Earlier this year, publishing house Penguin Michael Joseph snapped up a new cookbook by 13-year-old Buddy Oliver – son of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. As well as being Jamie’s son, Buddy has his own YouTube cooking channel (Cooking Buddies) with over 130k followers, and has worked hard to position himself as an attractive deal for a cookbook publisher.
But what about cookbooks more generally? With so many people turning to search engines and cooking blogs for recipes and cooking inspiration, does the cookbook market have a future?
A decade ago, there was a general assumption that cookbooks would soon be extinct. They’d be replaced by more convenient electronic devices – because storing and using paper books in the kitchen would surely become too awkward in comparison to digital recipe solutions.
And yet…cookbooks are very much still around. In fact, around 20 million cookbooks are sold every year. Sales in the US saw a 16% spike in the first year of the pandemic, which dropped off again when lockdown restrictions eased – but the market stabilised at pre-pandemic levels very quickly.
A survey by the International Association of Culinary Professionals found that most people buy two or three cookbooks every year, and 12% of those people buy four or more. While 30% buy cookbooks as gifts for other people, 70% buy for themselves; which makes sense when half of all cookbook buyers say they cook at home at least once per week.
While some standout celebrity chef-turned-authors do make significant returns from their books, the majority of cookbooks aren’t providing a solid income for their writers. After being paid an advance by a publishing house, the author doesn’t make any more income from the book until after it has ‘earnt out its advance’ – meaning the publishing house has recuperated the cost of paying that author advance, via sales of the book.
For many authors, this never happens. When it does, the author begins to receive a small percentage of the profits from book sales.
But even when the author is receiving royalties and making a reasonable income from the book, the work involved is immense: from creating and testing recipes to developing imagery and food photography; and then intensive marketing post-publication; a cookbook author’s workload is real. The majority of authors don’t set out to make a living from writing cookbooks – their books are a labour of love, or part of a wider marketing campaign for their food or cooking brand.
Yes. While the market itself remains stable, the types of cookbooks that are being published and sold are changing over time.
Today, there are fewer cookbooks that are straight-up how-to guides, and more that are aspirational, beautiful pieces of food art. The market demands cultural explorations of food; artful storytelling, one dish at a time; and a journey through the author’s own life experiences, told through the food they cook.
As more and more people turn to digital sources for how-to information, we expect to see the cookbook market continue to move in this direction: away from simple recipe guides, and towards art.
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