'She basically told me... no one is going to buy it.'

In 2023 former lawyer Anna Ansari achieved the seemingly impossible: a five-figure book deal with a prestigious publishing house, while having fewer than 500 followers on social media. Here she talks to Jenni Muir about how recipe testing for some of the industry’s most admired names proved excellent training, how she acquired an agent and how her persuasive book proposal came together.

Your start in the industry was recipe testing for a friend from university…

Around 2015 Georgia Freedman was writing Cooking South of the Clouds, a cookbook about Yunnan food, and had put out a call on Facebook for recipe testers. I was newly married, new in London, didn’t have a job, couldn’t get a job, and I was like: sure, I love Yunnan, I’ll cook Yunnan food, and I started recipe testing for her. And it was so much fun – but at that stage I hadn’t thought of it as a potential career.

Then during COVID, I started taking a lot of online cooking classes. I did one with Olia Hercules and messaged her afterwards, asking if she had a recipe for khingal and she said: ‘I’m working on one for my new book Home Food – do you want to test it for me?’ And I said yes, I would love to. Then I ended up testing more and more recipes for her.

She was so taken with my written feedback that she said: ‘You really should start writing about food – you’re a really good storyteller, quite lyrical but fun. Have you ever thought about writing your story through food?’ She asked me to contribute an essay to Home Food, along with people like Alissa Timoshkina and Jeremy Lee. 

I was shocked but also joyous because I really love her writing. So I thought, well, if Olia thinks I can do this, that really is a mark of something. And that’s why I entered the Yan-kit So Award. 

You were shortlisted for the prize, and although you didn’t win, it was instrumental in you landing an agent…

Emma Bal was starting her list and emailed Don Sloan, who runs the Oxford Cultural Collective (organisers of the Yan-Kit So Award), and asked to be put in contact with me. All I knew from friends in New York was that agents are impossible to get, so when Don asked if I wanted to be put in touch I said yes, of course. And I remember Zooming with her when I was in Greece, days before my 40th birthday, and thinking, I’m getting a literary agent – happy birthday to me!

And it was Emma who suggested changing the proposal you’d written for the Yan-kit So Award to emphasise recipes.

She basically told me: everything you want to write – the stories, the history, the narrative, the memoir et cetera – is all well and good, but no one is going to buy it, not now. You’re not an established voice, not an established food personality. However, you are a good writer, and clearly you’re a good recipe tester, and know how recipes work, so how about we turn this into a cookbook, and make it a package where readers could be transported, not just by your words but by some beautiful photography and the dishes themselves.

You and she worked together on the Silk Roads proposal for nearly two years, and it was a 75-page document in the end, submitted to almost 40 publishers in the UK and US.

Emma was like: we’re just going to throw the kitchen sink at them! We included 15 fully-developed recipes with headnotes, and the introductory essay from the book in the proposal.

It wasn’t as though I was coming to it with articles published, or a Substack or any sort of following. She wanted to make really sure that whoever actually looked at that proposal knew what they were going to get – in terms of the food that it would present, the story, the comparative titles, and who I was a writer, an author, and a voice. 

So she helped you structure the proposal and looked at your writing too…

Emma would say, okay, let's do a section on your background and how this led you here, then let's do a section on comparative titles and how they relate to what you want to write. She would tell me how many words she wanted for each of those sections and I would send them to her. And then she'd say: okay, that's great, but can you connect this point here on this first page to this bit on page ten. 

I felt like I was in like English class again, with someone very helpful clearly making those connections and asking me to make those connections, so as to make the writing stronger and therefore the proposal stronger and more attractive to potential publishers. She did an excellent job. Really, I was like: wow, this is great.

Once the proposal was out on submission, you had calls with ten or so different publishers over a three-week period, which led to offers from four different publishing houses. What made you choose DK Red?

DK was the only one to offer a simultaneous US release, and that was a massive factor for me. They were not the highest bidder, financially speaking, but they offered me something more than money: access to their image library and the ability to release the book in my home country. 

As an American, it was key for me to have this because the story is not just about the Silk Roads but about my family and immigration and where we have moved, as Ansaris. And we didn’t need to use DK’s image library in the end because I found all these old slides of my Dad’s trips to the Soviet Union and Iran in the 1960s while I was clearing out his library in Michigan. Coupled with my own travel photography and Laura Edwards’ food photography, they give the book a timeless mood.

How did you find the writing process?

I was given extraordinary free rein. I said yes to DK in August and then had a deadline of the following June – a decently short window, right? But I had to figure out how to do it on my own, project manage my entire writing process myself. Which is fine because I am a self starter and I am someone who is organised; I felt capable of doing it. But I was also kind of surprised that they weren’t giving me any suggested ways of organising the 70,000 words they wanted me to turn in. 

To be fair, they did ask me if I wanted to submit the manuscript in batches, but I have always been the kind of person who gets everything done and then goes back and looks at it. So it would have been hard for me to submit a third, a third, a third without being able to look at the whole together and see how it all interacted.  

So I scheduled myself. I decided I was going to work on the recipes first, then on headnotes and essays. And once I figured that out, I worked six days a week, shooed my husband and son out on Saturdays and hung out with them on Sundays.

It’s a strange thing, trying to go into a brand new industry in your 40s, I feel like I’m learning every step of the way. But it was fun. I like writing and I love research.

And you found people to test the recipes for you.

Yes, every recipe was tested. Once I finalised the recipe it was tested three times by me, and then tested at least once more by an outside tester, whether that was friends in Spain, the US or UK – friends who were in food and friends who were not in food, because I also wanted to make sure that the recipes worked for your average sort of cook.

So many aspiring authors are told the problem with their book proposal is that they don’t have a large enough social media following. They might be confused how you could be offered a contract when you had only 400 followers…

I do think I’m fortunate. In the proposal, we really pushed that although I didn’t have a large following on social media, I do have large networks. I was able to assure them that there would be a spread in the Yale Alumni Magazine, the Barnard college magazine, and so on. 

Alumni pride doesn’t exist much in the UK as I understand it, but Yale graduates love that they can open up the Yale holiday gift guide and say oh look, another Yale graduate wrote this, that’s why I’m going to buy it. Yale paid for me to go and do my first event in the US at Yale University and I was like: I don’t even care if nobody shows up because this is cool. It looks good, it sounds good and it signals to others that this is a legitimate book.

Not a lot of people realise a platform doesn’t have to be on TikTok, although these days that is what publishers do tend to imply. In truth a platform can include anyone and everyone you’ve ever met…

During the rollout of Silk Roads, when we talked about how we were going to get people to notice the book, we decided that I shouldn’t focus on growing my personal social media follower count as much as calling on people who already had a large social media following to - quote unquote - amplify. And it worked. When my friend Lacey Osterman, who has 1 million followers, shared my announcement reel, suddenly my numbers went up. Same with Adeena Sussman, and Meera Sodha.

You had a lot of high-profile foodies blurbing Silk Roads too: not only Adeena and Meera but Helen Goh, Felicity Cloake, Andrew Wong and Jay Rayner. How did you go about collecting those and what’s your advice for emerging writers on making those connections?

Well, I’ve known Andrew for 20 years, and Meera and I happen to be neighbours, so they offered to blurb. As for the rest? Honestly, I just asked. I figured it was better to ask if someone would read a PDF and potentially write some words of support and have them say no (which some most certainly did!), than to not have asked in the first place. My dad always told me to ‘knock at all the doors’, and so I did. But not in an overly aggressive or pushy way. I am a friendly and chatty person. With the exception of Adeena, I had met and enjoyed friendly conversations with each and everyone who gave me written words of support. 

As for making connections, I don’t know. I never set out to ‘make connections’ – I just wanted to meet people and chat with people and share myself and story not just in the book, but in real life. I have been in the UK for 12 years now and never had any ‘colleagues’, any ‘work mates’ kind of thing, so I really just wanted to get to know people and for people to get to know me. And sometimes that translated into a blurb of support and sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it’s translated into great friendship and sometimes into collegiate camaraderie. It’s all good.  

Find Anna on Instagram @thisplacetastesdelicious and subscribe to her Substack Where in the World is Anna Ansari?!

📸 Kristin Perers