Why cookbook writing is a brutal business
How I lost the will to write another cookbook (and then found it again). Plus a gorgeous garlic soup recipe.
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Along with chapped lips and a deeper attachment to my hot water bottle, the nippy winds of January blew in a new and unexpected desire. To write another cookbook.
This came as a surprise to me and my family, who share the chaos, tears, ill-temper, joy, mess, satisfaction, despair, interminable trips to the shops and literal shed blood that the cookbook writing malarkey entails. Or at least that’s been the way of it for me over the course of writing fourteen of them.
After my last book, Cocoa, was published in 2019, I think I subconsciously decided not to attempt another one. Although Cocoa was well received – Nigella loved it, as did others whose opinion I respect – it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. I may love to regret my candour, but the truth is, I haven’t yet ‘earned out’ my advance on Cocoa. Let me explain what that means.
An author’s advance is the money paid to them upfront (well, actually, in three painfully spread out instalments) after they sign a contract with a publisher. This advance is offset against future royalty payments once the book goes on sale. In other words, you don’t start earning royalties until the book sales are equal to the size of your advance. There’s still a chance of earning out my advance (she says, over-optimistically), as Cocoa was re-issued last year as The Little Chocolate Cookbook in a dinky smaller format with a luscious new cover. It seems to be selling OK.
But more than that, I suddenly felt the world just didn’t need another cookbook. I know I’m not the only cookery writer on whom this has dawned . We live in a time of unlimited access to infinite recipes, including on the internet and social media. And the cookbook market is brutal. The Sunday Times ran a piece about this last year, but its figures were based on a Covid year. So, I’ve managed to tease the most up-to-date cookbook sales figures out of Nielsen BookData. And they’re fascinating.
In 2022, total cookbook sales in the UK fell by almost 8% from 2019 levels (the last non-Covid year and therefore the most meaningful comparison), to just over £89 million worth. That translates to around 6.8 million cookbooks sold comprising
36, 799 different titles.
But here’s the thing. Around 89% of those titles sold fewer than 100 copies in 2022. That’s a whopping majority that sold a paltry, inconsequential number. Basically, to friends and family. Further, only 0.5% of the titles sold more than 5000 copies. (In a future newsletter I might try to get to the bottom of these figures. Do they include self-published books, for example? Do publishers give tiny advances to lots of authors in the hope of making their money back by striking gold with one of them?)
The biggest difference between now and 2019 is at the top end of the best-seller charts. Ten titles sold more than 100,000 copies in 2019 compared to only three titles in 2022 – so even the biggest guns aren’t selling as well as they were. The number one best seller in 2019, Pinch of Nom (more of which later) sold three times as many copies that year (over one million) as the number one bestseller in 2022, Jamie Oliver’s One (over 350,000).
What makes me sad is that the cookbooks really flying off the shelves aren’t the beautifully written ones that celebrate food and its vast and delicious possibilities – they’re about dieting and wellness. The publishing phenomenon that is Pinch of Nom, a slimming series written by Kate and Kay Allinson, took the second and third best-selling cookbook spots (429,139 in total) in 2022. Slimming Eats by Siobhan Wightman came in fourth (93,829) and Joe Wicks’ Feel Good Food was close behind (93,026).
Kate and Kay Allinson’s first book, published in 2019, became the fastest-selling non-fiction book since records began. They shifted more than 210,000 copies in three days. Today, they don’t write cook books so much as steer a business empire: they’ve released eleven cookbooks and meal planners and employ a team of eighteen people including three recipes developers. As of February 2022, four million copies of their books had been sold in the UK.
I admire their success. They’ve worked hard and been clever in creating and nurturing a close relationship with their Pinch of Nom community. And millions of people love their recipes.
But it’s dispiriting that we live in a world where so many people are so ashamed of their shape that the titans of food publishing are those who write diet books to help them change it.
So why do I want to write another cookbook? First of all, I do love the process, despite my moaning about the chaos. It’s immensely satisfying to take a vague idea, maybe one I came up with on holidays, and with a help of lots of clever and creative people, turn it into something tangible, beautiful and hopefully useful and lovely to read.
The best cookbooks – and they’re not the best sellers necessarily – always offer more than just recipes. They must, because there’s a vast ocean of cooking instructions on the internet if you want to know how to make your dinner. A good cookbook charms and transports you, shares new techniques and ideas, inspires you to eat good things, or tells you things you didn’t know before. They deserve a place on your bookshelf regardless of whether you cook from them.
No-one ever says: there are too many novels, let’s just read the ones already written. I hope I can convince the cookbook-buying public of that come January 2024 when – all going well – my next one is published. I’ll keep you posted on the chaos.
Roast Garlic and Chickpea Soup
This beautiful recipe is from Easy Vegan, a book I wrote many years ago now that I’m very proud of and it’s still selling well. That it’s vegan is inconsequential. It’s just delicious.
SERVES: 2 generously
PREPARATION: 15 minutes
COOKING: 40 minutes
4 large garlic heads, cut in half
230ml olive oil
3 tablespoons plain flour
1 litre vegetable stock
120g canned chickpeas (drained weight)
⅓ teaspoon cayenne pepper
⅓ teaspoon smoked paprika sea salt flakes freshly ground black pepper a squeeze of lime
Heat the oven to 170°C (325°F/Gas 3). Place the garlic cut-side down in an ovenproof pan.
Add 200ml of the olive oil and transfer to the oven. After 20 minutes, check the underside of the garlic - the cloves should be golden and starting to caramelise. If the cloves are turning brown too quickly, turn them over and continue cooking until the cloves are very soft.
When cooked, lift out with a slotted spoon and carefully remove the cloves from their skins using the point of a knife or a fork.
Remove and discard 90ml of the oil from the pan, put the garlic cloves back in and sprinkle over the flour. Stir over a medium heat, mashing the garlic if necessary with the back of a spoon, until the mixture is smooth. Add the stock, stir, then very gently simmer for
10-15 minutes.
Meanwhile, dry the chickpeas with kitchen paper and briskly rub in a tea towel to remove as much skin as possible. Combine the cayenne and paprika in a small bowl. Heat the remaining olive oil in a frying pan, add the chickpeas and fry for 10 minutes, or until crisp and golden. Drain in a sieve, transter to a bowl and then toss with the spices.
Blitz the soup in a blender until creamy.
Return to the pan, add the squeeze of lime and taste for seasoning. Serve sprinkled with the spiced chickpeas.
I'm glad you're writing another book, Sue. The data and figures you reference above must be sobering for many authors, although perhaps won't come as a surprise to most, although I'm sure would shock many who are unfamiliar with the book trade.
Some of the very best books I ever worked on when I was in-house in independent publishing were those that sold the smallest volume. Most of my favourites never made it to reprint, and perhaps less than 25% ever rewarded their authors with a royalty payment after those first three advance payments.
My ex-publisher specialised in restaurant books, which was a model with a certain insurance 'built in' in that the restaurant would pre-order books, safe (not always, but often) in the knowledge that they would be able to sell copies through their establishment. My publisher was the first to start restaurant book publishing (back in the 1980s) and continued to do so very modestly successfully with care, passion and curation. Fast forward twenty-odd years and Twitter changed the landscape dramatically and many publishers were suddenly paying big advances for restaurants with a booming follower count. This was true of individuals too, of course.
Ref. your point about tiny advances: this was often, albeit not always so. I still hear stories today which shock me about what authors have been asked to do for so little in return (which can include all of the recipe testing, photography, styling etc). And I've seen publishers cut all sorts of corners on things which should never be compromised. Often the budget has run out by the time the book is published and there is little to no money with which to market the thing that everyone has invested so much time and money into. But publishing is a high-risk business, too. Each book could run up thousands and thousands of pounds in cost which could take years to get a return on, if a return did indeed ever come. It's also true that one huge success (we had a few!) could be the profit from which we were able to publish half a dozen smaller books the following year from authors who we might otherwise never have been able to put into print.
It's truly a shame that so many books never earn out their advance, but I can't recall one (actually, I think I can recall *just* one!) that I've not enjoyed seeing make it to print and which hasn't made its author feel great joy and satisfaction. Whenever I consult on the creation of books these days, I warn all new authors to do it not in the hope of making money -- unless there is a business model (restaurant, product etc) that can drive sales -- but because they have something to say and share and a passion to see it in print form. After 25 years, I'm still as excited by new ideas and new ways of presenting old ideas as I was when I started under the wing of the person who brought Keith Floyd out of his Bristol restaurant to the book-buying and TV-cook watching masses.
Good luck with the new project. x
I am a Cookery Book Addict and still prefer a really great cookbook over recipes gleaned from the internet, though I sometimes use those too.
For me a good cookbook is one that is more than just a collection of recipes (no matter how good). I want wonderful food writing too! That could be insight into the food and culture of a place, it could be about the history of a given type of food, it could even be advice on how to grow my own ingredients to then use in the recipes.
Last year was one of very best for books I really loved, with favourites including The Nutmeg Trail, Cinnamon & Salt, Taste Tibet, Japaneasy Bowls & Bento... I truly love these titles!
Certainly, it makes me sad to think that so few of these gems sell in high volume, making it harder for authors of such books to get a deal, and harder for publishers to justify giving them one.
I shall remain an optimist though, and hope for many wonderful news cookbooks in the years to come! 😁