This is how one man made millions of dollars by publishing a cookbook…
Cookbooks always sell. They are always the number one salesperson. People buy hundreds of cookbooks. It seems that anyone who comes out with a cookbook sells it. Before writing his book, he didn’t know much about the cookbook market, he 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 sci-fi 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 what a great idea this could be for him: a special effects cookbook; how to create recipes that move and smoke and sing and glow in the dark and puff and snap and crackle and pop and so on.
And so, right away, he went home and created his first recipe: a steaming dragon cake. This was a dragon-shaped cake that actually exhaled safe and mysterious smoke.
Due to his inventive spirit, he was able to figure out how to do this on his own 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 into 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 her pocket, just for self-publishing!
Do you have the ingredients for a good quality book? Here are some tips for you. Unless you’re well versed in desktop publishing or a good artist, I’d hire you smart.
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. He then he took it to the printer and produced 20 books. They were all paperback and had no photographs.
It didn’t even have a formal copyright; he just went ahead and printed the 1990 copyright. his plan was to sell this through space ads, but he didn’t have enough money to do it right, so he did some advertising.
And this is another thing that I think a lot of marketers don’t pay enough attention to: getting publicity for 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 still won’t advertise it.
I hadn’t even considered going to a publisher with the cookbook. Instead, he always considered self-publishing to maintain full control over the product.
If you’ve been collecting recipes or have a unique idea for a cookbook, self-publishing with a solid marketing plan is a great recipe for success.