Corinne is out sick, so JT guest hosts as we interview former Penguin Senior Designer, photographer, and cake artist/historian, Jessica Reed. Jessica started her creative journey building cardboard furniture in her room as a child, and has spent her life integrating literature and art into her life and career, leaving zillions of Etsy stores in her wake.

After dropping out of beauty school (please don’t burst into song), Jessica moved from Denver to NYC to attend NYU’s Publishing Institute. She worked at Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, then landed a position at Penguin, where she eventually became Senior Designer. She coped with the stress of being an introvert in a fast-paced city by bringing art and baking into her day-to-day; she has baked multiple books-as-cakes including for Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water.

Don’t let your fear of what big publishing is keep you from going after it, because there’s nobody telling you you can’t write your book but you.

Since her move to Portland, Jessica has shifted her focus to her freelancing business, where she works with self-publishing authors. It’s been here that she has been able to get into cover design, and really embrace the freedom that self-publishing affords authors.

Our conversation covers self help books, dropping cakes, chasing after our favorite celebrities, the historical murder-locales of New York, and more!

Guest Bio:

Jessica Reed is an artist and writer and author of the book The Baker’s Appendix. Formerly a Senior Designer with Penguin Random House, she now freelances as a cover designer for self-publishing authors as well as writing about baked goods and other food subjects. Find her online at reedsy.com/jessica-reed, thecakehistorian.com, and on Instagram @cake_historian.

Books and blogs mentioned in this episode:

• Weeknight Baking by Michelle Lopez
• Cake Portfolio by Amanda Faber
• The New Way to Cake by Benjamina Ebuehi
• Smitten Kitchen blog
• Carbface for Radio podcast

You know? Yeah, so I love the the mental health

issues that you address on in your photos and in your art,

like the anxiety cake, like I saw that when you were like, I

tried to set it on fire, but then I just smashed it instead.

I really did, like I was so mad it wouldn't light on fire, and I

punched a cake, the crap out of the cake. That was terrifying. I

mean, you, you've tried to make gluten free, I assume I have,

yeah, doesn't work. And you just, you're so tired,

yeah, and it gets all over the carpet. You have to clean it up

so the dog doesn't eat it. It's terrible. I have, maybe not the

exact same story, but I get what you're saying.

Making things. Making things is hard,

whether they be podcasts, cakes, books, I don't care all of the

humans making things is really, really hard. Yes, yeah. I

foreign Welcome to the hybrid pub Scout podcast with me, Emily

einerlander

and me. Corinne kolasky,

just kidding. We're mapping the frontier between traditional and

indie publishing. And as you may have guessed, Corinne,

unfortunately, has a very bad sore throat today and will not

be here. And in her place, we have, we have, who is that? Who

are you? Who am I? I'm your husband. Oh, shit, you led you

in here. You did. You actually requested that I be on here.

Because while I don't know anything about books, I do know

some stuff about cake, and we're fortunate enough to have someone

else who knows a lot about cake and books here today. So it's

basically like, it's a special day. Yeah, everyone is happy.

So we have Jessica reed here today. Jessica is an artist and

writer and author of the book the Baker's appendix. Formerly a

senior designer with Penguin Random House, she now freelances

as a cover designer for self publishing authors, as well as

writing about baked goods and other food subjects. Find her

online at reedsy.com/jessica-read

the cake historian.com and on Instagram at cake underscore.

Historian, Hi, Jessica, Hi. Thanks for coming. Thanks for

having me. Yeah, it's nice of you to drive all the way out

here. It's, it's an adventure from the gigantic sprawl of

Portland, Oregon. I just get to, you know, my husband has the

daughter for the evening, so it's sort of a break. Oh, good.

Oh, she's gonna hear this and not be happy. I said that, but,

well, now, now, mom,

she's here playing with a dog without you,

are extremely needy and overly affectionate dogs who does not

have a good sense of personal space and dog I gotta get I'm a

cat person, so I've got to get adapted to dogs for for my

daughter's sake. Well, I understand that most book people

are cat people. I made the mistake once of making, like, I

like cats, just for the record, but I was in, I was in like, the

work room with a bunch of people in my publishing program one

day, and someone said something about dogs being smelly. And I

was like, I think cats are smelly and they just all it was

like Inception, where everyone turns around and stares at Ellen

Page.

One of the women was like, I like the way my cat smells. I

was like, okay, okay, well, that's intense. This was a

mistake. I'm sorry. Wow, but

I just want to make it clear, I love cats, and so does Corinne,

but yeah, so you're getting a dog soon, yes? Well, yeah, under

Yeah, she'll probably implode if we don't get one for her eighth

birthday. She just turned seven. We've been saying when she turns

eight, we can get a dog so, so this is the year we figure out

how to make that happen.

The logistics of having an oh, we have a cat. Ah, another

animal. What's your cat's name? Mary? Oh, my gosh, I love a good

human name for

we adopted her from a shelter in Brooklyn, and she came with that

name, and her paper said she was, I shouldn't laugh,

abandoned at a church in Brooklyn. It's just this

dramatic orphan story named Mary. Mary, though she she was

obviously owned by an old lady who pampered her because she'd

been horribly declared, which I don't believe in, but she'd been

declawed. She was obsessed with canned food, and she's lazy, and

so to me, that's the hallmark of a pampered pet. So we adopted

her the.

Blessed Virgin. She's just like the sweetest, laziest cat.

Yeah. Well, it was funny, because at the same time we

adopted another cat. We adopted them together, and that cat we

just, we were gonna call Elizabeth, for Mary and

Elizabeth, and then we found out Elizabeth was actually a boy,

because they'd done, I don't know, we had to change it to

Joseph. Well, then it was just Tom it was Tomcat, which did

Tomcat, and then, unfortunately, Tomcat passed away before we

moved here. Rip Tomcat. Rip Tomcat. Yeah, all right, well,

let's, let's dive into the publishing side of things to

start with. Why? Why did you start pursuing publishing, and

specifically design work and publishing well, so

I've always been a book person, always, always, always, always,

it's been my first love. And I studied writing and art in

college, and that was I went to college kind of late, because I

went to Beauty School and I dropped out of beauty school.

Did people sing the song to you always, yeah, I won't do it

then. And

then I went to college and I graduated, and I'd always wanted

to go to New York City. My mom grew up in New Jersey, and my

grandparents were both partially raised in the Bronx, and I'd

never been there, but I was really drawn to it, and I didn't

really know how I wasn't I didn't have enough guts to just

go, but I looked into I applied to the publishing Institute at

New York University, and got into that, and was like, I'm

just gonna give it a try. I'm gonna go. It's two months live

in a dorm, and I'll see what I think. I'll see if I think I can

do this. And so I went and went to the publishing Institute,

actually, with the the idea

that I wanted to write for magazines. That's kind of what I

wasn't actually looking at book publishing. I was more thinking

of being a writer for magazines. I was obsessed with Interview

magazine and all kinds of

magazines of that sort back then. So I got into the

publishing Institute, went to New York, lived in the dorms,

had it was just, it was amazing. And the two months ended, and I

went home and got all my stuff and gave my cat to my sister,

and moved out here or moved out there, moved out to New York

with a couple of boxes and a lot of CDs, because this was way

back when. Well, I mean, you were wanting to write for

magazines, so I assume, well, this was CD era as well. Yes,

was 2002 so right at the end, yeah. So it was, it was just

post 911

and so, yeah. So I moved, I went to the publishing Institute, and

went back. Took forever to get a job. I couldn't

get any, you know, I had tons of interviews. I couldn't really

get any magazine work. And so I wound up,

I initially had gotten hired at Magnolia Bakery, the sort of

bakery made famous by Sex in the City. That's it. Yeah. Like, why

do I know that? And and at the same time, I got a job at a

Barnes and Noble in Manhattan, and I was like, Well, I want to

go into publishing, so I should go to the bookstore, and I would

never been a baker. It was interesting that how this all

came about. But So I worked at Barnes and Noble in Chelsea for

a while, and that was a riot, because you just you turned

around and be like, Oh, hey, Kate Winslet, what do you need?

Or hey, Bette Midler, how can I help you? Yeah, it was nuts. The

people that would come in, I chased Nigella Lawson down and

to get to her sign a book for me. JC, is free. She was really,

really nice. Was she very nice? Yeah, and out of my hair, and

she kind of looked at it like it was a little gross, but she

signed my book anyway. And that's wonderful, yeah, just the

people that would come in was just, it was wild. The whole

store shut down when Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart came

in.

Wow. It was wild. So they read, you know, I actually didn't help

them. Some other co workers helped them, and then a couple

others carried the books back to their apartment. So, wow, yeah,

there was, there was first class service at Barnes Noble, but, so

that store is actually not there anymore, but, and totally random

story that I won't go into, but I did once get hit on the head

with a hammer at that store. Oh, wow, yeah, on purpose. No, okay,

well, that's good, no, but, and I was fine. I like the I grazed

my head. I went to St Vincent's, yeah. So a lot happened, yeah.

So anyway, so I worked at Barnes and Noble and and then a friend

of mine that I'd met through the publishing Institute was working

at Penguin in managing Ed. And we were we had lived together

for a few months after the dorms, we'd moved into a house

together in Carroll Gardens, which is a neighborhood in

Brooklyn, and then, for reasons I don't go into that living

arrangement didn't work out, so I moved into another apartment

in Greenpoint, which is the northernmost

little neighborhood in Brooklyn, before you get to Queens on the

west side of the

borough. So.

Um,

and

so I got an interview for advertising and promotion

assistant penguin at Penguin, and I had the interview. I had a

lot of interviews at that time, but I had that interview and

I went back to work at Barnes and Noble, and, you know, like,

a month later, I got a call saying, you know, they wanted to

hire me. And I think I started to cry or something like, I was

so relieved. And so I first started as an assistant and ad

promo working, I can't spend so long I worked on, like, the

Berkeley imprint, and so ace and rock, so sci fi, Berkeley

NAL, which dissolved into like so much has changed in the last,

yeah, over a decade. But Penguin Press, when it first started all

kinds of imprints, and then I kind of rose up through the

ranks and became an ad promo manager. And then,

all throughout the course of doing that, I, as a lifelong

artist, was itchy, you know, so I was taking

continuing ed classes at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts in

design, hoping to

Well, I wanted to do integrate design work in with the work

that I was doing as a marketing manager, which involved mostly

copywriting and product product project management, yeah, but we

also did, did some design in that position, and over time, I

kind of beefed up my resume and then internally found a position

As a senior designer, which switched me over to still

Penguin, but working, you know, there was, I don't know how many

imprints at Penguin at the time, before we merged with Random

House, but I went into a different group that was like

Riverhead and Penguin itself, and Penguin Classics. And so I

was there until I left. Well, then it kind of switched before

I left, because of the merging, but I did that as a senior

designer until I left New York in 2017 Great. Wow. It's a

really long answer. No question. Sorry.

Nobody really like, Well, I think there were a couple people

we've talked to who had a rather straight trajectory, but not

many people do, yeah.

Okay, so you said that the itchy art person was inside of you. So

you were doing art since you were a young person as well.

Yes, yeah, your medium of choice. See, I'm that person

that photography has been my kind of the running thread that

you could that you could look at through, at least in high school

when I started taking taking photography classes. But I've

always done, I mean, I used to build Cardboard Furniture when I

was a little kid from my bedroom and and I've always been crafty.

You know, I've had 17,000 Etsy stores selling a variety of

things, from, you know, silk screen T shirts,

hand etched bottles for pills. Oh, wow, have I got into

embroidery for a long time, and I was doing

hand embroidery on the covers of vintage paperbacks, and I sold

some of those through Etsy and through, like food 52 sold a

bunch of, you know, vintage cookbooks with my embroidery on

them.

So, yes, I've always been drawn to the arts and right writing

and arts were my two are my two, you know, and finding a way to

meld them into book was my kind of main goal in life. Well,

which I think is what I liked about magazines, visual as well

as as as written. And then I would think, like frequency as

well you get, yeah, it's exciting do projects, yeah. But,

you know, I loved being in an office every day, surrounded by

books like that. Having just the work I got to do was amazing.

The stuff we got to do there was, it was, I felt really lucky

that I had the career I had there was hard to walk away.

Yeah, I bet, yeah. Well, this is a show where we we have a lot of

different book people of different types. So we have

editors, designers, booksellers, writers, and we like learning

about each other's mechanics of what they do. So will you talk

with us a little bit about the cover design process as you

experienced it, and the amount of input that came from you

versus other people in the publishing house? Well, I guess

I should have mentioned so I never did cover design penguin.

No, I was, I was an ad promo, so I did. Okay, I guess I sorry. I

Yeah, no, I started doing cover design when I

was here. Okay, well, very tell us about that bridge. Okay,

well, well, yeah, so Penguin, I did advert. I continued staying

in marketing. And so I did,

you know, New York Times ads and online ads, and.

And I mean everything from ads and, you know, catalogs, down to

when publishers send galleys of forthcoming books out,

particularly if it's a special, I don't want to say special

author put a book that's getting a lot of press or something

they're super excited about, they'll send these. We'll make

these kits for sending the galleys and so we would work on

we did those by hand. I mean, those were done by hand,

assembled by six or seven of us standing around making these

kits.

We did a really fun one for Deb Harkness, when Discovery of

Witches came out, we did a really fun one for Elizabeth

Gilbert, for signature, of all things, I was pretty involved

with stuff for Lev Grossman and the magicians when that first

book came out.

So in that sense, I kind of had my hands in all the different

areas. And so

that's what I did for a very long time. And then we moved

here.

I did attempt to get into some attempted to get work in the

tiny publishing industry that is here in Portland, and had

absolutely no luck. Yeah. So I always wanted to do covers. It

was just, it's a harder game in design and in book publishing,

unless you've come straight. I don't know. It was not something

I think I was built for out there. I didn't come straight

from a design program.

How does someone get, like, chosen to make the book cover in

big publishing? Yeah, how fine. Now I really, I honestly have no

idea, and I there were some really nice people that worked

in cover design, but it was sort of kept this sort of insular,

separate thing. We had to interact with them. We had to

get their work. We would take their work and adapt it for arcs

or galleys, you know. So we were in constant contact with cover

design, but

it was a world unto itself. Yeah. And I think, you know, I

befriended, I befriended, over the years, I've befriended

Corley Bickford Smith, the British penguin person

responsible for all of the embossed hardcover classics that

came out. Oh yeah. And she was interesting to talk to because

she's a cover art like, that's what she does, you know, as

cover design. And

I think the trajectory, it's just, I don't know well. And

those are the people who do all of those, like, series of

classics, where every few years there's, like, a different,

yeah, that's so that's who I worked I worked at, I worked on

those most, or a lot of those, over the years. Wow, yeah, which

was, you know, really cool. Yeah, really, really cool. We'd

make T shirts, and we'd, you know, yeah, do all kinds of fun

stuff. I know several people who would like, envy the shit out of

you for that.

It was cool. And, you know, like their final projects on it and

stuff. It was funny being someone in that position. I

mean, it

isn't set, in a sense, true that a lot of the people that work in

publishing New York are either Oh, God, I don't want to get

myself in trouble for this. But either come from money or no,

went to the really big schools. You know, there's a lot of there

were a lot of people I worked with that had whose parents paid

for apartments for them, or they had,

they'd gone to the seven sister schools. They'd gone to Yale or

Harvard, and they had these, and I literally was a beauty school

dropout who went to a state college that I could get into

because it didn't require SATs. Like, that's how, yeah, and I,

you know, and I sort of

worked my way into it. So there was this,

I didn't come from where a lot of them came from. And I'm not

saying everybody that works in publishing is like that, and

even the people that did, I mean, they're all wonderful

people. I

can't really speak poorly about any of them, but it was just a

different experience. I mean, like, if you can then, you know,

if, yeah, well, yeah. I mean,

hey, if my parents could have paid for an apartment and I

wasn't living with, you know, a knife thrower's assistant in a

dining room with a plastic wall like, you know, that would have

been. Was that why it fell apart? They wanted to drag you

into the knife throwing No, no, no. She was cool. She was really

cool. She was an actress, and she was the person that got the

knives thrown at her. And we shared the apartment with four

or five other people, and it was this wacky. It was an old

dentist office and, oh, wow, that's fun. Yeah, there's a

plastic literally, my room was a dining room next to the kitchen

with a plastic wall that divided the dining room from the kitchen

so it could be a bedroom, and I slept on an air mattress. I

think my parents had to mail me an electric blanket because I

was so cold. Certainly don't put it too close to the plastic.

Get the tiny violin off my shoulder. But I mean, when I was

a kid, I thought that was like the starving artist New York

experience. So there you go. It kind of is actually not as cool,

though, as I expected it to be. Nor was it 19, you know, nor was

it New York in the 1930s which is, I think, what I went there

to find, or the 1920s I wanted to be in village, and you wanted

to do like in like, Thoroughly Modern Millie. It was awesome.

But I worked in Greenwich Village, which was cool. So at

least penguin offices were downtown Manhattan, whereas

everything else in publishing in New York happens in Midtown,

right? And I think honestly, had I gotten a job in publishing in

Midtown, I would have not lasted because Midtown, I'm actually

not a crowds person, which is weird for somebody that moved to

New York, but it's pretty chaotic. Whereas the village,

you walk around, and I'm not kidding when I said, see Sarah

Jessica Parker taking her kids to school, or you would, you

know Kate Winslet again, her kids, I'd walk past them going

to school, because people could do that down there. There was

not it's a part of town. It was people leave each other alone.

One of my greatest sightings was seeing um Lou Reed and Lori

Anderson having breakfast together at a coffee shop. And I

was I, it was really hard for me not to run in and say something

to them. So it was the kind of neighborhood restraint. I admire

your restraint. He jumped out of a car to say hi to John Brian

once, yeah, I mean

a moving car I was driving.

You were you were breaking at the time I was breaking. Well,

that's so jumped out. I understand, I understand, I do.

It's in LA, they expect it there. All right, yeah, no, it

was nice. It was quiet, and it was nice, and it was idyllic.

And you could walk around and see, oh, so and so lived there.

And you know, Edna St Vincent millay's house, the narrowest

house in all of New York City, was near there. It's maybe like

nine feet, something insane. It's so narrow, it's ridiculous.

And as a history fanatic as well, I'm cute, huge history

person, it was a really cool neighborhood to be in for that.

Oh, you're a cake historian,

yeah. And a spooky history person, and all kinds of Yeah. I

know all the places where people were killed in New York, I'd

walk around and be like, That's the building where so and so

died. You go to the Dakota a lot. I walk well, one of my so I

wanted a publisher I worked for had an apartment in the Dakota,

and I was obsessed. I so desperately wanted to be invited

to her apartment. I was never going to be. No, no, no. I was

never going she, you know, I worked with her sort of on the

side. I wasn't directly working for her. So,

no, but my, my OB, GYN, who, for my daughter, was, was near the

Dakota, so that was always exciting. It was, you know? No,

I love that building. Yeah, yeah. But no, there's a lot of

super creepy thing, like the park where my husband, um,

proposed, which, it's a long story, because it's near both.

We both work kind of near each other.

It's like, this used to be a cemetery. There's a grave right

over there, and they used to hang people in this park, and

then just, like, gets down really, just, he's like, where's

the grave, right here. Will you marry me? It's like, well, this,

you know, it's nice, you know,

maybe not nice, but it so, anyway, I got a history person.

I'm getting off topic here. No, but, but, um, no, yeah, it was,

it was, yeah,

I don't even know what I was talking about anymore. I mean,

we were talking about the New York experience for Oh yeah, so

Greenwich Village, and I was nice to work down there. And the

building was the penguin was housed in, was owned by Charles

Saatchi. It was where the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising

firm had their offices. So there was art everywhere. And we

weren't allowed, necessarily, to get up to the floors with the

good art. But it was, you know, it was, it was a nice building,

and there was a rooftop track that's you could go up there and

run. And it was, it was just New York. Oh, hey, satchel liberty.

Oh, hey, One World Trade, you know. And you'd run around and

just be like, Yeah, I'm in New York, you know, you do a Rocky

Run. But instead, you were on top of this building in downtown

Manhattan, just like having a lot of feelings, I would

imagine, yeah, yeah. It was always a lot of Yeah. In fact, I

might you're having, I'm just talking about, yeah, well, I

really, I miss New York a lot. Why did you come out here? Or

is that it's just really hard there?

I just got really the grind. Got just, it just got tiring,

especially with a little kid where you just, the

school system is pretty different out there. So trying

to figure out how to to navigate that was rough. I

was just really tired. Yeah, you know, my husband is an

architect, and he was,

he wanted to do work. He loved the work he was doing, but he

kind of wanted to get involved in stuff that felt a little more

meaningful to him. Okay. Then, you know, he did a lot of high

end residential, which was really cool, but at the same

time he was, he wanted to do something that felt like it was

giving back, right?

And I had, I just been at Penguin. I was there for 14

years, which was a really long time to stay at one company.

Yeah, you survived the early 2000s there. So, like, yeah,

that was a pretty rough time, right? It was a transitional

period. Was, yeah, it was always kind of transitional there. But,

um.

Yeah. So, yeah. I think we just, you know, I look back and I

realized I kind of wanted to leave forever. I mean, I feel

like I talked to one of my, one of my millions of therapists,

probably starting in 2006 in fact, when I met my husband, I

was pretty close to, I actually started baking because of all

this back then. But when I met my husband, I was thinking of

leaving New York, and that was around that was around 2006 and

and then I met him, and I was like, Okay, I'll stay. But yeah,

I think, you know, just

couldn't do it anymore. No, it's hard. It's a hard question to

answer, because to me, it's still the one of the best cities

in the entire world. It's, it's home. I you know, there's the

place I was born, there's the place I grew up, which, in my

opinion, is New York. Because I don't think, I think it's

amazing you grow up as a child. I think you really grow up once

you hit your 20s and go onward. You know, 100% believe that,

yes. So look, I grew up in New York. I was born in Denver. I

grew up in New York, and now I'm figuring things out here. Yeah,

yeah. But we've only been here a little over two years, so we're

still finding our feet.

Let's talk about your cover design work now.

So what do you how do you decide what direction to go with the

cover? Are you told, since it's self publishing authors, I know

they have a lot more control over the process. Do they just

tell you what they want, or do they kind of give you free

reign? Or is it a little bit of both? You know, I would say

working with self publishing authors has been one of the most

delightful experiences after all those years of working in

traditional publishing and seeing. I mean, frankly, how

many people got overlooked, how authors that already sold

gazillions of copies still had all the marketing money going

their way?

Yep,

and, you know, I mean, I could speak having been someone who's

published a book and worked in publishing, it's it's not what

everybody thinks it is. Oh no,

from the outside. So working with self publishing authors is

just, it's freaking amazing, because it feels so good

to give these people a quality look for something that they've

worked their butts off to create, and not just shutting

them down. Yeah, no, I mean, and so usually when I get a new

client, we start with I send them a questionnaire trying to

get an idea of what they're looking for, what feeling they

want their cover to do. They have any images? Can they send

me covers they like? More importantly, what do you not

like? A lot of people won't tell you what they don't like until

you ask them. So I find out what they don't like, and then it

just becomes a process I do. I do stock image research. I

usually start with that and see what images capture them. I

usually am just working off a synopsis, but a synopsis of

whatever of their book, of their particular book, yeah.

And then once we've agreed upon a look, I'll draft the full

cover, I'll come up with fonts, and usually I try to give them a

few options to choose from, and we'll get a direction. It's

really a collaborative process.

You know, of course, they're ultimately the ones with the

creative control. I'm just helping steer them in a more

polished direction, perhaps than then they might be able to pull

off on their own, right, right? I don't, I don't think a lot of

people, even people who do have a little bit of design

experience it, can pull it off a cover very easily. Like, to me,

it seems like a really difficult thing to do. Like, I have

friends who do self publishing, and they'll buy, like, $200

covers and they look good, yeah, but I just, I couldn't do it

myself. It seems like a very unique skill to me, so it almost

the sort of thing where you're like, you really should hire

someone else to do it, unless you're really confident, because

it really shows when you cover

that exactly, extremely amateurish. Yeah, it does.

Let's talk about cover trends. Just your opinions, your

opinions on cover trends. Okay, what ones do you hate the most?

Oh, God, you know

it's funny as somebody who's So,

what do I hate? This is really tough question. Yeah, yeah, I'm

sorry. No. I just, you know, I just, I don't think I've ever

thought about particular design trends, and what I hate about

them is the question too. Mean, no, no, it's not mean at all.

But I'm honestly blanking. I guess the covers, I never

really, I get really tired of a lot of prescriptive nonfiction

covers, particularly because they're prescriptive, you know,

they all look the same. They're the easiest to do, in a way,

because it's like, okay, big, big old font in a white

background color, a white background, maybe some, you

know, image that harks to some kind of thing that, you know, a

syringe or, yes, frowny faced.

Balloon. You know, a single image that evokes what the book

is like, Malcolm Gladwell, like a feather or, yeah, yeah.

It's just kind of

tiresome. But one of your cake historian pictures is of like a

cake being smashed by a stack of self help books, isn't it? Yeah,

self help to admit my my absolute

problematic thing with self help books, but I work for a lot of

people. Genre wise. Don't look at me.

I used to work for Mind, Body Spirit publisher, and Corinne

still works there, and I was the sort of person who, like, read

them on my own while everyone made fun of them. And was like,

yeah, that's stupid.

Like, I am less embarrassed about reading, like, really

smutty romance than I am about reading self help. People are

pretty it's, it's the sort of you make your own cover. You

could whip out your, you know, paper bag from the grocery

store, like you had to do in high school. Yeah, cover your

book with a different cover

with a book. So, yeah, no, I have, I've always been into self

help books, or,

I think it's I grew up with a father who is rather

existentialist in nature, and when I broke up with my first

boyfriend, he bought me a copy of existential psychotherapy and

said, read the chapter on death. Everything will be fine.

Wow. So it's always been sort of part of my life,

although I never did actually read that chapter. I mean, that

sounds like a smart move. That's pretty intense, throwing you

into the deep end. Well, I mean, I won't even get started there,

but,

yeah, no, I've always been drawn to self help and all that kind

of stuff. Yeah, but it's also problematic in my mind in a lot

of ways too.

I mean, we do terrible things to ourselves in so many other ways,

and why not with our reading habits, too? Yeah, which is why

I did that cake, because I felt like I was looking everywhere

for answers, and it was suffocating me.

All the different ideas are, you know? I mean, I think there's

this. I actually would not call it a trend, but it's been, I

think, in more widely,

widely shown in the world. I say, oh, but this whole

manifesting genre that's been happening? Yeah, I mean, maybe

they started with the secret and old law of attraction books, but

now there's all the new manifesting books, and they're

it on one hand, there's such a draw to think, Okay, I'm in

control. If I just am happy, I can make this happen. And then

you suddenly realize that, conversely, if it doesn't

happen, you blame yourself and all the poor people and the sick

people made themselves poor and sick. Well, exactly. And it's

elitist, it's classist, ableist. It's sort of, you know,

it's shitty. Yeah, it's really shitty. But then, on the other

hand, you want to feel like you can bring good things into your

life with your brain, but you don't want to bring the bad

things into your life, yeah. Don't want to feel responsible

if, if you know, if something doesn't happen, you don't think,

you know, I just didn't think happy hard enough, but you're

gonna anyway you know

exactly yourself up about it. So, yeah, that's probably so

I've actually pulled back quite a bit from from any kind of self

help literature.

Yeah, I'm proud of us. Yeah, it's, it's hard, but it's worth

it, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, empty calories, yeah,

you just hate yourself in the morning pretty much. Yeah,

probably even more than consuming empty calories,

though, because sometimes that's wonderful cake.

Cake is, cake is not an empty calorie. Okay, well, you know

we're talking, you know, perception, I agree with you.

I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that would think self

help. But help books are not empty calories. So that's what

I'm saying. Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. But let's talk

about, let's talk about cake more. Let's talk about how the

cake historian originated. I would like to know.

I can't. I mean, really, I I saw I did not grow up baking. No one

of my family bakes. My mother baked Duncan Hines box mix once

a year, you know.

And when I was in New York, I'd always been drawn to cake in the

artistic sense. And when I was working at that Barnes and Noble

and Chelsea, there was a book that had come out called cake

walk. I think it was by an artist named Margaret Braun. And

no, it wasn't called cake walk. Maybe it was cake walk. I can

Google it anyway.

I just, I don't know. I became enamored with that book and it.

Cake walk. Okay, good. I got it right, nice. I became enamored

with it. And

these are beautiful, yeah, they're kind of crazy, right?

And she had a studio in New York, and I sort of, I just, I

started to realize how happy I felt looking at pictures of

cake. And so it started out, I started a blog called pictures

of cake entirely for myself as a repository for pictures of cake

the days before Pinterest. So when I was at work and I was

feeling pissed off, I would go and I would look at these

pictures of cake, and they would give me good feelings. And then

when I did some of my design classes, I was

making things related to cakes. And

then I started baking. I, you know, I kind of lived in

apartments that were not very conducive to that for a long

time. And then I moved in with a good friend of mine into

different apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he is

an artist, and I was the, you know, consummate Etsy all the

time artist. And also started baking. And we lived in this

sort of wacky he had porches hung everywhere. I came home one

day and he'd covered the bathroom in tin foil for a

project. I mean, it was just, it was really cool.

So I started baking. I, you know, I went to the dollar store

and I got

stuff. I'd go to the bodega to get sugar. I would, you know,

and I would just, I started trying to bake. And

it it evolved into where I knew that I couldn't have them at

home with me, because I would eat them all. So I devised this

thing that I started doing at work. I called it Cake, cake

Thursday. So every other Thursday, I would design an

invitation, or I'd send an invitation out to coworkers, and

I'd say, Come join me for cake in my office. Thursdays at 430 I

thought this was a good way. Friday is coming. Let's have

cake. So we did that. I did that for quite a while, and one year

I made a calendar of all the cakes I'd done, and then it

became like cake Thursday on Monday, because after I had my

daughter, it became too hard to do it on two Thursdays. You had

to have that weekend, right? Exactly. Well, and then it got

more, kind of a bit more intense. So that's when I

started doing a lot more history work. I started to become really

obsessed with the history of cake and researching the history

of cake in the United States, its connection to feminism, to

our ideas of motherhood.

And so I would do these historic cakes, and I would design these.

I started designing the invitations, and I would email

them out, and people would come and we'd eat cake. And this went

on,

mostly until I left. I did,

but so the history became really kind of how it

began, you know, as I was really getting into the history, and

that's where cake historian started. And then as I've

progressed through the years, it's sort of been less about the

history of cake and more about the culture, its place in our

culture, its connection to mental health. The work that I

do is to sort of take a cake and use it as my medium to explore

mental health, identity, issues of our culture and

and so, you know, towards the end of my career at Penguin, I

started doing books as cakes. So I would take a book and distill

it into flavors and colors and textures and make a cake. So

that was really cool, because I got to do a cake for

Paul Hawkins. When into the water came out, I did a cake for

her. When Lauren Graf's Fates and Furies came out, I did a

cake for her. And am I to understand that it was served at

her book launch party? Yeah, wow, that was awesome. Yeah, I

have a picture of the two of us together. What was for Fates and

Furies? It was, it was an edible cake. Yeah, I'm trying to

remember why I used I'm on the website. Let me edible essence

for Ylang Ylang scented layer orange layer filled with creme

patisserie,

right? Okay, frosted with Swiss meringue buttercream and topped

with Spun Sugar. Hell yeah, yeah. It's all sort of it Evo.

There's, there's

the sort of craziness of marriage was, was the sponge

sugar? Orange? I think I try. I'm trying to remember what

orange had to do with the book, but all the flavors Florida, it

might, but, and then the creme patisserie was, one of the

characters was French, and the yelling Ylang was, it's, it's a,

it's, I can't remember his language of flowers or

something, but it's, it's a sort of sexual

scent. So the books as cake was all it was. And I still do that,

not as much as I

I don't have as much of an audience for it. Well, I do. I

give it to the neighbors here. Now, you know my husband's

office, but sometimes I have to explain what it is, and they get

a little confused, not confused, but if they've not read the book

or.

Or, or, I'm like, this is an esoteric experience, and it's

just a chocolate cake. Jess, I'm like, no, no, no. It's different

than just making puns. This cake out of your cake. I mean, yeah,

there is that.

I mean, you let your most thematic cake was

the the prince cake that was, yeah.

Now, are we talking about the little prince or the musician?

The musician, nice, it was a raspberry filled cake. Nice. Was

it shaped like a beret?

I mean, it just had a big purple, purple. It was all

vanilla buttercream. It had raspberries in the middle,

chocolate cake with vanilla icing. Yeah, that's the one.

Okay, yeah, no, I love that book. Yeah, I need to read it.

It was, it's a nice, nice read. It would do like nice reads like

that too, you know, just kind of stuff that doesn't, I don't

know, I can't get into the

the older I get, the less I can really torture yourself. Yeah,

we kind of live in a constant state of torture in our current

climate.

Yeah, so escapism in the form of literature right now is, I think

that's why I like going into the past too with what I read. It's

so far removed from and it already happened, so you don't

have to worry about it well, and it's made up, and it's flossy,

and it's, yeah, it's anyway. So, yes, so books is cake something

i When is this book coming out? Because you have a book called

the Baker's appendix, yes. How did that come about first? Let's

talk about that. That was a book actually self published first.

Oh, but it says, Well, I self published it.

I designed and self published this tiny, little booklet. It

was 45 pages. I printed it with these people out, I think, in

Minneapolis, in this lovely it was a lovely like linen weight

paper. And I hand tied a baker, a baker's twine bookmark and

hanging loop. And I sold them at a couple craft fairs, and then

food 52 picked them up and

sold that for a while. And then

the food writer, Julia tershen, I got friendly with her. She

was an early proponent of the Baker's appendix, and she

introduced me to her agent, and her agent took me on and sold

the book. So it was picked up by Clarkson Potter and then we

contacted an old colleague of mine named Ben Gibson, who is

one of the main guys behind a company called pop chart labs,

and they do infographic posters and all that kind of stuff. And

we got him and his team in to do the illustrations in the book.

And, yeah, and then, you know, they said you have three months.

And I was like, Oh crap, because the self published one was not

all, you know, it was mostly just the numbers. It was not,

there were no recipes, right? So I had developed that very

quickly, within a course of three months, while working full

time and with a little kid.

Well, I love the structure of the book, just because you've

got,

you have all these conversions, different things that are kind

of really the kind of stuff that you might just hop on your

smartphone and look for, but it's really nice to have on a

piece of paper in front

of you. I also really like the historical conversions, because

I've, I have a couple of recipes where I've had to tweak it a

couple of times. It would have been nice to have a little

better starting place, maybe. Yeah. So yeah, that crazy world

before common. And then

a lot of your, like a lot of your, I really like your cake

decorating advice,

which says that there's no need for fondant, is how you start

off. And I'm like, yeah, actually did my very first cake

with fondant a couple weeks ago. I'd never, ever, ever, wow. How

did that? Or it was fun. I did it. Planned a corn cake for a

dear friend's daughter for her birthday. And it was fun. I

mean, I'm still buttercream and things you can't eat all the way

I put, like, weird miniatures and stuff made of plastic on

cakes and stuff, and I tend to do a lot of cutouts on paper

stuck to toothpicks. But that Etsy coming out, yeah, fondant

definitely has its place. I'm just not a fondant person. You

don't have to bake pie

cake. I'm Team cake, and I'm team not fondant, though. I will

use fondant, and I like pies. Okay? Fondant pies for you. No,

is that a thing? No, I just made that up to be, well, there's

cakes. There's cakes that look like pies that are covered in

fondant. Okay, you're there's gonna be fondant pies. Now

you've manifested that. That's just know, how dare you can I

unmanifest it somehow

be poor, wow,

wow.

Jeez, sorry. I'm

shook.

I'm proud I made it that long without saying something. I.

Okay, I did. I did propose fondant in pie form, so I kind

of deserve That's true. That's true. It just brought out a

demon deep inside of me,

fondant Gremlin, like the cheddar goblin.

Have you seen Mandy? Oh, it's, it's a really weird movie that I

recommend. I know. JT has a question for you about, like,

shared interests. Are you a fan of a podcast called carb face

for radio? I have no I don't check it out. It's really good.

Yeah, hosted by

a guy named Chris who tweets under the handle shit, food

blogger. Oh, I know that. Yeah, wonderful. And Lori will ever

who was the late Anthony Bourdain assistant? Yes, who I

saw that? They were like, follows, man, Instagram. Yeah,

Instagram. And I'm like, you knew them, so I it's really

neurotic. But when I did my podcast, which is the sound

quality is terrible. It's hard. It's really hard here. And I,

you know, I did it, and then I won't get into the long Well,

you know, get into it, because this is what my cake work deals

with, too. Is that

I had some mental health issues that came about about a little

over a year ago, and

without getting too into it, which a lot of the cakes, the

mental health cakes, were born from, kind of trying to

understand what I was going through, right?

And so I did the podcast, and then I sort of couldn't do

anything for a while,

and so I've been wanting to get back into the podcast, but it's

been really difficult. So because I was so nervous about

how my podcast sounded, I stopped listening to any other

podcasts. Oh, yeah, which is really sounds weird. No, it's

hard because I listen to things, I listen to other podcasts

extremely judgmentally now, because I go, Oh, I can hear

that person smacking their lips, or like, oh, there's too much of

there's too much boom, and there's too much, like, lower

levels as a creative person, I mean, you're probably, probably

have a little bit of a perfectionist streak. Like, did

you try while editing your podcast? Did you like, weep

bitter tears? I because I do well, I just, I it was more

weeping. Like, what the hell am I doing, kind of

with this podcast? I mean, I loved doing it. I mean, my first

guest was my daughter, and that's what actually, we were

talking as I was coming here, and I was like, you know, b I'm

kind of nervous about this. I've never been on a podcast before.

She said, I have.

She's great. She's amazing. She's amazing. She said that

she'd been on a podcast. And my husband was like, Well, what

would you what advice would you give your mom? And she said,

Mom, just be brave. And you're doing a great job. You're being

very brave. I just want to offer that affirmation. Thank you.

I'm sorry. I wish I'd like done something to make you more

comfortable. No, no, no, no. It's just it's,

I'm pretty much an open book person. And, yeah, that worries

me, because I'll talk. I'm pretty open about my life. I'm

open about my mental health stuff. I overshare constantly,

you know? Yeah, so I love the the mental health issues that

you address on in your photos and in your art, like the

anxiety cake, like I saw that you were like, I tried to set it

on fire, but then I just smashed it instead. I really did, like I

was so mad it wouldn't light on fire. I punched a cake, the crap

out of the cake. That was terrifying. I mean, you've tried

to bake gluten free, I assume I have. It doesn't work. And you

just, you're so tired,

yeah, and it gets all over the carpet. You have to clean it up

so the dog doesn't eat it. It's terrible. I have maybe not the

exact same story, but I get what you're saying.

Making things. Making things is hard,

whether they be podcasts, cakes, books, I don't care all of the

above. Humans. Making things is really, really hard, yes, yeah,

yeah. I think my daughter's so cool because I went into labor

with her two weeks early during Super Storm slash Hurricane

Sandy. Oh, my god, yeah, my we were just talking because her

birthday was October 30, and my parents were out here. My mom

was like, Don't you remember that night you texted me picture

and you said, Mom, I'm baking cookies. Everything's fine. And

I just knew something was gonna happen. Such a Scorpio move on

her part, yeah? Like, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come now. So we

had to, you know, it was dramatic. They closed the

bridges and the roads, and we couldn't get to the hospital,

and we had to call an ambulance, and there was a tree down in our

yard, and they kept having to move around because of downed

power lines. And it was, you know, and then she just, yeah,

she came into the world with a flourish.

Interesting shit happens to you,

yeah?

Or maybe I get in the way of interesting Shit, I don't know.

But yeah. So that was that was a memorable birth.

Yeah, I got off track there again. This.

Is no born. We're talking about making things as hard and the

feelings that they evoke. And I mean, I just think it's so

interesting how it's both therapy and like, harm inducing

at the same time. Like it helps you purge bad feelings, but it

also like can possibly layer them on top of you as well. The

cake, the baking, any kind of creative pursuit, yeah? Baking,

definitely, for me, the one thing that was hard as I've had

a lifelong eating disorder problem, yeah? And so it's super

strange being someone who I remember I worked on one of,

God, who is it? Oh, God, I can't

believe I'm blanking his name. He wrote Omnivore's Dilemma.

Michael Pollan, yes, I worked on a couple Michael Pollan books

and Michael Pollan, okay, and

one of the food rules came out, and I had to do a poster for the

food rules. And I remember one of them was like, Don't don't

eat. It has something to do with not eating sweets unless you

bake them. And I wanted to shake Michael Pollan and be like, what

if you bake a lot of them? Does that mean you can run into that

exact same thing? Because I've had some, like, weight issues,

food, you know, disordered eating, type of issues in the

past as well, and I had somebody say that to me, and it's like,

have you met me? Yeah,

my oven. It's a lot. Okay, sorry, it's fine. But I also

don't want to call the person out on the podcast.

Call them in. I will just sub, no, I'll just sub tweet and say

thanks. And I don't think they ever got any of my baking good.

Screw them.

Or don't probably know, okay,

but it's Wow. Okay.

Sorry, I took it step two.

We don't cake shame and we don't kink shame. Yeah, no, yeah,

yeah.

So, yeah, baking and eating, it's, it's complicated

relationship, yeah? And actually, that's one that I

think a lot of, I know a lot of people who are food bloggers and

food writers and and it's,

it's, it's, like, the unspoken, yeah, thing in the food I want,

I wonder if that's going to be broached kind of in food media

at some point. Has it been, I'm surprised that I haven't really,

I, you know, I've thought about broaching it quite a bit, just

because, you know, in conversations I've had,

especially people that write cookbooks,

you put on weight, like it's You have to taste what you make. And

I see a lot of food bloggers, and they make a point. And some

some food bloggers make a point of saying

or showing off how fit they are. And which is great, you know,

kind of over, but a little bit maybe, or there hasn't really

been a lot of true talk out there about, you know,

the eating of the food you make. You know, they look at chefs and

they Okay, well, they taste everything they make. But if

it's a baker, I don't know, it's a weird, it's a weird elephant

in the room. Yeah, yeah, something does people don't talk

about. And similarly, that the whole mental health

stuff as well. It became easier for me. I couldn't use words,

really, to talk about stuff for a while. So I could bake it. I

could bake how I was feeling. And there has been a riot, you

know, there's been articles in New York Times about

procrastinating and,

you know, anxiety, people that bake to relieve anxiety and

depression. And why is that, you know, becoming such a big thing?

And in some ways, I think we're lucky that we can make it a

thing, because we're not living in an era where we had to bake

like baking is a choice we're making, as opposed to we are

women, that is what we do, you know? Yeah, also, you have the

resources to be creative right now. Yeah, that's not just

limited to baking in a lot of ways. I i had a one

of my former bosses, I was speaking with his wife, and she

had come over to the States before the war in or before the

Second World War, and we were discussing gardening and things

like that, and she mentioned having this peach tree. I'm

like, oh, that must be awesome. You'd be able to can those

peaches. And she gave me this very like grave look on her

face, and she said in a very thick German accent, I didn't

come to America to be canning all these things, and I had this

moment of shit, man, what I do for a hobby is what do to

survive? Yeah, just kind of further is the same point. You

know,

just how, how context changes everything? Yeah, absolutely,

yeah, something you're doing for pleasure or because you are in

pain, and it gives you pleasure because you're in pain is also

something that was a pain point for somebody else. Yeah, yeah. I

think back, you know, to even my mom, being the first generation

that really could work outside of the home.

I mean, granted, she was also lucky in that she.

Was able to choose that whereas she didn't have to because of,

you know, yeah, economic circumstances, yeah, but,

yeah, it's, it's again, you you know, I think the domestication

question that comes into a lot of these conversations, it's

even though we're definitely in a place where I think,

I think you got the return to domesticity. But then there's

still the people feeling weird about it performative.

Now I'm going off on another Well, do you, do you feel like

the history that you use to inform the the work that you do

makes it weightier on you personally? Or do you feel like

it's, it's something that makes you more excited. It makes me

more excited. The exploration of it, I find

just,

it's just how I talk. It's how I mean, obviously I use words to

talk other ways. But,

you know, I never, you know, using cake as a medium is funny

because it's kind of a, you know, there are people that do

cake art, but it's pretty small

group of us that use cake in an artistic sense, as opposed to

making art to cakes, if that makes sense. Oh, like using it

as a medium. Miss, yeah. That struck me about seeing your

seeing your work is that it is such an except, I mean, it's

food, it is everything, some ways, well, the intimate,

accessible medium, yeah, because everybody needs it well, and

then the things that you're putting underneath the frosting

also mean something which is everyone, yeah, the difference

between, so You're saying there's layers to it. Oh, my

God, we made it how far? And this is the first part I made. I

don't think it is, but it's the first one that made me angry.

Okay, then it's the first one that counts.

Yeah, no, that is huge difference. And I hadn't really

thought of that in that way before, but not a lot of people

who do. When you think of cake art, you think of, you know, Ace

of Cakes, fondant, fondant, yep, fondant, everywhere, fondant,

fondant. Or you think of my daughter's always like, Mom, you

should go and nailed it and my husband, I don't think you

understand, what nailed it is, yeah, that your mom would

probably do. Okay,

you know what? I don't know, because they give you two hours

and I just, I don't know, it doesn't cool enough. Yeah, it's

like, so many things that everybody likes to watch great

British baking show, and like, I love it, but at the same time

it's like, this is making, like, I'm picturing myself in this

role, and I'm having a really hard time, like, not running

screaming out of the room. Yeah, I have anxiety attacks watching

it. I love it. Yeah, I love Great British baking. So it's

like, my calm time. And we make the kid watch it with us too.

And she's like, I don't want to watch it. And then she then she

loves it, yeah, a video from her when she was maybe three, and

she gets up on a chair, and she's like, What are you

watching? And we're like, Great British baking show. She's like,

you're not watching Great British baking show. You're

watching My Little Pony.

But I have to confess that the one of the meanest things I ever

did to JT accidentally was he was baking something on

Thanksgiving, and I like, took a phone video of him, and I

started singing one of the like, stress part music. And I, like,

put it on the internet. And he's like, take that down.

It's funny. And he's like, no, no, no, no, just take it down. I

don't have to explain myself to you. And I'm like, I was having

one of those moments where the thing isn't coming quite out,

right? And I'm trying to contain the rage. Well, I couldn't,

yeah, because he, you know, to me, like, I am not a baker and

anyone who can pull it off, which I see him do time and time

again, is like, that's awesome. And so I was just like, Haha,

pop culture reference. And he's like, this is an emotional

experience well, and also trivializing it. Just to give

you context, I cloned the C's scotch, mellow, oh yeah, yeah.

It was a pain in the ass, and they started leaking everywhere,

and the chocolate work was not good. And I'm just like,

delicious, see, that's the thing is. And I totally get it, though

it doesn't ever look like you or when it doesn't, but if you

gotta ship them and they're dripping, yeah, butterscotch out

everywhere, it's not good. It's not a good situation. It did

taste really good. Then I do want him. Yeah, it was amazing.

But no, that stuff happens. I mean, I remember I was baking a

cake, and I, I took,

I just baking for me is like, it's, it's a mindfulness tool,

because if you're not paying attention, I mean, I've so many

burns on my hands from not paying attention, or I'm doing a

cake, and I, I did a cake once for friends, and if you're

listening to Those friends in New York, but you have to send

it to for, like, their engagement, well, they're

divorced now, but for their, like, little work engagement

party. And I dropped it down, it was in a cake carrier, but I

dropped the cake down the stairs, and it was a chocolate

cake, and it was covered in these sugar pearls. And.

So I was like, What the hell am I gonna do?

So I

squished all the sugar pearls into the frosting, and then I

made up a story at their engagement thing. I was,

like an old tradition used to be hiding gems under the frosting

of a cake to signify, you know, deep love. Or I made this whole

thing up, if you can't fix it, featuring it's, that's a

classic. That's a classic move. I love it. When's your birthday?

February, end of February. Pisces. Oh, okay, yeah, no. So I

totally made up the story to save the cake because it was so

awful looking. And I was like, Well, I have to come up with a

reason. It looks like shit. That's so good. So I came home

that story that's amazing. Yeah, yeah, I probably and you did it

with a straight face, yeah, wow, somehow I was we're all liars.

Everyone likes to think that they're not a liar, but every

single person is a liar. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I think

it's fine, no, I'm not

okay. Pretty sure that was a lie. I know it's a lie.

Absolutely

we don't need to go and then that True, true. I had a

question, just kind of in general, in terms of food media

nowadays, what?

What kind of things do you read? What are you excited about?

Cookbook wise, is there anything that's kind of on your radar

right now that you're hyped or excited about authors? You like,

bloggers, whatever? I don't read as many blogs as I would like to

read.

I and there's one big reason behind that is I get really

irritated when the recipes at the bottom of the essay, oh,

which is why I have a page on my website called just the damn

recipe. Thank you for that, by the way, because I hate it's not

that I don't want to hear your story. It's all the recipe I

click on it is for the recipe. So if I'll read the recipe and

then go back and read the story, and it drives me crazy. So I

don't read a lot of blogs. Don't read a lot of blogs, because

that drives me crazy. Now they've been putting a button

where you can jump to recipe, so make good. The worst is when

you're trying to find a recipe and there's a bunch of different

options, and you have to scroll through eight different blog

posts about your Yeah, because

pop up, pop up, yeah, drives me crazy. So I feel you there, but

I still read the old, you know, smitten kitchen. I see she's

forever, just a great one.

My friend Michelle, who is Hummingbird high, she just put

out a book, weeknight baking book. And she's Portland

located, actually, and, but we actually met. She lived in bed.

Stuy,

where we were in Brooklyn, um,

there's a a baker named Amanda Faber. She won the great

American Bake Off, and just self published a book called cake

portfolio, which is wonderful. And I had a long talk with with

a friend of mine recently, who just published a cookbook about

how much of a proponent I am of self publishing, yeah, and how

this woman who's pretty, you know, reasonable, big name,

reasonably, okay, you know, good Instagram size, but because of

the way traditional publishing works, and because you know how

hard it is to get them to look at you. And because of how many

resources there are for self publishing, now that I

I wouldn't hesitate to suggest to people to Self Publish, and

do people buy a lot of cookbooks that are self published? Would

you say see as many self published cookbooks? I mean,

I'll be. I have not worked on any self No, I've worked on,

well, it wasn't really self published

cookbook. It was a like a like a magazine, a good recipe

magazine, Thanksgiving recipe magazine that I designed for a

friend.

This was the first

one I'd really bought. And it's great. I love it. I think, you

know, it's a very, very, it's called cake portfolio. I think

it's a wonderful book.

We'll link it. It's great one.

And,

yeah, I've got to think there's a, I mean, I would think, I

would think that it's hard to

get, like, get a cookbook if you're not a celebrity or, like,

not on television, and so you don't have an Instagram

following in like, the Yeah, hundreds of 1000s, yeah. You

know, I have a good friend who published a cookbook recently,

and

I was talking, or I was following her on Instagram, and

she was doing this tag that was popping up a lot. And I thought,

Hmm, I wonder if she's doing a new book. So I texted her, and I

was like, Oh, are you doing a new book? And she said, You know

what, it's I can't get them, you know, she was struggling to

get the publishers excited about her new idea. And I was like,

Well, you know, you have, like.

20 something 1000 Instagram followers. And she said, Oh, no,

no. Now it's 80 to 100,000 they won't pay attention to you. It's

true. And I was just like, well, I have a 3000 you know. And I

know that, you know, my publishers have said, Unless you

sell 20,000 copies, it's not, they won't look at me. But you

have to have a really strong proposal to get and that's with

an agent, you know, I have an agent, and it's especially if

you want to do something that's like, full color glossy, yeah?

So no, it's, it's,

it's hard, yeah, it's really, really, really hard. And so I

would totally tell anybody listening out here, find a good

designer.

Find a good designer, and do it yourself. When you can initially

do the output, you're going to get a lot, much, because I, you

know, I'm not going to see any but money from my book for

years, years, because that's how traditional publishing works.

You put you get an advance. People understand, you get an

advance. What they don't think, I don't think they know, is you

actually have to pay that back to the publisher before you get

in, before you get any more money. So until your book sells

enough to cover your brand out, you're not getting any

royalties. So

whereas, if you're self publishing, if you put that

initial money into it, you can charge, yeah, you get the money.

You get all the, almost all the money,

yeah, but man, you also own it. Yeah, there's, of course,

there's pluses and minuses to everything. But

I, yeah, I would you do a cake historian, self published book.

I think a lot about my next book would be, I would love, I don't

even bake, and I would love that like frankly, but I'm a book

person, so I don't know where in the cake historian world I fit

right now

I am talking about working on a project with a photographer on

the East Coast who we want to do a stories as cake series, women

in peril, stories As cakes. So we're going to take five or six

short stories

featuring women in peril, and I'm going to conceptualize these

cakes, and she's going to photograph them. And we've

talked about like that, you know, she's got some really

great contacts out east.

And I,

you know, because the work I do is a little more esoteric, it

doesn't necessarily lend itself to a straight up cake book. It's

harder for me to sell the concept, true,

but so I do have, like, a non fiction food related book idea

in mind. You don't have to tell everyone

about it? Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it's related to

sweets and it's related to stuff that's creepy and dark and kind

of morbid and, yeah, a crossover hit. Yeah, it's like, my two

worlds colliding. I feel like there are a lot of, like, spooky

chicks who love to bake. So I think there'd be a I like that.

There's some new spooky chicks who love to bake, yeah, yeah.

Meetup group I

started one of the contestants on the most recent season was

yeah, the Oh yeah, Spanish goth, yeah. Remember Her Name, but

man, yeah, she was great. Was she? She was great? She was the

character. I don't know. I don't feel like there were a lot of

characters on the last season? Yeah, I had a crush on Henry.

Oh, Henry blesses. We still actually haven't watched the

last episode to see. I don't even remember what happened. I

won't say a word, okay, still haven't watched yet. I don't

even remember who won,

but yeah, no, actually, a former Great British baking show

contestant, and I can't remember her name, but I believe the book

is called a new way to cake, and it's very new. Just came out,

and it's beautiful. And I love that book.

Benjamina Buli, Oh, awesome. I loved her. Yeah. She was, yeah,

fantastic. So she just put out a really great cake book which has

some really cool recipes. There's a cardamom cake with a

mulled wine jam That sounds lovely.

There's a sweet potato cake that she adds caraway seed to, which

is fascinating, just a pinch of caraway seed. So I would

recommend that book that's been really exciting to me. Okay? And

I'll link that as well. But I am such a book book person that

cookbooks all the way. Yeah, it's hard for me not to, I

haven't, you know, to spend a fortune. I could they're

expensive. To spend money on cocaine. I spend it on books. It

is my, it is my dirty habit that, you know. I mean, well, I

mean, the books at least stay around. They do, they do. But

sometimes they show my short lived fascinations, like, oh,

for a little while, just thought she was going to be a woodworker

or something, you know, because there'll be, like, 16 books on

woodworking. And, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, we're not gonna talk about our bookshelves right now.

I mean, you're in this house. Why? Why not? Well, we're not.

We're not because I could just talk too long about it. Do you

have anything else you would like to talk about? Or just,

I just

that big publishing isn't everything that you know, we

still aspire to be picked up by the big guys and be published by

them, and it's still great to have these starry eyed dreams,

but we live in in a way, in a world right now that's much more

democratic when it comes to publishing. And if you want to

write a book, write a book, publish, you know, I mean, if

you don't have the money to self publish it. There are avenues.

There are ways to make it happen.

I think,

don't let

the fear of what big publishing is or

could mean to you keep you from going after it, because there's

nobody telling you you can't write your book, but you

Yeah, that's it, yeah, yeah. Everyone else is imaginary. Like

they don't have a dog in the fight, and there's no one else

saying you can't publish your book. Like that is an option for

everybody. And even, and even if they do say don't publish your

book, they can't control you still can publish Yeah. Like,

screw them.

You can. I mean, to say you wrote a book,

just because, you know one of the big guys didn't pick it up,

doesn't mean you didn't write it, yeah, even just write it for

yourself, yeah, yeah. And you know you're not publishing it

later. If there's anything you can see by looking at it, what

gets picked up, so much of what gets picked up now by the big

publishers started off as self published. Yeah, and the numbers

on Amazon, a lot of the high numbers are self published

books. Yep.

I just, I mean, I guess if I was to say anything, I would just

say, go for it. It's there's never been a better time. Could

you tell people where to find you one more time? Sure if

you're looking for the cover design work I do. It's

reedsy.com/forward/jessica-reed

R, E, E, D,

and then I met the cake historian.com

and on Instagram at cake underscore, historian, great

Instagram account. Thank you. Do it gorgeous. I love it. Thanks.

Yeah. You can find us at hybrid pubscout on Twitter, at hybrid

pubscout on Facebook, at hybrid pubscoutpod on Instagram, please

go to hybridpubscout.com to

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email us. We want to share your successes in our newsletter.

Emily@hybridpubscout.com

or corinne@hybridpubscout.com

and thank you, Jessica, thank you for having me. This has been

a lot of fun. It was great. And JT, thank you for being guest

host today. Always a pleasure, and

thanks for giving a rip about books. You

I think.