Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook

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.

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.

Pretty unforgettable experience despite how much booze they give you. I'm definitely more interesting in this cookbook knowing it was self-published.