What Can Writer/Publishers Learn From Recipe Formatting?

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water.

These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the author is writing about and cooking this particular meal.

To the aspiring chefs at the Culinary Institute of America, a recipe is a three-column format. (Example 1; Example 2)

One column lays out the timeline for the entire meal, logging what needs to be done when.

The second column lists everything they need to produce, and the equipment needed to cook and serve it.

The third column breaks down the ingredients needed for each recipe on their docket.

It’s the first column that makes the difference, logging everything from prepping ingredients to turning the oven on to gathering equipment for every stage.

There’s no space here for instructions hidden in the ingredient list (“wait, these onions were meant to be chopped?”) or unexpectedly necessary utensils (“Jesus, fuck, why didn’t you say we’d need a pastry brush?”).

It looks nothing like the recipes you’re used to, but once you’ve seen one, it’s hard to go back. The flow of cause-and-effect is too clear, the mapping-out of requirements to clean.

But it also takes up space—a precious resource in design for both books and websites—and goes into detail that many first-time cooks may find intimidating.

Ergo, the more useful approach gives way to the aesthetically pleasing, less detailed option and the detailed, timesaving layout of the CIA is a piece of secret knowledge shared by the pros.

Physical documents that become internalised by the time they graduate into the world.

The most useful way to approach something isn’t always the most popular, especially when the purpose behind the presentation moves from create a useful learning tool to create an aesthetically pleasing book.

Here’s the thing: I’m a writer and a publisher. Producing aesthetically pleasing books is kinda my thing, but I’m very conscious of the limitations that come with that.

If you’re trying to write books about writing, for example, the aesthetics and standards of the publishing industry shape the eventual output.

Books are ‘meant’ to be a certain length—usually 200 to 350 pages—in order to be commercially successful.

Books are ‘meant’ to follow a certain structure, and they should be aimed at new beginners (because there’s more aspiring writers to buy it than established writers).

When you’re selling books into bookstores, working at velocity, selling to aspiring writers makes sense because you need numbers to mitigate your print costs.

A velocity publisher—ideally—needs to clear at least two-thirds of their print run within a month of release.

A nice approach if you can make it work, but it shapes the way we talk about writing. It changes what can be accomplished.

So, I sometimes force myself to think about the three column recipe format, and ask myself how I want to present ideas.

What happens if we let books be shorter?

What happens if I produce short, cheap essays on very specific niches?

What happens if we don’t aim the book at writers just starting out?

Which is how I end up producing the GenrePunk Ninja essay series and the Writer Chaps series over at Brain Jar Press. Trying to break my own assumptions about what a book ‘should’ look like and try something new.

It’s not the right format for everyone, but I’m also not a velocity publisher. I take my time finding an audience for books and connecting them with the right readers.

They’re there just in case someone needs them in that format, and I can build longer books out of those parts for the folks who absolutely need a 200 page paperback to feel like they’re reading a book.

There’s not one way to write a recipe anymore, and it opens up what you can do as a writer and publisher.

And it’s one of the things I love most about publishing right now.

The Best Worst Start To The Year

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

So, picture this: It’s a new year and—for once—you’re ready to go out and kick ass. You’re ticking off daily task checklists and things are humming along. Your ambitious plans are achievable, and you’re delivering on your resolutions.

Work is good. Health is good. Life is fucking great. For the first time in a long while, you’re ahead of where you need to be.

Then things go wrong. Your spouse is sick for a week, and nobody can figure out why.

Then you figure it out—there’s water trapped in the walls of your house, growing black mould in the bedroom—so you spend a week camped out on the kitchen floor.

Then some cavities in your wisdom teeth get infected, and the surgery you’d carefully planned for next month ends up happening now now now.

Then the surgery complications arrive, and you re-enact scenes from the Exorcist that involve vomiting up blood. Which, at least, distracts you from the catastrophic political situation going on.

You’re thirty days into 2025 and so much has gone wrong. You’re on longer ahead on work. Huge chunks of your day are spent talking to insurance companies, trying to get the mould thing fixed.

You dimly remember, nine days later, that your new book went live, and you forgot to mention it to anyone.

Now imagine you look at all that, sigh, and think about how happy you are, because things are going well.

LIVING IN THE GAP VS LIVING IN THE GAIN

As you may have surmised, nothing in the above is truly hypothetical. By many standards, I’ve had a truly abysmal start to the year.

And I would probably be writing a very different email if I hadn’t read Dan Sullivan’s The Gap And The Gain in the waning days of 2024.

The core philosophy of the book is simple: there’s two ways of measuring what you’re doing with your life/business/writing.

The first is looking at your goals and measuring the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

The second is looking at where you started and measuring the gains you’ve made since the origin point.

One puts your focus on the things you’ve failed to do, while the other puts your focus on your wins.

It’s easy to look at everything I laid out in the introduction and think about the opportunities I’ve missed in January. Hell, at one point I cracked a joke about being cursed, because it felt like one damn thing after another.

But if I flip the script and look at gains:

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains​ came out and—even with no launch-week promo—has sold about 50% more copies than my new releases normally do .
  • We’ve been living with a crazy mould problem for a while, which adversely affected my wife’s health, and now we’ve cleared that problem out (and we’re slowly putting the bedroom back together).
  • Good financial decisions in late 2024 meant—for the first time in a while—I was fully prepared to cover a few weeks where I wasn’t able to work (which is huge when you’re a freelancer/self-employed and don’t get sick leave).
  • I didn’t have time to celebrate my new book coming out but I also have Unfamiliar Shores dropping in late February because this year’s releases are set up months in advance.

Plus, the really important thing: as things calmed down, my focus on gains made it easier to get back in the swing of things.

I’m not quite kicking all my goals for the week, but new books are getting scheduled for GenrePunk Books and Brain Jar Press, my writing speed is picking up, and I’m clearing my freelance gigs to make space for new work.

Lots of terrible things happened in January 2025.

But it’s still shaping up to be a pretty good year.

If you’re struggling with the state of the world right now—and, honestly, I don’t blame you—narrowing your focus down to a handful of wins might be the right step. 

Not because bad things aren’t happening, but because we live in a capilist hellscape which says you need to get things done in order to survive despite everything that’s going on. 

In bad times focusing on the wins—however small—can be a survival strategy.

But Also, What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains is out

Did you catch this bit of news seeded in the above? My ‘What if Raymond Carver lived through a zombie apocalypse’ collection of short fiction, What We Talk ABout When We Talk About Brains, is now live and in the world!

Here’s what you need to know:

Vicious storms of red rain sweep across Australia, raising the dead as zombies hungry for human flesh. Fortunately, we’ve all seen zombie movies and know what comes next, allowing the locals to band togetherand live small, desolate, ordinary livesdespite the ever-present danger.

Drawing inspiration from George Romero and Raymond Carver in equal measure, Peter M. Ball presents six dirty realism tales of quiet desperation and spare, razor-sharp narration in a world overrun by the walking dead.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains – Ebook

$4.99
SKU: e9781922479761

006: Sometimes The Right Call Is Stepping Back

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume in October, and some of the ideas in this week’s entry might be expanded out.

Mainly, though, if you’re hungry for great advice about writing and publishing, however, I’m going to direct your attention to Cory Doctorow’s recent speech about Disenshittifying Online Spaces (watch it on youtube | read it online). 

Doctorow is speaking to a room full of tech folk and coders, but what he’s saying is incredibly important to anyone involved in the creative industries.

It’s important he’s pointing out the problems with online spaces and we, as writers, use online spaces to promote our work and build community. They are a boon in many ways, but their usefulness can be short lived.

Tech and social media companies thrive by capturing attention and communities, then locking you into those spaces and turning your attention into profit. 

Usually, they do this by making things shittier. Amazon started as a bookstore that offered incredible organic reach to independent publishers, with a recommendation engine that was scarily predicted.

Now that they’re the place to read ebooks, for most folks, they have turned their attention to selling advertising tools instead. Authors hoping readers will stumble over their work now pay for the previliege.

The same cycle has played out again and again. Facebook used to be great for keeping in touch with readers (and, hell, your friends), but now it’s an algorithmic nightmare where you see more ads than friends. 

Tiktok used to put videos in front of a huge number of eyeballs, but now you’ll be lucky to break 200 views as you feed more content into the mill and quietly hope something goes viral.

One of the reasons I recommend Doctorow’s most recent speech is the way he breaks down the way virality can work on these platforms. Notably, he talks about the TikTok “heating tool”, which the use to manipulate engagement.

For those who haven’t clicked over to see Doctorow in person, here’s the important part:

Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating tool to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

…

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!“

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

Tiktok has a heating tool, and the’re not the only one. As Doctorow notes, we’re live in a world where your food delivery app can track when you get paid and therefore bump up the price you pay for food delivery.

I suspect every platform has something similar.

Which brings me to why this is imporant for writers to know: as we hit the fourth quarter of the year, there’s going to be an uptik in the number of ads and marketing campaigns trying to convince writers you’re writing and publishing wrong. 

No writer is ever satisfied with the number of books we’re selling, so there’s money to be made in promising folks you have a solution. In the hour before I wrote this my Facebook feed was full of potential solutions: facebook adveritising, tiktok courses, making better use of reels, writing better newsletters.

These will be supplemented by ads about launching high-paid courses and coaching, writing low-content books using AI, learning to write more “saleable” novels, and countless other approaches.

But selling a solution means you need to convince people they have a real problem. That their career is out of control, but you’re promising a way of regaining control.

That promise is seductive for writers, who often feel like there’s no control in this career at all.

It’s more seductive than usual in 2024, because we’re entering into the high-stress period leading into the US election. Everyone’s on edge, regardless of which side of politics they’re on, because political ideology is closely aligned with our sense of self.

We live in fear that the other side is going to take over, and fuck everything up. The discourse on our social feeds slowly drifts to more contentious topics. Algorithmic patterns show us entries designed to get our dander up, because angry people engage and engagement drives use.

Which is one of the reasons I’m taking a break from writing long entries at the moment: I don’t want to be online.

Going on threads leads me down spiraling rabbit holes of anger. Being on Youtube subjects me to advertising from local political parties here in Brisbane ahead of our state election. 

Facebook is determined to make me feel bad about my writing and publishing systems, with promises I can turn everything around by spending hundreds (or thousands) on a course that teaches me how to do things better.

I have nothing against courses, but I know that this is the point of the year where it’s easier to get suckered into spending on them as a reactive choice.

The final quarter of the year is a hard time to sell books at the best of times, and its worse than usual during an election year.

Even if advertising or spitting content into a social media machine is your strategy of choice, the added costs and distractions 2024 brings make everything harder and more expensive. 

So instead of reacting, I’m asking myself what would actually be a useful and productive use of my time. I’m dailing back my social media use so I’m not suckered into the discourse. I’m focusing on building up new titles I can launch in early 2025.

The launches I’ve got in mind for the end of the year are very targeted and specialised, and are more focused on information gathering and testing systems than hitting huge sales targets. 

Outside of that, I’m writing books and hanging with my spouse and patting my cats. Trying to calm my nervous system in a world that wants my to spend a huge chunk of my day in fight or flight.

Ironically, all of this taps into what today’s newsletter should have been about: asking what someone who offers you writing advice wants you to do with that advice.

Often, in the writing and publishing space, the answer is “buy my widget that helps.”

I certainly have widgets for sale. Books on writing and mentorship sessions and a bunch of other stuff.

Mostly, though, I don’t want to put a huge amount of effort into selling them and I can’t promise they’ll do anything other than give you important stuff to think about with regards to your writing and publishing. 

The thing that makes me happiest is when people buy coffee mugs and ebooks because it means I can put these ideas into the world and go back to writing fiction. 🙂

I run this newsletter because, primarily, I want writers to think about their business differently. To make smarter decisions that support their long-term goals, rather than short-term reactions that involve blowing a lot of cash and burning out.

It’s one of the reasons why, after four years of tinkering away and putting things behind a paywall, I stopped wriitng about writing on Patreon and started holding forth on blogs and newsletters where the ideas are easily shared.

ADDITIONAL READING

This isn’t new territory for Docotrow. He’s written about the enshittification on TikTok in recent memory, and he has a whole book about Chokepoint Capitalism. I reguard both as recommended reading if you’re serious about making a living from writing, and they’re very worth your time.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

  1. Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
  2. Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
  3. One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.