Paris Cocktails: 55 bars in six weeks!

Doni Belau, author of the famous Girls Guide to Paris,  has a new book, Paris Cocktails,  and it's  getting rave reviews (see NYT).  Paris Writers News was curious. How does a Paris writer end up getting paid to hit 55 bars in Paris in only six weeks?...    

55 Paris bars in six weeks - researching is not for weak livers

a Paris Writers News guest post,

by

Doni Belau,

author of Paris Cocktails

 

Surviving 55 bars in six weeks in Paris was no mean feat.

The fact that my liver is still in tact is a miracle. When Alex Lewis from Cider Mill Press emailed me and asked me to write a book called Paris Cocktails, I thought to myself – why me? But then another voice said, they’re going to pay you to drink in Paris, good God you simply can’t say no.

In 2009 I started an online guide to Paris for ladies and those who love them entitled Girls’ Guide to Paris, after much research and painstaking website building.

I did it all wrong – no business plan, no idea for how we were going to make money, just a dream that I wanted to spread my passion for Paris. I knew at the time that no one was going to publish me….after all who was I? That’s what my good friend David Gernert said when I asked him about an idea I had for a book on Paris. David is the former head of Doubleday/Random house, he discovered John Grisham and to this day represents the prolific writer as his agent and editor.

According to Mr. Gernert, no one wants to publish a book these days particularly non-fiction unless the person is so big that he/she can on her own get on the Today show.

Basically you need to already be famous to get a book deal. Not letting that stop me, I figured I could put together a website and an online guide with blogs without too much headache. While it wasn’t easy and its been a long road my site with our 1,000,000 readers and 75k social media followers is the reason Alex chose me to write the book rather than someone else who might have been more apropos, such as a serious craft cocktail pro.

Doni Belau is the founder and creator of Girls’ Guide to Paris and author of the newly released Paris Cocktails by Cider Mill Press. She survived tasting over 150 drinks in Paris with her liver in tact. Key tip: just two sips

 

Little by little, I had become a Paris expert in the minds of googlers and travel intelligentsia - add to that a few articles we’d done on Paris bars and nightlife I landed the job. Apparently being a good writer is no longer enough. You have to have a following.

Even if you are not an expert on the topic at hand, I found that after 10 weeks of research I am much closer to an expert on cocktails now that I ever thought I could be. The other thing I’ve learned during the process is that while researching and writing the book was a lot of fun, editing gets extremely detailed, which is not my best quality.

I forced myself to re-read hundreds of times the reviews and recipes I’d written and collected converting them from grams to ounces trying desperately to have the meticulous mind of a copy editor meld into my big-picture brain. Getting permissions for photos and recipes was extremely time consuming and at times frustrating. The hardest part of all has been shouldering much of the marketing and PR that you could once rely upon your publishing house to do. They have 10, 20 or 50 books to promote and your have one. You are always going to have more passion and time to push your book than they are.

Basically the business is really tough on writers, but still when you open that package and stare at a beautiful book that you created and then you read about your book in the New York Times, all of the hassle melts away kind of like the pain of childbirth. Lucky for me, my publisher picked a hot combo of topics and created a stunningly designed book out of my 250 pages of words and photos. I’m tickled pink to say that it sold out on Amazon in less than two weeks and I’ve been selling it from my own site (where I actually make a return on each sale) in large numbers. Because it was designed as a gift book and released in September in time for the holidays a large number of people are buying two, one for themselves and one for a friend. Everyone knows someone who loves Paris, don’t they?

I’m not sure when if ever I’ll truly feel like I can call myself a writer, even with one hardcover book now under my belt, an e-book and countless articles and posts I still am wary. 

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 About the author: Doni Belau is the founder and creator of Girls’ Guide to Paris and author of the newly released Paris Cocktails by Cider Mill Press. She survived tasting over 150 drinks in Paris with her liver in tact. Key tip: just two sips

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Events with Doni Belau in Paris & London!

(Cost covers cocktails, food and everyone walks home with a book).