You feel like you have a million and one recipes at your disposal. You’ve always been passionate about cooking so you’ve written them down so you can pass them down to your children and they can pass them on to theirs. Why not share them with the world instead?
If you love cooking as much as you feel like you do then it makes more sense to be paid for what you enjoy doing. Does the idea of it have you feeling anxious because you’re a cook, not a writer?
Don’t worry, we’ve got your back! Here are a few tips on how to write a cookbook and turn your passion into dollars.
1. Make a Recipe List
Before you start putting your recipes into book form, it’s a good idea to get them all together so you can choose the ones that you want to put into it. Decide if you want them to have a common theme or not.
Like if you have a ton of cookie recipes that you make around Christmas or you have a lot of fall goodies that you make for Thanksgiving. Once you’ve decided which recipes are going to make the final cut, it’s time to move on to the table of contents.
2. Organize Your Table of Contents
Unlike a novel, there are a lot of different ways for you to set up the table of contents for a cookbook. You could do it by meal type (so breakfast, lunch, and dinner).
You could set it up by ingredient types. For example, having all of your chicken recipes in one place, and all your beef ones in another, ext. If you center the book around all of the seasons rather than one then you could do all the warm soups in a winter chunk.
If you have any special dietary meals such as gluten-free or vegan then you can put those into one section in your table of contents.
3. Check Off Your Ingredients and Put them in Order
Go through your cookbook and read all over the preparation methods for the meals. As you do, check off your ingredients to make sure you didn’t leave anything out. It’s easy to forget something small.
Also while you’re checking off the ingredients, be sure you have them in order. Nobody wants to take out a frozen item in step 5 only to realize that they were supposed to take it out to thaw in step 1.
4. Standardize Your Measurements
You shouldn’t use tbl to represent tablespoon in one recipe and then switch over to tbsp three pages later. Both options work so it’s only a matter of which one you think is easiest to read.
The only rule when it comes to picking your standards of measurements is to be consistent. If you’re not then you may throw the reader off a little.
5. Take Killer Pictures
When someone is deciding if they want to buy a cookbook or not they may pick it up and flip through it. The thing that they are going to be focusing on when they do this is how good they look. This is why you need to have tasty looking pictures throughout.
If you feel confident in your skills you can cook the meals and take the photos yourself. If you’re not the best photographer though, then you may want to hire this photography service to take care of it for you.
6. Add in Extra Tidbits
Your book is almost ready to go into the editing stage. Before it does, you should consider tossing in any extra text for flavor. For example, making some suggestions for serving the dishes.
You could also put in difficulty ratings for the meals or let your readers know long it takes to prepare them. While putting in these extra tidbits aren’t that important it adds a bit of personal flair.
7. Cook Your Recipes
One final thing you should do before you send in your cookbook for edits is to make sure they work. It may feel cheesy and be a little tedious to go through and cook every meal in the book but trust us it’s worth it.
Again, it’s easy to forget something small and when it comes to cooking any small miss-step could ruin a meal. It’s easier to notice these small mistakes if you go through and cook according to the recipes that you wrote down.
It’s sort of like reading your research paper or novel aloud to check for mistakes. You notice them when you’re hearing the words spoken.
8. Make Edits
Once you’ve found out that all your recipes do in fact work, it’s time to send your book into a publicist to edit it. You could self-publish but then you have to do this process yourself. If this is your first cookbook it’s better to get a professional to do it.
They can tell you how to cut the lengthy introduction to your recipes down a little or let you know if there are some meals that you can take out altogether.
How to Write a Cookbook and Turn Your Tasty Meals into Dollars
If you have a passion for cooking and have a bunch of original recipes, it may be beneficial to pass them on to the public. Not only will it be a fun project but it gives you the chance to make a little extra money from your hobby. Try out some of these tips on how to write a cookbook to spread your meals out to the world.
Are you not exactly skilled enough with cooking to make a cookbook. Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Visit our blog for a few tasty cooking tips!