187: How to Self-Publish Your Own Cookbook with Chelsea Cole

In this episode, I chat about a book about delivering happiness and then Bjork interviews Chelsea Cole from a duck's oven about the self publishing process. Hey hey wonderful listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast where we chat about the strategies, tools and mindsets that can help you build a growing, profitable blog. This week's episode is sponsored by WP Tasty, our sister site for plugins for food bloggers. If you're looking for rock solid WordPress plugins to make your blog SEO ready, profitable and optimized, you can learn more@wptasty.com and for today's tasty tip, I'd like to talk about Delivering Happiness, both the concept and the book by the same title. Delivering Happiness is a book written by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and it's a fascinating book about his life after college and building Zappos, an online shoe company. Not only are the stories just interesting, but I actually love the focus of this book, AKA the title of the book, Delivering Happiness. It's about going above and beyond to make your customers, or in a blogger's case, readers happy to be so good at what you're doing that your customers or readers can't not talk about you and share their experiences with others. I'm just really loving this book and I'll put a link to it in the show notes if you're interested in checking it out, but I thought the takeaways could absolutely be applied to bloggers. Are your posts supremely helpful and valuable for your readers? Do you respond to comments and emails in a timely and helpful manner? Are you making your readers happy? These are the questions that I asked myself as I was reading the book and I think they are great questions to consider as you're building and growing your blog. And now the interview. This is actually part two of our two part book publishing series and it comes after our traditional book publishing interview with Lindsay Smith. This week's interview is with Chelsea Cole from the blog A Duck's Oven. She recently published her first cookbook, but her experience was much different than the traditional publishing route that we talked about last week. Instead of going through a publishing house, she decided to self publish her cookbook. This episode focuses on the self publishing process as a whole, from finding a topic to testing recipes to figuring out a price and so much more. We hope you love this second episode of our book publishing series. So without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Chelsea, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, super excited to talk to you about cookbook publishing. And we actually have. We're not sure yet if it's going to be before or after this yet, but there's another interview, actually, that Alexa is doing. Everybody that listens to the Food Blogger Pro podcast knows Alexa did a little conference on traditional publishing. And we wanted to do these kind of side by side because we wanted to represent two different sides of the cookbook publishing world, traditional and then self publishing. And you just went through that process, and as a matter of fact, you're right in the middle of it. But before we get to talking about that, there's a couple questions, clarification, and just general interest on two different subjects. And one is your blog and specifically your blog's name. So tell us what your blog's name is and a little bit of a background, a little bit of a story of what that's all about.

Of course, it definitely has a story. So my blog is called A Ducks Oven. And so when I started my food blog, it was back in 2010, and I was at the University of Oregon, and the mascot for the University of Oregon is the Ducks.

Go Ducks.

Yes, exactly. Go Ducks.

So this is all coming together for me now.

Yes, yes. So my husband, he and I were dating then, and I wanted to start this food blog, and he was helping me come up with a name, and so he actually named it, and it's supposed to be a pun on Dutch oven.

Oh, like, yes, okay. For sure. This is all coming together. I was, as. I was kind of researching for the show, I was looking through and saw some of your tweet, the tweets that you had specifically about Oregon, like, the Ducks. And I was like, ah. But I didn't make the connection until you just said it right there, which I'll say, I feel like the Ducks are one of. And I'm not just saying this because you're on the podcast. I feel like one of the coolest football teams, right? I mean.

Oh, yeah.

And that has to do with access to, like. Yes, exactly. Like, essentially anything and everything they want from Nike.

Exactly. Our facilities are. They're kind of ridiculous, Honestly. When I was in college, I was a little resentful of the student athletes, but they are beautiful and our uniforms are super cool.

So cool. Yeah, for sure. So have you read Shoe Dog, the Phil Knights book? Oh, my gosh. You need to read it. I would say yes. Yeah, it's one of my top five books of the past five years. It's just, like, such an incredible story. And I feel like there's business application, but also just general life application in terms of what he went through in order to build Nike. So for everybody listening and for you, that'll be on your reading list for the next. Next month or so.

Absolutely.

So Duck seven, that makes sense. So when you started off, you were in college. You know, you kind of talk about that as part of your story with the blog and kind of that period becoming a time where you're starting to become really interested in cooking and that becoming an important thing. The second thing that I wanted to talk about and that some people will know about on the podcast, other people might not, is this idea of sous vide. So can you talk about what this style of cooking is and when you started to integrate that as kind of one of the focus areas for your blog?

Yeah, absolutely. So I had kind of started to hear about sous vide cooking a few years ago. I didn't totally know what it meant. And I'd seen like the immersion circulators come up on Amazon's what's the day in July? It's like the Amazon deal day in July.

Essentially. It's just like another excuse for them to promote stuff and then everybody buys all these things.

Yeah, exactly. Yep. So I had seen it one year about that time, but I didn't buy it. And my birthday's in August and my mom ended up buying it for me for my birthday. And so I'm like, okay, I have this thing now, I better figure out how to use it. So I, I picked it up and did some research. And essentially what it is, it's all about cooking food to a very, very precise temperature and keeping it at that temperature. This is really cool for me because I eat a lot of steak and seafood. I mostly eat a lot of seafood. And seafood is so easy to under overcook and it's really expensive. If you do buy it and you under or overcook it and you ruin it, it really sucks. So I was really excited about this for that reason. So the way it works, the way I explain it, is an immersion circulator is this cylinder shaped device. It's about a foot tall and 3 inches in diameter. And you put it into just like a stock pot of water, some kind of container of water, and it circulates the water to bring it up to a temperature. So I always say it's what would make a hot tub. A hot tub instead of a mini pool is the best way to explain it. The doneness of food is all about Temperature. So if you say, if you go to a restaurant and you order a medium rare steak, that refers to the temperature the center of the steak gets to. So I love, like, a medium rare steak. And so I can set the water bath to 129 degrees, and it's going to stay at that perfect temperature. So I'll put steak into this water bath and it'll cook for like two hours, which is way different than the way you'd usually cook steak. And it'll be perfect from edge to edge, which is amazing.

Yeah. And so the idea being that there's a little bit more. Would you say science as opposed to. Opposed to just kind of saying, like, yeah, right. Just kind of guessing.

Yes, absolutely. Which I really like too, because so I grew up eating, you know, steak and seafood, and when my husband and I were trying to cook these things ourselves on the grill, it's. It's such a guessing game. Like you're just hoping. And you can do the test where you, you know, press your thumb to your hand and you say, yeah, this right texture. But you never really know until you come into it. And so there'd be so many nights where I'd cook this steak, think it was awesome, cut into it, it would be completely raw in the middle, and we'd have to throw it back on the grill. So this just takes the question out of that. And so I became obsessed with it pretty quickly and figured out all these other things that it could do, too. And I also saw that people were starting to talk more about sous vide, since the device you use to do this cooking method is called an immersion circulator. And now they're pretty affordable. They're as affordable as an instant pot. So it's gaining traction in that way. And I'm. Okay, I think I'm going to start talking about this on my blog. And one of the first posts I did was suvi tri tip steak. And now it's like my number three post for bringing in traffic to my blog, which has been awesome.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've never in general cooked anything worth eating, but also done sous vide. But I'm really interested in it because I feel like in some ways, it almost feels like a good entry point for people who are. Are maybe kind of intimidated by, you know, let's say, cooking a steak. Whereas you could say, okay, here are the steps that you want to follow, and for the most part, you're going to be able to have a consistent result. You know, if. If you go through These certain steps. And it's. There's actually a tech podcast that I listen to. It's a Mac podcast, and at the end of it they have. It's called MacBreak Weekly, and they have these like a. What do they call it? It's just essentially like tip of the week or like recommendation pick of the week, I think it's called. And. And really consistently they talk about sous vide cooking like it's. It's one of the things that comes up all the time. So I was familiar with it from that, just that podcast and know that is something that, like you said, is kind of trending. Um, and it's. It's interesting to hear you talk about that and say, okay, I'm going to kind of, kind of be intentional not only of doing something that I'm interested in. Right. So you personally had some interest in this, but it also sounds like there's a little bit of strategy around. Hey, I can kind of see this as being like a general upward trend. Was that part of the decision making process that you had as you kind of thought about having sous vide cooking as part of your focus?

Absolutely, yeah. I actually kind of tested it out. I'm pretty active on Instagram stories, and so I would. I hadn't posted anything on my blog yet, but I would talk about it a lot on my stories and kind of walk people through how I was using the immersion circulator to make dinner and I was doing sous vide pork chops tonight and stuff like that, and people were asking me questions and really interested in it. And I was like, okay, so that means this has legs in terms of other content. And so that's when I was. Because at first I was like, is this too weird? Is this too polarizing? But that kind of helped me take the next step into publishing quite a bit about it on my blog.

Yeah, that's interesting. And it's interesting too. One of the things that I like to do is pull up Google Trends, which I actually just did. And it provides some kind of cool insight as to. It's not the number of searches that happen, but just the general popularity of a certain term and how that relates to other pieces of content that people are searching for. And so, like, if you search and for anybody that wants to do this, you can just go to trends.google.com if you pull up sous vide. And then what I did was I did over the past five, five years. And you can look at it and you can see like, okay, from 2013 to let's say 2016, it was kind of like, man, like, you know, there's some people talking about it, there's some ups and downs, but now there's kind of this general trend upward where, you know, there's. There's. You can see that it's becoming more and more popular. And if you can compare that to something like, let's say, Paleo, it's actually the opposite where there's a trend downward other than a peak in January, which makes sense. So for you, it's just like, okay, yeah, that's a really smart decision to say, hey, this is something that I can see people are interested in. I'm interested in it personally. So I'm going to start pursuing this as something that I think might be a good path to go down. Were there other things that you did that, or were there other things that came up that led you to believe? Like, hey, this is a good path to pursue. This is going to be something that I think will kind of generally be trending upwards.

Yeah. I am a really big fan of Facebook groups. They're becoming so useful. I use them for everything now. And I joined a couple of suvied Facebook groups right when I started to get into this. And just watching those communities grow was really interesting. Which means, oh, more people are buying these. And also this is a little less strategic and a little more emotional. But the communities involved with sous vide cooking are, like, so wonderful and so empowering. And that kind of just made me more excited to continue to be a part of that as well, for sure.

And it's such a huge part of. I think sometimes people can feel like business is just numbers and decisions around growth. So much of it, though, has to do with, like, emotionally, what does it feel like to do the thing that you're doing and to be involved with the community that you're involved with. So I think that's a huge part of it. Like discovering not only something that you're interested in, passionate about, that's maybe generally true, trending upwards, but also that you feel like, hey, there's other good people, and I like spending time with these people. What an important thing that is.

Exactly.

So you get into it, you're starting to get interested in it, and then you kind of have this idea. I actually not only want to create content around this for my blog for social media, but I also want to publish a cookbook. Can you tell me when you started to have some of those early thoughts around publishing a cookbook and what your early thoughts were around the topic.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think for most food bloggers, or at least a lot of food bloggers, it's kind of like a dream in the back of your head to eventually write a cookbook, because that's just like the next form of food writing. And so this has always been the case for me. And as I started to get more involved with sous vide, I knew for me, if I wanted to write a cookbook, I needed to have a really compelling topic. And so sous vide is such a niche topic, and even better, it's a growing niche topic. And at that time I was like, this, this is my book. Like, this is what it has to be. And so I just once that kind of clicked for me. I had a lot of momentum. And so I reached out to Melissa Joulan, who wrote all the well Fed cookbooks, because I had heard that she self published her cookbooks. And I learned more from her about that process and she kind of gave me the confidence to go for it. And so I had the topic, I had the right niche, and it was something that I'm truly obsessed with. So I just felt like the perfect opportunity.

Yeah. And so Melissa, the well Fed series will link to Melissa's website to give her a little shout out. Can you. What did. What were the things that you learned from her? What was the most helpful advice that she gave you?

Yeah, honestly, hearing why she chose. She actually chose self publishing over traditional publishing because I think there is a little bit of stigma around self publishing. So I wanted to kind of hear from her why she actually chose to do that. And part of that was because traditional publishers take a way bigger cut of your royalties, whereas if you self publish, all that money is going to you. It doesn't have to be split among all these people for the most part. I mean, you're paying contractors and things like that. And so that was interesting. And I actually recently spoke to another cookbook author. Her name's Diane Morgan. She's written 18 cookbooks, which is amazing. And she even talks about how if she was going to write a book now, she would probably self publish as opposed to traditional publishing, because many publishers require that you do so much of the work now that they used to do with the advent of social media and all these. So you're asked to do your own PR and build your own following in a lot of ways and like your own marketing. And so many people who write cookbooks now are also food photographers or can do their own food photography. So if you want to go the traditional publishing route, you might also be asked to do your own photography, which just makes it all a lot more work. And you still don't get a very big cut with self publishing, you have to do all that work anyways and you get to take home a bigger piece of the pie.

Got it. And so I think most, you know, we've talked off and on about publishing and specifically cookbook publishing and kind of royalties and advances and things like that, but I think it's always good to rehash those things. So when you talk about the royalties and the publishers taking a cut of that, just at a high level, can you talk about how the kind of the relationship in a traditional publishing relationship works? And like, if somebody were to work with a traditional publisher, why is that beneficial to them both from a financial perspective and then maybe from a resources perspective? And then what, what? You talked a little bit about the downsides, but you could rehash those as well.

Yeah. So if you work with a traditional publisher, you're paid in advance. And that can they, in my understanding is that they usually calculate this based on how well they think the book is going to perform and they take into account things like the topic of your book, what your audience size is currently like now, things like that. So that advance is really helpful because then you have money coming in while you write this book, so you don't need to work. So for me, I work part time doing marketing and so I wrote this book while I was working, which you can imagine in the amount of time. So if you're, if you do get that advance, you don't have to worry about that. It's a lot more comfortable for you and you do have resources. In that case, while the book is being developed, the publisher also plays a huge project management role, which, writing a book, of course, I should have guessed this. It's even more work than I would have ever expected it to be. So having that kind of oversight is incredibly helpful. And you have people who have access, or in theory, you have really good PR resources. So people have access to magazines, TV shows, all those kinds of things that even we as food bloggers are pretty used to marketing ourselves on social media and through email and things like that. But we don't necessarily have those types of contracts which are really helpful for this type of publishing.

Got it.

And so those. And then of course, you know, if you aren't a very, if you want to outsource your food photography, they have those resources as well. But I actually recently learned that a lot of Times you're asked to help pay for that. So it comes out of your cut of the royalties. So royalties are the way that works is you get a small amount of money from each book you sell. And so if you do go with a publisher, a lot of that money goes to the publisher a lot of that money might go to, and all the that money goes to all the people that helped make your book happen. Whereas if you self publish, a lot of that money goes to you and some of that money probably goes to the other people who help make that book happen.

Got it. So you look at this, you say, okay, I know that these two paths are possible. I'm going to go the self publishing route. But that means then that you're taking on a lot of these things that would come with a traditional publisher. That things like the project management, which in and of itself is a job. It's the design and kind of branding and the copywriting and the editing. How did you go about assembling a team for that? And then what advice would you give in regards to managing the project and the timeline?

Totally. One thing that was really helpful. I'm glad that you mentioned branding is last year at around this time, I actually totally switched up my branding. So if you go to my Instagram account right now, for example, or my blog, it's all like really bright and fun and pinks and yellows and flowers and it's really. I also really niche down on my branding, which my audience has responded really well to. And that also gave me a ton of clarity for the branding of this book. Like, I went into it immediately knowing this has been so successful to me. My book is going to look exactly the same way and it looks way different than any other sous vide book on the market right now. Because a lot of the other SUV cookbooks are really dark and really masculine. And my book is hot pink and it's really feminine and it's really fun and the writing is really light and playful and that was really intentional for me. So I knew that I could do the food photography. I knew my day job is marketing, so I knew that I could do the marketing and the branding. And I, for example, I've got some book signings coming up, which I'm really excited about, and tabling events and I knew that I could get those tables together and I knew how to plan for all of that because my background in marketing. And then I have a friend who is a graphic designer and so I worked with her to do the designing of the book. I can do really basic design. I'm familiar with Illustrator and InDesign and all that stuff. So she created a template for me that I was able to then just kind of fill in the pieces of, which helped me save a lot of money because it costs a lot less money to get a template than to have somebody design it from scratch. So that's how I worked with that. And then for project management, I used Asana to essentially build out a really in depth schedule. And I used a Google spreadsheet to map out all of my recipes and kind of help me visualize where each recipe was in its stages. Because the way the process kind of works for recipe development for a cookbook is it's develop the recipe, test the recipe yourself, have as many other people as you can test this recipe and give you feedback. Yeah, incorporate that feedback, try it again, and then shoot it. I had like a huge spreadsheet that showed me where each recipe was in this stage. But I am also a huge fan of spreadsheets and Asana, so those luckily played to my strengths.

Can you talk about Asana a little bit? We actually use Asana for our businesses as well, but I know a lot of people just personally use it for project management. Can you talk about what that is and maybe just in general how you used it, the parts that you found most helpful?

Totally. So I just use the free version. I don't have the paid version. And it's essentially a task management tool. And you can organize things by project. You can have things organized into different boards and lists. It's a really great organizational tool. And so I had my graphic designer friend who was helping me, and then I also had another woman who I had hired to edit all of my copy. And so they were both able to join my Asana project and I could assign them tasks and they could easily see each other's deadlines and my deadlines. So they knew when to expect to get work from me and things like that. And one of them lives in Omaha or, I'm sorry, Lincoln. And so that was really helpful because she lives so far away from me here in Portland. And so that was like, honestly crucial for me for getting this thing done and seeing, okay, she's working on this, which means I should be working on this. But it's an amazing task management tool.

Cool. And the other thing you talked about was the template that you had your designer friend create. Can you talk about what that was and why that was helpful from a cost savings perspective as it relates to design?

Yeah. So she theoretically could have designed the entire book from scratch. But what she did is she did a lot of research. So she's never designed a book before. Most of of her graphic design is like signage and things like that. So this was actually a really fun project for her too. And so she took a ton of online classes on things like skillshare and stuff like that and taught herself how to design a cookbook. And so she. After she did that, because there's a lot of. You rely on indesign, this is a little technical, but on stuff like grids a lot for writing a book because you do have these really tight margins and things like that that you need to be aware of. And so, so she did a template for the recipe pages for me and then for the chapter and separate template for the chapter introductions. And then I just went in and dropped in all of my copy and photos in the appropriate places myself, which essentially means she did like the technical, beautiful work. And then I was able to do the more like grunt work, for lack of a better word, of getting this thing built.

Yeah, that's great. It actually reminds me, and I feel like it's a good reminder for people to think about. Okay. In general, when you are thinking of trying to solve a problem, I think it's helpful to think about, is there some type of structure that already exists out there? The example that I can compare to is we had thought about building an app and the app around recipe video specifically. And we worked with a developer and a designer. We went through this whole design process to customize it. And then probably about 75% of the way through, I realized that there are kind of these kits that you can buy where it's like somebody has gone through the process of locking all of that stuff in from a structural standpoint. And then you go in and essentially put in your, you know, develop. You develop around that. And I think there's lots of different examples of how you can be strategic and smart about not creating something that's like the ultimate customization, but getting something that's probably 90% of what you want it to be and then going in and then you on your own filling that in.

Exactly.

I think that's a great little piece of advice. Where did you find these people? So were they all friends? Were they friend of friends? As you assembled your team, how did you reach out to these people and find who would be good people to work with?

Yeah, so since I was doing this all myself and this was kind of like a. In a way, like a Pet project and a test, because I didn't really know how lucrative this is going to be until I really got into it. My goal was to keep this as inexpensive as possible, and so just kind of going through again, like, the phases of the development of the book. My first team of people that I needed was recipe testers, and as many of them as I could get. And so I posted in some of these sous vide Facebook groups and just said, hey, I'm writing a cookbook. Would anybody want to test recipes for me? And I had so many people volunteer to test recipes for me, which was amazing. And so I ended up with over 30 recipe testers. And they were incredible and so helpful and so supportive. Again, like, that kind of goes back to the community. And they were so encouraging and wonderful, and they tested everything and gave me awesome feedback. A ton of them would even send me photos of their finished dishes, which I didn't even think to ask for, but it was really helpful. And so they were incredible. So they were free, which was awesome. And then Lauren, who did my copy editing, she. I found her through another Facebook group. I actually found her through a Facebook group for my day job to help with copywriting for them. And then I really enjoyed working with her. And I was like, hey, would you want to help me with this other project? And she was thrilled to do that. And then I found another woman who edited my recipes, because that's a very different type of editing. And yet another Facebook group. And these are all. The great thing about that is these are just, you know, one off projects. And there's a lot of people who like to do these things on the side.

Yeah.

So these are projects that might just take an hour or two, and they're people with all these background in the subject.

That's great.

Yeah. And the graphic designer was a friend.

Sure. And I feel like the thing that's nice about the Facebook groups is that you know that within the context of the community, that people are going to understand, like, if you're in a sous vide Facebook group, you're not going to have to teach them about sous vide. Like, they're going to know how to do that already. And just the idea of leveraging and being intentional about the communities that you're part of, not in the sense of, like, trying to get as much as you can out of them, but realizing the power of community, I guess, is what it is. And, you know, there's stories of. Of Food Blogger Pro, people connecting on the forums, but that's not because there's some magical way that we connect people. It's just the power of community and people that understand a certain niche or industry or genre being able to connect and find ways that are mutually beneficial for them to help each other. So love that little piece about finding those Facebook groups and becoming a part of them. So if somebody's interested in doing this, would you have. Have a, like a range that you could say, hey, if you're going to start out, not. Not considering time as a part of it, but let's just say, hey, you should plan on. If you're going to self publish, you could have a range from at the very low end, this amount to the very. You know, obviously it could be infinite, but like, on the higher end, if you wanted to, you know, pay people a little bit more or whatever it would be, what do you. Could you provide just kind of a rough estimate of what that range could maybe be of what people could expect to pay if they're interested in sel publishing route without paying for the books. Which we'll get to.

Right, that other part.

Yeah.

So it depends on if you count your groceries. We ate a lot of our food or put it in the freezer to eat later.

Sure.

There was very little food waste during my photography process, which was super helpful. Although there I do still include a lot of the grocery expenses for all of those photo shoots. But I think at the low end, $600 and at the high end, like $2,000. So. And this is if you, of course, can find these people who are more affordable and if you can be really efficient about what you take on and what you outsource.

I love that. And what I love about it is I think sometimes we approach a project, whether it be a home improvement project or a business project or personal project, and we think, okay, what do we need to do to make this happen? And sometimes we can jump to the most expensive place, like, okay, we got to hire the somebody who's super expensive and we got to, you know, custom create this design. And what you did is, is you said, okay, what is, what do I want to get to? What is the end product? And how can I be really efficient in getting that? And my guess is that, you know, the final product is pretty probably pretty close to what you would have gotten with, you know, if you went through the process of spending tens of thousands of dollars. But being intentional and methodical with it, you're able to do it in an affordable way. So what about the actual books? So it's expensive to print A book. When you approach this or when you think about moving forward and marketing it, which is one of the other topics I'm interested to hear you talk about, do you think of it first and foremost as something that'll be a digital book that you're distributing or physical or kind of 50 50.

So that's a really interesting question. Right now it's only available as a paperback, but I. Because I'll have to completely reformat it for a Kindle book, which is. So I'm like, oh, man, I need to breathe for a sec. And then I approach the Kindle version or the ebook version. And I actually pulled my Instagram followers just to kind of get a rough sense if this was going to be a big disappointment for them. And only like, it was like 2% of people said that they would be interested in an ebook version. And I was like, okay, great, I feel good about this then. But. But the amazing thing about self publishing now is it's almost entirely print on demand, which means I don't have a stock of cookbooks in my house. When somebody orders it, they print it as soon as people order it and then ship them out. So there's no pile of cookbooks anywhere. The expensive thing for me is when I order them for these events that I'm going to or for marketing purposes and things like that, it's $10 a book for me. So I have to be. If I'm giving somebody a book, I'm like, like, okay, I'm giving you $10, right?

Yeah. It's a gift. It's not free. Yeah.

An opportunity cost as well. And so I try to be really careful about this. For example, I'm really interested in doing giveaways on Instagram just to kind of drum up some excitement. And so I want to see how effective this is going to be. So one of my friends on Instagram who has a really sizable following and who talks about sous vide, she bought my book the moment it came out, which was so wonderful and supportive and. And I asked her, hey, would you be willing to host a giveaway on your Instagram account? So I can kind of see how effective that giveaway is going to be before I start reaching out to all these different people on Instagram and sending them all these books.

Got it. And was that something that you did? Was it?

Or is that in the works yesterday? So it's in the works at this point.

Got it. Cool. It was interesting. I forget exactly what it was. I think maybe Lindsey had published a post. Our friend Melissa from the Faux. Martha had a cookbook kind of. It was called the Minimalist Kitchen and Lindsay had. It was, I think it was some. I don't know if it was something on Instagram or it was a blog post, I don't remember. But anyway, she said it was really interesting to see the correlation in the, like, how it was able to, because you can track like where it's at in terms of the, the number in, you know, the genres and then like sub genres. And. And she said when that happened you could see this uptick and who knows if that meant 10 books were sold or what the amount is that creates that correlating uptick. But it's one of the great things about you being a marketer and a publisher is you understand that a little bit. So I'd be interested to hear you talk a little bit more about your plan from a marketing perspective as a self published cookbook author. What are the things that you're thinking about doing and that you're planning on doing to help get the word out about the book and to help increase sales?

Yeah, so the very first thing that I did, luckily I have spent the past few years building an email list which as everybody's heard, I'm sure many, many times is such an important and effective source of marketing. So right when the book came out, I had an email completely drafted and ready to go. And the moment the book came out, I sent that email. It was actually really funny. I was having kind of a hard time getting the book uploaded and a lot of the emails I would get about its status would come in the middle of the night. And so I wasn't like sleeping very well and I would wake up.

Because you just are. Yes, for sure.

And I had like, in my weird dream conscious state, dreamed that the book was live. And so I started to go onto mailchimp on my phone to go publish this email. And then I was like, did I actually receive that email back and checked in?

No.

So thank goodness I didn't send anything.

What a terrible stage of sleep that is, where it's like, it's like that 80% asleep, but 20% not. And then you just create these weird stories that are so believable.

Yes. It's horrible. So once they finally did go live and I was really, truly able to send the email, these are people who have like intentionally chosen to learn more information from me. So I feel a little bit comfortable asking a little bit more from them. So I had, hey, my cookbook is live. I so excited about this I'd love for you to support me. And I said, here's how you can support me. So, one, obviously you can buy the book. Two, if you feel like going above and beyond, the first place my book was published was on Amazon. So I said, instead of just buying the book, go on there and search for sous vide cookbook and scroll until you find my book, then buy it. And the reason being that teaches Amazon's algorithm that my book is a good search result for that query. And so it's going to move me further up in the rankings. And tons of people did that, and now I'm on page one. So that was really successful and effective. And then, of course, leave a review and tell your friends. But in my experience with marketing, when you do launch a product like this, it's really important to be really explicit with your core fan base on what they can do to support you, because usually they're really excited to support you and they do want to do those things. So of course, I said the same things on Instagram and Facebook, and it was super effective and helpful. So that was great. And then, of course, I talked about it a lot on all of my social channels. I had a bunch of. I had gotten a copy of my book that was like a not quite done copy. It was essentially a proof. And so I used that, though the COVID was final, it was just the interior that wasn't. And I used that to create a ton of content and paint. So I had a bunch of videos ready, a bunch of posts, a bunch of blog posts, all this stuff ready to go. And I spent the first, like three days really just kind of blitzing on that front. And so. And I. I did some things I hadn't done before, like igtv. And I explained, hey, this is what sous vide is, in case you're curious.

Yep.

And then I just kind of opened up my Instagram and said, hey, if you have questions about sous vide, ask away. And a ton of people had questions, and I took the opportunity to clarify. And for some people, once I did kind of teach them more about it, they felt more comfortable taking the plunge and investing in immersion circulator themselves. And then they also bought my book, which was great.

Yeah, it's interesting. It seems like a lot of it is. And this is the sweet science of marketing, which is it's promotion, but promotion through education. So it's not necessarily saying, here's my book, go buy it, but saying, hey, here's sous vide. Like, here's what's great about it. What questions do you have about it? So. So it's having conversations around the thing as opposed to directly about the thing. Maybe. Another example is this podcast. Like we mentioned Food Blogger Pro, we mentioned our plugins wptasty but it's not like we're getting on every time and just talking about those. So it's like education, it's promotion through education. When it just sounds like a lot of that was what you were doing, especially in those. In those first few days.

Yep, exactly.

Got it. So I actually went through the process. Right now I am on Amazon, I am place. I'm going to click the yellow place. Your order, I followed your instructions. I have placed the order and it says thank you, your order has been placed. What happens on your side now? Like is there anything that you're doing? Do you get a little notification that says Bjork and St Paul is bought your book?

I wish. It's actually so for me I need immediate gratification and with marketing now I'm kind of used to that. Like I do something and I see I have a new follower or I do something and I see I have a new email subscriber with this you only see once the order has shipped, which for Amazon for example, that could be you know, the next day because so many prime now. Or somebody could have chosen that like little deferred thing when you.

Which is what I did because I get a $1 extra digital spend or something like that.

Yes. So then you don't see that like five days. So you don't. And you don't know who bought it. And so for example, I saw the other day that somebody had bought one in Germany and I was like, oh, that's interesting. And then a couple days later one of the people who had tested recipes for or had volunteered to test recipes for me, who was in Germany, but I got your book and I'm like, oh, that makes sense of that. No idea. It's a black box.

Yeah, got it. So for me, purchase price $23.12. You had said the book costs $10 to actually create. When you're shipping it out is there also costs that then you have to pay Amazon. Like what are the. When it breaks down, what do the numbers look like in terms of as a self published author you're getting all of it, which doesn't mean literally getting $23.12, but what does that actually look like? So for every cookbook that you sell, how much of that are you actually able to get back?

This was A really good learning experience for me because in my dream world, I would have priced my book more in the late teens, but I couldn't. So once I had my book up. As you are designing your book, they have a royalties calculator on Amazon. So you can go in and say, my book is full color, it has bleed, which means there's photos in it that go off the page, which is more expensive to print. And you can add your page numbers and see exactly what your royalties are going to be.

Where is that? On Amazon?

Yeah. So if you just Google, it's like kdp Amazon. KDP is their self publishing network royalty calculator. You can find it. And so literally every page that I added to my book made my royalties go down. So I was like, we need to be efficient about our page space here. I'm learning this now. And because therefore, if my royalties go down, that means I may need to make the price of the book go up. So another thing that I learned is Amazon sets a minimum price that you can charge if you want it included in an expanded distribution, which means theoretically, a bookstore could buy your books through Amazon and stock them in their store. And I wanted that to be an option for my book. So my price is actually the minimum price for expanded distribution right now. So it wasn't the royalties. If that expanded distribution piece hadn't been part of the equation, my book would be priced lower. But right now, I get about $5 per book that's sold. And so which means Amazon is taking the other 20. And that has to do with obviously production and shipping and all those other costs. But from people I've talked to, which, I mean, this is just hearsay, but you usually get around a dollar a buck for traditional publishing. So I'm still pretty happy with that.

Sure. Yep. And a lot of times with traditional publishing, what will happen is like, you don't get any of that until you pay back back the advance that you have. So obviously a lot of kind of number crunching and calculating goes into that. But the advantage in this case, like you said, is like, right from the start, you're able to start getting all of that. Obviously it's not like we said, the $23, because there's a lot that goes into the shipping and distribution and the channel and all of that stuff. But that's. It's really helpful to. For people listening to say, okay, like, let's say on the high end, I go into it and I'm going to be efficient, but we're going to say okay, we're going to, you know, spend $2,500 on this. You can start to crunch those numbers and say, how many, how many of these would I have to sell before I earn back my initial investment? And then it can become part of. You know, there's a podcast that we did a while ago in a blog post I published called the Egg Curtain Method. And just this idea of like, hey, you want to. As you're thinking about building a business, there's going to be multiple ways that you're creating an income. There's going to be ads in this category, there's going to be ads, sponsored partnerships, potentially. Maybe it's, you know, you have a product that you're selling, digital product. And this is, this can be another piece of that puzzle. And so you can start to layer that in and say, okay, I know that every month if I get, let's say, 100,000 people that come to my website, you know, I'll have 20 cookbook sales or 100 cookbook sales or X number. And you start to learn that. And you can kind of layer that in as a snowball. And the great thing is that you'll have it forever. Like it now, now it is forever something that you'll be able to offer to your people. And it's not like a, you know, tech blog or something where it very quickly goes out and becomes irrelevant. Like, these will always be things that you be able to do and to use. So coming to the end here, really fun to jump in and talk about the process of what's involved with it. If you were to go back and do it again, what are some of the things that you would do differently now that you've been through the entire process? And the cookbook itself is actually out and published within the week, at least when we were recording this. Looking back at the process, what are some of the things you'd do differently?

Yeah, that is a great question. I would have definitely given myself more time. So I really started this in earnest in May, and I had a deadline for myself of November 1st, and I was about two weeks late on that deadline, which is pretty impressive, honestly, I'm pretty okay with it. But the last couple the weeks to get it done were so stressful. And that's in part because I totally underestimated. This is the biggest takeover thing. I can tell anybody who wants to self publish their own book. Amazon makes it look like the process, and I'm sure this is true. I'm looking into. There's other self publishing websites like IngramSpark. And I'm looking into this as well. I'm sure it's the case, but it looks like it's this like instant thing and approval is going to take less than 72 hours and it's going to be no big deal. But it isn't. And so the process of getting my book live took about a week and I thought it would take maybe two days. And that ended up being really stressful for me because I wanted it to be long and during or before Black Friday weekend because it's such a big buying weekend and because I have an event this weekend that I need physical copies of the book for myself. And I was really nervous I wouldn't have them in time. So just give yourself a lot of time at the very end to make sure that book is perfect and that you have all this time to get it uploaded. So that would be one thing for sure. And honestly, I'm so happy with everything else, in part because of the opportunity to work with so many amazing people. And I had so much fun during the process. And I think if you can have fun, that's super helpful. Like, my mom was my quote unquote photography assistant during this whole process, and so she came over and hang out, hung out with me all day and like, did dishes for me while I did all my photo shoots. And I think if you can, there was definitely moments where I had a lot of stress. But if you can have fun during the process, if you be such a cool experience.

Yeah, that's such a. If you can align the enjoyment of the thing that you're doing as well as a hustle with the thing that you're doing. I feel like that is kind of the ultimate project or the ultimate business or the ultimate blog where, let's say, even if everything crashes and burns, like there. There probably will be those points where that were stressful or felt like you were, you know, working hard when you could have been relaxing. But. But if you can look back on it and say, like, throughout the process, it was fun, I enjoyed it. I was able to spend time with people that I enjoyed. It's still a win and it's still a beneficial thing, which I think is a great note and a great concept to wrap up on. So we've talked about the book, but we've talked about your blog, Chelsea. If people want to follow along with what you're up to, where can they do that? And I'll say this before I forget, get if I'll make the plug. If people are interested, they should all go out and buy the book, but buy it by going to Amazon. Don't click on the link in the show notes, go to Amazon, search sous vide and it's spelled. It's. It's spelled not how you think it would be. S O U S space V I D E sou vide and then find the. Find the book and then, and then buy it there. But in terms of following along with you online, where can people check out what you're up to, both on social and your blog?

Awesome. I love that plug. So my blog is a ducksoven.com and my Instagram is a ducksoven. And then if you want to pick up my book and if you're interested in sous vide, it's everyday sous vide. It's all French to me. And that's currently available on Amazon.

Awesome. Chelsea, thanks so much for sharing your story on the podcast today.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for joining us and for tuning in this week, friend. We hope that you enjoyed this episode and that inspired you to look into self publishing, if writing your own book is one of your goals. But before we sign off, we'd like to take a second to thank our iTunes reviewer of the week, Bob. His review says this podcast is everything you need to know about food blogging. I'm working on launching a new food blog and would be lost without this podcast and all of the great resources from Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yam. What I love about the podcast is that you could listen to it while running errands, getting ready in the morning, etc. When you don't have time to sit at your computer, give it a try. Thanks so much Bob. We appreciate you tuning in and learning alongside us. And we hear that a lot that people like to multitask whenever they're listening to the podcast so that they can learn and grow and get stuff done all at the same time. So that does it for us this week, friend. We appreciate you you and we'll see you next Tuesday. So from all of us here at FPP hq, make it a great week.