How to Self-Publish Your First Cookbook
This is how one man made millions of dollars by publishing a cookbook …
Cookbooks are always for sale. They are always the number one sellers. People buy hundreds of cookbooks. It seems that anyone who comes out with a cookbook sells it. Before writing your book, I didn’t know much about the cookbook market, I had just read something that said cookbooks always sell well.
He was thinking of the “hungry” market and, at the same time, his love of science fiction movies. He says of his idea that he was “driving down the street. My twisted brain put these two ideas together, science fiction and cooking, special effects and cooking.”
This was in 1990. He thought of what a great idea it could be for him: a special effects cookbook; how to create recipes that move, smoke, sing and glow in the dark and breathe, snap, crack and explode etc.
And immediately, he went home and created his first recipe: a steaming dragon cake. This was a dragon-shaped cake that actually breathed out a mysterious and safe smoke.
Due to his inventive spirit, he was able to figure out how to do this himself, and then from there he just created another and another and another. It took him about two months to create 50 recipes and put them in a book.
He also decided to self-publish, and with this he sold 500,000 copies at a profit of $ 10 a piece. That’s five million dollars, right in your pocket, just for desktop publishing!
Do you have the makings of a good quality book? Here are some suggestions for you. Unless you’re a desktop publishing expert or a good artist, I’d get it done.
In the cookbook, he wrote all the recipes by hand and made some sketches. In fact, he had a good friend who was a cartoonist and he did the hand drawings that he did for the cover of the book. Then he took it to the printing press and took out 20 books. They were all softcover and had no photographs.
It didn’t even have formal copyrights; he just went ahead and printed the copyright in 1990. His plan was to sell this through space ads, but he didn’t have enough money to get it right, so he did some advertising instead.
And this is another thing that I think a lot of marketers don’t pay enough attention to is advertising their products, especially books. Books are hard to sell. If you go to a publisher and ask them to agree to publish your book, they won’t advertise it yet.
He hadn’t even thought of going to a publishing house with the cookbook. Instead, he always considered desktop publishing to maintain full control over the product.
If you’ve been collecting recipes or have a unique idea for a cookbook, desktop publishing with a solid marketing plan is a great recipe for success.