mykidsmom...your post made it sound so sentimental it makes me want to try the cookbooks. I'm gonna bring it up at the next meeting. Thank you so much for your in put.
My mom is the veteran here! One year she helped with cookbooks for three different communities (also three close girlfriends!) I have each one of these books now as an adult and my favorite is the one with helpful hints on the dividers, and a conversion chart in the back. Since these were done for the churches cenntenials so the ladies had boxes avaliable to put their family recipes in. There is one section in my hometowns book that is of celebrity recipies! Some are kinda funny but they did get really positive response from news anchors, radio personalities, fire houses, mayor, govenor, senators, etc.
Now, 20 years later I am still asking my mom "are you sure that this recipe calls for 1/2 cup or 1/2 teaspoon of salt!" My mom did do corrections for the really bad oops!
Oh, They used a local printer that helped them with advertising and flyers.
***when recipes were low on one topic Mom often went to her own recipe box and books and found family favorites to add, she omited her name though.
Please have as much fun with this as my mom and her friends did! THese are books I use and teasurer since now some of the authors and one of my moms best friend are no longer with us.
Thanks! I'm not sure which companies the chairs are looking at, though I do know a local printer is in the running. He can get us amazingly quick turnaround, plus we get to personalize as much as we want with not too much extra cost. He charges a bit more though, but to me its worth it for the quick turnaround, especially if we (hopefully!) have to reorder.
We went with morris press, I liked the quality of and choices they gave. We used alot of the free choices. We ordered about 700 cookbooks they have all sold but we did it as a memorabilia. We paid everything up front. Customer service was a great help. Lots of parents and students turned recipes but had to rewrite quite a few because they did not read instructions. It is a very nice book.
I'm sorry I didn't reply to your email sooner. I couldn't remember the name of the publisher. We used G&R publishing and they've been great. We did once and made about $6,000 (small school 150). This 2nd time we did a not to great version and out sales were not as great. Our 1st successful cookbook, we put clip art from the kids in it. This definitely made a difference in our sales. Little Tommy's mom bought multiple quantities because her child's artwork was in the book. We had the Kindergarten children draw pictures of their favorite food. We used all of their artwork and shrunk it down very small and used it throughout the book. Some of the artwork was not legibly which made it even more cute. Under a blob of of a picture, we wrote "spaghetti" and the child's name. Each grade then drew a picture of each heading (i.e., 1st grade - desserts, 2nd grade - salads, 3rd grade - meat/poultry) We then picked a top drawing from each grade and that became the artwork for that section. We've learned our lesson that making it more personalized was more successful. G&R was REALLY easy to work with.
We really didn't need a large group of volunteers. Maybe 5 or 6 just to get together the recipes, proofread and alphabetize. The rest was pretty simplified.
