My NetGalley Project

My involvement with NetGalley all started with my addiction to the Goodreads website, which has never been a secret. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Goodreads is so much more than the Facebook of the literary world. It not only allows you to keep track of and share your personal library with your friends, but it also has a wealth of information on millions of books. Book information isn’t just limited to the standard boring Library of Congress cataloging data and publisher’s blurb; there are also the community reviews, which can get pretty interesting. Once you start checking them out, you can fall down a rabbit hole…

One day in early February I was reading community reviews on Goodreads and noticed that a number of the reviews began “Thank you NetGalley for the advance reader copy.” That really piqued my curiosity. I didn’t know what NetGalley was, but I knew enough about advance reader copies to know that I wanted them too. So I opened a new browser window and, through the magic of Google, landed on the NetGalley home page. After a few clicks, I learned that NetGalley offers limited life digital advance reader copies of books to media, librarians, bloggers, and community reviewers. I also learned that since I had been writing short book reviews on Goodreads for the past five years or so, I was a fairly well qualified community reviewer. So I registered for an account, wrote a profile, designated some favorite categories, requested a few books, and waited to see what would happen. Within a few days, I was approved for my first book!

Although NetGalley offers an entire universe of books – from Children’s Fiction to Philosophy – I decided that I was going to “specialize” in the Cooking, Food, and Wine genre. Eventually, I got into a groove where I would write a review of the book and then I would test a few recipes. Some books were challenging to recipe test because the recipes were either very complex and time consuming or required esoteric ingredients. Fifty-five days really is not a lot of time to read a 300+ page book cover-to-cover, write a comprehensive review, test a few recipes, and update the review with the results. Especially when I have a job search to conduct and weight to lose!

Currently, I have the following seven NetGalley advance reader copies in various stages of review.

• Naomi Duguid, Taste of Persia, to be published by Artisan Books in September 2016.

• Dan Goldberg, Andrea Kuhn, Jody Eddy, Cuba!, to be published by Ten Speed Press in September 2016.

• Marcella Hazen and Victor Hazan, Ingredienti, to be published by Scribners in July 2016.

• Eric Hites, Everybody Loves Ramen, to be published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in August 2016.

• Liana Krissoff, Canning for a New Generation: Updated and Expanded Edition, to be published by Abrams in July 2016.

• Jerry Thomas, Jerry Thomas’ Bartenders Guide, to be published by Dover Books in July 2016.

• Danielle Walker, Danielle Walker’s Against All Grains Celebrations, to be published by Ten Speed Press in September 2016.

Some of them I have already read cover to cover and published my review to Goodreads. In my review, I talk about how easy the cookbook is to understand and use. Things like are the measurements in both American and metric, or just American? Are the recipe steps numbered, or written in block paragraphs? Stuff that would give you a good feel for what it would be like to use the book to cook from. As a community reviewer, all my reviews and updates are posted to my Goodreads account. That means they are publicly available under the book title on the Goodreads website. So if any of the cookbooks in the list intrigues you, and you want to know what I thought of it, that should be pretty easy to find. Unless it is a book published by Ten Speed Press; they have a rule that you can only publish a review within two weeks of the books publication date. So I have a file of Ten Speed reviews just waiting to be published!

Some of the books I have tested recipes from, and updated my Goodreads review with the results of my recipe testing. That is the fun part! I’m not so sure the Goodreads community likes to read about the confectioners’ sugar for the cream cheese frosting exploding all over the kitchen because the mixing bowl was too small or getting scalded while trying to get a proper temperature on a caramel because the pot was too deep. But none of that would have happened had the recipe steps or headnotes been written properly!

So here is where this blog comes in: it will be much more fun to write my recipe reviews here, where I’m not constrained by character count or content concerns. And I can include photos of my catastrophes – or successes – in hopes of inspiring others. Also, I won’t feel limited to just reviewing the recipes in my advance reader copies. I have over 130 cookbooks in my collection at home, and it is time to give some of them a more critical look as well. Finally, there are the recipes in the Germano Family Cookbook (and Addendum) that are always evolving, so this will be a good way to chart the evolution of some of the more experimental recipes.

What am I going to cook next? I don’t know! There is a Lavender Lemonade recipe that needs to be tinkered with to get rid of the bitterness. I’ve got over two pounds of cherries that need to be preserved before they go bad. I’ve got two bottles of pomegranate molasses that I’m really interested in using on something, as well as a whole box of other Persian spices from Zamouri Spices that I’m really curious about. And then there is the Ladies Only Magic Mike Viewing Party that I’ve agreed to “cater,” which will be a full brunch menu from bellinis to a Florentine frittata. So really anything can happen in the Newfield Street Kitchen!