Oh, to be a cookbook author with 75,000 copies in print and your picture right there on the cover in full color. Even if the photo session - an all-day ordeal under hot studio lights where the photographer snapped and snapped - dragged on until the torta di ricotta was warm and the giambotte was cool.
"They put so much makeup on me I said I was going to get pimples," Elodia Rigante recalled. "And I did. I never had a pimple in my life."Such is the price of authorship. It may not be "The Bridges of Madison County," but Rigante's publisher never expected "Elodia Rigante's Italian Immigrant Cooking" to sell so well.
Just last week the publisher, who hatched the idea for the book in the first place, gave the go-ahead for 25,000 copies more, a sign he is confident he will not be swamped by returns from booksellers who discover that they cannot move the $29.95 book.
The publisher is Rigante's son, Aniello Panico, who is known as Neil. (And in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where, over six decades, she tried out her recipes for three children, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, the woman on the cookbook is known by her Americanized married name, Helen Panico.)
"I wanted to recapture a certain aspect of the era I grew up in," said Panico, 60, a former executive at publishing houses like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster and a former Los Angeles bookstore owner.
So he started his own publishing company, First View Books, in Cobb, Calif., where he now lives. He also started - and this is what made the difference between 10,000 copies and 100,000 - his own distribution company, First Glance Books.
"We are the middleman," he said. That means that the salesmen hawking the book are not preoccupied with pushing blockbusters and can talk up Rigante. It also means that Panico can cut deals with giant discount stores, like Price Club.
"Any major publisher would be happy to get a first book that would sell 100,000 copies," said Claire Schoen, the editorial director for Book Publishing Report, an industry newsletter. "Thirty-five thousand would be a good press run."
Book salesmen? One can just hear Rigante saying "fuhgeddaboutit."
"The kids are selling the books," she said. Her granddaughter Tara, who works in a wholesale travel agency, sold five. "I had one on my desk," she said. "I said, `That's her on the cover.' They didn't believe it."
Rigante, whose parents came from Apulia shortly after the turn of the century, didn't believe it when her son said her recipes should be published. "I thought he was teasing me," she said. "Then I told him he should have done it when I was 49 going on 50 instead of 79 going on 80."
Rigante did not sit down at a personal computer or even a typewriter; she got on the telephone with Panico's wife, Brenda Phillips. They collaborated long distance.
"These were recipes from the head - I didn't have a thing written down, so they called and taped me - 9 o'clock their time, 12 o'clock my time," Rigante said. "I'd talk hours and hours until I couldn't talk anymore. We'd finish and she'd say, `O.K., you can go out now.' I'd say, `Who wants to? I just want to go to sleep.' "
At her end, Phillips had to figure out how to translate quantities like pinch and dash and instructions like "throw some of this in" into spoonfuls, cupfuls or whatever. Then, of course, the recipes had to be tested. "We all got heavier putting this cookbook together," Panico said. "I gained seven pounds."
Unlike many first-time authors, Rigante did not go on a mind-numbing book tour, answering the same questions in city after city.