Diane Cowen's churchy cookbook

   Diane Cowen, Alec Harvey and Terry Scott Bertling are talking about book publications.

   Diane's Sunday Dinners combines food and religion. It's a cookbook for religious people, and it is not her newspaper's product. She did it on her own.

   Her market, Houston, includes a huge faith community with megachurches. She thought up the book while driving home, a 40-minute commute. 

   Then she looked for the pastors who provided recipes and prayers in important churches in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston. She sought a variety of denominations. And then she branched out of her state. She looked for pastors with a sizable constituency.

   "You could pick people that nobody ever heard of, but I wanted people to have a reason to buy the book," she says, noting that a few of the pastors aren't well known.
   Not all these people were good cooks. George Foreman's wife's bean recipe was "disgusting," Diane says, because they don't use any salt.

   She found an agent by asking friends who theirs were. One day she got a call from an independent publicist for a faith book she was doing a piece on. She asked that publicist for advice and got a referral to an agent. Got an email back from the agent the same day.

   If you're looking for an agent look for acknowledgements in the books you read. Authors thank their agents, by name.

   Getting a publisher took quite a while. Every Christian publisher said no. Either they weren't doing cookbooks or they weren't doing color, or they didn't publish books that include evangelicals or they only targeted evangelicals.

   But almost as soon as they started sending queries to mainstream publishers, she got a contract with Andrews McMeel.

   She just learned it's in a second printing, one month after publication.