Writing a cookbook or cocktail book is a dream for many chefs and bartenders, and even many passionate home cooks. Having your name on the cover of a glossy tome is a mark of success – it means your food and your story have been deemed important enough to share. And the cookbook market is booming – in 2023, Australian consumers purchased over 18,700 unique titles, totalling 2.1 million individual copies, and generating over $62.1 million across this sector. This time last year, while the rest of the publishing market had flattened out, the food and drink subcategory was up 17%. In a world where almost any recipe is available on the internet, the heft and beauty and design of a cookbook still calls to many readers and cooks.

But for every bestseller, there are a slew of books that go unnoticed and unread. One of publishing’s dirty secrets is the many authors who poured months of work, love, and sometimes, their own money into a project, and saw very little in return.

So, what actually goes into the writing of a cookbook? How do you get a deal in the first place? What are the common pitfalls that make the process difficult, or lead to lacklustre sales? We spoke to a host of chefs, authors, editors and book agents to find out the real costs, risks and rewards of this fickle industry, and came away with a ton of advice for the aspiring cookbook author. 

A Game of Numbers

Social media, the beast that has infiltrated our lives in so many ways, has also changed the basic equations of publishing. It has given metrics to individual humans – in the form of followers, likes and overall clout – that didn’t really exist in the past. And people who are particularly good at social media – especially in the food category – have a new way to market themselves as potential cookbook authors.

“The more Instagram followers you have, the less you need a strong concept,” says Katherine Cowles, a New York-based agent who has represented numerous cookbook authors, including New York Times writer Eric Kim and Seattle chef and restaurateur Renee Erickson. But, Cowles says, with or without a huge following, a strong thesis – and backup for that thesis – is essential.

Concept is King

“People think a cookbook is a collection of recipes,” she says. “But there has to be a real culinary concept. It has to be engaging and well written, with recipes that back up your idea. And that overall idea has to be deep enough to be worthy of covering in 300 pages.”

Cowles gives examples of the kinds of ideas she deems worthy. “Can you say, ‘there has never been a cookbook before that covers X?’” she said. “And also, ‘X is relevant right now because of Y.’”

With a big enough platform – be it social media, or a certain amount of renown thanks to restaurant ownership or media coverage – that never-before element could be your own story. Junda Khoo, who published Ho Jiak: A Taste of Malaysia earlier this year with Hardie Grant, says that the following he’s built over the years made the story the most important element of his book. “People have always followed me because of my story,” Khoo says. “An untrained chef, with no culinary experience, who hadn’t worked in another restaurant before I do what I do now. They probably know bits and pieces through articles and social media, but I thought: why not put all the details in the book? The recipes are just extras.”

For Pamelia Chia, an author who self-published Plantasia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia this year, the inspiration was quite different. “The impetus of writing cookbooks for me has always been to empower younger cooks like myself by sharing what I know in a clear, concise manner,” she says. “Plantasia was written after I’d moved to Australia and was inspired about how creative and thoughtful local chefs were in crafting vegetarian or vegan dishes, and how unafraid they were to fuse techniques or ingredients from Asia.”

Pitch Perfect

Simon Davis, Hardie Grant’s Food & Lifestyle publisher, echoes Cowles in terms of what makes him excited when looking at proposals or potential authors. Successful concepts, he says, all have a clear sense of purpose. “Depending on the author this can be anything from a midweek family cookbook to a treatise on whole fish cookery – but wherever the writer sits within the market, the best concepts are always those that are clear to understand, that manage to cut through the noise, and which leave you with a real sense of ‘yes, this needs to be a book.’”

The Rub

So, let’s say you’ve made it: you’ve got a great concept, a successful proposal, and are on your way to publishing a book. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, as it turns out.

“Overly complicated recipes,” Cowles says, without hesitation. Having worked with many restaurant chefs, Cowles knows how hard it is for those chefs to understand that despite the fact they might have a book deal based on the cooking in their restaurants, a good restaurant and a good cookbook are very different things. “You want to work with someone who has really great ideas,” she says. “And a lot of people who have great ideas want to show them off in a cookbook. But a cookbook is for a home cook. You have to be able to write a good recipe, and to me, a good recipe is defined as: something for a home cook, it should have ingredients that are available, and use techniques that are doable.” There is wiggle room, she says – if the technique is really simple, you can maybe add one ingredient that’s harder to find, or vice versa.

Davis says that he encounters authors getting into trouble by over-planning and over-writing, and not understanding the collaborative nature of the book publishing process. “Many individuals, including photographers, stylists and designers on the visual side, along with editors, publishers and the many areas that make up the publishing house, will be involved in helping to shape and guide that original concept into a finished, printed book,” he says.

Khoo worked with a co-writer his book, journalist Nick Jordan (who was also the first journalist to write about Ho Jiak, Khoo’s first restaurant), while Chia acted as writer, food stylist and photographer. She did hire few people to help with the process, including editor Jess Ho. A large part of Chia’s decision to self-publish was the freedom it gave her to assemble the team that worked for her and the project. “It was important to me to assemble an all-Asian production team because I understood that there’s so much diversity in Asian cooking,” Chia says. “To represent it well and do the subject matter justice, I wanted as many Asian eyes looking through my work as possible. Having an Asian editor was especially crucial as a thought partner, as there’s bound to be certain facets of Asian culture that a non-Asian might not necessarily understand or place importance on, such as the choice to not italicise non-English words.”

Timing, Planning, and a Dash of Magic

And as for the sales and success of a finished book? Some of that is just the fluke of doing the right thing at the right time. “Bread books did fantastically during the pandemic,” Cowles says. But mostly success comes from true connection with the subject matter and the audience. Which brings us to the downside of that social media metric: “Publishers have bought all of these Instagram books,” Cowles says, “where maybe they had a ton of followers, and they’re cooking but their followers aren’t really there for the culinary aspect.”

She also says that authors should have a clear idea of what they want the book to look and feel like when they go into the process. “Crappy paper, the wrong sized book, bad photography … I’ve seen all of these things derail books, even really good books. A lot of that can be avoided if you go into conversations with publishers with a clear idea of what you want from the beginning.”

And some of it, she says, is simply unknowable. “It’s like putting on a play,” she says. “You don’t know how the play is going to be until opening night. It’s all the different parts and people – it’s what makes it fun. If we knew, it would be a lot less intriguing.”