Living Homegrown Podcast Episode 98 How a Garden Book is Born. Show Notes are at:

Transcription

1 Living Homegrown Podcast Episode 98 How a Garden Book is Born Show Notes are at: This is the Living Homegrown podcast, episode number 98. Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown podcast, where it's all about how to live farm fresh without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host national PBS TV producer and canning expert, Theresa Loe. Hey, there everybody. Welcome to the Living Homegrown podcast. I'm your host, Theresa Loe, and this podcast is where we talk about living farm fresh without the farm. That can mean preserving, fermenting, small space food growing, and just taking small steps towards living a more sustainable lifestyle. All the different ways that we can live closer to our food, even if we have little or no garden space at all. If you want to learn more about any of these topics or my online canning academy or any of the other things I have going on, just visit my website, livinghomegrown.com. Before I dive into today's topic and guest, I wanted to tell you about something that I have going on that you might be interested in. Now, I've been doing this podcast for about a year and a half now, and from all the feedback and the s that I get, I find that there are certain things that many of you have been struggling with. There are many of you who care about where your food comes from, and you're considering growing your own fresh organic produce, but you're just not sure where to start or you don't have a lot of garden space. Then I have others who are interested in making their own hand-crafted foods, like fermented vegetables, Greek yogurt, homemade cheese, and sourdough starter, but they're just a little unsure where to start or maybe they're afraid of doing it wrong or making a costly mistake. Then there are others still who are interested in learning about all of these hand-crafted foods and gardening, but maybe you're one of them, and you just don't have time to cook anything from scratch or add anything to your already super busy schedule. Here's the thing. I've heard you. I've heard all of your complaints and your worries and your wishes and your goals, and that's why I've decided to create a couple of free workshops that will help with all of this. I've been drawing from all my years of small space food growing and my professional training in food preservation and culinary arts, and I've put together some free workshops that will help you get some traction towards living a more organic, farm fresh lifestyle.

2 Now, these workshops are completely free, and at the time of this recording, we are setting up several different dates for the live workshops. They'll all be happening in mid-may Now, if you're already one of my subscribers, then you are all set, and you will be notified when the dates go live so that you can sign up for the workshops. If you're not a regular subscriber and you'd like to be notified when these free trainings are opening up or when you can sign up, then just go to livinghomegrown.com/go... That's G-O... to get on the notification list. Now, as the dates get finalized, when you go to that link, it will automatically take you to a signup page so that you can look at the dates and times and pick a workshop that works out for your schedule. Now, the purpose of these free workshops is just to get you one step closer to a farm fresh lifestyle without all the overwhelm and all of the stress. I hope to see you there. Okay. Let's dive into today's topic. Today, I have back a returning podcast guest, and that is Julie Chai. I thought this would be a really great topic to go into, because I have never covered it before. I wanted to bring Julie on to talk about behind the scenes of what goes into creating a garden book. So many of us have books that we love and adore, and we have no idea how much work went into them. Maybe you are a budding writer or a gardener yourself who've always dreamed of creating your own book, and I thought it would be really interesting as well as helpful to understand how the whole process works. What better way to look at this than to look at one of the most stellar books that has come out so far in 2017, and that is the book by Erin Benzakein called Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden: Grow, Harvest, and Arrange Stunning Seasonal Blooms. Now, if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you know that just a few episodes ago, I had Erin Benzakein on, who is the author of the book, and the flower, farmer, florist who wrote the book. I had her on to talk about being a flower farmer and writing this book. But who I am asking on today is Julie Chai, who was the editor who worked with Erin to create the book. We're going to be looking at the same book, but from a completely different angle. I thought that would be really fun. Now, Julie was on episode 43 of this podcast on growing food in containers, but I want you to know a little bit more about Julie so you understand where she's coming from, because she's unusual as a book editor in that she is a very wellestablished gardener and garden writer. Let me tell you about Julie. This is her background. Julie is a San Francisco Bay based writer and editor focusing on lifestyle content, including garden, home, food, and travel. As I said, she was the editor of Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden by Chronicle Books, which came out in April For more than a decade, she was on staff at Sunset Magazine, most recently as the Senior Garden Editor, where she covered topics including landscape design, ornamental and edible gardening, and organic decorating for print, television, and the web.

3 Julie Chai's work has been featured in Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, Gardenista, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Fine Gardening, and she regularly appears on television, radio, and video for ABC, CBS, HGTV, and NPR. She gardens in Los Altos, California where she lives with her husband and son. I have known Julie for many, many years. I met her when she was one of the senior garden editors at Sunset Magazine, and to have her as an editor of your book would just make your book stellar, because she's so good. I wanted her to come on and tell us what it was like to put a book such as this together, how it all comes together, how you work within the seasons, all of that. One more thing. Just remember that in the show notes for this episode, I will have links to everything that we talk about. To get to the show notes, you just go to livinghomegrown.com/98. Okay. Without further ado, here is my interview with Julie Chai. Hey, Julie. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited about this topic, because I've never done this before. We're going to talk about behind the scenes of creating a gardening book. I have had so many authors on, and we've talked about so many books through the lifetime of this podcast, but I've never talked about what goes into putting a book together, so thanks for coming on with that. I think it's a great topic. Absolutely. I guess we should start with letting people know a little bit about who you are, because you worked as the editor on Erin's Benzakein's book, Floret Farm s Cut Flower Garden, but I would first like to let everybody know a little bit about you. You and I have known each other for a long time, so I know all about you, but I thought it might be good to start there. Why don't we start with you telling everyone how you first got into gardening and then into editing and how you got to what you're doing now. Sure. I guess I became a gardener by accident, like a lot of people do. My grandma was a gardener, and it was something that I was always interested in and curious about what she was doing. I think it was some time after college, I just started experimenting in my parent's garden, and they were happy to have me do that. Then it just became something that I fell in love with. I continued that as a hobby, and I had always wanted to work for Sunset. I had applied over and over and over, over the course of years, and kept getting rejections and finally met somebody who had been the editor-in-chief there. He gave me the great advice that I really needed formal experience in gardening or one of the content areas to get in there, even though at that point, I had a background in journalism and had been writing a long time.

4 After he told me that, I literally quit my job, and I started scrounging garden jobs. This was before everybody had a website, so I was literally calling people in the phone book, just going down through names in the phone book, and calling different landscape designers and architects and asking if they needed an assistant. Some people said yes, and so I started working and learning on the job, digging a lot of irrigation ditches and planting and doing all of that, and then taking courses at the same time. Eventually, after I had some more formal experience under my belt, I was able to weave that into getting a job at Sunset, where I was a writer and editor for about a decade. Wow. I did not know that Sunset did that, that they wanted to have hands-on experience. That's probably why it's such a great magazine, because... Yeah, it is.... the information is always spot on. What is it that you've been working on now? Mostly freelance projects? Yes, mostly freelance projects. I've been writing for different magazines and newspapers, including some stuff for Better Homes & Gardens and Martha Stewart Living, the San Francisco Chronicle, and also doing some videos for HGTV Gardens. Fantastic. I would love to hear how you got involved in book editing, because you were a senior editor. You were an editor at Sunset for 10 years, and then you got hooked up with Erin Benzakein for her book. How did that happen? Her agent is a friend of mine and somebody I knew through different garden-related work. She called me to help a little bit with the development of the book, to actually help guide what the contents would be and take a look at it and reshape as needed. I had worked with her agent on several other titles before that, doing the same thing. When Erin and I connected, Erin just wanted a little bit more guidance with the actual writing, since it wasn't her day-to-day job. We started off, after working through the contents and reshaping and figuring out what would make a really strong book, we started working on the actual writing. Initially, she asked me just to help her with a chunk to help her get moving, but it ended up working out so well that we worked on the entire book together. Well, I think it really shows, because that's one of the reasons I love this book is it's so well-written and so well thought out. It takes the home gardener all the way through the entire year of how to grow a cut flower garden, but then actually how to cut the flowers and take care of them. It's a beautiful, beautiful book as well with beautiful photographs.

5 Thank you so much. Yeah. That's really what we were going for. We wanted something that was going to be stunningly beautiful and really captivating to draw you in, but that was super, super complete in the information so that you could go... Even if you were a complete beginner, you could start creating your own cut flower garden and go through an entire year with blooms. When you guys are tackling a project that's this massive, because you're looking at the whole year, did you have to do it in real time, like several years ahead? How did the timeframe work for this? That's something that's actually quite a challenge with garden books. It can be quite a challenge with garden books. Erin was already working on this for a year or more before I was involved at all. When you're creating a garden book that's focused on the seasons, you want it to look seasonal, so you do need to make sure you're photographing in real time, as things are growing and blooming and being harvested. She was already working on that photography before I got involved with the book. There are a couple of different ways garden books can happen. Sometimes people will be able to use photography from different sources that already exists to fill in the information that they want, but because this is based on Erin's work at her farm, she really wanted something that showed her space and showed what she actually does. It was really important for this particular title to be shot in real time. Of course, the complications with something like that can be the weather. Maybe a crop doesn't work out, so there are lots of variables, and it's a huge challenge, but she was able to really pull it off. I hadn't thought of that, but if a crop doesn't work out and it's in the book and you can't get pictures of it, then you have to scramble a little bit, I'm sure. Yeah, you do. Sometimes what might happen, and what did happen to us, is you might decide early on that you want a certain type of photography, but as you progress through the year or whatever timeline you have for the book, you might change your mind, and you shot the first set of crops one way, but the next season, you decide you want them another way, but you no longer have the other ones to shoot in a different style. It's a good idea, if you're going to shoot something in real time for a garden book, to have as much as possible, a pretty solid plan that you feel good about in terms of the images so that you can make sure to capture them the way that you want to. Not only are you thinking about the photography, but also were you having Erin doing the writing in real time, so that she was actually working on daffodils when she was writing about daffodils, or were you guys doing it a different times? The writing came at a different time. The schedule that we had set up with the

6 publisher was a shorter timeline. We had to work through the text pretty quickly, and it wasn't necessarily going along with the actual time of year. Okay. You were writing as the publisher needed, but you were photographing as the season was really happening? We finished the text before the photography was completed. Oh, okay. I get it. How long was the whole process? I know Erin was working on it for a year or two before you even stepped in, but how long, once you stepped in, did the whole process take to get the book completely written? From beginning to end, when we first started working together and when we actually sent the final text to the editor, I think it was about a year and a half to two years. The first year was when we were really moving through the text and sending big chunks to the publisher, and then we got series of edits back from them and were just refining at that point. Overall, it was probably a year and a half to two years. See, I think that's really important for people to know. They don't realize, I think, how much work actually goes into creating a book. I'm sure they think that they know, but it is a massive, massive project. It really is. It takes a lot of time. Yeah, it really is. It can vary depending on what your content is. Some people can produce a book in six months. It totally depends on the content and how fast you can work, but I think if you're doing this for the first time and if you don't write for a living and you're not used to deadlines, you can expect it to take a lot longer than you would have thought. Yeah. First of all, sometimes you find yourself staring at a blank paper, and you're not inspired to write, but you have a deadline hanging over you, but also the edits going back and forth. Let's talk about that. How did this work? Erin would write a chapter at a time, and you were looking it over and guiding her, but then it was sent off to the publisher. Is that how it would work? Yeah. Erin and I set up a series of deadlines for the entire book. There were lots of pieces within that that we were working through. She would send me a chunk. I would edit it, send it back to her. We would go through edits together, and we did that at least once or twice for each round of text. Then when we were finished with that, we then sent it to the publisher. They had both a copy editor and kind of a high-level editor who had just overarching questions that we would get the text back from them after they edited it, and then go through

7 another round. There's lots of rounds of editing. Again, that can vary from publisher to publisher. Some are more hands off, and some... If you're interested in self-publishing, obviously there's very little oversight. It just depends on who you're working with as to how many rounds of edits you'll have. Yeah. This is really an important point, because it's very similar to when we do a television series, when we do an episode. When you and Erin are working together, you're looking at it more to make sure that what Erin's trying to say or have come across is very clear and concise and maybe there's no major grammar issues, but then when it goes off to the editor, many times it's being looked at by someone who knows nothing about this topic. I think, we feel in television that that's super important. We actually have one of our producers who looks over the show, usually knows nothing on the topic. He's looking at it from a different... From someone who knows nothing, to make sure that we don't glaze over something because we know it so well. Like we might say, "Oh, CSAs." He's like, "What's a CSA?" We don't realize that we've just done that. I think that's super important. You guys were doing that, and that's probably why the book is so fantastic is because you had several different eyes. You guys look at it, and you know the topic, and then someone else is looking at it who knows nothing. They may have a question or maybe feel something isn't clear or they don't understand or maybe feel something has to be rearranged. Is that how it worked? Right. That is how it worked. Also, from my time working at Sunset, I would also look at it as... We were always trying to make sure it was complete for the beginning gardener. There was also that layer over it. Erin has extreme expertise. This is what she does for a living, and she teaches about it, and she has deep, deep knowledge of it. I tried to make sure that that was information that we could distill to somebody who had never done this before. Then beyond that, the editor at the publisher really had far less gardening experience and was able to call us out on things that seemed just slightly too specific or advanced level. Yes, exactly. Sometimes it would have been fine the way you had it, but they just put another element in there so that you make sure you have a wide net and you're covering the people who know absolutely nothing and the people who are more advanced.

8 Yeah, and I think that's really important. If you decide you want to do a book, it's generally because you've got expertise on that subject. It is really important to have several different sets of eyes on it, even if you decide to self-publish or go with a publisher who is more hands off. I think in order for it to be a useful book to your audience, it's really important to have several people look at it to do that kind of high level check of making sure the information can reach people. Yeah. You could even have one person who just is checking all your botanical names... Oh, yeah.... and another person... Because, boy, isn't that a nightmare? Yeah. I know it is for us. Also, have someone else look at it for grammar, and maybe someone else look at it who knows nothing about the topic. Absolutely. I think that's probably the best piece of advice you can give is that having several sets of eyes look at it, even if you're self-publishing. I think if you... Always, always, it is worth hiring a copy editor. I'm not a copy editor. That's a very specific skillset that I don't have. Really good copy editors make your book amazing. They catch all the grammar, they catch all... They catch the sorts of things you wouldn't even think about. Right. Apostrophes, commas, everything. Yeah. Even beyond that. Word choices. If you use a phrase that you've heard a hundred times, you might be using it wrong, actually. The actual meaning is different. They catch things like that. It's amazing. That's something I would recommend to anybody. Even if you're a writer for a living or an editor for a living, unless you have that copy editor skillset, I think I would absolutely hire somebody to do that. Yeah. Sometimes you may be using a certain phrase or a certain way of speaking over and over and over, and it can get boring in the text. We have that same problem on camera, too. You have a certain way that you might say something. Okay, that's a really good one. Yeah. Have a copy editor. If someone wanted to do a garden book or they've always dreamed of doing any kind of book, really, I know we've talked before about how every publisher is a little different. I guess they would have to start with researching the type of style or feel they want

9 their book to have? I think that's a really good idea. Different publishers often focus on different types of content and the way they produce the book is different. Some are focused very much on visuals and aesthetics. Others are focused more on really complete text. I think it's a good idea if you're starting out thinking you might want to write a book just go look at a bunch of... If it's garden, look at a bunch of garden books. See what's out there on the shelves. Take note of who is publishing those books, and focus on the ones you want. Oftentimes, you'll see sort of theme running through if you find a publisher that you like. Yeah. I definitely have noticed that, because you and I have talked about how we both get a lot of books crossing our desk. There's certain publishers that they all have kind of a style to them. You end up having... You're drawn to that if that's your style. That's a really... Go to the bookstore and sit down and just look through, because the way they lay out the books, the feel that they have, or the... It's kind of intangible to describe, but as you look at a stack of books from one publisher, they all have this way about them. Just like a television show or a novel or anything else, they all have a style. If you find a publisher that you like, I think that's a really good thing. If you're not going to be self-publishing, I think what some people think they're supposed to do is to write the book first and then find the publisher, but that's not typically the best way to go. Yeah. A lot of times, if you do all that work ahead of time and then find a publisher, oftentimes, since this is what they do, they'll have ideas that can make the book much, much better and much more marketable. If you do all the work in advance, you might end up having to do quite a bit of revision. Typically, you write a proposal. When you have an idea for a book, you write a proposal, and they can be quite lengthy. I've seen proposals that are 20 pages, so it's not a small amount of work. You generally give an overview of the book, a sample of what the writing might be, maybe a chapter or so, and if it's an imagedriven book, a sample of what you see the images being like. You can go as far as even suggesting some photographers who reflect the type of photography you'd like to see in the book. You're proposing to the publisher a complete picture or relatively complete picture of what you see the book being. Yes, absolutely. There are many books and places online that you can go to to learn how to do a book proposal, because there's kind of a... It's kind of like a resume. There's certain things that they expect to be in a book proposal. I wrote a book many, many years ago, before I had children. It's a big undertaking. When I did my book proposal, the thing that I noticed about it was that it then

10 gave me a clearer picture of the book I was trying to create. It forced you. Yeah, it really, really does. It's like explaining to somebody what you want to do. When you have to do that and boil it down to a few points, it really clarifies what you're doing. Yes, absolutely. What I ended up doing with that proposal... And you put a lot of work into figuring out what the book will be in your mind... so much of it I was able to take, and that was my outline for then building the book. It's not like it's wasted time at all. It really forces you to hone down what your idea is in a real tangible way so that you can articulate it to the publisher, and then they'll put their spin on it or help you, guide you, and then you can go from there. It's absolutely useful time, because it... Exactly as you said. What you put into the proposal, if the publisher accepts it like that, that's your framework for the book. Exactly. It's like your table of contents for the book... Exactly.... and you can just work from there. When you guys first started, though, you did some reframing of the book. You shifted from where you started. Did you do any shifting midway, or you pretty much, once you laid it out at the beginning, then you just tackled it chapter by chapter? Yeah. I think we spent a lot of time getting the structure to a place where we really liked it. We talked it through a lot. We really talked about where should this information go? Where is it most useful? Where in the book will people be looking for this? We spent a lot of time trying to make sure that it was going to be as useful as it could be for somebody looking at it for the first time. Well, now, when you're doing that, how do you figure out what to leave in and what to leave out? Isn't that the hard part? I don't know if I could do that. It's really hard. It's really hard, especially... Erin has so much knowledge. She really, really knows this content, and she has so many favorite flowers. We couldn't, obviously, include every single flower that she grows, so these were

11 like the greatest hits of what she grows. There is. There's a lot of information that you have to just really look at critically and decide what makes the most sense for this particular book. That takes revision. That takes revision. It takes a lot of real careful consideration, because you could. You could put too much. You could put not enough. I hope we hit the just right mark with this. It's a process, and it's just a set of decisions that you have to make. I do think you guys hit the sweet spot, because you don't want the book to be so big that it's overwhelming, and you want it to be actionable and really get everyone a jump start. I'm sure, for Erin, it was probably like picking your favorite child. Trying to pick your favorite flower would be really hard. Once you have the book written, were you guys involved at all in picking the actual photographs that went into the chapters? They're absolutely gorgeous. Erin really was very involved in driving the photography. She chose the photographer and really had the short list of what she wanted to include in the book. So then you guys had to figure out where they are placed, or is that something that the publisher does? Erin also had a shot list for the publisher and sent over all the photos, and then on the designer end, they put it all together and then sent it back for review. Ah, okay. There were places where she thought that another photo would be better, and we took a look at things, and this photo doesn't really reflect the content on that page. There was some back and forth on that, too, but for the most part, Erin really, really had an idea of what photos would work with each chapter, and we went from there. Yeah. I know Erin said something about that she had to make sure that anything that she picked as a flower that was used in there, that was shown in a photograph, had to be something that was accessible to the home gardener. I know that limited her and you in a lot of ways, because some of the things that she grows are not readily available to everybody. Right. That was something that I felt very strongly about. Again, from my time at Sunset, when we would write about a plant and people couldn't get it, we would hear from readers about it. Oh, yes. Also, if you're going to show something that's really beautiful, you want people to be able to get that. That went into the revising of the plants that were

12 included. Unfortunately, since Erin is a grower, she can get a lot of these rare varieties. What we talked about doing partly was making sure she sold those varieties on her website. She also sells a lot of seeds and Dahlias on her website, and so we talked about trying to make sure that anything that was shown in the book was either accessible out in the world or something they could find on her website. I think that was so smart, because I would have personally been very upset if I saw the pictures and she talked about it, and then I couldn't grow it. Right. Absolutely. You see these gorgeous varieties, and then a lot of them are in the projects in the book. If you want that specific look, and you can't find it... Especially if you're a beginner, and you don't know what some of the other plants are that look like that one... that can be really frustrating. We felt strongly about making sure that people could get the plants. That's so good. Thank you for doing that. Well, I guess one thing I've always noticed, whenever I work on an episode for our TV show, even if I knew the subject matter really well, from working on that episode, I always learn something or end up diving a little deeper than I ever expected. Was there anything while working on this book that you learned? You have a vast horticulture background and editing background in gardening, but was there anything you learned from working on this particular book? There was. I learned a lot about flower production. I never thought about flowers in those terms before. Like when you grow your edible garden, you think absolutely of growing your plants in terms of your yield and how to grow them in different ways so that you get the most out of your crops. I hadn't thought about flowers that way. I just never had gardened like that. I hadn't done a lot of cut flowers before this. I always thought of them as something that's growing in the garden, but not so much as things that you're going to bring into the house. Since this is Erin's business, growing flowers for production, she had so many great tips about how to grow different plants for the longest, straightest stem, and how to space your plants so that you can get the most cut flowers out of a particular square footage, and different ideas for staking things and just caring for your plants in a way that would give you the most production. It was really exciting, because now I'm getting to do that in my own garden, in addition to having them in the ground. That's really good, because of course with farming, they're trying to get the most yield out of the smallest amount of space. That is what she does with

13 flowers, so being able to- Yeah. I never thought about it. No. It makes so much sense once somebody says it to you, but I just never thought about it. There are all sorts of tight spacing methods for crops, but I didn't think about them for flowers. No. No. Boy, having a small space... I just have a small backyard, and having that mindset around flowers means I could get even more beautiful bouquets. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Julie, I can't thank you enough for coming on today. I think this was really fascinating, to dive into the back side of how a book goes together. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing everything with everyone today. Oh, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Wasn't that interesting? I thought you would enjoy that. It's so interesting to understand the actual work that goes into some of our very favorite books. I think it will make you appreciate a book even more, and if you are at all interested in writing a book yourself, it's best if you understand the big picture before you dive in. It's certainly doable, but it is a big project. As always, if you would like more information about anything that we talked about on this episode, you can get it in the show notes. You just go to livinghomegrown.com/98, and I'll have everything there for you. Thank you so much for joining me here today. Until next time, just try to live a little bit more local, seasonal, and homegrown. Take care. Announcer: That's all for this episode of the Living Homegrown podcast. Visit livinghomegrown.com to download Theresa's free canning resource guide and find more tips on how to live farm fresh without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown podcast.