What would you most like to see in a sourdough baking book?

I’m creating a sourdough baking book and wondering if I’ve covered everything that people might want. Some things that are important to me:
• Practical everyday recipes that take minimal hands-on time but create great results.
• Weight measurements, volume measurements, and bakers percentages.
• Lots of information explaining why each step of baking is done, how to work with different types of dough, how to work with different temperatures during fermentation and baking, how to work with different equipment options - like with my cheesemaking book, I want the reader to come away understanding not just how to do the techniques, but why they are done and how to tinker with them to get different results.
• Recipes that work with fresh milled 100% wholegrain flours, as well as bought flours.
• Recipes that will work with different grains and flours.
• Ways to minimise or eliminate sourdough starter discard.
• Plastic-free and zero waste.
• Budget friendly - working with stuff that’s probably already in your kitchen rather than purchasing speciality gear.
• Recipes that work on or off the grid in all seasons - not just ones that work in centrally heated houses or warm climates.
• Recipes kept on the same page spread when possible, for easy use, because I think it’s more practical to teach techniques such as strengthening and shaping in one place in the book rather than explaining them again and again with every recipe and creating longwinded recipes, plus I don’t like turning pages when my hands are covered in dough!

A couple of questions:
• What do you want to see in a sourdough baking book?

• Recipes for using up sourdough discard - do you want to see lots of these? Just a select few? Or none at all?

• Any bread or treat in particular that you’d love to see a wholegrain sourdough version of?

• Do you find it more appealing to go to a page and find one single recipe (with a photo next to it) for one specific type of bread (e.g. baguettes), even if it might use the same (or similar) amounts and techniques to a couple of other doughs, but it’s just shaped differently, or would you prefer to go to a page for something like a basic sweet bun dough or basic French-style lean dough and have several variations for shaping, flavouring, and baking? Which of these options is most likely to get you motivated to bake?

• I’ve created a thread about roadblocks to baking bread - I’m interested to hear about things that have prevented you from baking as much as you would like so that I can figure out ways to overcome this and bake lots of lovely bread. If you don’t bake as much bread as you would like to, please feel free to share your thoughts in this thread - maybe I can come up with strategies to get around your roadblocks. Here’s the link: https://permies.com/t/272980/bake-bread-biggest-breadmaking-roadblocks

• How do you think it is best to way to separate recipes into categories? Is it better to have chapters organised by shape and type (e.g. hearth loaves, pan loaves, flatbreads, rolls, pastries, etc), or by technique (e.g. same day loaves, overnight preferment loaves, overnight cold fermented loaves, overnight cold proofed loaves)? Right now I’m leaning towards the first idea.

• Would you benefit from having an absolute beginners bread recipe that goes really in depth giving detailed descriptions for the techniques used, and running over several pages so that the beginner can follow it from start to finish rather than needing to read all the intro stuff first?

Well, that stuff and your name as the author is good enough for me!

In my opinion (feel free to ignore), focusing on the method rather than lots of recipes would be more helpful.  However, if you have sourdough recipes for different baked goods like cookies, cakes, muffins, etc--the kind of baked goods people wouldn't normally associate with sourdough--I think these would be good with individual recipes.

Maybe a good detailed section on how to make a starter, preferably with more than one method:  aka, here's a really simple/foolproof/cheat's way to get started, here's how they do it in these cultures, here's a good method if you're wheat-free, etc.  

Also I like your idea of how to use up sourdough discard;  I don't like the word discard though, it's such a waste!  How to use up extra starter, how not to have any more than you need in the first place too.  This I think would be very helpful.

The cookbooks that I really enjoy are a bit chatty;  they are also older cookbooks--I don't know if some newer ones still employ this style as I only really buy secondhand these days.  I do have some newer ones (still secondhand) that I refer to for specific recipes (mainly "ethnic" cookbooks) but there's a couple I will never part with because they are so much fun to read!  Examples of the kind of chat I mean are menu suggestions (for example, an eclectic list of sandwiches, or what to pack for a picnic on the beach), anecdotes or little bits of history.  I find it interesting and engaging to have this kind of extra content sprinkled throughout the book, though not interfering with the recipe layout.  It might be distracting in an ebook though;  I've only read your writing here on permies, not your books so maybe you have a different writing style (and go with your own style of course!).

I'm not particularly drawn to photos in cookbooks, but that's just me.  Unless illustrating something very specific, I find them distracting;  like the author/publisher needed to fill some pages to make the book worth printing.  Other people may not agree with this.

I think you've got a lot covered and it sounds like a great project.

A procedure for making delicious whole-grain burger buns. I don't really need a sourdough book, but I'd buy one for that.