Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook
medium.com
medium.com
"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!"
One implication of this is that the cost difference between digital and physical publishing is probably much less than most people think. While a weighty tome may literally feel like it's worth a hefty premium, this is due more to consumer psychology than anything inherent to cost of production.
Customers can always tell the difference between quality and non-quality, and since manufacturing is actually a small part of the retail price, it's crazy to try to save money on quality.
On the other hand I've read accounts of people who've published through O'Reilly and were very happy with having a team of people to crunch through the layout, typesetting, etc.
That doesn't make book writing for publishers a good deal for anyone, by the way. Executing on a book contract is one of the lower effort/reward things you can do.
If you asked me what about a big cookbook with glossy pictures would make it cost more than a regular book, I'd go with the glossy pictures, not the mass.
This is because they have access to a traditional printer and are able to order the volume needed for that price. A print on demand book from amazon that is 200 pages, full color will cost ~$15/book. But, that price is fixed whether you buy 1 or 5000 copies. Add in amazon's cut and you're looking to make 30% for each sale on amazon.com. If they handle distribution to bookstores you're looking at a 10% cut.
This is the option available to most self publishers and the margins are not that much better than going with a traditional publisher. Especially, because the author needs to front all of the costs for editing, design, etc.
If you write a very successful book with traditional publishing cut you might make 30-40k. Average is lower. There are power laws at play, but as few as 5% make it past six figures.
So when I wrote a book about step-by-step user acquisition (https://secretsaucenow.com) I self-published. Made $60,000-ish in presales, sold another $60,000 while I was finishing the book. And now pull in 4-8k/month.
If I signed a deal with a publishing company selling the same number of books I would have made ~10k. Instead I found a freelance editor and typesetter ($400), printed the first 100 ($700), and sell the vast majority as eBooks. It's done well, but not earth shatteringly well, and I'm up above $140k in profit.
There is very little reason nowadays, IMO, to not self-publish.
This credibility can often turn into some very lucrative gigs.
I wouldn't mind publishing fiction myself, but if I was doing non-fiction, I would want to go through traditional publishing.
It doesn't really matter whether people like, say, Malcolm Gladwell made any money off their books. The credibility their books earned them pays off in the longer run.
Does success with a self-published book (or multiple books) translate into making it easier to get books published by big-name publishers on more-acceptable terms?
The first 11 books I wrote were published by mainstream publishers (McGraw-Hill, J. Riley, Springer-Verlag, Morgan Kaufman). While I am grateful for the advance monies paid and great support in writing, I eventually decided that I wanted the freedom to write on whatever topics I wanted and all my new stuff is self published, first through lulu.com and now through leanpub.com.
I encourage people to write a book (or books). It is a really fun process. I would suggest using a publisher for a book and then also try self publishing using leanpub.com or some other platform. Decide for yourself with you prefer.
...or am I wrong?
We use Markdown for authoring (one of two dialects: either Leanpub Flavoured Markdown or Markua).
We automatically produce PDF, EPUB, MOBI (what you were saying, essentially), but we also produce InDesign export. If you have a designer, give him/her the InDesign files. You can then produce exactly what you want as a finished product for print, with as much design as you want. But while the book is in-progress, nothing beats being able to click a button to publish.
...and if you don't want to do the InDesign work, you can just click a button and get a print-ready PDF file automatically produced by Leanpub.
I got the impression it was 100% opaque from web ui -> paying for printed books.
Do you offer paper size/weight options? And what are the prices if I already have the book proofed and am just looking for a press?
With the print-ready PDF, you can use it on unchanged places like Lulu or CreateSpace. (With the print-ready PDF, we alternate margins (wider in middle) and page numbers (put them on the outside), start chapters on the right, etc. We also omit the cover, so that you can use their cover wizard things.)
With InDesign, your designer will need to do some work. We produce ICML.
Leanpub is primarily an ebook production workflow + storefront. The print-book-ready file export is something we just give away, since our authors want it. We currently don't want to be in the business of producing physical books ourselves.
but my opinion is quite different.
i've been active in the e-book sphere for a long time, and i've studied e-book authoring quite extensively, even programming some systems myself, and i think leanpub is quite good. i liked it better when you didn't have to make a lump-sum payment in advance, but even now, i think it's one of the best systems around, especially for people who don't want to code their own solution. and leanpub gives you access to a customer-base that's more than large enough to warrant the small percentage they skim off your sales.
[0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2017/05/06/crossing-the...
Edit: here's the explanation on why you can't find a lot of his earlier material online: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agi...
I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but you are insane.
I've written a couple for MK and SV and edited a few more conference books and a few more compilations of submitted chapters in an attempt to create a cogently thematic book, and I hated the world, everyone in it and myself. Never again.
Happy to answer any questions you may have.
-- Nick
Hey, if you use InDesign and Google Docs, sounds like you could use our DocsFlow plug-in. You're welcome to a free license or two in support of your efforts...
Baseline: 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.
First book: All told, the cost per unit was around $10.80 laden for the first edition run of 30,000 books.
Second book: Initial estimates for a print run of 15,000 and 30,000 are about $13.80 to $15.20 per unit for the basic book without any ‘extras’.
What were the factors that increased the printing costs between these books? Was it mostly photos vs text, or was something else the main driver? And at the volumes you sold, how does this difference end up comparing to the total cost of producing the book?
And I’d be happy to work under those terms again. But then 10 Speed Press, a great independent publisher that could adroitly make an unusual deal for a cool book, got sold to Crown Publishing in 2009. ... I really doubt any publisher will make a deal like that again anytime soon.
Why do you think this is? Presumably, the deal worked out well enough economically for 10 Speed. While the current incumbent publishers are based on a low-risk high-volume corner-cutting model, might there be room for an upstart to take 10 Speed's place? Or room for a publisher who cares about books as art?
If you haven't seen it, the documentary "How to Make a Book with Steidl" is a nice look at a German publisher who appears to stay in business creating books with high attention to detail: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/steidl_documentary_imprint. And at the extreme high end, the Spanish publisher Siloé has a facsimile of the Voynich manuscript coming out that attracted a lot of attention and preorders: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/23/491033798/....
The end results proved that customers could tell the difference. Alinea is in it’s 6th printing edition with over 100,000 copies sold. It won a James Beard Award for Best Cookbook from a Professional Point of View.
How does the "super amazing cookbook" that "won every award imaginable" fit into the theory that the attention to detail made a difference? Do you think it would have done even better on the market if they had used the more expensive printing processes you did? Or would it likely have done just about the same, but produced a few hundred thousand dollars less profit for the publisher?
I'm worried that the correct conclusion is not that the publishers are missing out, but that maximum profit occurs at relatively low level of quality, such that anyone trying to create a worthy work-of-art in this space is by definition economically irrational. Not that this is a bad thing --- instead, what is the force behind this irrationality, and how can we ensure that it doesn't get drowned out further?
1) the different factors are: number of photos, quality of paper, quality of inks used (bigger difference than you'd imagine), 6 color offset printing, full bleed on every page, veneer on every photo, quality of binding. If you look at most cookbooks there is a LOT of writing and pages that contain no images. That's intentional.
2) I think 10 Speed did OK on our book since we sold so many. If you do the math from the numbers I gave you can see that they likely made something on the order of $390,000 on our book (this is a very rough estimate). And they took virtually no risk, beyond their time. That said, they did this as a vanity project in order to attract other authors to the imprint -- that was stated from the beginning.
3) Whether there is room for someone else to create an imprint to do this -- I'm not really sure. It's very different to do it as an individual than it is to take on a lot of overhead and put out dozens of titles per year. The point is that the winners pay for the losers... but as an individual you don't have to worry about that.
4) Thanks for the links! I'm going to order that Voynich now -- oh wait, no I'm not... it's $8,000! There are a few publishers that do amazing art quality books and do them very well. But typically they are priced much higher than mass market books, even high end ones at $50 or $60.
5) The 'super amazing' cookbook fits in because it proved to me that the margins were way better than I ever imagined. And frankly, after speaking with the editor that ran that imprint I really felt like she knew I would figure that out and did everything to try to convince me I was going to fail. At this point that book has sold something north of 500,000 copies and the restaurant / chef has IMO received a fraction of what they should have. You're looking at something like $12,500,000 of wholesale revenue from one book alone, maybe more, and the royalties were likely paid at 12% to 15% of cover price after recoup of advance. That's $6.50 per copy. Rough estimate: $3M to the writer. $8M to the publisher, lifetime.
I agree with your conclusion that max. profit occurs with a relatively low quality level... (Hollywood Sequels anyone?)... but that for an individual author it's easier than ever to spurn the system especially if you already have a following through your main profession.
It sounds like you're going in completely ignorant to an industry and, because you're very talented in another area, take a simplistic approach and assume anyone benefiting from your (most likely) amazing documentation of your culinary skills is taking money from the only one producing something here. I know it's not your intention, and I think it's more and more common these days.
If anyone could share a bit more about the cost of self publishing would be great.
For some reason, I'm more worried about the copy editing at this point than anything else.
Publishing a text-only book with no or minimal pictures is shocking inexpensive.
But you basically need a content review and a review for flow/grammar/spelling/etc.
I've self-published but my objective has never been to make money. It's about supporting other activities that I get paid for. (Which is the situation with a lot of the lighterweight O'Reilly and "Dummies Guides" types of things these days.)
They remind me of those books from the 1980s filled with printed copies of the source code for computer programs. You would input the text from the book using your keyboard, and compile/interpret the program. That was how many programs were distributed, because a printed book on a truck had higher bandwidth than any other readily-available channel. And then there were also books about learning to write your own programs that may also have included some source code. I think that cookbooks filled with recipes are like the former, and books about learning to make your own recipes are like the latter.
Those recipe books simply became obsolete with ubiquitous Internet access. Countless recipes are open source and freely available. Barely anything in a recipe book is eligible for copyright protection. You can basically rewrite instructions in your own words and make your own drawings or photographs, if any, and that boxed spaghetti with canned marinara recipe is now printable as part of your own cookbook.
So it is very smart to--as with the book in the article--load up all your recipes with copyright-protected photographs, rather than leaving them out to cut print costs. But even so, that book as described seemed more about trademarks and brands than content. It might be useful for franchisees or for professional imitators. When I am cooking at home, I rarely even refer to a recipe, and when I do, it is just one of the thousands of results from an Internet search.
Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks? Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes? Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen?
These two sentences contradict each other. You are correct: countless recipes are open source and freely available. However, that leads to the same problem with anything else that's freely available online—quality wildly varies. Without some strict curation of what's available, the expected value of a random recipe you find online is often too low to be worth spending the time and ingredients making.
Thus recipe books keep their value—if the book is well reviewed, you can have enough confidence in the recipes it contains to be worth the money and effort to make.
All those curation arguments boil down to trademarks and branding. If you don't know enough to judge for yourself, you still have to know enough to judge whether the judge you delegate knows enough to judge for you.
Maybe you delegate to Alton Brown because he is on television and you like how he explains things. You're choosing to trust Alton Brown to only put his trademark on things that Alton Brown approves of. But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know! Based strictly on screen time, he seems better at describing what he is eating than actually cooking anything.
If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do. How do you know you can trust those reviewers? A lot of them are just food snobs parroting what they learned from previous generations of food snobs.
The key precept is that when you are the one doing the choosing, it's less likely that someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick.
The argument against curation is that the pool of potential curators is just as deep and variable in quality as the things they curate. So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers. And then you need a meta-meta-curator to judge the quality of your meta-curators, and it's just tortoises all the way down. I'd prefer to do an objective analysis. Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best. The same process can inform you as to what brand of tomatoes is best in your homemade pasta sauce, or whether unbroken-grain wild rice is really worth the price premium over the bits and pieces, or which tortillas are best for burrito night, or which beer brand is best for general drinking.
Trust the objective measurements. A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.
And that makes you a reliable curator for your friends and family, because your meta-curator is the unimpeachable wisdom of objective science!
A pinch of informed trust would save you a pound of time and expense.
> But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know!
And if all I knew about Alton Brown or Guy Fieri was that they were hired by Food Network, you'd be right! Luckily, the Food Network also put out hundreds of hours of video content with those two guys, so I can get a better sense of where they're coming from, and so how trustworthy their food recommendations might be.
> someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick.
I'm okay with choices that benefit someone else, as long as it benefits me as well. Also known as: all of commerce. Hell, given two choices that benefit me, most of the time I'd prefer the one that benefits someone else as well—which is why I buy things I like, instead of pirating everything.
Because I've found the information from his shows has been useful in improving the output of my own cooking. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bought any of his cookbooks.
> If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do.
Cookbooks are generally not written for, or primarily marketed to, people who don't know anything about cooking.
> So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers.
That's what acquaintances you know who have demonstrated proficiency in the kitchen are for.
> Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best.
This is optimal, but an extreme time and resource hog if you are going to do it with a wide enough range of recipes to be meaningful with no prior filter, and also logistically problematic because many dishes are sensitive to holding time (and because of variability in even skilled execution, you need to execute each recipe multiple times, grade them all, and do statistical aggregation of the results), so you need lots of parallel cooks and parallel kitchens to effectively execute this.
> Trust the objective measurements.
Ranking according to your preference is subjective measurement.
> A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.
If you ignore time and resource constraints, it avoids the need for curation (whether earned or not), in practice, to be usefully used, you need a curated filter in front of the process (but then, it also feeds back into the process of meta-curation by providing information on the reliability of curators.)
With dishes that are sensitive to holding time, it's impractical to do more than two at a time. So you usually end up with a series of "beat the champion" trials between two options. It takes some extra effort, but compared to the amount of effort already expended in cooking, the marginal cost isn't that severe. If you're good at it, you basically end up with a few extra dishes to wash. Maybe you need some extra freezer or pantry space.
You have an entire lifespan to refine your recipes. But you also only have one lifespan to enjoy them, so it's good to do it efficiently.
The cooking recipe problem is the same as a lot of other things. Doing things scientifically is the best way to make things better, but you can't really trust that anyone else is not cutting corners, so any time someone shares their results, you have to be skeptical. The peer review system in place for cookbooks isn't any more trustworthy in my eyes than the one for academic chemists, and that is compounded by the fact that different people like different things.
No, I'm not.
Subjective (adj.): based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions
> A blinded taste test is an objective, qualitative measurement
No, the kind of blinded, ranked preference test you described is a subjective, quantitative measurement (the measure is ordinal rather than interval or ratio, but an ordinal measure is still quantitative if less powerful than other classes of quantitative measures.)
When the same taster is judging two dishes at the same time, the emotional state is the same, the taste buds are the same, the mental state is the same. The effect is the same as if you had a tasting robot programmed to output a number when you drop food into its sampling port. Most of the subjectivity is removed. But different people/tastebots have different calibration settings, so you can't compare results between tasters, or even between different times for the same taster. It's only objective if you taste steps to remove the subjectivity: blindfolds on, equal-sized portions, neutral-flavor palate-cleanser between tastes, quiet room, etc.; but if you are careful, you can then have reasonable confidence that if A > B in that subjective state, it is likely that A > B in most other subjective states, too. (Any state that caused B > A would then be considered "interesting".)
A subjective, qualitative measurement would be something like Scoville heat units. Each taster has a different sensitivity to piquant chemicals, and different rates of sensory adaptation, so multiple judges are used, and results are imprecise.
An ordinal ranking is not quantitative. You can't tell the following apart:
qualitative ordinal ranking
A > B > C > D > E > F > G > H
|<-theoretic quantitative measurement->|
----A---B--C-------D-EF---G------H------
------AB----C----D----E----F-----G--H---
A------------------------------BCD--EFGH
-------------A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H------------I also still buy travel guides, for the same reason. Paying twenty bucks for a dead-tree guide to the place I'm going means I don't spend half my vacation reading Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews.
Yes.
> Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes?
They aren't mutually exclusive ideas; if you have a basic understanding of cooking, recipes are great points of departure.
> Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen?
Consistency is not the only reason to buy a cookbook.
They do "experimental" cocktails (or artistic cocktails). Cocktail in a bag, Smokey cocktail, bubble tea cocktail, cocktail in a tea pot, ... and they taste amazing as well.
If you read that blogpost I suggest googling or checking on TripAdvisor/Yelp for some visual pictures :)
Pretty unforgettable experience despite how much booze they give you. I'm definitely more interesting in this cookbook knowing it was self-published.
I once had a copy of the Alinea cookbook, it's a wonderful object. For mere mortals like me, 'The Way To Cook', by Julia Child is the cookbook I refer to most often and suggest most often to those looking for 'the best cookbook.'
too many birds ...