Publish Your Own Best Selling Cookbooks!

Every year cookbooks are high on the list of the world's best selling books. There are tens of thousands of them sold each year with no suggestion of any weakening of the market. But the trouble is, with so many cookbook writers and publishers in existence today, the odds of any one particular cookbook becoming a best seller are about as high as a new novel becoming an instant hit. But, it can be done!   And all you have to do is make your cookbook different to anything anyone else is selling.

By the way, eBay is an excellent place to advertise recipe books in general, as well as for promoting your service for creating personalised recipe books.

Basically, there are three main approaches to this business:

1. Accumulate recipe collections and have them published.

2. Publish recipes for organisations.

3. Print private recipe collections.

The first category is the collection and publication of recipes from any sources where you are the publisher, author or the editor, sometimes all three. Recipes used in your books can be from your own family cookbook, or purchased or collected by many different means.

The recipes can be in virtually any category, such as diet, ethnic, geographical area, beef, vegetarian, all desserts, etc.

Don't overlook recipes for specific groups of people, such as diabetics or people allergic to milk products.

About the only major ‘no-no’ in this area is to include recipes from a copyrighted publication.

Once you have your recipes you have to make sure they are accurate and actually produce the desired results, and that means it is usually necessary to create some of the dishes yourself, just to be sure. 

Additionally you’ll have to work out how many people each dish serves and add the details to your recipe.  Number of servings expected from your recipes is especially important in a cookbook for singles or dieters.

When publishing your own cookbook, the greatest challenge is selling it.

There are an awful lot of cookbooks on the market today, so if you are to compete successfully you must offer something different. It must be something calculated to meet or create a demand to make people want to buy it.

The trick is to convince potential buyers that your cookbook has recipes they want and do not already have, and which other cookbooks don't offer - at least not in the same form as yours.

Probably the best way to come up with a novel approach is to study what is currently selling and how it is being sold. Do that by researching items in book stores, advertisements and offers you see in supermarkets and department stores.  Find out what recipes are included in the best selling books cover, and more importantly what is not included.

The third option is to publish a private family cookbook, where typically you gather recipes from one or more members of your client family and arrange them into a collection.

Naturally, the easiest way to compile such a cookbook would be on a word processor or desktop publishing system. It would be extra nice to include illustrations from clip art, and to personalise the cover and main title page. It could bear the family name as the author, for example, The Jones Family Cookbook, edited by Sally Jones-Smith

Additionally, each section title page could have a cute comment, so that the complete product would reflect as many members of the family as possible.   Your cookbook should be charged according to time and expertise you put into creating it, and the amount and type of materials used. Covers can be plastic covered, or printed on card on a colour printer, or they could be embossed or hand done and inserted under the plastic cover of a three ring notebook, and many other possible combinations.

One of many ways to provide an inexpensive but impressive cover is to obtain a good black and white picture, silhouette or drawing of the lady, couple or family involved and use that as a centrepiece.  Then around that centrepiece you use clip-art or rub-on letters to make a master copy of your title page which you then have copied and inserted under plastic on a three-ring notebook. And, if you can use or have access to a good desktop publishing system, there are many other options easily within your reach.

Your profit will not be on the first book. You should just about break even on it, meaning it should cover your time and expenses for creating your first print run. Your profit will come from subsequent orders, to the client’s brothers and sisters, for example, also uncles, in-laws, and daughters and daughters-in-law when they marry. Once the family owns a single copy of this heirloom, they will want to pass it along, especially when they learn that additional copies are half price!

This particular option has an additional potential profit source which comes from offering add on and updates for the book on a continuous basis, for an appropriate fee.   So you need to keep your back up copy of your first edition of the book somewhere safe and let customers know you have it and can update, re-issue or add to it whenever they wish.

For example, you can add a page or two of recipes from newer family members, along with their comments, or you might be asked to correct a mistake in an earlier edition, or run off another complete copy whenever you wish.

Prepare your own marketing plan by studying regular repeat advertisements for cookbooks.  Regular advertisements mean books are selling and making a profit from those ads., compared to advertisements that appear once or twice and quickly disappear and indicate the advertisement was not paying its way.

Where ads are not paying their way, the problem can be the product, the pricing or wording of the ad, or perhaps there isn't sufficient demand for what is being advertised. You will have to make judgements based on these factors relating to other people’s books, and use what you learn for your own advertisements.

When it comes to ordering copies of your book, you’ll find many printers will be glad to publish and promote your cookbook, but almost all will want their money up front!

So you  must get several quotes for printing a specific number of copies, and by shopping around you should be able to obtain 5,000 copies at a pound or even less per copy.

That’s the easy part of the task all done, now comes the really hard work of selling your books.

As a general rule, unless you have the funds to spare to pay for others to promote your books, it is best to do all of the marketing yourself. You do that by sending copies and price lists to possible buyers, by advertising your product and making personal appearances, by renting booths at shows and trade fairs, or by giving it away as prizes and running special offers, alongside any other marketing method you can think of.

Another good way to avoid heavy capital outlay and protect yourself against a poor return on your investment is to publish a cookbook with a guaranteed readership. That happens where you collect recipes from individuals, list their names as contributors, and sell copies to them! This is not as far fetched as it might seem at first.

An example is a recipe book for a church group or club, where the completed cookbook is purchased by the recipe contributors, as well as other members of the congregation or club to raise money, and also promote the organisation.

As the promoter, you collect, edit and organise your cookbook, arrange for printing and then help sell it, both in and outside the organization.  In return you receive a share of the profits.

Or, you could promote a community cookbook featuring the cuisine of your area, and again give credit to contributors. In this case you may not need to share your profits with anyone, yet people whose names are in the book will buy it

The bottom line in successful cookbook publishing is to plan carefully, and know exactly what you what to achieve before starting work on your book.  Plan what type of recipes you want to feature and consider who would be most interested in buying them. Next, figure the best way to attract those potential buyers to your product.   Work on your recipes until you are certain they are just the way you want them to be.  Then design a cover for your book, have copies printed, and start promoting.