How To Get Your First Book Published with Zöe François

Author Zoë François has 800,000 copies of her books in print. And she is here to tell us a remarkable tale that will inform you about how to get your first book published. Her whole success began when her co-writer called into a radio show one day and pitched their book. And you know what happened. This is a tale of publishing success and how you, too, can get your book published. It’s also a tale of how to test your writing ideas in the marketplace. Read along as you listen in and learn about how to get your work out in the world. 

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY, my podcast with co-host David Leite. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher.

David Leite: Well, today we are in my wheelhouse and that is of cooking and of food and of cookbooks. And today’s guest is actually a culinary crush of mine. Along with … It’s true. It’s true. Don’t laugh. My mother would be very happy I had a female crush-
Marion Roach Smith: I’m so happy.
David: … along with Dorie Greenspan, and that is Zoë François, who is coming to us from the Twin Cities. She’s half the team, along with Jeff Hertzberg, who wrote The Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day cookbooks.
David: So, here’s the list: The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day; Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day; The New Healthy Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day; Artisan Pizza and Flatbreads in Five Minutes a Day. And her most recent and beautiful book is Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
David: I’m exhausted reading that list. Can you imagine having written all those books.
Marion: No.
David: Actually, she should be brought up on indecency charges or a public indecency for her Instagram feed, which is pure food porn.
Marion: It is. I’ve looked. Oh dear.
David: So, welcome, Zoë. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Zoë François: Thank you so much. And I have to say, I haven’t quite gotten over being introduced in the same sentence with Dorie Greenspan. So, I will, I will.
David: It may be good.
Marion: It’s kind of wonderful.
Zoë: Yeah.
Marion: So, Zoë, I have to ask you about your background. I was fascinated reading up on you that you grew up in the Northeast Kingdom. I know the Northeast Kingdom. For those people who don’t, it’s the top of Vermont. And that you grew up in a commune in the Northeast Kingdom. I know it from going dog sledding up there, from going fly fishing up there, but it’s a place of extreme weather, very few neighbors.
Marion: And this wonderful sense of you growing up on a commune. Although you do say that your parents taught you that raisins were sugar and desserts …
David: Dessert.
Marion: Dessert. Here’s a raisin. Yeah. And that you swore you’d never bring that forward, but that you apparently did the same thing to your own child.
Zoë: I did.
Marion: I’ll leave that between you and your children. But I couldn’t help but ask. This idea of a northern Vermont commune. It can’t have left you. In other words, like what place does it have in the cooking and the writing that you partake in today?
Zoë: Yeah. It’s so interesting because that influence has sort of come and gone. And I’ve gone through periods of absolutely resenting my parents for pretending that raisins were candy.
And going to public school, eventually, and discovering Twinkies and just, like, “What were you people thinking, when this magic is on the earth?” And then reverting back and realizing, “Yeah. No. I think this is probably not the best thing for me.”
I went through a long period where I didn’t eat sugar and in fact, and not many people know this, but I went into the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, not eating sugar.
Marion: Wow.
I wanted to go there to understand the food science and the chemistry that was going on so that I can create these, beautiful, gorgeous, light-as-feather pastries not using sugar. Pretty much the day I stepped on the campus, I got seduced back into sugar.
David: I love the evils of sugar.
Marion: Did somebody wave a Twinkie at you? But, no, they wouldn’t have. Yeah.
Zoë: No, I just saw the sugar work that was going on and just the beauty of it. And the textures that you can achieve with sugar are really different than the things that you can get through maple syrup or honey or any of the malts.
So, I go back and forth. I’m one of those people that can have a taste of something and be really satisfied, so I believe in moderation with the sugar.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Zoë: You may not know that if you ever stepped foot in my house because there’s cakes everywhere.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
Zoë: So that relationship and that imprint that I had as a kid is always there. I’m always aware of it and I’m also, having grown up using alternative sugars, they’ve always just been part of my repertoire. It’s not something new or unique to me. That is just part of how I bake and how I cook.
Marion: Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.
David: And Zoë, for those folks who maybe don’t know your cookbooks, those four people out there listening who don’t know your cookbooks, tell them a little bit about what Five Minute a Day Bread is.
Oh, yeah. Interesting.
Jeff, my co-author, learned how to bake bread from his wife when he was a resident in medical school. He was working a hundred hours a week and basically just started stripping parts of the process away.
So, he wasn’t kneading the bread. He wasn’t letting the yeast proof. He wasn’t punching it down. He wasn’t doing any of those things that us trained bakers held sacred.
And then I met him, fast forward many, many years, and he told me about this crazy bread that he was baking. He had one or two recipes and he said, “Try this,” once he found out I was a pastry chef.
It took me a long time because, you know, I was a trained chef. I could read a recipe.
David: Mm-hmm.
I read this recipe and thought, “This is going to be absolute trash.” And we were friends. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And then he’s persistent, so I did finally try it and it blew me away.
Basically, the process is you dump the ingredients. Our master recipe is water, flour, yeast and salt. You dump that into a big bucket. We’re making enough for about four loaves of bread all at one time.
You just stir all of that together. You’re not kneading it. You let it rise to let the yeast activate and do its thing and two hours later you can be baking bread or you can refrigerate that batch for up to two weeks.
So, as you want a loaf of bread, you just pull a piece out, you shape it, you let it rise and you bake it. It could not be any easier and it could not be any more delicious.
I knew that if people got their hands on this technique that they wouldn’t be intimidated by the process. So I told him, “You have to write a book about this.” And that’s where it started.
David: That’s where it started.
And Marion, I can attest both on the ease of this recipe and the deliciousness of the bread. I’ve made a gazillion-and-a-half loaves.
Marion: Yeah. I’ve seen them on your blog.
But, here’s the thing that … This idea blew, basically the oven doors off of the cooking world when you did this.
David: Yeah.
Marion: I mean, people need to understand that this literally did. People said, “No,” just like you did.
Zoë: Yeah. I said no.
Marion: Right. So what was the turnaround time between the, “No,” to, “Yes,” to, “Let’s write a book”? In other words, from idea to the book is really where so many people have aha moments, but …
Zoë: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Marion: Then they don’t do it.
Zoë: Yeah. He shared the recipe with me. I tried it and the very next day I said … You know, because I’d been teaching pastry, baking. I would teach a class.
People would be more likely to build a five-tiered wedding cake than they would be to bake a loaf of bread because they were just scared of yeast. They were scared of the whole process of how long it took of … You know, they just thought it was some magical element.
And I was like, “If people knew how simple this was, they would do it and not just do it, but do it for their daily bread.” Like bake all their bread.
We have groups and groups of people that bake all of their bread. They don’t buy bread at all anymore because of it. So it was really me trying it the next day saying, “You need to get this in front of people.”
And Jeff had gone on to, well, The Splendid Table. He called in to The Splendid Table and asked Lynne Rossetto Kasper how to get a book published. She gave him all this terrific advice about writing columns and newspapers and getting your name out there. And there was just no way he was ever going to do that.
But an editor from St. Martin’s Press was listening to that show and called in and asked Lynne to connect her to-
David: Well, talk about luck.
Zoë: And that Ruth Cavin ended up being our editor. And so-
Marion: I love that story. That’s a great publishing story.
Zoë: I know.
David: See folks? If you just go on the radio, you’ll get your own book. It’s not that hard. Why are those writers always saying it’s so hard to get a book published?
Zoë: Exactly. Exactly. And then Lynne introduced us to her agent and we were off and running and yeah, I mean, I did this as an interest.
I thought, “How fun.” You know, he said, “I’ll do this book if you do it with me.” And I was like, “Sure.” I was home with my kids. I thought my parents would love to have a copy and it was really just for the process of putting a cookbook together. I thought it would be really interesting.
Jeff was positive it was going to do well. I don’t have maybe the confidence that he had and you know, it sold out. I think they printed 5,000 copies the first run and we sold out in a week and then they printed another 5,000 and it just sort of went on like that. It was really quite an experience.
David: And now-
Marion: And there are a half a million copies in print? There are 800-
Zoë: About 800,000 copies in print and that’s all of the titles together. But I have to say that the first title, which is now The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day has about 500,000 of those 800,000.
Marion: Mm-hmm.
David: And speaking of The New Artisan Bread, this is what I think is fascinating that may really help our listeners. You’re one of the few people I know who has gone through the process of updating and revising, updating and revising.
David: Most people don’t have a chance to update their book and you’re not going to update a novel, say, So, tell us a little bit about the process of updating and revising.
Zoë: I have to say that’s probably one of the things I’m most grateful for. This was really the pet project of our editor, the first book. She had the great wisdom or insight to see that this book might do well.
But they didn’t put a lot of money behind it because we were first-time authors. Neither of us had done anything like this and so the publisher didn’t put a lot behind it.
So, our first book was, I think there were eight photographs in it. They didn’t want to give us an index. We had to fight, fight, fight for an index, which is just crazy in a cookbook.
Marion: Crazy.
David: It is.
Zoë: There were just lots of things that we asked for that they weren’t really willing to invest in. Then once it sort of caught on and it was selling, they actually came to us and said, “Okay, this is doing really well. We want you to do the book that you would have done if we would’ve let you do anything.”
Marion: Oh, my goodness. I’ve never heard that sentence spoken in American…
David: Really. All we have to do is get on a radio show. Get a book and then the publisher will say, “We’ll give you whatever book you really want to write.”
Zoë: Right. Okay. Okay. However, it didn’t really work out exactly that way because there still weren’t as many pictures. I mean, you know cookbooks today. They have a picture for every recipe.
David: Every recipe.
Zoë: And we still had inserts. So, it wasn’t exactly that. It wasn’t my dream book, but it was a whole lot better. And we added all the things, with the exception of all the pictures I would have put in there. Because cooking is such a visual medium.
David: It is.
Zoë: I mean, you see what you’re going to eat and you experience what you’re going to eat through your eyes before you ever taste anything. And so, I know people are inspired by and educated by the photography. So that for me was such a huge piece of it.
David: So the early revisions, were they just more recipes? Were they explanation or a kind of an accordioning out of technique?
Zoë: Yeah, so-
David: What did it consist of?
Zoë: Well, the day that we put out the first book, we also started our website.
David: Mm-hmm.
Zoë: So we were the very first cookbook authors to be in communication with our audience.
David: Mm-hmm.
Zoë: And it was part of our strategy to make up for all the things that the publisher hadn’t let us do, like have photographs. So we added photographs to the website, we’ve added videos, we were answering questions just because we knew that bread baking was intimidating to people.
David: Mm-hmm.
Zoë: So we learned so much from communicating with these people. We learned what we hadn’t put in the book. We learned what was missing for them to make this the easy experience that it could be, that we knew that it could be. And so we got to add all of those things.
And people were getting more and more sophisticated about cooking and baking because of websites and the Internet. And as sort of the globe was getting smaller, and people were starting to weigh their ingredients as opposed to using cup measures, which we know in baking makes all the difference in the world.
David: Very important.
So we started out with cup measures and in the next edition, we got to add a chart that had weights as well. We expanded some of the explanations and we cut back on some other ones that felt like they were going on too long and actually making things more complicated.
So, we got to do a little bit of everything. More photographs, more recipes, so it was just more of just about everything, including the index. We got much better at that.
David: You got your index.
Marion: That’s good. That’s good. So this integration with the various platforms really supports the brand. And that is a really interesting and very important lesson, I think, for the readers to understand.
Zoë: Absolutely.
Marion: And baking can’t be the only topic on which you can do this. You get some feedback, you make some changes, you take what limitations your publisher puts on you. You say, “Okay, you aren’t going to put enough pictures on, we’re going to put some pictures over here.” It’s a wonderful lesson.
Zoë: Yeah.
Marion: And did you have advice on how to take all that information or were you just winging it?
Zoë: It’s so funny because I actually asked the publisher for their marketing material, because as you know, publishers don’t necessarily, and especially for a project like this that they didn’t put a lot of money behind, they weren’t going to do any marketing for us. We had to figure it out.
Zoë: I said, “Okay, well, just send me sort of your marketing how-to.” And they’re like, “That doesn’t exist.” And I’m like, “What?” So, we actually just started reaching out to bloggers and said, “Here. We want to send you this book.” And the publisher was like, “You’re what? That sounds like a waste of time.”
So, we were ahead of the publishers in terms of understanding that absolutely everything that was going to happen for us was going to happen online. That we were not television stars. I mean, the Food Network was huge at that time already. We were not Food Network stars. We didn’t have TV shows. We weren’t in major publications, because nobody knew who we were.
And so, we reached out to every single food blog that we could find. We sent them the book and asked them to bake from it and that’s how it happened. It just sort of one person did it and it just snowballed from there.
So, we really had to figure out. We really did have to reinvent the wheel for marketing a book. Maybe somebody else had done it, but they sure weren’t sharing that information with us.
David: And I think that you guys were pioneers in the idea of crowdsourcing, because you were hearing back from your readers. You were hearing back from cooks and bakers about what worked, what didn’t, things that weren’t clear and you were using all that information to constantly improve all of the editions of the books that you were doing.
Zoë: Yes.
David: Which is very smart. So, you went from updating and revising your books to then suddenly doing what we could consider a line extension.
Zoë: Hmm.
David: Went into pizza, you went into gluten-free, and then the latest one is Celebration and Holiday Breads.
Zoë: Yep.
David: Who comes up with those ideas? Is it the publisher? Is it both of you and what makes that jump to that next topic using your dough?
Zoë: Again, it was our readers and when we put the book up on the Internet and started our website, I think the very first question that came in is, “Love this technique. I love the bread. I’m trying to eat more whole grains. How do I adapt this for whole wheat recipes?”
Zoë: And we got that over and over again. And so, it became immediately clear that we were going to write The Healthy Bread book.
David: Right.
Zoë: The other thing that came up almost immediately was gluten-free. I was a pastry chef in restaurants for, you know, decade plus before I wrote a book. I had never, ever heard one request for gluten-free. I’d never heard of celiac. And then all the sudden, we put this book out and we’re getting question after question about gluten-free.
And we had to figure it out because we knew that if this many people were asking about it, that this was something that was going to become really important in the baking world. So, we were getting these ideas from our readers and it just became crystal clear that these books were going to come out.
This one that we just put out, The Holiday and Celebration book, was probably the book I would have put out first, just because it’s the sweets. It’s basically a pastry chef in bread form. So it’s like absolutely everything I love about baking and the holidays and the beauty of it and the sweets. And so it’s just, it’s me in a book about bread.
David: Well, it’s an astounding book. Marion, and for our listeners, it has monkey bread, it has cinnamon rolls, it’s got panettone. It’s got all kinds of incredible, incredible things.
And what I find fascinating is that you’ve become … you’re not even a cottage industry anymore. You’re a mansion industry. I mean, you’ve grown up so much and the brand is so large now.
I think that you guys are, you’re both geniuses for having caught on early to the power of the Internet, caught on early to the power of crowdsourcing. And then you’ve created this closed loop between your readers and your users and what you’re doing. So, I’m assuming there’s more books coming down the pike, right?
Zoë: There is, but I am working on another book, but it’s actually not with Jeff. I’m starting a pastry series and this is my first time out on my own. You know, Jeff and I had a great time and we’re best friends. We’ll always be connected because we’ll always have our bread book babies out there.
But yeah. I’m starting a pastry series that came, again, from the Internet, from my Instagram feed.
David: Which is gorgeous.
Zoë: Thank you. And yeah, so it’s just so interesting the ways that I can connect directly with the people that are reading the books and making my recipes. I put up a recipe on Instagram, I’ll do a tutorial in my stories and the very next day I’ll have a dozen people who have made that recipe.
David: That’s pretty amazing.
Zoë: So, it’s pretty amazing. You know, essentially I’m a teacher and it’s really satisfying to see people utilizing what we’re putting out into the world.
David: Mm-hmm.
Marion: So, what about writing by yourself, writing with somebody else, writing with this world at large, teaching on Bluprint. You’ve got this amazing, lovely platform here and I love the various ways you communicate with people. But let’s just hone in for a second about the actual writing.
Marion: So, you’ve been writing with a partner for a good long time now, very successfully. And you’ve been writing a blog simultaneously.
Zoë: Yes.
Marion: So, you’ve always been writing alone and with someone else. Just talk about the beauty, the troubles of both, please.
Zoë: Well, I think the first time writing a book and a cookbook, which is the only thing I have experience with, is enormous. It feels like an enormous task, especially the very first one. Having a writing partner was a godsend. I mean, I don’t know that I would have had the nerve and the confidence to pull it off.
We were just a beautiful team because he’s all about spreadsheets and calendars and staying on track. And I’m all about creative and beauty and I’m very much about deadlines. That is definitely one of my things and bakers tend to be pretty precise. But we just had a very complementary set of skills.
So it really was just a beautiful partnership that way. We had to make a lot of compromises with one another. And Jeff is a doctor, so putting as much butter into a recipe that I want to and sugar sometimes can get a little bit heated.
But it was really fun. We had a great time doing it. And so I learned, I got sort of my legs under me in terms of the process and how to do it. And obviously since we were doing a series, we kind of had a formula of what the books were going to look like.
They evolved a little bit and they got better and better. But there was a bit of a formula to our series. Not that my next book will have that same formula, but I have the confidence. I know how to go about the process of writing.
Of course, that’s going to be different for everybody. But I have my personal process down and I can take a lot of what I’ve learned from the bread books and put it towards my next projects.
David: So now that you’d be working individually with yourself as the only author, what do you find to be the most difficult or troubling aspect of the writing process for cookbooks?
Zoë: Well, simply the writing. You know, I’m a baker.
I’m a baker by training. I mean, this is how I got into this world was because I love to bake. So, developing the recipes, testing the recipes, that’s where I sing along and I am perfectly comfortable and happy in that space.
The discipline of sitting down and writing about the recipes and researching the recipes that I’m do … I even love the researching and I do like the writing as well. But stopping and sitting and being with those recipes and being quiet with them and putting it to page, putting it to the paper, that’s a challenge for me. Once I’m in that groove, I really enjoy it, but it’s not the same level of ease for me that it is with the baking and recipe developing. So yeah.
David: That makes sense.
Marion: Just some advice to somebody who’s a food person writing on a blog right now. She/he knows they’ve got a great idea. They’ve got something to say.
Zoë: Yeah, yeah.
Marion: What do they do?
David: Go on The Splendid Table and we’ll get an agent.
Marion: Sure. And after-
Zoë: Just calling to the radio shows.
David: Exactly.
Marion: What you’re saying, though, is to get your ideas out there and test them in the market anywhere you can. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing in this story for others.
Zoë: Yeah. I think that there’s so many ways to do it now, because I think people are starting blogs for that exact reason. They’re going through other people’s books and sort of educating themselves.
I came at this process as a professional chef, so I had the confidence in my baking. I mean, that’s always been evolving and I’ve always been learning, but I was really, you know, that wasn’t something that I was questioning all along.
I know that I get contacted all the time about how do I start a blog? How do I start this process? I want to be doing similar things that you’re doing. And I think that one of the things is to practice your craft. You know, if baking is really what you want to be doing, you need to sort of focus in on that.
Writing is exactly the same way. Because I had the confidence in the baking, it was the writing that I really felt like I had to practice. And that blogging was such a magical way to do that because you don’t feel … it’s not there forever. You can always go back and edit. Whereas publishing a book, it’s there, and if you don’t love what you’ve written, it’s still going to be there in 10 years.
But with a blog, it’s such a beautiful way to sort of practice that craft. And so blogging every day, even just posting on Instagram. And I do write on …
In fact, I was just mentioned in The New York Times yesterday for my captions on my Instagram posts. Which never in a million years did I think the captions were what I would be mentioned for, you know.
David: Known for.
Zoë: Because I’m baking all the time and I’m doing the photography and …
But I do now love the writing, I think because I’m describing something that I love. So I think that doing it. I’m not a writer, but I’ve talked to a lot of writers and that’s what they always told me was, “Just write every single day until you feel comfortable in your skin doing it.”
And this is 12, 14 years later and it’s still not the most comfortable thing for me, but I’m way more into it and enjoy it a lot more.
Marion: That’s wonderful. Thank you.
Zoë: Thank you. This is such a pleasure. Thank you.
David: The book is Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day by, Zoë François and Jeff Hertzerg. Get it everywhere that books are sold. The guest is Zoë François. Check out her website, zoebakes and her sinfully, sinfully delicious Instagram feed and stories. Thank you, Zoë.

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