Bestselling Cookbooks from Non-traditional Publishers
I thought I'd take a break from writing about self publishing and take a look at a special class of cookbooks from non-traditional publishers, including subsidy presses. I used the Amazon Power Search to do this, with the query:
publisher: (iuniverse or authorhouse or xlibris or publishamerica or lulu or booklocker) and title: (cookbook or cook book or food or nutrition or cooking)
Some of the six publishers in the query market themselves as self-publishing companies, but as far as the industry is concerned, these are subsidy presses or non-traditional publishers. I'm not going to get worked up about labels, the key in this case is that they are the publisher of record on Amazon where we are doing the search.
I used title keywords in the search, since category and subject searches can get pretty flaky and I prefer the fine-tuning the title search allows. For the record, Amazon has 16,396 listings with "cookbook" in the title and just 3318 with "cook book", so I'm going with the more popular of the two in writing this.
The search string given above turned up 215 results, a smaller number than I'd expected given peoples love for food. The bestseller on the list was "Raw Foods For Busy People: Simple And Machine Free Recipes For Every Day" by Jordan Maerin and published through Lulu in 2004. With an Amazon sales rank of 2400, that's a commercially successful title by most standards. The next title on the list was "Zone Cooking Made Easy: 6 Weeks of Delicious Zone Balanced Meals" by Faye Hoffoss and published through Authorhouse in 2001. Next came "Eric Is Winning !!: Beating A Terminal Illness With Nutrition, Avoiding Toxins And Common Sense" by Eric Edney, published through Xlibris in 2004. Fourth we have a brand-new title, "Freezer Bag Cooking: Trail Food Made Simple" by Sarah Svien, also published through Lulu. I suspect this book would have ranked much higher if it was available new through Amazon, but unlike the other Lulu title, it isn't set up through Lightning Source. It could be the author didn't opt for distribution services, or the title could be so new that it just isn't fully set up yet. In fifth place was "Nicaraguan Cooking: My Grandmother's Recipes" by Trudy Espinoza-Abrams, published through Xlibris in 2004.
Just for grins, I re-ran the search without the publisher restriction, which turned up a whopping 90,311 titles. Then I started skimming down to see where our first non-traditional title appeared, and Jordan Maerin's Lulu published title came in at #38, well wittin the top 1%, actually in the top 1/2 of 1%. When you consider that our non-traditional published cookbooks list only included 215 titles, vs the 90,000+ from the more inclusive search, it's all the more impressive. Of course, many of the title from the inclusive search are long out of print, so I re-ran again with pubdate: after 1995. This cut the list in half, down to 47,764 results, but it's still clear that non-traditional publishers can boast a winner in this competitive genre despite the far large number of titles published, even on a proportional basis, by trade publishers.
publisher: (iuniverse or authorhouse or xlibris or publishamerica or lulu or booklocker) and title: (cookbook or cook book or food or nutrition or cooking)
Some of the six publishers in the query market themselves as self-publishing companies, but as far as the industry is concerned, these are subsidy presses or non-traditional publishers. I'm not going to get worked up about labels, the key in this case is that they are the publisher of record on Amazon where we are doing the search.
I used title keywords in the search, since category and subject searches can get pretty flaky and I prefer the fine-tuning the title search allows. For the record, Amazon has 16,396 listings with "cookbook" in the title and just 3318 with "cook book", so I'm going with the more popular of the two in writing this.
The search string given above turned up 215 results, a smaller number than I'd expected given peoples love for food. The bestseller on the list was "Raw Foods For Busy People: Simple And Machine Free Recipes For Every Day" by Jordan Maerin and published through Lulu in 2004. With an Amazon sales rank of 2400, that's a commercially successful title by most standards. The next title on the list was "Zone Cooking Made Easy: 6 Weeks of Delicious Zone Balanced Meals" by Faye Hoffoss and published through Authorhouse in 2001. Next came "Eric Is Winning !!: Beating A Terminal Illness With Nutrition, Avoiding Toxins And Common Sense" by Eric Edney, published through Xlibris in 2004. Fourth we have a brand-new title, "Freezer Bag Cooking: Trail Food Made Simple" by Sarah Svien, also published through Lulu. I suspect this book would have ranked much higher if it was available new through Amazon, but unlike the other Lulu title, it isn't set up through Lightning Source. It could be the author didn't opt for distribution services, or the title could be so new that it just isn't fully set up yet. In fifth place was "Nicaraguan Cooking: My Grandmother's Recipes" by Trudy Espinoza-Abrams, published through Xlibris in 2004.
Just for grins, I re-ran the search without the publisher restriction, which turned up a whopping 90,311 titles. Then I started skimming down to see where our first non-traditional title appeared, and Jordan Maerin's Lulu published title came in at #38, well wittin the top 1%, actually in the top 1/2 of 1%. When you consider that our non-traditional published cookbooks list only included 215 titles, vs the 90,000+ from the more inclusive search, it's all the more impressive. Of course, many of the title from the inclusive search are long out of print, so I re-ran again with pubdate: after 1995. This cut the list in half, down to 47,764 results, but it's still clear that non-traditional publishers can boast a winner in this competitive genre despite the far large number of titles published, even on a proportional basis, by trade publishers.
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