Here’s How A Man Made Millions Of Dollars Publishing A Cookbook…
Cookbooks are always sold out. They are always the number one seller. People buy hundreds of cookbooks. Anyone who comes out with a cookbook seems to be selling it. Before he wrote his book, he didn’t know much about the cookbook market, he just read something that said cookbooks always sell well.
He had in mind the “hungry” market and at the same time his love of science fiction films. He says of his idea that he was “driving down the street. My twisted mind put these two ideas together, science fiction and cooking, special effects and cooking.”
This was in 1990. He thought about what this great idea could be for him: a special effects cookbook; How to make recipes that move, smoke, sing, glow in the dark, blow, pop, pop, pop, etc.
Immediately, he came home and made his first recipe: the Smoking Dragon Cake. This was a cake in the shape of a dragon that actually blew out safe and mysterious smoke.
Because of his inventive spirit, he was able to figure out how to do it on his own, and then from there, just create another, and another, and another. It took about two months to prepare 50 recipes and put them into a book.
He also decided to publish himself, and with this he sold 500,000 copies at a profit of $10 apiece. 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 some hints for you. Unless you are well versed in desktop publishing or you are a good artist, I would hire it.
In the cookbook, he wrote all the recipes in longhand and did some rough sketches. He actually had a good friend who was a cartoonist and did the hand drawings for the cover of the book. Then he took it to the printing house and took 20 books. They were all soft cover, and they had no photographs.
He didn’t even have an official copyright; He just went ahead and copyrighted it in 1990. His plan was to sell this by satellite advertising, but he didn’t have enough money to do it right so I did some publicity instead.
And that’s another thing that I think a lot of marketers don’t care enough about is getting publicity for their products, especially books. Hard to sell books. If you go to a publisher and ask them to agree to publish your book, they will no longer advertise it.
He never considered going to a publisher with the cookbook. Instead, always consider self-publishing to maintain complete control of the product.
If you collect recipes or have a unique idea for a cookbook, self-publishing with a good marketing plan is a great recipe for success.