The popularity of cookbooks as a product that's easy to sell has continued to go up, along with the sheer quality of the recipes, the design of the book and the downright creativity of self-publishers.
Cookbooks have proven throughout the past 50 years or so to be much more than a collection of recipes. Cookbooks are a great public relations tool. They add to local history.
Cookbooks are an important documentation of a nation's heritage. They are a collector's item, a family's memoir and a way to maintain our sense of identity. Passing down recipes from generation to generation has long been a tradition whether published in a cookbook or not.
The cookbook market will never be saturated because the public is always looking for new recipes and for the best possible way to make food taste great.
With more and more cookbooks featuring color photography with their recipes and interesting sidebar information, cookbooks are even leaving the kitchen and finding a home on the coffee table.
Actually most cookbook buyers are referred to as armchair cooks. They really don't have time to cook but love to read recipes, read about cooking and food, and collect useful and beautiful cookbooks.
I know this is true because I have spent many a bedtime poring over the recipes in my cookbooks -- avidly marking recipes that I intend to try -- some day!
Food and cooking are a part of everyday life, making cookbooks a staple in every American and European home. Even in a weak or down economy, cookbook sales always remain strong.
Whether people buy cookbooks for casual reading or to fix meals, they continue to sell year after year. We live in a cookbook crazy culture. Actually 80% of cookbooks are sold by word of mouth.
And cookbook sales continue to climb every year. Some years it has been as much as 76%.
The third best-selling book in the world is the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. It ranks behind the Bible and the dictionary in sales. And many community and regional cookbooks have been published continually for more than 50 years.
The average American woman owns about 15 cookbooks and three out of ten women collect cookbooks.
Ninety-seven million people gave or have received a book as a gift and the most popular category is cookbooks.
A fast and cheap way would be to publish your recipes is in a simple ebook, which you could do and still work from home. Another option which requires more capital would be in a self-published trade book. It wouldn't require color photographs to publish a great book with your recipes.
If you have a lot of money to invest in your own self-publishing business then consider publishing a cookbook with color photographs. The choice is up to you.
Promoting, marketing and selling self-published cookbooks can be a lot of fun. You can do public demonstrations of your recipes and give away free soup samples.
You can give away free recipes. You can print up free recipes on bookmarks with your cookbook information. You can print free sample recipes on your fliers.
As you can see, the cookbook market has always been a fantastic market. If you've always wanted to publish your recipes, this is a good reason to think about publishing your collection of recipes in a cookbook.
What is a promotional article and how can you submit articles that have the greatest chance of being accepted by publishers?
It helps to know that the purpose of the articles used in Article Marketing is first and foremost to educate and inform, and not to promote yourself, your website, your products or your business. The information conveyed in your article should be for the benefit of your readers and not written with the intention of making sales for your products.
Here's where the confusion comes in--the reason why people love article marketing is that it's a great tool for driving traffic to a website which in turn can increase sales. So, the reason why you started submitting articles may have been to increase sales, grow your customer base, or simply get people to visit your website.
This does not, however, mean that you would use the article body to accomplish these goals. To increase website traffic you do not need to say anything about your website in the article itself.
Article marketing is more subtle than that--increasing traffic to a site is an inherent side effect of submitting articles:
You submit an article to an article directory, then website owners see your article, like it, and decide to reprint it on their websites. Each time your article is republished, your resource box containing a link to your site is also republished. This builds links, and an increase in links can elevate your search engine ranking. An increased search engine ranking for your major keywords can of course build traffic dramatically for the long-term.
So, what causes traffic to build is the accumulation of links, rather than a direct plea in the article body for the reader to do something to benefit you.
Always, always, always--your article body should contain information designed to inform and educate the reader. The appropriate place to toot your own horn and talk about your website and products is your resource box--that is the author bio box that sits below your article.
In order to give your article the greatest chance of being attractive to most publishers, you need to remove any impression that your article is written for the purpose of making a sale or drawing readers to your website (remember--save that type of info for your resource box).
Here are 5 things that make an article look promotional (self-serving):
1) The article has a sales slant to it.
2) The article is about a product that you're selling on your website.
3) The article uses hyped up language, like what you would see in an advertisement.
4) The article tries to get readers to go to your website. (The resource box is the right place to try to get folks to visit your website.)
5) The article is about you and how wonderful you are. (Remember, save that type of info for the resource box.)
If you are having trouble getting out of the "promotional article" mindset, try thinking of yourself as a teacher rather than a sales person.
A teacher provides information that educates and informs.
A sales person presents information with the intention of getting a person to buy a product.
Even if your website sells products, you still need to approach your articles from the perspective of a teacher.
This isn't to say that your articles shouldn't be on the topic of your website--your articles should always be on the same topic as your website, but they should not be about specific products that you're selling on your site.
For example, if your business is Lizzie's Gourmet Chocolates, an appropriate article topic would be anything having to do with gourmet chocolate or chocolate in general, but it's best not to write articles about your specific brand of chocolate.
So, that would be NO to an article called "Why Lizzie's Gourmet Chocolates Taste Best", and YES to an article called "10 Ways To Tell If Your Chocolate Is High Quality".
As long as you're writing articles, why not craft them in a way that maximizes the number of publishers who will accept your article?
The more publishers who reprint your article, the more backlinks you'll receive. The more backlinks you receive, the bigger impact on your search engine rankings. A higher ranking in Google is what you're after--that is what will bring the increase in traffic (and sales!) that you're looking for.
Both Helen Hecker & Steve Shaw are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.