Two Roads Diverged: Understanding Traditional and Self-Publishing Differences

Posted by Todd Rutherford on March 6, 2010

Cookbooks have emerged as a very popular book choice in recent years. With the emergence of cable channels for cooking, alongside a growing interest in all things culinary in the country, cookbooks have been flying off the shelves in recent years. However, they are a very special form of book writing, and they have their own special requirements.

The traditional publishing path of the past has been described similarly by many sources. Write a book, send query letter and/or book proposal to agents, get picked up by an agent, get sold by agent to a small-to-medium-size publisher, pray that your book takes off and garners attention from a big publisher who pays you a six-figure advance in return for the rights to your book.

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent with Curtis Brown, discusses going from small presses to big publishers. I agree with many of his points on the difficulties of being recognized by a big publisher. His advice is very similar to my premise, if your book is really good, well edited, designed, printed, distributed, and promoted, it will succeed.

2. Understand the tradeoffs between narrow and broad focus: In recent years, there has been a trend in non-fiction, referred to as the “noun” books. These are books written about very narrow and commonly found “things” in our lives, such as salt, coal, and water. This would be thought of as a narrow focus, as opposed to books that cover the subject of say war, work, and economics. Narrow-focused books typically require a lot of highly detailed research. They offer depth. Broader- focused books, on the other hand, offer breadth, and sacrifice some of the details in the process.

Photographs are a huge component of cookbooks. Not only to do they help the reader to visualize how a recipe is supposed to look when complete, they are inspiring and often beautiful to look at when done well.

4. Read: The writing of great non-fiction is about 10% writing, and 90% researching, thinking, and reading other works. If you follow the first tip above, then this part will be the labor of love in the process of writing your non-fiction book.

Learn more about self publishing. Stop by Todd Rutherford’s site where you can find out all about book proposal template and what it can do for you.

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