If you’re a cook who wants to publish a cookbook, I have a question for you:
Q: How many cooks does it take to publish a cookbook?
A: None, it takes a publisher. Besides, too many cooks spoil the binding.
OK, it was a trick question, but I’m not a cook myself so I don’t want to waste any time moving the discussion onto more familiar ground. Now that we’ve established that it takes a publisher to publish a cookbook, I have another question:
Q: What’s the main job of a cookbook publisher?
A: Selling cookbooks.
The most important thing you can learn about the publishing business before getting involved as either an author or a publisher is that printing books is as easy as boiling pasta, but selling them is harder than making a good sauce from scratch. If you think simmering tomatoes takes a long time, you’re going to have trouble with my recipe for marketing, which is, a sale a day on Amazon helps your cookbook bubble to the top few search results after few months, depending on the competitive heat.
Anybody can gather together a bunch of recipes and have a cookbook printed, and in some case, like charity fundraiser cookbooks that won’t be sold outside the community, that’s all it takes for a moderate success. The customers are motivated to buy the cookbook to support the charity, you could be selling them candy bars instead, but a cookbook is a nice way to get a bunch of people involved in contributing recipes, production, and community building is one of the benefits. But when you come to my website with a question about how to publish a cookbook, I assume that you’re talking about a cookbook for sale to the broad public, so you can make money.
Making money with any type of book brings us to the next point, which is, while there’s no easier way to get published than paying some hundreds or thousands of dollars to a subsidy publisher and sending off your manuscript, you’ll very rarely earn back the subsidy payment. There are even subsidy publishers who specialize in cookbooks, but their real function is acting as a sort of service bureau for the charity cookbook model and they won’t generate any sales for you. If you’ve already written a cookbook and you can convince anybody you talk to that people will line up to buy it, put your argument in writing and send off a proposal to one of the trade publishers who’s published similar cookbooks. While I’m obviously an advocate of self publishing, unless you have a platform that guarantees you book sales (a TV show, a column, a popular website or a professorship, you’ll probably make more money your first time out with a well positoned trade who can pay you an advance. No advance, they aren’t a well positioned trade.
The most serious question I can ask you illustrates how to publish a cookbook that will sell:
Q: What’s the main job of a sucessful cookbook author?
A: Market research.
When you’re writing as a business, the worst error you can make is to invest your time in writing a book that you can’t sell because there’s no audience. For example, you might know a bunch of recipies that will make a person’s hair fall out, their teeth rot, or give them terrible indigestion, but without having done the market research myself, I’m guessing you’d be limited to selling it as a novelty item. If you want to publish a cookbook that people will read and use, you have to write one that they either already want, or will want when you present your convincing arguments. This last bit is a serious stumbling block for most self publishers, who assume that they’ll be given the opportunity to make their argument by getting their books on store shelves and having people browse them. It just doesn’t work that way. You have to convince the chains to give your book a try on the shelves, and that’s a tougher job than setting up for direct sales and convincing customers one-by-one. Also, getting your book stocked by chains means a very large upfront investment and earning a very small proportion of the cover price, probably between 20% and 25% depending on your printing and shipping costs.
My own take on self publishing is to try to do it all with print on demand, using a model based on Lightning Source or Replica short discount distribution which lets you earn 50% or more of the cover price. With print on demand, your out of pocket investment is limited to purchasing an ISBN block to become an official publisher, and a hundred or so dollars in setup fees (you still have to produce the digital production file), then Presto, your cookbook becomes available on Amazon, and by special order through most of the bookstores in the country, not to mention direct sales. The problem is that color print on demand is just coming into its own, so for the time being, I recommend that publishers stick to black and white, and avoid greyscale graphics (photos) due to quality issues. I actually wrote something a while back about how to publish a cookbook specifically with print on demand.
How to Publish a Cookbook
The Democratization of Publishing
A quick thought on the democratization of publishing. It is quite likely that under a large, free, print on demand library system, you would get a huge number of titles uploaded, but as with subsidy published books, very few of them would get printed in any quantity. Memoirs, poetry, books that people write because they feel something in them that needs to come out are wonderful medicine for the author who writes them, but they almost never succeed commercially because strangers just aren't interested. Most people who read biography and memoir want to read about famous people or at least, biographies by famous biographers. Library patrons want to check out the latest bestseller or a classic. The local memoirs and "minor" books that get acquired over the years tend to get culled out when the library needs shelf space and they check the date stamps.
I do see many authors, particularly in the nonfiction genres, slowly disposing with publishers, but I think they'll be replaced with self-publishing partnerships that allow the author to earn a living, such as Google (thinking of their new video program), Amazon and Lightning Source. The authors who can't or won't work on spec will continue writing for the big trades who, through their business models, will continue providing the 80,000 wallpaper titles for the big bookstore chains who don't show any signs of weakening. There seems to be room in the publishing world for all these different models, but I don’t see many commercial authors wanting to work for free. Maybe it's because most commercial authors count on writing income for a significant portion of their living.
The Internet is a practical case study in the democratization of publishing. It turns out that the people who author book length content for websites, and I mean publication quality content as opposed to adventures in daily blogging, are authors. Some of them haven’t been published on paper yet and some just don’t see the need as they earn a living from their online content, but they are professional authors all the same. I suppose I’m cheating a little in my argument here, since anybody who writes book length content could be called an author by definition. Many popular blogs are maintained by authors who are searching for greener pastures. The demographics of authors haven't changed that I’ve noticed. Most of the productive nonfiction authors are in their 30's to 50's, people with the experience and know-how to work on spec, and wolves howling at the door for motivation.
The recent history of music downloads have some people outside the publishing industry convinced that copyright owners can no longer make the rules (the French Senate seems to agree). They believe that publishers and authors will simply have to accept any new distribution system and take what people are willing to pay them. I suspect that music was a somewhat unique case, and that model won't be extensible to books, forced or unforced. Very few people go to the trouble of scanning, OCR'ing and correcting books for the sake of giving them away. Most of the ripped books you see on the web are ripped from e-book versions, many which were published without DRM to start with. There’s no question that print on demand and the Internet make the public accessible to all authors, but there’s no sign that the public prefers non-commercial books to commercial titles. I guess that’s my second cheat of an argument today since titles are deemed commercial precisely because the public buys them in quantity.
Choosing A Book Printing Company
Before getting into details, I want to warn off those self-publishers who have already mortgaged the house and are ready to invest $100,000 in their first book. You’re so far beyond where I’m coming from that any advice I give just won’t match the business model you’re trying. For the record, the most I’ve ever invested (obviously not including my time) in self publishing a book was a little over $2,000; the least was about $350. I don’t self publish books as a hobby. I need them to pay for the effort by the end of the first year. Keeping costs down is a good way to avoid digging a bigger hole than you can climb out of without a bestseller.
Self publishers today are faced with two basic choices when choosing a book printing company. First, can they get by with print-on-demand quality or does the book absolutely have to be printed on an offset press? There are exactly three print on demand companies at the moment that can provide their publishers with hands-off access to distribution at a short discount. They are: Lightning Source, Replica and BookSurge (BookSurge only direct with Amazon for the time being, but that’s a large chunk of the typical self publishers’ marketplace). The discount off the cover price is what determines how much money comes back to the publisher for each book sold. The shorter the discount, the more money returns to the publisher. Despite the higher cost per copy that printing on demand entails, the availability of short discount distribution from these three companies means that the publisher earns more than if the books were printed on offset for free and then supplied into distribution at the standard trade discount.
Second, does the book absolutely require access to distribution or will all of the sales be done directly from the author to the customer? If the publisher plans on fulfilling all orders directly and storing the books in the garage or the back bedroom, then the short discount distribution advantage of print on demand becomes meaningless. However, absolute price per unit is still not the only factor to decide which book printing company is best for you, since the location of the printer and their ability to produce short runs is critical as well. The location is important for two reasons. For your first book, if you’re committing to an offset run of hundreds or more copies, you want to get it right the first time. That’s a lot easier to do if you can visit a local printer, talk to their setup people to find out exactly what they need, and be able to exchange materials without incurring a huge FedX bill. The second factor in location should be obvious. Books are heavy and not particularly cheap to ship. If you can drive to a local printer and pick up a few hundred books, you’ll save yourself as much as a couple hundred dollars on shipping and handling. In other words, if you think you’re saving 40 cents a book by ordering from some place
Finally, even if you’ve decided to forego distribution and do all of your own fulfillment (which means foregoing sales to some retailers who will only buy through distribution), you still have to have a place to put the books and money to pay for them. You’ll find that the cost per book drops rapidly with the number of books printed on an offset press, but for very short runs (under a couple hundred books) it’s usually cheaper to chose a book printing company that uses print on demand equipment for the short runs. If you fall into this category, you should really rethink whether you can get by with the quality of one of the print on demand companies that can give you short discount distribution as well. At large quantities, offset is always cheaper for books you’ll be taking possession of, but the cost of money and the risk become a factor. You can get books very inexpensively by ordering a run of 10,000, but that represents several years sales for a successful self publisher, and the odds of you’re getting there on your first outing are quite low.