Cookbook economics

[fjtorres]

https://medium.com/@nickkokonas/why-...k-e89236ab6ca1

One of the most opaque industries around is publishing, not here online, but good old-fashioned print-books and their digital and audio spin-offs. Poke around and try to find some hard sales numbers and you’ll quickly find that it’s near impossible to do so. You can find bestseller lists from reputable sources like the NYTimes, Amazon and others but tying those rankings to an actual number of books sold at retail is simply not doable. Publishing costs, deals, and profit lines are even harder to shake loose.
About a decade ago, in 2007, book agents and publishers began approaching chef Achatz and me to gauge our interest in creating an Alinea cookbook. Ever since that process started I have wanted to write this post. Having never published a book before I was fairly mind-blown by the terms of the offering and my inability to properly and easily research the process, costs and revenue potential of a cookbook. In the intervening decade I’ve ranted privately to dozens of chefs, restaurant owners, writers of fiction and non-fiction alike, and even a few screenwriters that they should avoid traditional publishing deals if at all possible. I’ve pushed the case in private, but have always been afraid to fully burn my bridges.
Until now.

Burning bridges is about right.
Good read, though.

I still had no idea what it actually cost to print a major cookbook. That was as hard to figure out as sales numbers. So our team started calling printers in China and Korea, print brokers in the US, and any publishing contact I could find to ask a very specific question: “How much does it cost to print 30,000 copies of a [Very Famous and Successful] Cookbook, do you think?” I was met with responses that were akin to me asking for state secrets that were highly classified. No one would talk.
Until one-day I got lucky. Just by chance I spoke to the print broker who actually worked on the exact bid for that famous book. And he told me precisely: that super amazing cookbook that I truly loved, which at the time retailed for $50 and had won every award imaginable, cost $3.83 per book to print, shrink wrap, and ship to the US. I thought he must be mistaken and I said so. “No way.” He replied, “well that was the first edition, I’m sure the cost has gone down since then.” He thought I was implying that $3.83 per book was too high!

There's a reason China is the go-to source for tradpub batch printing.

It took us nearly a year to make the book, all the while learning a lot and making a ton of mistakes, and doing so while Grant went through an arduous series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments for Stage IVb cancer. The entire process proved incredibly stressful, but we worked with amazing food writers who were my inspiration to get into the restaurant business just a few years earlier — Jeffrey Steingarten and Michael Ruhlman among them.
We set up a website and sold nearly 5,000 books directly, with the promise of a slip-covered edition signed by all of the creators, before we even printed them. And perhaps the funniest error is that I never bothered to consider that 5,000 7.5 pound books is 18.75 tons of books!

Despite the difficulties we had successfully created the book we wanted. It was truly unique, over 3 times the production and printing cost of a typical cookbook at that price point, with a small font, black pages, and metric measures. Martin even went to China for 3 weeks to oversee the printing, ensuring the proper color saturation, printing throughput and standards — and driving the print broker and the factory completely nuts with his attention to detail. All told, the cost per unit was around $10.80 laden for the first edition run of 30,000 books.
The end results proved that customers could tell the difference. Alinea is in its 6th printing edition with over 100,000 copies sold. It won a James Beard Award for Best Cookbook from a Professional Point of View. And it was featured in the Communications Arts 50th Anniversary Annual for its innovative design, a true honor for any graphic designer let alone for Martin and Lara working on their first book ever.

That is just chapter one of the story.

Much more at the source, bringing it to the present.

Highly recommended for both the data and the narrative.

[Cinisajoy]

Just wow at they wanted the author to buy 5,000 copies.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Just wow at they wanted the author to buy 5,000 copies.

Note that the initial advance they offered was $125K. A bit *less* than the profit they made off the buyback copies at wholesale.

Too bad for the publisher that restaurateurs have to know math just to survive.

[Cinisajoy]

Very true

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Just wow at they wanted the author to buy 5,000 copies.

I take it that this contract was with Publish America, now known as America Star Books.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Fiat_Lux

I take it that this contract was with Publish America, now known as America Star Books.

The article didn't say.