From a box of recipe cards to a book on the shelf.

Three things move the number more than anything else: how many recipes there are, whether the interior prints in full color, and whether you need photography commissioned rather than supplied. A sixty recipe full color book with a commissioned shoot sits at a very different level from a hundred and twenty recipe text led book using your own images.

We do not publish a single package price for cookbooks, because the honest answer changes with the recipe count. After the consultation you get an itemized quote with every line broken out, so you can remove anything you would rather handle yourself.

A bare list of ingredients is generally not protected by copyright on its own. What is protected is your expression: the headnotes, the instructions written in your voice, the selection and arrangement of the collection, and the photographs and design. That is one of the reasons headnotes matter so much in a cookbook, and one of the reasons we spend editorial time on them.

General information about how cookbook copyright usually works, not legal advice. For your specific situation, speak to an intellectual property attorney.

No, but color photography changes how a cookbook sells, and readers do decide with their eyes. There are four routes and all of them work: a full commissioned shoot, a partial shoot covering only the hero recipes, illustration instead of photography, or a curated and retouched selection of images you already own.

If you shoot it yourself, we write the brief first so the images are consistent enough to sit together in one book. Inconsistent photography is harder to fix later than almost anything else.

Most trade cookbooks land between sixty and a hundred and twenty. Below sixty the book can feel slight at a normal price point, and above a hundred and twenty it starts to lose its shape unless there is a strong organizing idea holding it together.

Recipe count drives page count, page count drives spine width and unit cost, and unit cost drives your retail price. This is worth settling early. It is almost always better to cut ten weak recipes than to pad with them.

Every recipe in a published cookbook should have been cooked successfully by someone who did not write it. That is the standard, and it is what protects you from a one star review that begins with the words "the timing is wrong."

We work at three levels: a desk check for internal consistency, a structured test by a second cook, or full independent testing across a panel. Most first time authors choose the desk check plus testing on the recipes they are least sure about.

Longer than a novel of the same length, because photography and color proofing are sequential and cannot be rushed without showing. A straightforward text led cookbook moves faster than a photo led one, and a book that needs a commissioned shoot is paced by the shoot.

We give you a dated schedule with the plan at stage two, and the two things most likely to move it are photography and how quickly approvals come back from you.

Yes, and it is one of the most common places a family cookbook starts. We transcribe the cards, standardize the measurements, fill the gaps that every handwritten recipe has, and send you a query list for the things only you can answer, like what "bake until done" meant in your grandmother's oven.

Where a card is illegible or a step is missing, we flag it rather than invent it. Nothing goes into your book that you have not confirmed.

Major online retailers as print and ebook, wholesale catalogs that bookstores and libraries order from, and your own direct channels, which is where a cookbook author usually keeps the most margin per copy.

Print on demand covers the long tail with no inventory. If you want stock for events, markets, a restaurant counter or a farm shop, we can quote a short offset run alongside it.

Then you only pay for part of it. Plenty of authors come to us with a finished, designed book that needs print production sorted out, or with strong photography and no idea how to lay out a recipe page. Every stage on this page can be bought on its own.