Fresh from the launch of eBooks in October, self-publishing company Blurb hosted a cookery master class on Wednesday night to show off its expanding portfolio of services to a packed roomful of bloggers and press.
Due to the recent success of recipe and cookery book publishing and retailing on Blurb.com, the company teamed up with fast-growing food network Great British Chefs, which is itself about to launch a festive cookery app for the iPad.
The Great British Chefs team brought Michelin-starred chef Josh Eggleton from his Bristol-based gastropub The Pony and Trap to The Cookery School on Little Portland Street. There, he demonstrated some excellent terrine-making skills and kept a watchful eye on the group as we cooked risotto and spiced crème brûlée.
From its launch in 2005 to now, Blurb has grown to offer creation on all devices whether desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile, and the goal to make publishing easier and quicker than ever was demonstrated in several case studies on the night.
The Blog Aid cookbook, put together by food blogger Julies Van Rosendaal in response to the Haiti earthquake, sold 1818 copies in a little over a week and raised - with matched funds from the Canadian government - $47,166.00. The speed with which the book was compiled, designed and made available for purchase through Blurb – just three weeks – is something that wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago.
Whereas the Eat/Gather series is a Master’s degree project from a student who shares personal stories told by the Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) within her family to narrate the shared process of making one specific traditional food. There was once a time when she’d never have been able to create a run of 50 editions without stumping up a sizeable fee.
I trialled Blurb’s Instagram offering last month, finding it completely intuitive and pretty good value for money. It’s great to hear that eBooks start at $1.99 (£1.25), and apparently updates have been made to the Microsoft Word integration to make the creation of a novel much more straightforward.
Though I’m not really inclined to take the plunge into author-ville just yet, the idea of using Blurb to make a record of key events and share with a small circle, or even on a large scale for corporates and SMEs is extremely compelling - and now a feasible option both off and online.
All images courtesy of The Great British Chefs' Flickr