Press Release Summary: You are about to embark on the most exciting enterprise of your life -- publishing a cook book! You will soon learn that writing a cook book is truly a fun, exciting and challenging project - more than you can imagine. Like me, you can publish your own wildly successful cook book. And if you ask me if I think publishing a cook book is worth the time and effort? You bet I do! My cook book, Fit to Cook - Why 'Waist' Time in the Kitchen? Sold over 250,000 copies (with, I might add, less than 10% of those sales coming from book stores). However, I wasted a great deal of time, back-tracking and scrambling in order to sell all those books because in the beginning I did not have a complete grasp of the publishing industry and the process of marketing a cook book.
Press Release Body: marketing a cook book. Before you rack your brain figuring out how to write a cook book, and more importantly, how to publish a cook book, take some time to thoroughly research the why and what you are writing about, who you are writing for and when is the best time to launch your book. Whether you want to get published or whether you want to self publish your cook book, the same basics apply - you need a good understanding of the publishing industry. Without the basics, will you know if your contracts are in order, that your book is the best it can be and that your cook book marketing plan is actually an effective strategy? No - but, knowledge is power. It is crucial that you take enough time to educate yourself about the entire publishing industry. Understanding publishing, and the marketing of books, will clearly help you to identify why you are writing a cook book. Perhaps you are writing a cook book just to record secret family recipes or to have all of your own favorite recipes in a book format; maybe you are writing a cook book for a community or church fundraiser; or best of all, your goal is to create a bestseller. Cook books that are written for a very small group do not require business and marketing plans because you already know how many books will be purchased and who the buyers are. However, if you are planning to publish your own cook book for the mass markets, you need to understand that you have moved beyond author to publisher. That means that you are now a business person whose primary goal is the creation of a product to sell. There is no point in printing a book that no one will want to buy. When I began writing my own cook book, I naively thought that it would be a two or three month process, and that in no time I would have a book on every book store shelf in the country. Ha, ha, ha, chuckle chuckle. Experience is a great educator, but who says that you have to learn the hard way? Obviously I had no idea how to publish a cook book in the beginning! However, through this article and via the publishing course that I and my partners have created, I intend to help you avoid losing time and money. How did I create such a successful cook book? The short answer is research, research, research, and then more research. Thankfully I had the wisdom to do the research before going to print. But research can, and did, take years.