Here's how one man made millions
of dollars from publishing a cookbook...
Cookbooks always sell. They're
always number one sellers. People buy hundreds of cookbooks. It
seems like anybody who comes out with a cookbook sells it.
Before he wrote his book, he had not known much about the
cookbook market, has just read something that said cookbooks
always sell well.
He was thinking of the "hungry"
market and at the same time, his love for 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 back in 1990. He
thought of 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, crackle and pop
and so on.
And so immediately, he went
home and created his first recipe: a smoking dragon cake. This
was a cake in the shape of a dragon that actually blew out safe,
mysterious smoke.
Because of his inventing spirit
he was able to figure out how to do this on his own, and then
from there, just created another one and another one and another
one. 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 sold 500,000 copies at a profit of $10 a
piece. That's five million dollars, straight into his pocket,
just by self-publishing!
Do you have the makings of a
good quality book? Here are a few hints for you. Unless you're a
very well versed in desktop publishing or you're a good artist,
I would hire it done.
In the cookbook, he wrote all
the recipes out in longhand and did some rough sketches. He
actually had a good friend who was a cartoonist and did the hand
drawings that he for the cover of the book. He then just took it
down to the print shop and cranked out 20 books. They were all
soft cover, and had no photographs.
He didn't even have a formal
copyright; just went ahead and printed copyright 1990. His plan
was to sell this by space ads, but didn't have enough money to
do it right, so did some publicity instead.
And this is another thing I
think a lot of marketers don't pay enough attention to is
getting publicity for their products, especially books. Books
are hard to sell. If you go to a publisher and have them agree
to publish your book, they're still not going to advertise it.
He had never even considered
going to a publisher with the cookbook. Instead, he always
considered self-publishing to maintain complete control over the
product.
If you've been collecting
recipes or have a unique idea for a cookbook, self publishing
with a sound marketing plan is a great recipe for success.
