What I Learned From My Unsold Cookbook Proposal
Cookbook Proposal Writing Resources
My goal for sharing my story is simple: I want to help first-time cookbook authors have a more informed experience entering the traditional cookbook publishing world and feel less alone in the process. Additionally, I want others to have a better experience trying to sell their first proposal and here, I don’t necessarily mean successfully selling the proposal, but going into it with more clarity and understanding. This is a list of things I wish I knew and considered before endeavoring on this thrilling yet perilous journey.
I OFFICIALLY BEGAN WORKING on my first cookbook proposal in June 2022. It was actually around the same time as the then brand new podcast Everything Cookbooks was coming out, their first episode aired March 2, 2022. How apropos! Let’s be honest, the Everything Cookbooks podcast has become a type of curriculum for cookbook authors. Especially for those of us who are brand new to traditional cookbook publishing. As of today, there are 88 episodes on almost every topic you can think of in the cookbook making world.
In addition to what I was learning from the podcast, I decided to sign-up for an 8-week online cookbook writing course, How to Write a Cookbook, through the Stanford Continuing Studies program. The course was taught by the brilliant Tori Ritchie. These days, there are a lot more online courses available for those interested in learning about cookbook writing. There are even courses focusing on writing cookbook proposals. For specific recommendations see the resources section at the bottom of the newsletter. By the end of the course, I believe we finished in August 2022, I had a full rough draft of my proposal ready to go.
At this point, I thought I knew everything I needed to enter the cookbook proposal selling phase. It took me a couple more months to finish writing, editing, photographing, and adding photos to my proposal before I was able to hand it in to my agent in October 2022. The proposal officially went on sale in November. What this looks like in reality is your agent e-mails your proposal to cookbook editors, usually in several rounds and across a variety of publishing houses. The next 9 months were full of back and forth emails, phone calls, but mostly just lots and lots of waiting. I heard from others that waiting is a natural part of the publishing industry, but until I went through it myself I didn’t realize just how difficult waiting for all the responses was going to be.
Looking back, I would have made sure to think through how to best structure the 9 months to a year following the submission process. I think this is especially important for first-time authors since we don’t have a clear system or plan for navigating this new phase of our career, there is no blueprint for us to use. Blocking off more time on your calendar for rest, processing, therapy, walks in the first three months of the proposal going on sale could be a healthy first step. The last thing you want to do is be consumed by the wait and not have any ways of coping with all of this new stress. In my case, it took a whole year of waiting before my proposal was considered officially unsold.
I knew entering the world of cookbook publishing, and publishing in general, was going to be hard but I had no idea just how hard. I was so focused on doing everything I could to learn as much as possible about how the industry works (and doesn’t) that I forgot to consider the emotional, psychological, and existential implications of this process. In addition to reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, taking courses, and of course actively following food writers who openly discussed these things on social media, I should have been doing more to prepare for the emotional toll of trying to sell your first cookbook proposal especially given the sensitive nature of my proposal.
This project was incredibly personal. I was writing and thinking about Ukraine at the same time as I was watching the news, running fundraisers, and seeing my city, people, culture, and country be actively erased on a daily basis. But I threw myself into this completely, how could I not? The primary goal of my cookbook was aimed at preserving the culinary culture of Ukraine with a specific focus on showcasing the diversity of Ukrainian cuisine. These things were in dire need of preservation and I knew I had to do everything in my power to tell their stories.
I know now, that no matter how much you read, there are some things that are just not written down, the so-called hidden curriculum of the industry. This meant I was entering the cookbook publishing world with several incorrect assumptions. In light of this, and in an attempt to try to further demystify the cookbook publishing world, I want to share 6 lessons that I learned having recently gone through the cookbook proposal writing and selling process. Additionally, I want to share what I learned about navigating the world of traditional cookbook publishing as a first-gen working class disabled female aspiring cookbook author.
Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum of Cookbook Publishing
Disclaimer: Keep in mind these are generalizations from observations and conversations I’ve had along the way about the business practices and business culture of traditional cookbook publishing.
Lesson 1: An Advance Is NOT a Salary
ONE ASPECT OF COOKBOOK writing and publishing that’s talked about the least is money. Well, the specifics of how money works. When I just got my agent and started writing my proposal, I started making plans for leaving my job(s). Yes, I was that naive. I did some research to get a general sense of how much first time cookbook authors get for selling their first proposal, in traditional publishing it is anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000. I could totally make it work and live on $30,000 a year if that’s what the cookbook sold for or so I thought.
What I didn’t realize until I asked my agent is how little of that money is actually for you, the cookbook author. It turns out only 10% to 15% of the total budget is what an author expects to get as payment for writing/making the cookbook. The publisher is giving you the advance primarily to make the book. This includes everything from paying for the ingredients, recipe testers, photographers, cooking assistants, food stylist, prop stylist, and using some of that money for also promoting the book! On top of all that, the advance is usually paid out in 3 separate installments. The first part is paid out when the contract is signed, the second when the manuscript is handed in, and the third when the book is released. That’s $30,000 ($25,5000 after the agent’s 15%) paid out over the span of 2 YEARS which is what it takes on average to make a cookbook in traditional publishing. This news hit me like a ton of bricks. I was struggling to come to grips with this reality and with this perceived inequity.
This of course meant that on top of writing the book, I would have to continue working my other jobs since I still needed a monthly income and benefits. These two pretty essential things are unfortunately not provided by publishers to their cookbook authors. I knew about the benefits since I am not new to contract work, but to not be fairly compensated for the labor of writing, researching, developing the recipes etc. was too much for me to comprehend (check out
work on similar topics). My partner is adamant that this is a labor and labor rights problem imposed upon creatives in general. I couldn’t agree more! To be honest, to this day, I haven’t met a cookbook author that makes their living solely from writing cookbooks. Cookbook authors usually have other streams of revenue such as newsletters, social media, teaching, freelance writing, podcasts, being independently wealthy or they work full-time. I would fall into the small percentage of cookbook authors who are working class. This route is not for the faint-hearted. In a recent conversation with a cookbook author, they summarized it perfectly with this one line:“The publishing world has no idea what to do with working class authors.”
What this means is that you will need to be your own advocate and have the energy and ability to ask for things that the publishing world is not used to hearing. It is possible to write/make a cookbook while having a full-time job but I recommend you consider the challenges that may lay ahead before making a commitment to pursue this path. You can listen to Abi Balingit openly discussing how she navigated the cookbook publishing world as a working professional on episode 48 of the Everything Cookbooks podcast.
Pro Tip: You only start making royalties once you earn out your advance—once you sell $30,000 (from the example above) worth of books, after that you will start receiving royalty checks. From what I have heard, the average royalty rate is between 10% to 15%. Don’t forget that your agent also gets 15% of royalties.
Lesson 2: How Publishers “Really” View Cookbooks in 2024
FURTHERMORE, I HAVE COME to realize that often publishers (not editors) view the “products”, the cookbooks, made by cookbook authors not as a product in and of itself, but as a form of marketing and advertising to drive consumers towards the author’s brand. My partner and I are both hyper critical about some of the cookbooks we see. We view cookbooks as educational tools as well as cultural and historical objects to be used and handled, not as decoration, fashion, or WORST OF ALL simply to be considered AN EXTENSION OF SOMEONE’S BRAND. We’ll gripe when a cookbook is more-so an art gallery or advertisement than a service manual, as Tom likes to call them.
But isn’t this a problem that publishers are making by devaluing our cookbooks into advertisements for author brands? To me the answer is yes. If publishers don’t ascribe any other value to cookbooks other than a cookbook being an extension of an author’s brand, why would they be investing money into making cookbooks that focus on preserving and sharing culinary and baking traditions, eating practices, and cultural history of diverse places and people. I know that publishing like other industries and fields goes through periods where certain trends are prioritized over others. I wanted to be honest about what publishers seem to be looking for these days and how they tend to conceive of modern cookbooks. This also explains the emphasis on signing authors with large platforms who in other words have an already established brand or as they like to call it “lifestyle.” I recently made a TikTok addressing the topic of what cookbooks are actually trying to sell their audience nowadays. To me, a lot of cookbooks are selling performative forms of labor and a certain type of idealized lifestyle hence the emphasis on lifestyle photography.
Lesson 3: Don’t Take Things Personally—It’s Business
ONE OF THE BIGGEST lessons that I took away from my experience of writing and trying to sell my proposal was the importance of having the ability to not take things personally. My agent forwarded me the replies from editors (just so you know, you can actually ask your agent to not do that and instead summarize their replies in an email or phone call) and reading those was HARD, especially in the very beginning. I simply wasn’t mentally prepared or ready. The first 10 or so rejections I couldn’t help but take personally since I didn’t know any better. No one warned me about the emotional toll that trying to sell a cookbook proposal takes on one’s mind, body, and soul. What really helped get through the rest of the no(s) was receiving these rejections from a more objective place.
My partner comes from a fine arts background and was immediately, almost too immediately, ready to reassure me that the core of this is someone gambling on me as an investment and they’re just looking at data to avoid risk. It’s not a popularity contest and they don’t have time and inclination to be personal because they’re looking for a product that they know they can sell. (Of course editors do have their own biases that influence their decision making but 99% of the time, it really is just an informed business decision.)
The editors who work for companies that are emphatically all for-profit are making a business decision and in their minds accepting my proposal wasn’t a good business decision. It had nothing to do with me. Or rather, everything that matters is, for the most part, beyond our control. Printing costs have gone up in recent years, this includes the rising prices of paper, binding, housing, and distribution (transportation). The lack of a booming market for Ukrainian, Eastern European, Balkan or Central Asian cookbooks was the ultimate problem. There was only room for so many books in these fields and all of those spots had been taken. Nothing more and nothing less. This meant that the Eastern European cookbook writing quota had been met and given how small the current market is for Eastern European cookbooks there wasn’t enough demand for another Ukrainian cookbook. No market, no cookbook.
Lesson 4: Marketing REALLY Matters
THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE if you are someone with a smaller platform. Remember, publishers really truly seem to not want to have to do marketing, advertising, promoting, and all these other costly things. This labor for the most part has been displaced on to the cookbook author. If you have a small platform, this will make publishers nervous. A lot of publishers equate metrics, such as how many followers an author has to the author’s ability to sell their books. Publishers are also worried that authors with small platforms won’t be able to do the heavy marketing lifting that is now expected from authors. If you have a small following you might want to add data points such as your engagement rate to communicate to publishers just how dedicated your community is to supporting you. Highlight your engagement over your follower count so that publishers get into the habit of distinguishing between the two. It’s not fair, to the already overworked editors, to expect them all to be social media managers and analysts. Cookbook authors with large platforms have already proved to publishers that they know how to influence consumer behavior.
Looking back, one of the biggest changes I would make to my proposal would be to enhance and expand my marketing section. If I were to do this all over again, my strategy would be to outline a very specific marketing plan, social media growth plan (ESPECIALLY for those of us with “small” platforms), and add a lot more supporting quantitative and qualitative data to my proposal. Metrics matter in these deals and publishers want to reduce their investment costs and risks. Remember, the publishing world needs to know that they can sell your book before they invest in you.
Now that I realize how publishers’ decision making works and that it’s important to think of this whole transaction as a business deal, I would make sure that my proposal can reassure publishers as much as possible that the book can sell. Additionally, I would assign your own monetary value to the proposal. Because why would you ultimately want to work with a publisher who can’t provide you with what you need to make the type of cookbook that you want. These are your stories and recipes and you need to figure out what that’s worth to you first and foremost.
Lesson 5: Most Authors DON’T Sell Their First Proposal
AFTER A CHALLENGING YEAR, I opened up to folks in the cookbook industry about not being able to sell my cookbook proposal and many of them shared similar stories. It’s a conversation that is often reserved for private environments instead of public forums. This is completely justifiable given how much pressure cookbook authors are under to be portraying an image of success, perfection, and non-stop productivity. Some authors told me that their first cookbook took years to sell. They ended up selling their proposal years later when the timing was better and their subject matter gained more popularity or became mainstream.
A lot of the decision making in the publishing world is driven by what’s trending and what publishers are interested in making. There will always be that initial frantic gold rush to be the first to a new trend. Whatever is trending is gold. Just look at the current boom in the production of cookbooks from popular TikTokers. Looking back, I think by the winter of 2023 there was less and less media coverage of what was happening in Ukraine and the buzz generated by the early month of the war died down, or rather the portrayal of the war and its realities began to change and set in. Public opinion matters to publishers, and war, cultural reservation, and intangible cultural heritage is not sexy for what are being sold as essentially coffee table books. No (positive) media coverage, no buzz, no trend, no interest from the public = no cookbook. I think looking at the rise of Korean cookbooks in the U.S. is a perfect example of a cultural shift that needs to happen to publishers to start fulfilling this growing interest in Korean cuisine and cooking.
Just remember, if your first cookbook proposal doesn’t sell the first time, you are not ALONE. This is actually the norm! Most proposals are turned down. It takes multiple rounds and several revised proposals to get to the finish line. It also takes time to find the right publisher and editor. There might be an editor who has a personal connection to your work and when an editor wants a proposal they have a way of making mountains move. If an editor truly wants for your book to be made they will find a way to convince the publishing house and the various internal stakeholders involved to invest in the project!
I wanted to end on a more cautiously optimistic note, just because you didn’t sell your proposal the first time doesn’t mean you won’t sell it in the future. You might also end up making the cookbook through self-publishing or hybrid publishing. A “no” from a traditional publisher doesn’t mean your book won’t get made. We live in a world where making your own cookbooks is a lot more accessible than it has ever been. There are still a lot of barriers, money being a major one, but there are options for alternative ways of making cookbooks that weren’t previously available to cookbook authors.
Lesson 6: Set Up Informational Interviews with Cookbook Authors
IN AN AGE OF social media, we have been given the ability to connect to those previously unreachable. I would start by making a list of cookbook authors who inspire your work or who have made the type of cookbooks that you want to make as well as a list of cookbook authors who share some of your identities. You want to sign up for their newsletters, follow them on social media, attend their online or in-person events, and most importantly engage in a genuine way with their content. This will give you an opportunity to make a connection with the author and eventually reach out to them to ask for an informational interview.
This is especially important for first-time cookbook authors who have marginalized identities. My advice would be to reach out to cookbook authors and set up informational interviews with those who share your identities and can tell you about the ways they navigated the cookbook writing, selling, and publishing process. If you do end up having an informational interview, make sure to do a lot of research ahead of time and make a prioritized list of good questions. During the informational interview most of the talking should be done by the author you are interviewing since you are there primarily to listen and learn. After a couple of questions that focus on the author you can start asking more self-serving questions. Consider asking if they are aware of any resources or communities that address the specific needs of their identity(ies) in the cookbook publishing world. You can ask them to share what their experience has been like as a black immigrant LGBTQIA+ author for example in traditional cookbook publishing and what they wish they knew going into the industry? What advice would they give themselves if they were entering cookbook writing? Just remember, talking to people is a great way to learn about the industry and its culture while at the same time building professional relationships and community with fellow cookbook authors.
I hope today’s essay helped demystify some aspects of the cookbook writing world. There is still so much I don’t know about this world, but I am in the process of learning. Remember, it is also okay to give yourself permission to grieve. You spent months (years) on this project. It is completely fair to be upset and sad. Give yourself some time to process what you just went through. If you ever need someone to talk to, please reach out, you now know at least one person who went through a similar experience.
Lastly, in many ways, I am actually relieved that I didn’t get any offers. This way, I wasn’t tempted to say yes to an offer that didn’t align with my vision for the cookbook. I didn’t have to spend time agonizing over the decision to sell my story to a publisher that didn’t align with the same type of values as me.
I want to find a publisher that believes fully in my cookbook, who will support me and my book financially, and make it for the right reasons.
COOKBOOK PROPOSAL WRITING RESOURCES:
1.
Dianna also offers 1:1 coaching on cookbook proposal writing.
Dianne’s print book Will Write For Food, Fourth Edition
2. Everything Cookbooks Podcast
3. Kristin Donnelly
Courses such as Take Your Proposal From Draft-To-Done or Find An Agent For Your Cookbook
Kristin also offers 1:1 coaching on cookbook proposal writing.
4.
5. Paula Forbes
Great resource for researching comp titles
6. Tori Ritchie
How to Write a Cookbook Standford Continuing Course
7. The Ekus Group:
How to Write a Cookbook Course
8. Katie Parla
9. Institute of Culinary Education
So You Want to Write a Cookbook? Blog Post
10. Michelle Lopez
11. Penguin Random House
How to get your cookbook published blog post
12.
13.
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This is a really helpful look inside the process, thank you for sharing this! One thing that’s definitely under discussed is the emotional toll through the process. Timing is a huge component of publishing. Also, your comment about adding details to the marketing section of your proposal happens to be the subject of my upcoming Not So Secret Agent newsletter. I hope you’ll check it out this coming week and leave a comment to keep this discussion going. I’m tuning comments on for precisely this reason!
Thank you for your bravery and transparency in writing this, Olia!! We need more discourse around the realities of cookbook writing. I received many rejections and ultimately came to peace with moving on before the one publisher that believed in me and my story came through. In those months of waiting I started to look at "rejection as redirection". How can I redirect this energy? What other format can I explore? If something is meant to be brought into the world, it will, but maybe the timing and format will look differently from what you initially expected. Thank you for continuing your work on Ukrainian cuisine and in the meantime, I'm excited for your Basque cheesecake cookbook!!