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Episode 146: Self Publish Cookbooks to Launch Into a New Level of Success with Jason Logsdon

In episode 104, we talk with Jason Logsdon of Amazing Food Made Easy about self publishing cookbooks.

We cover determining your goal, how to consider your audience and specific niche, print on demand options as well as pricing and how to have a successful launch.

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

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Guest Details

Connect with Jason Logsdon
Website | Instagram | Facebook

Bio
Jason Logsdon is a best selling author, public speaker and passionate home cook who loves to try new things, exploring everything from sous vide and whipping siphons to blow torches, foams, spheres and infusions. He has published 14 cookbooks which have sold more than 50,000 copies. He runs AmazingFoodMadeEasy.com, one of the largest sous vide and modernist cooking websites, Makin’ Bacon, a website dedicated to helping bloggers succeed, and is the president of the International Sous Vide Association. He has been blogging for over a decade and making his living full time as a blogger for the last 6 years.

Takeaways

  • You can publish your cookbook as a paperback, hardback, electronic version for a Kindle, itunes or Nook or an electronic downloadable PDF such as an eBook.
  • Design your book specifically for that format. But writing it can be done in Google Docs, Word or on a Macbook. The hardest part of publishing a book is writing the book, so by self publishing it, you get full benefit of the profits of your book.
  • If you go with a traditional publisher, you have to almost always come up with new content. If you self publish, you can repurpose some of your content along with any new content.
  • Look for smaller niches within your overall niche to really dominate the market – start with solving a problem, that’ll be your cookbook topic. This allows you to connect with your audience in a new way and bring in a new audience.
  • Sizing is best determined by looking at your favorite cookbooks and seeing what you like to use and what fits. You also have to consider that when you use print on demand, you have to pay by the page so length of your book matters too. Keep your layout and format simple.
  • Printing full color photography is expensive so determine what is necessary and add photos if that’s what your audience expects from you, but there’s different ways to approach it to keep costs down. Check your ego at the door.
  • There are two print on demand companies – one is Amazon KDP, and there is Ingram Spark. What these companies do is buy a copy of your PDF/book on Amazon.
  • The printer gets an order from Amazon for the book, they print off one copy of your book and they ship it to that customer. So to get to your first sale, you have to pay for the printing costs of one book. And that’s being sent directly to someone that already bought it.
  • The easiest way to determine pricing is to look at your niche on Amazon and look at what’s out there, where you fall into the category and price on the upper middle end of the line. You don’t want to underprice your book and signal to customers its not quality.
  • Make sure to have a customer who does buy it write an Amazon review because once your book is on Amazon, it needs some credibility with reviews. Shoot for 4-5 people to write a review.

Resources Mentioned

Amazing Food Made Easy

Makin’ Bacon

Makin’ Bacon on YouTube

Makin’ Bacon Podcast Episodes

Free Sous Vide Quick Start

Paid Sous Vide Made Easy

Revenue diversification important to you?

In episode 113, you can learn about micro-influencer programs which help you to focus on becoming a micro-influencer, how this helps you network and help you grow as a blogger.


Transcript

Click for full text.

Intro:

Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, where food bloggers come to get their fill of the latest tips, tricks, and insights into the world of food blogging. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll provide you with the tools you need to add value to your blog. And we’ll also ensure you’re taking care of yourself because food blogging is a demanding job. Now, please welcome your host, Megan Porta.

Megan Porta:

Food bloggers. Hey, if you have not yet joined the new, amazing Eat Blog Talk community, you have to go do it. You will find so much value inside, including connecting with other food bloggers in a much deeper way and having access to all kinds of exclusive value, such as bonus podcast episodes and mastermind groups, and a Resources and Service providers directory, and so much more. Go to eatblogtalk.com for more information, and we cannot wait to see you inside.

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What’s up food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk. This podcast is for you, food bloggers wanting value information and clarity that will help you find greater success in your business. Today. I will be having my second interview on Eat Blog Talk with Jason Logsdon from Amazing Food Made Easy, and we are going to dive into self-publishing a cookbook.

Jason is a best-selling author, public speaker and passionate home cook, who loves to try new things, exploring everything from sous vide and whipping siphons to blow torches, foams, spheres, and infusions. He has published 14 cookbooks, which have sold more than 50,000 copies. He runs Amazingfoodmadeeasy.com, one of the largest sous vide and modernist cooking websites, Makin’ Bacon, a website dedicated to helping bloggers succeed. And he is the president of the International sous vide association. He has been blogging for over a decade and making his living full-time as a food blogger for the last six years. Jason, I always love chatting with you and I am ready to dive into self publishing, but first give us another fun fact about yourself.

Jason Logsdon:

Coming on for the second time, this is, I can’t use my improv fun fact anymore. So much pressure. So I will say my fun fact is that one of the best things that ever happened in my life was getting busted in an undercover sting operation.

Megan:

What?! Okay, explain.

Jason:

So back before I was a food blogger, I was doing computer programming and I was working at ESPN. That’s where I met my wife. It’s been a passion of mine since I was really young. And it’s something that kind of defined my career before I got into food blogging about a decade ago. And so all through high school, I knew I was going to do computer programming. I was really excited about it, and took all the classes my high school offered.

And then I went to college and I wasn’t, I just couldn’t learn programming in the way that they taught it in college. And so I dropped out of computer programming and I was like, I don’t know what I’m going to do now. And I was exploring a few different things, but I had pretty much given up on computer programming. But in college you need a job to, you know, afford, you know, important things like beer and going out to movies and stuff, the essentials.

And so I found a job at a gas station and did like two weeks of training. And my first day after training, I was working the counter. It was rush hour. There’s this big line of people. And everyone’s looking angry and upset and a kid walks up to me, looking old enough. I was 20 at the time or 19. So, I looked older than me at least. And I said, can I see your ID? And he said, yep. And he flipped it up and pulled it out. And I was like, great. And sold him his beer. I didn’t look at the ID, I just glanced. And he pulled it out. So I figured he was legal. About five minutes later, he came back in with two cops, there was an undercover sting operation and so they grilled me. The guy seemed very confused that I wasn’t actually consciously selling it. Like the cops actually felt bad for me, they knew that I was like, there was a long line. I did look, just tried to make people happy. It’s my second day. They’re like, Oh, this is not why we were doing this. But, so needless to say, I got fired and then I still needed, you know, money.

So the next day I was looking through the classifieds for the school paper and there was an ad in there for a computer programming job that you didn’t need a degree for. I was like, oh, maybe I’ll try that. I ended up getting that job, which got me back into programming and web development, which led me across the country from Utah to Connecticut at ESPN and meeting my wife and getting into food blogging. And if I wouldn’t have got fired there, I don’t know if I ever would have got back into programming.

Megan:

Oh, that is such a cool story. So the moral of the story is thank goodness for that sting operation. And thank goodness you didn’t look at the ID. Oh, that’s so cool.

Jason:

My lack of commitment to my job. See, I knew it would.

Megan:

It’s not often that we can say that, right.

Jason:

I was telling my parents all through high school, I didn’t need to pay attention. They just didn’t believe me. You know?

Megan:

And now you can say, see, I told you. It actually hurts when you pay attention sometimes. Thank you. I don’t know which one is more interesting. The improv or that; probably this one, but I also liked your Improv fun fact. And I’ve been thinking about that recently because I think I’ve been trying to work on the way that I talk, like just my speech and editing my interviews, I just get annoyed by the  “likes” so I thought about you the other day. I was like, I think Jason said that he’s done Improv so once the world is a little more normal, I think I’m going to follow suit and try that out.

Jason:

Improv is great. It’s the best thing that I’ve done for my, I would say for my professional life, as I’ve moved into podcasting and public speaking, and even trying to get my brand out there, that it, it made me even more comfortable in one-on-one situations, whether that’s networking at a conference or just having conversations with people, it really freed me up to be myself in a lot more situations. And then it pushed me in a lot of ways to get better at talking and be more comfortable with being out there, which is important. And if you’re trying to get your brand out there as well.

Megan:

Absolutely. I need all of that, so I’m gonna follow suit and do that too eventually. Well, it’s always fun talking to you. I feel like we have so much to talk about, but you’re here for self-publishing today and outside of this conversation, I’ve been picking your brain recently about this topic. And I also attended your webinar this week that you hosted along with Lori Rice, because this concept of self-publishing, our content is something that I had never really considered before I met you, honestly. I mean, I knew it was possible and that was an available option, but I just never had considered it. I’ve dabbled in ebook creation, like I think a lot of food bloggers have, and I’ve also traditionally published one cookbook, but I did not realize how fruitful and easy self-publishing could be for us for food bloggers. So I would love it if you would just share all of your great information on this topic, because I know that other food bloggers are going to be surprised to hear how easy this is to actually do and how fruitful it can be. So Jason, would you start by giving us just kind of an overview of publishing?

Jason:

Yep. So regardless of how you’re publishing, this is kind of how the overall process works. You first come up with your book idea, like the subject, who you’re writing it for and what it’s going to cover. You then research it and you write it. And as I like to say, it’s one easy sentence, your research and write your book and it’s six to 12 months of work for most books. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s doing the type of things we do as bloggers. It’s writing recipes, writing content, figuring out what works best, photographing your recipes and testing them. Once you have it written, you then decide how you want to publish it. And there’s a lot of different formats. The main ones are print and either paperback or hardback, there’s electronic versions that could be a Kindle, iTunes or Nook or a downloadable PDF.

And those are the main publishing formats. You decide which ones of those you want to publish in and then you design it specifically for each format. Something on a Kindle, especially on a Kindle black and white one like I have, is very different from a printed cookbook that’s going to be in your hand and full color, maybe full color. Once you have it designed, then you send it to the printer who prints it out. They start distributing it, normally on Amazon is the big one. And then if you’re with a traditional publisher, often in Barnes and Noble or other bookstores, and then you market your book. And that’s regardless of how you publish it, that’s what happens. The big difference comes between traditional publishing and self-publishing. And with traditional publishing, the publisher that you go with will do the design, they’ll do a lot of the editing work for you and they’ll do the printing and distribution.

They, a lot of people think they do marketing, but they almost never, ever do marketing anymore for cookbook authors. And the other thing that you end up having to do then is you have to, before you write your book, you have to convince an editor and often a literary agent that your book is worth writing. And that’s something that I never liked people telling me what I can’t do. So one of the reasons I skipped it was like, I’m going to write this book. I think it’s great. I don’t care if a traditional publisher agrees with me or not, I’m going to do it. So they handle that process and they take a large cut of your money for that. And they give you some of that money upfront, which can be nice. But to me, I don’t think it’s a good trade off because the hardest part of publishing a book is writing the book. That’s where all this blood and sweat and time and energy goes into. And these days the publishing process itself is pretty easy to accomplish. And so I’m more than happy to kind of jump through the hoops, to publish my book since I’ve already written it and put the time in there. And that way I get full benefit of the profit of my book, I’m not splitting it with someone else.

Megan:

Yeah. I mean, you make it sound so easy talking through those steps, but really, I mean, like you said, the writing of it is the big part. And I wanted to ask you, this isn’t something I asked you the other day I wanted to though. I mean, a lot of the content for food bloggers we could potentially already have, right? I mean, we’ve got like hundreds probably of recipes on our site, so we could repurpose the content. And then when you say writing, are you talking about like writing an introduction and writing something to go along with each recipe? How much writing do you do for your cookbook?

Jason:

It’s a great question and a great point there. And that’s, if you go with a traditional printer normally, and I’ve been traditionally published as well, there’s nothing wrong with it, depending on what your goals are. So I don’t want to come across, like if you’re currently talking to a publisher, I don’t want you to be like, well, Jason said that it’s a dumb idea, so I’m not going to do it. There’s, I know a lot of people who have been traditionally published and very happy with it, I’ve done a few, it’s a great way to go. But a lot of people understand that process a little bit more than self publishing. 

So if you go with a traditional publisher, you have to almost always come up with new content. So let’s say you have a hundred recipes in your book. You’re going to have to come up with a hundred recipes. For self-publishing, you can publish whatever you want that’s out there that you own. And so my first few books were all recipes I had on my website already. One of my books was a, I put together a lead magnet that was an online email course people could take. And I repurposed all that content and put that into one of my cookbooks. I’ve also written recipes specifically for my book. And then over the next six months, dribbled them out onto my website to keep my website going, without having to spend time on that because I have all this content. And at the same time it was promoting my book. So there is a lot of reuse you can do. And that’s one of the things I talk about, regardless of the topic, is that being able to reuse your content is a super power, that if you can take a podcast and if Megan takes this podcast, that’s one piece of content. If she can then break that up into social media, that’s even more pieces of content. If she can take out individual quotes or sections from this, that’s more content. All from this one thing that she did, it’s all reusing that content, repackaging it in different ways. And that’s a great way to approach, especially your first one or two books, is what do you have that’s out there? How can you put this together in a compelling package for your fans and then publish it and get it out there.

Megan:

Repurposing is so beautiful, right? Because we put a lot of work into everything that we do, whether it’s just one post. Yeah, it sounds very easy. I created one post, but within that one post, you’ve got all kinds of writing. You have amazing tips about the recipe. You have a recipe, you’ve got photographs. So repurposing our content I think is so smart and traditionally publishing a cookbook, I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think most publishers like for everything to be new right and fresh, like not existing anywhere else?

Jason:

Yep. The majority of cookbook deals specify that it’s new content that won’t be used other places.

Megan:

I think there are a few exceptions. I remember when I was concepting for my cookbook, they told me if it’s a topic that I really, really love or that’s, you know, rings true with my niche, that I could maybe carry a few recipes over from my blog, but they were really kind of frowning on that. So, most things do need to be new, but with self-publishing the beauty of it is that you can do whatever you want. I loved what you said earlier about, I don’t like people telling me what I can and can’t do. If I want to publish a book, I’m going to publish a book and here’s what’s going in it. And that is beautiful. Yes. We don’t like being told no, that’s a bad idea. And you can go at your own pace. What are some other good points?

Jason:

You have a lot more variety of what you can do as well. Like if you go to a publisher, as a cookbook author, they’re probably going to tell you, okay, we need to hit this market that has, you know, let’s call it 50,000 people that we know exist, that are actively looking for cookbooks now. And it’s going to be a bigger niche cause they want to hit bigger audiences. As an author on your own, you can decide what you want to go after. One of our examples was we went after the whipping siphon market, which is a pretty minuscule market as far as markets go. But, our books didn’t make much money for a publisher standpoint. They brought in probably $10 or $15,000 throughout the year. Which our publisher doesn’t care about. For me, a blogger, an extra $10 to $15,000. That year was nice. That’s a nice bump to our income. So you can find these smaller niches that are already part of your overall niche and you can really dominate those niches and put out some, some shorter books, some pamphlet style books, I like to call them. And connect with your audience in a new way and bring in a new audience, where a publisher would look at that and say, we would never make enough sales to make that, you know, to make that worth our time, where for us, it can definitely be worth our time.

Megan:

Yeah, definitely. That’s a nice chunk of money for a blogger. So let’s talk about figuring out what your topic is because we have probably a huge collection of recipes on our blog. A lot of different things we like to make. Where do we start with that?

Jason:

I always like to start with solving a problem. That’s how I approach a lot of things. And if you can come up with a problem that your fans have, that you can solve, whether that’s with a video course or with a podcast or with a lead magnet or a cookbook, or just an article on your website, finding these problems that people have and then solving them is a great way to really provide value to your fans. And so that’s the way that I’ve approached it. I’ve looked at things, like some of my first books were sous vide. No one understands how to use sous vide. I’m going to write a book that will explain how to use sous vide cooking. And that was a very different book, even though some of the recipes were the same, like not the exact same, but were similar to my book on how to do sous vide grilling. For them, it was people that knew sous vide and understood it, but they wanted to marry that with using their grill as well. 

So I wrote a book to solve that problem for them. So finding these problems and then finding solutions is what I’ve found to be the most effective way to approach it. And sometimes you will have shorter, smaller cookbooks. And this is where I always recommend, if you’re getting started, don’t do a 300 page cookbook with 200 of your best recipes and this huge blowout production. Do a book that’s like 20 recipes, 30 recipes, solving a very small specific problem and it looks good and you’re honest and upfront with your fans. You’re not telling them it’s a 300 page book, but put out a hundred page book and say like, hey, here’s everything you need to know about using metallic frosting on cookies.

Like it can be a very small thing because you’re going to go through this process. And it’s, there’s a lot that goes into publishing. Like it is very possible to do, but it’s like publishing a blog, that there is a lot of small steps that go into putting out a blog. Each one on its own is pretty small and easy, but learning them all at once can be, can be a little overwhelming. So I suggest starting with this smaller style book and that will teach you how the self-publishing process works, how laying out a book works and you’ll go through everything. And you’ll learn so much more that your second book will be just an order of magnitude, better than it would have been, otherwise. It takes a while to learn this stuff. And just like writing a blog is your, if you’ve been blogging for more than two years, is your blog the exact same that it was two years ago? Your writing style and your photos and how you approach recipes, like you have changed and evolved.

And the same thing will happen as you put out books. So hit those small books and it also gets rid of that kind of like, this has to be perfect because this is my first book and it’s my baby. Do a smaller one, get it out there. Like if you have enough content for an ebook, if it’s more than probably 30 or 40 page ebook, you have enough content for a printed book, because once you put in the front matter, like the index and the table of contents and the title page and the back matter, like the author page and the index at the back and the acknowledgements, you’re adding another 10 to 20 pages up on the top right there. And you now have a decent book that can solve some problems.

Megan:

I loved your suggestion. When I was watching your webinar this week about starting small, because I tend to think big, like I’m going to go, this is going to be amazing. I’m going to go huge. It’s kind of an experimentation process too. Like you can experiment with the subject, if it’s well-received and yeah, it’s like a way to just learn about the process of self-publishing. So love that recommendation that you had. So, kind of talk us through some logistics. So you determine your topic and you’ve decided that you want to self-publish. What are some other things that we need to think through? Like types of cookbooks. I know this is something you touched on in your webinar. So we’ve obviously got recipe style books, you have more technical, talking about processes books and things like that. What are some other types of cookbooks that people could launch into?

Jason:

This goes into a lot of your question that I skipped over I think earlier about how much writing goes into a new cookbook. And that’s part of it comes down to what type of cookbook. You know, like you said, there are, when we think cookbook, we think these recipe based cookbooks, like, was it the New York times cookbook that has like 2000 recipes and there’s three photos in the entire book, but there’s a recipe for everything you would ever want under the sun. But there’s also books, there is, I think it’s the Hannah Swenson mystery series that it’s, it’s a fictional mystery series, like a normal mystery novel, but it takes place in a big shop and they have recipes from the bake shop. So there might be 10 or 15 recipes in the entire book and it’s a mystery novel basically. So in that case, there is a ton of writing, but it’s still in the cookbook vein.

And depending what your blog is, that could fit into your style. There’s more technique-based that I’ve done, like my whipping siphon book and some of my earlier sous vide books were much more about, here is a guide to how you use this device or how you make this type of food. And then there’s recipes to help enforce, reinforce the points that I’m making about the technique. But it’s not someone that knows the technique isn’t going to necessarily love the recipes because they’re not these expansive kinds of pushing the boundaries. They’re trying to show you that, when I say this is how you cook a chicken breast, this is the simplest way to cook a chicken breast in this recipe, because I’m highlighting what I just talked about. So taking these different styles of cookbooks, you can really do what works for your writing style, what you enjoy doing.

We’ve all talked to bloggers who love, love, love, writing recipes. You should probably do a recipe style book that’s recipe heavy. We’ve all talked to bloggers who really don’t like writing recipes, but they enjoy exploring different types of food. Well, maybe you can dive into a few different ingredients and talk about the history of them. There’s a book that I like, that I think it’s like the eight, eight foods of the world. And it was a look at eight historic foods. And they provided historic recipes around those foods, looking back at salted cod, when that was helping run the economy of the world and some salted Cod recipes. So you can explore these different types of cookbooks for what kind of meets your style.

Megan:

I mean, we’re talking about food and there’s so much to explore in the realm of food, right? I mean, styles of cooking, methods, meal prep, food from around the world; there’s so much to dive into. I think probably most food bloggers listening would be, would align with that recipe style cookbook. But you never know. There are plenty of food bloggers like yourself, Jason, that do more, you know, just explaining methods and you get into sous vide and explaining how to do that. And I’m sure that is very word heavy, very writing intensive, whereas maybe just a recipe book about holiday dishes wouldn’t necessarily be. So if you do the recipe style, you do still need to write an intro, right? I don’t know. I don’t even know what else. Right? Probably an intro to each chapter, an introduction to the book. I mean, all of those things still need to be done.

Jason:

So you are, if you’re self-publishing, you’re in charge, you can do whatever you want. You know, my easiest or not my easiest book, my book with the least amount of introductory material had a two page introduction to the technique to kind of lay out here’s what the recipes are. And then it had one paragraph maximum for each of my recipes. It was 200 recipes, a paragraph headnote and that was it. And about one to two pages introduction, everything else was just recipes. And I’ve done books that are 90% text. So it really comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish and what your style is. And this is where, especially initially, you’re saying what are next steps? Look at what you have out there already. That’s your first step. What have you written? What recipes do you have? And if you have a blog that is very recipe heavy, and you’re one of the people that hates that you have to, you know, write a big intro to the recipe because you just want to provide recipes to your fans.

I think, you know, what type of cookbook you want to write. It’s not going to be this narrative story-based cookbook, which on the other hand, if you are the type of person that writes huge novels going into your recipes, because that’s not because you have to do it for SEO purposes, but because you love sharing the background of recipes, then awesome, that’s probably the type of cookbook that you should do because this isn’t a one or the other, these can kind of blend together. So, instead of a one paragraph headnote and a recipe taking up one page, maybe each one of your recipes is three pages and the first two pages are normally a story with some more photos around it and explaining like, well, this is my mom’s casserole recipe. And here’s where it comes from. And here’s the memories I have associated with it. And in a book like that, you need less recipes because you’re providing more content for each one.

Megan:

Again, another beautiful thing about self-publishing is that you’re in charge. You can do whatever you want. Nobody’s telling you what to do. So if you want to write less than write less and put it out there and see what happens. If you love writing narratives, then do that and see what happens there. But you are in charge. You’re the boss. So write what aligns with your style and go from there.

Jason:

Yeah. And I would definitely say, look a lot at what, how you write and whatx . your fans are relating to, and that should be the type of book that you put out. You know, don’t push yourself into one of these categories because that quote unquote is the right way to do it. You have a style that’s attracting fans, make sure your book stays aligned with that style because they’re going to be the ones buying it, and if they, that they are used to these tertiary recipes that are just, you know, all about the recipe and the technique and the recipe and then you put out a cookbook, that’s all this narrative and all these stories about it, your fans are going to go, what the heck is this? This isn’t what I bought it for, I wanted just recipes.

Megan:

What we’re writing about. We write it in our own format. However, we think it would align best with what we’re trying to accomplish. So how do we actually get the book printed?

Jason:

I will, I’ll take one step back real quick. And because people always ask, well, what do I write it in? If I want to publish, how do I write it? What tools do I use? And my answer is always, what is easiest for you to write in? Because I always try to separate the writing from the design stages. And in the webinar that I hosted with Laurie, she’s a professional photographer and talks a lot about having your photography plan. And I think that makes sense to kind of know what your end look and feel might be as you go into taking photos, because are they horizontal? Are they landscape or a portrait? There’s a lot of things that you need to keep in mind from a photography standpoint. But from the writing standpoint, you can write your book in anything that is easy to write in.

I wrote most of mine in pages for my Macbook or Microsoft Word. I now write in Google Docs, which has almost no formatting capabilities, but it’s easier for collaboration. Like we were talking about, if this is your first book and you have all your recipes in WordPress, great. You can write all your text pretty much in WordPress, if that’s easiest for you and you know it. But stop trying to use these fancy tools that take more time to learn the tool and you aren’t writing because you’re trying to figure out the tool. Do what’s easy because once you have it written, then when you decide that you want to format it, you are going to format it in something specific to what you’re trying to put out there. So for a print book, I format it In Design now. It’s been very good for me to do a little fancier style cookbooks.

And that’s what, it’s what professional designers use. But I laid out my first ones in pages and Word, I’ve done cookbooks in both of those. And for shorter ones, I know a few people have used Canva before that they know Canva very well. And so, they went with that. So it’s all you need to do to get your book up there is to have a PDF of your book. And almost all programs will export a PDF. So I will talk to some people that are so worried about designing their book and that they just can’t figure out how to do it and they’re stressing about it. And so they say, you know what, I’m just going to do an e-book and they’ll send me a copy of their ebook a month later. And this is a beautifully designed ebook, which is normally in PDF format.

And I’m like, why did you think that you couldn’t design a print book, but you designed an ebook, which often is fancier than a print book. Like you could take what you did and just use that as your PDF. Like there’ll be slightly modified, but those same skills that allow you to create an ebook you can use for a print book. My original, like two or three books were very, very simply designed. And my fans loved them. They didn’t care. They weren’t buying my stuff for brilliant, bold colors and my great design decisions. They were buying my books because I had really good recipes that they were looking for. So if you can do an ebook, you can also lay out a print book. It’s not, it’s not that much different.

Megan:

See, I think that’s where people get hung up. They think that self-publishing is so complicated and there’s like this element that we believe should make it just super complicated when it’s really not. And just having a PDF file is enough. That’s all you need to do to turn into your print on demand company, right?

Jason :

That’s all you need. And there’s templates out there that you can actually purchase to kind of give you that jumpstart on that baseline. And in my, I have the self-publishing 101 course, it launches at the end of October. And that has the jumpstart program there that has templates that you can download for InDesign and Word. And it gives you kind of that, that base look and feel so you’re like, okay, this looks like a cookbook, and now I can tweak it in the directions I want to go. But I always say, especially for your first book, start simple because it’s easier to accomplish something that’s simple. And when you do that, it looks professional. When you try to do something fancy and you fall just short maybe it doesn’t look professional, it just looks bad. So start simple and get something out there as a professional. If you start with a small book, you, again, you don’t have to worry about that, this is your baby, that you’ve always dreamed about putting out your cookbook. This is a smaller book that you’re not expecting to be number one on Amazon. You’re expecting it to make some money from selling it to your fans, but really educate you about the process. And you’ll still get your brand expansion. You’ll still grow your network. You’re still a published cookbook author, which adds a lot of benefits outside of just monetary gains. And you never know what will connect with your fans, that they might end up buying, you know, $10,000 worth of whipping siphon books. That was a shock to me. I wasn’t expecting that.

Megan:

That’s crazy. I know you just never know. Experimenting is always the way to go though, because you just don’t know what people are going to resonate with. Do you have recommendations for page sizes for books? Like what size page is good? What do you recommend?

Jason:

People go back and forth. The way that I approached it, there were two components. One. I looked at the books on my cookbook shelf and I was like, what size do I like? And does it fit nice into shelves? And then what would look good with the length of my cookbook? So if you’re doing one of those shorter pamphlets style books, I have a lot of books that are 50 to a hundred pages. And the ones that are smaller, maybe eight by eight or six by six, look a lot better at that size than the ones that are 8×10, cause they just look kind of like magazines. For 150 to 300 pages, you can do the larger size and a lot of times that looks better. I do 8×10 or 9.5×10 for most of mine.

And that’s just a generally standard cookbook size so I picked it and went with it. And that’s because the other, I went with the larger size and that’s because one of the considerations is print on demand, you pay by the page. So the length of your book matters as far as your profit goes. So I went with a larger size, so my recipes could be on one or two pages instead of two to three pages. It’d save me money in the long run. So I would make more of a profit while having the exact same content for my fans.

Megan:

I kind of glossed over what you said earlier, so I was just going to reiterate. So as far as laying out your cookbook, you need to just find an application or a software that works for you. Maybe, you know InDesign really well. I love InDesign and I use that as well, but Canva might be a really good place to start if you’re just starting out and have a small cookbook. Even Word, like you mentioned, I hate Word, but that would be feasible to use because you can produce a PDF from Word. So basically anywhere you can produce a PDF file, will work. So get that PDF file produced, figure out what page size you’re using before you start, because you don’t want to have to reformat. And at the end decide, h, wait, I wanted 8×8 and then, oh, that’s a pain.

Jason:

When you’re getting started, look to figure out what, what your book should look like or how it should work, pull out your favorite cookbooks. And by favorite cookbooks I mean, the ones that you cook from, not the ones that you bought and you were like very excited, cause they’re so pretty and beautiful and you bought them because they’re by a famous chef and they’re pretty. We’re looking at ones that are functional and the ones that you use on a daily basis. Cause those were the ones that are gonna make you more money, are the ones that your fans buy. And then your fans tell their friends because they use them all the time. And that’s what you’re looking for. Pull them out. And I think you’ll be shocked at how many of them are designed so simply. I put out my first few books and I always felt really bad how, in my opinion, bad they looked like I was upfront and honest with my fans, but my first cookbook was 85 pages, black and white, had 12 photos and I was like, this is not like, it was competing with Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure cookbook, which was 300 pages with three-star Michelin recipes in it, with full page glossy photos. And one day I was thinking like, I was feeling just a little bad about that, but I, you know, four and a half stars on Amazon, everyone that bought it, loved it. But I am such a cookbook nerd that I am not my audience, right? I am a food blogger who’s a cookbook nerd. And one day I went to make pancakes for my wife and I pulled out the Michael Romans ratio. So that’s what I make pancakes from. And the book flipped open to that page cause I use it so often and it dawned on me like, his book is black and white.

The only photo of the pancakes was like a one inch by one and a half inch photo on there that’s black and white. It is, if you can lay out an essay, like a college essay, you can lay out Michael Romans Ratio, using a word processor, using you know Microsoft word. And this is the book that I use more than any other cookbook I have. And that was like one of those light bulb moments for me that a cookbook doesn’t have to look gorgeous and sit on your coffee table and be 500 pages to be of vast use to fans. His book changed the way that I approach baking, the way that I approach cooking in general and it’s black and white. And he doesn’t take photos in it. That was just eye opening for me.

Megan:

What is functional for you. That’s kind of what you’re looking for. Go through your archives of cookbooks. And most of us do have a huge collection of cookbooks, myself included. So sort through them and see what works for you. And like Jason said, you don’t necessarily have to have the full page, beautiful, full color photographs. Not everyone’s going to resonate with that. But I loved your aha moment. Just like, wait a second. This works for me. So this can work. You don’t have to go crazy with your first cookbook. Starting small is really great. I kind of like that your first cookbook was totally black and white. You had very few photos and recipes and you built it from there instead of backwards. You know, like, Oh, I made two, I put 200 recipes in my book and it was full color and it costs me so much money. You did the exact opposite, which I think is the smart route to go.

Jason:

I think our ego gets in the way a lot when we look at this, cause we want our thing to be perfect. And our readers, a lot of times don’t care. And what was simple for me can be different than what’s simple for you. So someone listening, maybe simple for you is instead of having fancily designed recipe pages, that you decided that simple for you is having a nicely formatted recipe next to a full page glossy photo. And that is simple for you. You’re not doing multiple photos, you’re not doing, you know, color elements, like bug elements that are going throughout the book or hanging in dense, like all these advanced techniques, but simple for you might be a full color cookbook that has a full page recipe, a photo for each recipe you have. And that is your definition of simple. And it’s not this over-designed thing that you could do that you would prefer to do, but you keep it as simple as you can, but it’s still going to be professional and easy to put together. Something like that compared to trying to do all these other, even more advanced elements in it. So it doesn’t have to be a black and white thing with no photos. You can put out some really good, beautiful cookbooks through self-publishing these days.

Megan:

So you touched on print on demand just a little bit. And you mentioned that when you go this route, you pay by the page. So do you also pay for paperback versus hardcover?

Jason:

Yeah. Paperbacks and hardcovers are different prices. The hard cover is about five to $6 of printing costs. And that means that for an average cookbook, your royalty from probably about $6.50 To $7, down to a dollar to $1.50. And this is where you need to know the purpose of publishing your book and you need to know what you’re doing for your readers and what you’re doing for your ego. A lot of us, you know, a lot of us want a hardback cookbook because that’s what we want and that’s what we should have. But if our readers don’t care and if you’re trying to make money for it, will having a hard cover sell four times as many books as having a paperback. In most cases, the answer is no. So if you’re trying to make money from this or get your cookbook into people’s hands, realize that to make the exact same amount of money with the exact same content you’re going to have to sell four times as many, if you use a hard cover. And a color and black and white, color is a lot more expensive than black and white. In my opinion, depending on your niche and your fans, doing a color book and giving up, you know, having to sell three times as many copies to make the exact same amount of money can be worth it.

In many niches, if you’re known for your photography, your fans are expecting your photos, they’re expecting full color. So you should do that and give up the profit, it will pay off in the long run. For other people it definitely might not. I’m working with someone that’s putting out a book and it’s going to be black and white. And I think that’s the right decision for them because his photography skills are not the focus of his cookbook or what he offers his fans. So it doesn’t really matter. So him going full color for mediocre photos, isn’t great. And his readers don’t care at all.

Megan:

So if you are known for having just mouthwatering delicious hero shots, then maybe you should lean more toward the color versus black and white. And then maybe go paperback to save a little bit of money. What is the cost difference between color and black and white? I’m just curious.

Jason:

I forget off the top, but I think the average royalty for a black and white would probably be about $10 and for color, it’s probably $5-$6. So it cuts it in half, maybe a little bit, a little bit steeper than that, but that’s in general what you’re looking at.

Megan:

Okay. So we’ve figured out paperback versus hardcover color versus black and white. How many pages we want to pay for. So where do we get this done? Where do we go for print on demand services?

Jason:

So print on demand is what made self-publishing easy. You know, back in the day, you had to order 500 to a thousand copies of your book from a printer, they would deliver it to you on a pallet and you would store that in your garage and ship it out to people and try to get distribution deals. And there is a lot of work and a lot of going back and forth to the post office. Which is why I never would have done it until about 10 years ago when I did it. And that’s because print on demand came out. And the way that this works is there’s two main companies. The first one is Amazon KDP, which used to be called CreateSpace before Amazon bought them. And there was Ingram Spark. And what these companies do is, once you submit your PDF to them, basically someone buys a copy of your book on Amazon.

It looks like any other book you’d buy on Amazon. They get an order from Amazon for the book, they print off one copy of your book and they ship it to that customer. So to get to your first sale, you have to pay for the printing costs of one book. And that’s being sent directly to someone that already bought it. You don’t have to order 500 or a thousand copies. You don’t actually get the book. So you don’t have to be the one going to the post office. This whole process is now automated for you. And there is almost no upfront costs to getting your book out there, live on Amazon.

Megan:

I heard you talking about the same thing the other day. And I was like, why not? Why not do this? This sounds so easy. And in recent years it was not this easy. I don’t think, I think you mentioned like 10 years ago. It was probably a lot more difficult.

Jason:

Yeah. It was a lot riskier back, you know, 10 years ago. Cause you, you had to order 500 or a thousand. Like the more copies you order, the cheaper each one would be. So you could order 10 copies. It would just cost you like a thousand dollars for your 10 copies and you would never make money, but it would cost you like $1,200 if you got 500 copies. So, it’s like so much of it went into the setup of the type of printing presses they used to use. And they still use a lot of traditionally published books, but you have to set up the printing press each time for each book. So once you have it set up, you’ve already paid that money. So each copy was pretty cheap at that point, where with print on demand, you have to stay within a few guidelines.

But if you do that, they just get printed one at a time when they’re ordered, which just eliminates so much stress. And then, you know, 20 years ago you’d have to try to talk to book chains. You’d have to talk to, you know, Borders and Barnes and Noble and your local coffee shops, because that’s the only place you could buy books. Now there’s this little company called Amazon that most people have heard of and they sell over half the books in the world. And that was before the pandemic hit. I’m assuming that’s gone, you know, that market shares increased. So if you get on Amazon, you’re reaching almost everyone that buys books, can now have access to your book and you don’t have to worry about being in Barnes and Noble. You don’t have to worry about, you know, printing a thousand copies to have two copies in all 500 Barnes and Noble stores, or like you only pay for copies when they are sold, which is great. And you can still do these wholesale deals. You can get in local coffee shops, your local farmer’s market. I do a lot of deals with equipment manufacturers who carry my books or resell them on their site. And you can still do these bulk deals, but they don’t have to make up the majority of your, of your sales anymore.

Megan:

I love that you sell outside of Amazon too, but yeah, like getting an Amazon you’re pretty good there. Everyone’s on Amazon. So how do we determine a price point for our book?

Jason:

Throw a dart at the wall?

Megan:

Have your kid say a random number?

Jason:

It’s always so entertaining trying to set pricing. It’s one of my least favorite things, cause it’s, it always is so hit or miss. And, my guess is I’m always a fan of simplification. If you couldn’t tell from doing a simple book first, doing a smaller book first, you know, what’s the easiest way you can solve these problems, starting small and for pricing? The easiest way to do that is go to your niche on Amazon. Look at what the other books are selling for and set your price of your book somewhere in that range. I recommend the middle to high end of the range is what I normally recommend because going too low, you can price yourself out. This is the example I always use in our whipping siphon book. We put it out, there is a shorter book, like a hundred and something pages on the low end.

And we’re like, you know what? Maybe we’ll sell this for $13 or $14. And we were selling pretty good, but we thought maybe we’ll raise this price. Like it’s doing good. It’s number one in that Amazon category. So that’s, let’s raise the price to $19 and see what happens. Like, we’re doubling our profit. We’re going to sell less books because we’re increasing the price, right? We all know that, but will it make up for it with the profit? We increased it to $19 and our sales went up 30%. So we were now making double the profit, selling 30% more copies than we were before. And that was because people went on there, they saw the book and Amazon was discounting it a little bit for us. So they said, $11 for a cookbook. What is the quality of this cookbook? Probably not very good. And then we raised the price. They went over and said $19 for a cookbook. What’s the quality of that cookbook? Probably pretty good. That’s a normal cookbook cost. And so they purchased it. We had sent a signal that our book was low quality by our low pricing.

Megan:

There is something to that, right? When you see a super low price, you just assume that the quality is not as great, but there it’s such a gray area because you don’t want to go too high. So, ugh, pricing stresses me out. I cannot even say that enough. Landing on one price is probably my least favorite part of selling any sort of product ever.

Jason:

Yup. My general approach lately has just been, especially for books or even courses, look at what’s out there that’s comparable and I price myself in the middle of the upper end of that range. And to me, that signals that my product is high quality, but it’s not, you know, a $500 cookbook like Modernist Cuisine box set or something. So it’s within the range of things that my book is. And then I try not to worry about it. I just say like, I am trying to remove pricing as a decision-making factor for the buyer.

Megan:

Now we got all that done. We have our book on Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark, and we’ve determined a price. And now the fun part comes, right? Launching and marketing. So talk to us a little bit about launching and marketing our books.

Jason:

So there’s two main components of launching your book or of marketing it in general. The first is having such a strong launch. I’m not necessarily a proponent of these huge launch events for courses and for eBooks and all these things that a lot of people do talk about. And that’s because it stresses me out a lot. So I tend not to do those, but for cookbooks, it’s very important and that’s because your book is on Amazon. And the best thing that can happen to you is you have a lot of sales. And pre-sales going into your launch because Amazon goes, Oh, this is a new book, it’s getting a lot of traction. Maybe we should promote this book. And it’s just like SEO, that if you show up high on Google pages, people go to your site, because you don’t always go to the, especially on Google, the second, third, fourth page of search results.

If you show up when someone types in whatever your niche is on Amazon, people are going to look at your book. They’re going to see it a lot more often. They are willing to go deeper on Amazon search, but having those sales increases your sales rank, makes Amazon notice you. And then you start showing up higher and higher, which means more people notice you, more people buy your book and it is self perpetuating. So having that initial launch, which the two big keys to that are, hopefully you have a mailing list. Even if you don’t send newsletters, you have a list of emails that you can, you can contact people with and your social media accounts to hammer them in a very nice, respectful way about your upcoming book, sharing stuff with them. Like, you need to talk about it a lot. And there are ways that you can do that, that isn’t like, I have my book coming up, get ready to buy it. You know, you can say like, hey, here’s my new cover design. What do you think? Your fans aren’t going to be like, Oh geez, I can’t believe you’re trying to sell me by showing me the neat cover you’re excited about. Like, it’s conversational. People enjoy it, but you’re priming them that this is coming out. You’re building excitement. And then the other aspect is to have people ready to put in Amazon reviews. Because just like under pricing your book, how many products on Amazon have you bought that have zero reviews? And if you have, you’ve probably thought long and hard about whether you want to buy this because there are zero reviews. If there’s five reviews, you probably didn’t think twice about it. But if there’s zero reviews, you say, has anyone ever bought this?

Like why, why has no one ever looked at it? So you want to prime it, that when you launch the day of your launch, before you send out your first newsletter and social media blasts, you want to go to your fans. You’ve already primed throughout the last two weeks and you specifically talk about doing a review, have them go on and put on honest reviews from their experience with seeing like an electronic version of your book or a print version that you sent ahead of time. Get them in there with some honest reviews so when people show up, they say, Oh yeah, there’s five reviews as launch day. I wasn’t expecting 300 reviews, but there’s five people that have looked at this book, think that it’s good and you know, left you a good review.

Megan:

It makes people feel important too, right? Like, Hey, I am trusting you to look at my book and to give honest feedback. I think they’re like, Ooh, that’s so cool. Yeah, for sure I’ll do that. And you mentioned showing a book cover and one of the ideas I had, I haven’t actually done this yet because I haven’t self-published a book yet, but I was thinking about creating a handful of different covers and then asking my audience, my email list, to vote and say which one they liked. That allows them to have a hand in the process, like they feel like they’re involved. So I thought that was a really fun idea. And you can do that in so many ways. Get it out to people instead of just like you said, saying, hey, buy my book, it’s coming soon. Because that’s annoying. I’ve been on lists like that before. And I’ve actually done that before to my poor audience, where I’ve been like, I have this product coming out, get ready to get your checkbooks ready. So annoying. There are so many more ways to do that.

Jason:

I love that idea of talking about covers, presenting those things to your fans. Jenny Melrose talks about that. She did her photo shoot and she posted her four favorite photos and said, Hey, which one of these do you want to see on the cover of my book and let the people vote for those? And it’s, you’re involving people and you can, as a self-publisher you can share any of your content. So throughout this entire process, if it’s a six to 12 month process and you are creating some new recipes for it, post about it, like your fans are curious. If you take a picture with your cell phone of your photography set up and say, hey, here’s the green bean casserole I’m working on for my cookbook that’s coming out later this year, thought you might want to see some of the process of what goes into a cookbook shoot. Or here’s a little piece of content that I just wrote that’s going in. And what do you think about this topic? Would you have any questions that I need to fill in on my upcoming book? You’re not pitching anything. You’re just including your audience in this journey. And if there’s anything that your fans want, it’s learning more about what you are up to.

Megan:

People love behind the scenes, too. Anything that I ever post on, either side of my business, about behind the scenes, people respond to that. They’re like, ooh, this is so cool. I love seeing how you set up your videos or whatever it is. I think that’s kind of a way to include people as well.

Jason:

Yeah. We always talk about authenticity, right? And where’s that line of, well, I don’t want to talk about like my kids or whatever, like this is a way to be authentic and show your personal life, but it’s still all work-related and it’s still very much in a safe space, regardless of what your kind of social, you know, fears are, how much you want to share. This is very easy to just share these types of things and really draw your audience in.

Megan:

And with traditional cookbook publishing, it’s really hard to do that because there are so many rules and guidelines that you have to adhere to. Like you’re not supposed to share recipes beforehand, unless it’s approved. I think I got approved to share one when I was going through the process of making my cookbook. And I just felt like that was a bummer. Like I want to share more, but you have to be, you have to hold everything really close. But with this, with self-publishing, you are the boss. You can do it however you want. You can share whatever you want. So I think that’s part of the beauty too.

Jason:

I did a lot of free previews for my content. So I would export, it’s already designed for the print book, right? I would export it as a PDF, my chapter on meat and it’d be like 40 pages. And I’d say, Hey, here’s my chapter on meat, you know, to my mailing list. If you want to check it out and see what, get a feel for the book, here’s an electronic version of it that you can, you can look at for free. And if they like that, they’re more than, you know, they’re more likely to buy the book when it comes out in a few weeks, but you’re not pushing anything on them. You’re sharing all this great content and you’re writing a ton of value, even if they don’t buy the book, like you basically just gave them a free 40 page lead magnet, you know, for nothing, and they’re going to be excited and they might buy your next book that comes out.

Megan:

So I have to ask you, I read in your bio that you have published 14 cookbooks, which is so awesome. Have you done that in 10 years over the span of 10 years or how long?

Jason:

About eight years.

Megan:

Eight years. Okay. And you’ve sold more than 50,000 copies Jason, that’s insane. I know I read that bio in our previous interview, but I did not retain that. That’s a lot of books, 50,000. So I want to know which one or two are your most popular and why do you think they’re the most popular?

Jason:

So I got lucky and a lot of people that I know that have had bestsellers, like I have, consider it luck. You know, if you go through a traditional publisher and you’re an established author, there’s things that you can do to one of my favorite authors, John Scalzi, and he is almost always a New York Times bestseller and they have this whole process set up and his fans and, you know, all these things. For a self-publisher it’s really hard to get an individual book to go off. And even for traditional publishers, 99.9% of the ones they publish don’t do this. So one of my books, which was Modernist Cooking Made Easy Sous Vide, was probably about my fifth book, I think. That one I had, there was just the perfect moment of, sous vide was starting to take off. My audience was primed. And I had a track record of all my previous books that people liked.

So I launched the book. I sold about two to 300 copies in the first week, which put me at the top of sous vide on the search results on Amazon. And then it was right as sous vide was blowing up. And what that did was people going on there and buying like a Novas. A lot of people have heard of Nova’s brand. When you went there. It said, people that buy this, also buy this cookbook. I was listed on a Nova and Gourmia, and if you want to buy, yeah, like I was everywhere. And so, it became a top 10 cookbook on Amazon. It sold probably about 40,000 of those copies from that book. It doubled our revenue in one year when it came out just because it was selling thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a month of cookbooks, which is great. And some of my, you know, my worst ones sold, you know, $500 a month worth of books or $200 after the launch. And it’s still a thousand dollars coming in.

Megan:

Absolutely, I mean, that’s not peanuts. That’s great.

Jason:

And that’s what I talk about is too. It’s like, it’s hard to have a book like that. If you’re publishing your book to make $200,000 next year, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But if you view this as one more building block in your revenue, one more thing that you can do to get out there to keep bringing in income. The second book I put out was Beginning Sous Vide, and three years after it came out, it made more money than it had in any of the previous three years. This is my number one or number two best-selling cookbook for six years. Like it was out there selling copies and yeah, it was bringing in four or five grand a year, which isn’t a huge amount of money. But times that by six or seven years, that’s a good chunk of change coming in. If you can put out a cookbook every year or two, it keeps adding just more and more to your revenue. And it’s the steady growth that you’re moving things forward.

Megan:

I think that we’re all looking for those additional revenue streams right now. And we were all wanting to diversify and just find those extra things that can boost our income and looking at it as a like immediate, huge moneymaker is probably not the best way to approach this. Food blogging is a long game and so is this, I think.

Jason:

And the thing I always talk about too, is that is really hard to build your traffic, right? We all know this, that if you want to double your income and you’re on ads, you have to double your traffic to get twice as much ad income. If you want to also double your income, try putting out a book. Like you can have it marketed on all the same pages that your ads are on. It’s not affecting your ad income. It’s not affecting your SEO and it’s just giving it, your fans, one more place to spend money. And it’s a lot easier to double your income by putting out a book or a course or any of these other types of products than it is to double your traffic time and time again.

Megan:

This is just such a great new thing to have on people’s radar, because I don’t think that a lot of people know how successful it can be. So I really appreciate you just sharing your story and your journey with self publishing. And I want to mention before we go, you do have a course coming out that fills in all the gaps. So anything that we did not talk about today is in your course. So tell everyone a little bit about that.

Jason:

Yeah, I put together, I’ve been speaking at a few different online communities, like Eat Blog Talk and spoke at a few mastermind groups. And what came out of each one was thank you for answering all of our questions, why don’t you have a course so I can give you money and it’ll teach me everything. So I finally said, okay, I’ll listen to, I’ll listen to people asking for something and wanting to give me money for it. That’s a good way to find a product when people ask for it. So I put together this course that really distills down my knowledge over eight years of self-publishing and says, once you have your book, how do you get it out there? You know, we talked about how easy it is, but that there are a lot of steps. And so how do I, how do you break down those steps?

And that’s what I decided to do. So it talks through the different things that go with the front of the book. What does a title page look like? What does an index look like? What do acknowledgements look like? How do you create a PDF? How does some of these design tools work? How does pricing factor into it? And I cover all that in a video course. It’s about 40 videos, three and a half hours of content, designed to take someone that wants to, serious about putting out a book, but once a little more help about what they need to know. And you can jump around it to get specific answers, or you can just go from start to finish and you’ll know pretty much what I know about self-publishing. I also offer as one of the upgrades to that class, is a one-on-one call with me.

I’ll sit down with you for an hour, answer any questions you have about self-publishing or publishing in general though, I’m not as well versed in traditional publishing. And for an hour, we will have a conversation about your specific needs and what you’re looking for. So those are kind of the two products that I have out there. And it’s something that the people looking at it so far have had a really good response to. So I’m excited to share my knowledge and get it front, in front of a lot more people because self-publishing a cookbook changed the trajectory of my entire blogging career. And I love seeing what other people use to change their blogs and move their blogs forward in so many unique and interesting ways.

Megan:

Oh, I can tell you’re passionate about it and you really enjoy doing it. So I’m glad you put this course together. So can we link to that from your show notes on Eat Blog Talk, I’m assuming that’s doable.

Jason:

You can go to makethatbacon.com/publishnow. And if you use the promo code EATBLOGTALK, I’ll give you 20% off of any of the packages.

Megan:

Oooh, that is a great deal. Take him up on that. Jason is super fun to work with. I’ve been collaborating with him on work projects here and there, and he’s full of great ideas and information. So definitely take him up on that. This episode that we’re doing right now is no exception. This was packed with information, Jason, thank you so much for sharing all of this. I really appreciate it.

Jason:

I appreciate you having me. Come on. I always have a great time talking to you and being on your podcast.

Megan:

Well, thanks again. And I will let you go about your day, but before we go, why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you online?

Jason:

You can find me makethatbacon.com. That’s all my information for food bloggers, helping you look at different ways you can expand your revenue. If you want to learn more about sous vide or modernist cooking, you can go to amazingfoodmadeeasy.com or theISVA.org for the International Sous Vide Association.

Megan:

Awesome. And I mentioned show notes. I will put together a show notes page for this episode, and you can find those at ea blogtalk.com/selfpublish. So if you’re interested in getting all of that amazing information that Jason mentioned, you can go there and everything will be in one easy little spot. So thank you again, Jason, for being here and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Intro:

We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.


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Questions or comments on this episode?

Head over to the Eat Blog Talk forum post about episode #146 to leave any questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Megan
Megan

Megan started her food blog Pip and Ebby in 2010 and food blogging has been her full-time career since 2013. Her passion for blogging has grown into an intense desire to help fellow food bloggers find the information, insight, and community they need in order to find success.

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