookbooks and the author of my own.

What is a “series editor?”

It’s the short-form way to indicate to others that I am the editor of the Make it Plant-Based! series. I was the bridge between the writers, publishers, and agent responsible for guiding the authors through their proposals, chapter drafts, manuscripts, and, most importantly, editing over thousands of pages along the way. There was no clear job description or definition until we formulated my contract and essentially crafted this role for my exact responsibilities:

• researching, selecting, and reaching out to three potential authors

  • writing author profiles and pitching authors to the literary agent and publisher

• working with each author to produce a compelling book proposal that includes:

  • personal narrative for why they are the best person to write their book, an ethos for the book’s organization, and a proposed table of contents complete with their proposed essays and recipes.

• learning how to be a cookbook editor from our publisher and practicing those lessons for 18 months of simultaneously learning each author’s vision for their book, while editing in line with extremely precise style guidelines.

• months and months of editing and writing thousands and thousands of pages of many, many words.

Wait, did I edit my own book?

No! Thank God. A critical element in my operations as a series editor was the help of our publisher’s best editor, who edited every step of my book-writing process. With guidance from the literary agent, I wrote and organized my own proposal, drafts, and manuscripts. Every step of my work was the test subject for our publisher’s feedback, so they could take their sharpest microscope to my writing. This process both perfected my work, but also demonstrated the caliber of editing they expected from me as I edit the three other books in the series.

What did I learn from editing three cookbooks for the first time while writing my own?

First, I witnessed valuable expertise lie within the minds of experienced home cooks and writers. Each author of the Make it Plant-Based! series worked full time but spent every ounce of their free time thinking about, making, and creating incredibly smart recipes before I ever approached them to author these books. That’s how I knew they were right for the job.

I also learned that writing is deeply personal, and every published book you’ve ever read was probably thrown into heavy-duty, laundry-like machine cycles of edits, re-writes, and countless pages of precious words thrown away like fuzzies in a lint trap before the next tumble dry. It isn’t easy to translate the intricacies of your life stories to written word, all for a stranger to distort your work into an unfamiliar shape. But, an editor’s job is to acquaint the writer with new, uncharted possibilities that accurately express what they mean, just cleaned up with a rigorous red pen from the publisher’s style guide.

The outcome is a work of art that coalesces cooking techniques, recipes, and the textures of so many different lifetimes into one cohesive series of books.

This is the start of a series where I introduce you to each of the authors of the Make it Plant-Based! cookbook series.