Tools you need to publish your cookbook in Kindle, iBook, nook and more ebook platforms.
Becoming an eBook author is a great decision and it is a lucrative business model, where it lets you earn a lot of passive income with less effort.
The caveat here is it is hard to predict if your book will be an overnight success or not until you publish it.
Fortunately, the experts have figured out a pattern and right tools that will get you closer to massive success.
Having said that before you start reading this guide, you need to keep few things in mind.
1) You need to publish more than one book to be successful.
Preferably many series of books. It helps in many ways.
First, you will be seen as a well-established author and people will trust you more if you have many books published rather than just one.
Second, it will let you increase your revenue, people who bought one of your books has more chances to buy the next book.
2) Publish books that people want
Many times author publishes books that they think is cool. Like the best recipes of the author. There is nothing wrong with it, just that it is hard to get new readers for these types of books and have to completely rely on your continuous marketing effort. That defeats the whole purpose of passive income with less effort.
Alternatively, publish books that are in trend – Each season and year the trend changes. So publish books that are in current trend. These books sell well organically and earn a tonne of money for you.
3) Optimise for better conversion
Cookbooks are a crowded market and that is one of the main reason people shy away from entering it. For me, I see that as an opportunity, many great bloggers are not marketers or don’t focus on generating additional revenue using cookbooks.
At the same time, there is a tonne of demand from consumers, with the new types of devices coming up often people like to consume the content in a form of collection rather than browsing the internet for content.
In reality, the competition is way too less for the increasing demand. Getting the right tools and techniques will give you an advantage over the competition.
4) Believe in yourself and take action
Last and most important is to take action. This comes down to believing in yourself. That’s when the magic happens, you will start seeing that you are making so much progress and reaching the goal sooner than you think.
Now without further ado, tools to publish your books online.
Cover Photo:
People do judge a book by its cover and it no far from the truth when it comes to publishing your book in kindle or any publishing platform.
There are many options to create your cover.
Option 1: Canva.com
Canva is a free online tool to design many image formats. It also has some book templates that are free and easy to use. You can browse for any of them and see if it fits your needs.
For me this option did not work well when it came to publishing cookbooks, the reason was most of the ebook covers in canva are geared towards the general books. For cookbooks, I wanted something bright and highlight the food well.
Option 2: Inkscape
Inkscape is another free tool that can help you to design better custom cover photos. I highly recommend custom photos for the book cover, they look more professional and would entice potential customers to buy your book rather than your competitors. If you have some design skills you can create your own cover photos.
Click here to download the Inkscape
The easy option is to get a book cover SVG file (either pay for it or find a free one online) and use that as a template to create your book cover rather than creating one from scratch.
For me, this did not work as I don’t have the time or skills to create the book cover. And even if I tried it would not be as professional as I would like.
Option 3: Hire someone
This is one of the easiest options for me. Get someone who is good at doing the design and get it done. Of course, this would cost a little bit but it is worth it. It saves a tonne of time and gets a best-designed book cover.
Don’t be scared to hire someone, your goal is to make more money not save money on everything. So treat time as money and use right resources to speed up the process.
Find the popular and non-competitive categories:
We all know that cookbooks and recipes are one of the most wanted and most competitive markets to enter. So if we find the right niche/ sub-niche within the food category you would hit the gold mine.
There are 2 ways to do it.
One is manually searching, which is quite impossible.
Furthermore, there is no easy way rather than going to each page and list the rankings and then ordering the title based on the ranks.
Even with all that, it is hard to find the sales volume. I wouldn’t recommend this as you would be wasting a good chunk of precious time.
Another option is this tool called Kindle Spy. Watch the below video to find what it can do.
I definitely recommend this tool if you ever decide to start writing your cookbook. This would help you find the right category and predict the sales volume. It also tells you how competitive the niche is and the one you should go after.
Not only saves time and effort but also helps find the highly profitable niche with less effort.
Keyword research for title and description:
As I mentioned earlier, publish a book that people want. In order to find the right title, you need to do keyword research.
And identifying the right keywords in amazon kindle is a time-consuming task and it’s tricky given that the keyword popularity keeps changing in amazon. So I use this tool called Kindle Samurai for making it easy to do the research.
Remember SEO is a key even when selling on Amazon and other publishing sites. Finding the right keywords and using those keywords in the title and description helps to boost sales organically over time.
It would save a lot of time especially if you are publishing more than one book. Even if you have one book, you will need to keep altering your keywords when the sales drop or trend changes. A definitely useful tool for keyword research. For the incredible price its no brainer.
To create and format to make your own cookbook:
If you ever tried to create a book on your own, this is the part I think many of us stumble upon.
The most asked question is
WHICH TOOL SHOULD I USE TO CREATE COOKBOOKS?
Before we dive into this part, I like to clear one thing.
Writing physical cookbook is different from writing an ebook and publish in kindle, apple or other platforms.
Physical books although it sounds cool. It is a different ball game. It requires a lot of investment and ROI is crazy low unless you are already a celebrity or a famous author.
I started designing one for myself and while I was ready to throw in the investment. I learnt many things that led me to put a pause on creating the physical books.
In short, it cost a lot to design, format and since you would need a colour book the cost to print is super high in amazon. Doing the math and research it was evident that no one would buy a cookbook for the price that amazon was suggesting. The only other option is to shell out few thousands of dollars to print in bulk or find a publishing company to help with your book.
The easiest way for me was to publish eBooks for the following reasons
- There are more channels to sell your ebook. Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Smashwords and much more.
- The cost to create books are very low and can be super quick.
- I can do it all by myself, no special skills required.
Here are the options to create the ebooks.
Ultimate eBook Creator
If you are planning to create your cookbook from scratch, this is a must have tool. You can add pages and design it the way you want. Although this could take some serious time and the result would be good.
A good tool for beginners, this also provides additional options to convert them into many other formats to publish it in other stores like Apple and Barnes and nobles.
Click here to start using ultimate eBook Creator
Calibre
This is a free tool that you can download and use for converting and formatting cookbooks. In this option, you can create your cookbook in a document and then convert that into epub and other format using this tool.
You cannot create a book from scratch using this tool. However, you can convert, test and make some changes to the existing books.
I use this tool a lot and definitely recommend this for your publishing needs.
Click here to download Calibre
Sigil
Another powerful tool and its free as well. You can create cookbooks from scratch but it requires some Html and CSS coding skills to get it perfect.
I used this tool to publish a couple of books. My approach is to get an existing formatted epub and then copy paste my content on it.
This way it is super easy and it only takes few hours to publish your book. It’s already formatted, tested and ready for publishing in kindle.
I certainly recommend this method, it is fast, simple to do.
Marketing Tools
Now that you have published your book in kindle. Let’s talk about tools that helps to sell the books.
When you publish your book in amazon, you will notice that nothing happens automatically. You need to push a little to start your selling cycle.
Kindle book submissions
One of those is submitting your book in many book sites as possible. This is like a directory service where your book would be featured on these sites and start getting some eyeballs on your book.
This tool helps to do that automatically. When I started doing it I did it manually and used some paid help as well, it is so much time consuming and a tedious process. With this tool, the whole process could be automated and quick.
The tool is called KDROI
I found this link where they are offering a steep discount on this software, I am sure it’s worth considering this tool at this low cost.
Social media sharing
Social sharing is one of the powerful strategies to get your book to sell well. I used this strategy to get one of my book a best seller.
Unfortunately, this is the most time-consuming task for everyone and is hard to do it consistently.
To share your content in many social media as possible and as often as possible is super hard.
I found this tool called Mass Planner and I am glad that I found it. It makes it super easy to share content in bulk in many social media all at once.
p.s. The tool is so powerful so use it with caution else you would lose your social media account if you start spamming a lot.
However, it is a must to have tool, to sell your books or anything in social media.
Click here to subscribe to Mass Planner
Email Marketing
I know you might have heard this a lot but many of us don’t have a lot of success with it.
The reason is in the way we use it.
Most of us are sending email in random and not targeting the content to the right people. And don’t see a good result from it.
That is the reason we need to use email automation. It is not a complex process to implement or would need special skills.
It is basically scheduling the emails in advance in a sequence to engage with your readers. Once the readers are engaged, you offer a product at the right time and sale happens.
We can use this technique to sell your cookbooks as well.
Follow these steps
- Define your target audience – Write down the characteristics of your audience, gender, age group, interest, and location.
- Write content that interests your target audience – If your target is mums then talk about parenting, helpful tips for child growth or recipes for kids. The one that catches their attention and is super useful for them.
- Create a sequence of emails that would keep them engaged – Keep publishing interesting content on a regular basis. It should be absolutely necessary to send more than one email to build the trust with your readers. Once you warmed them up and when they are looking for more then show your book for sale.
- Offer the book for sale – Create a compelling offer rather than saying “Hey buy my book” tell them the good reason and add bonuses if possible to make it a good deal. This will also make them happy with the purchase and will bring them back to you for purchasing more from you.
In order to do all these, you need a good email automation tool. I recommend
I recommend Aweber
A well established and a powerful email automation software and it is not that pricey compared to the competition. There are a lot of technical details involved when it comes to delivering your email to the subscribers, so it is crucial to sign up for a reliable one.
If you have less than 500 subscribers and test the automation feature, then you can try the Mailerlite
They get the job done and I see it’s growing its features lately. It’s free to try for a small list and gets tricky when the list grows.
For people with a larger list, I recommend something reliable like the Aweber. Remember you will never know which email is going to bring that viral effect and gets you a lot of sales.
Next steps:
If you made it to the end of this guide, then you are definitely ready to publish your cookbook soon.
All you have to do is to take the first step TODAY.
And I am going to make the first step super easy for you.
Just get all your courage and pick a date you want your book to be published and put that date in the comments.
Setting a goal is going to be the first step to making it a reality, so pick a random date and put that in the comment.
We together will make it happen.
Always remember you can reach out to me in case you are stuck somewhere. My success is in seeing you succeed.
Good luck and keep me posted.
The post 11 tools and techniques you need to publish a cookbook appeared first on Anto's Kitchen.
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