SNM120: Turn Cookbooks into Mountains of Cash

speaker 0: 0:00 turning cookbooks in the mountains of cash on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by ECM. Rush started in 2008 with one mission to make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SCM Rush can help you compete with the big boys. Go to serve no master dot com backslash ECM rushed today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams Now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. The last couple of weeks, I've gotten a couple of a group of interesting messages, all asking me about cook books, books on Amazon.

Obviously I know a great deal about Amazon. Oh, we're gonna do it releasing books and actually do have a cookbook out there. I don't talk about very much, cause us is every good, but I'm gonna take you through that process. Hi. Really start booking. It does make money, but it's not like a masterpiece. Okay, is like a life changing book. I don't recommend you buy it and start cooking from. It's really it's only recipes as well for infant. So it doesn't really target you.

If you have teeth, you're too old for it. But I received these couple of messages from people across the spectrum. Some of the people who mess, he said, Oh, I thought about jumping into cookbooks, but I don't know anything about cooking. And someone else I'm talking with. The wedding with Now is one of the best cooks in America to enter the specter right Master chef. So what about cooking? I'm very much in that. It was very little about cooking.

A lot of my conversations are asking what certain terms mean because they're always different trends and cooking. You know, there's the paleo diet, and then there's other stuff. Then there's ketosis, which is like hot Cheetos really popular. Right now. There's a possibility. I've been talking to some friends about this about alkaline becoming the next trend. Indicting fat bombs is a popular term. I'd look up what that is like, Why wouldn't eat something called a fat book? That sounds horrible for me.

So there's all these things that, like an expert in cooking, would just know that I don't know my expertise, isn't it? Cooking my expertise isn't books, and I do know the process. And I was sure the process of creating a cookbook ing doing very well. Now the first thing I do not recommend going into it.

If you don't have the ability to create your own recipes or modify recipes or cook the dishes and take pictures, you have to have that love expertise in old method that someone I know used to teach. And I'm not gonna say who they don't teach anymore was to go to recipes dot com, find a bunch of recipes, then go find pictures either on guru or stock photo images that look close enough and create a cookbook that way. You know you have.

There is what I call a little light mare because every aspect of your book is stolen. You could actually those books did well for a while, and you could get away with it for a while, but eventually someone notices that you're still in a picture from their log your love ways of tracking that. Now they're actually to image tracking. Service is tonigh and Google it reverse image search, so you steal someone's image.

There's a very good chance he'll get caught eventually, even if the technology doesn't is this now, in two years, it might exist at the Olympics in Greece, they took everyone's blood and all these samples all the Olympic people, and said, We're gonna test your stuff as future tests get developed. So there are people who got a gold medal. Whatever the Greek Olympics work like 10 or 20 maybe 20 I think, was 10 years ago or something we're on.

Then five or 10 years later, their medals got taken away. When people retested the blood with more events, tests just cause you could get away with it now doesn't get away with it forever. And when you get caught on Amazon, you're messing with the beast there, one of the biggest companies in America. And when they blacklist you, they are un forgiving. You could try to sneak back on, and people do they go home and open an account in my wife's name and good luck.

They'll find you and they always d'oh! Very, very smart and everyone happy. That's right to catch you because guess what? When you're married to someone, you're so security numbers of tie to each other, you have the same mailing address. You probably use the same computer or you have used the same people in the past. If you've ever logged into Amazon from a computer and your wife has ever logged in using the exact same computer, even it was 10 years apart.

Amazon knows they keep a record of that and they go, No something going on here. And if they see enough signs of trajectory, they see enough signs that you might know a person. They have a manual check. A person goes and checks the two things and goes on you, and then you're done. You might fool the computer, but you won't feel a person, so I do not recommend going down that path for my cookbook.

What I did is I actually hired a grandmother to put together 25 recipes for me. She took all the pictures, which is why the picture. My cookbook actually aren't that great, but they're really don't have any plagiarism risks. It was totally original, and she took all the pictures and you could tell that she really took the pictures of real thing. She worked really hard. She's a great job.

Okay, when the many times I went hired someone on the outside, The reason I don't do a lot of cookbooks is hiring a cook, hiring someone who's been to. And I got bids from these people. Hired someone who's been Thio. Uh, what is it called? Not lost of a nun block. I think that's a wine, but there's, uh, whatever the famous cooking school in France is.

I had someone who had been there, even people who just got their graduated for them to do a cookbook for you. You're looking at 10 times more money instead of a couple $100 for like, a dozen recipes. You're looking at thousands of dollars, and there's a reason for that. They have the expertise. If you want to go into cookbooks, that's a route you can go that I actually think is viable. If you have the funds you have actually make all your money back for sure.

That's one way to do it. But I really recommend for cookbooks. Is people they're actually cooks themselves, even if your home cook. So that way you can make your own recipes, take your own pictures and create something that actually original after you tweet recipes and stuff. If you just copy and paste and I've seen this before, people will copy and paste a recipe, and then you recovered. Pay something like one little letters missing.

It changes a recipe when you mess up a letter, I've seen it before. It becomes the wrong food and wrong regiment teaspoon tablespoon when you have it as an initial as T. S, P and TSB. If you miss that last letter that beer that p, it changes what the measurement is, and the recipe becomes a kn viable so people try to make it. It won't work, and that's a nightmare when you get one of those reviews on Amazon and you're out of business.

So the process, though let's go to now the rest of the copy and sent my story. Let's go into the process now, actually launching a Cecil book on Amazon now the first step is creating your brand. It's so, so important. And this is something I've been talking to a couple of chefs that I talk to. You have to have a nickname and it could be. I've seen. There's the shredded Chef.

There's the Galloping Gourmet, There's the Naked Chef, There's The Barefoot Contessa and now I don't know what it contest. Iss M a task I meant to ask with chefs, I was talking to a trudge Google. It probably is Italian mom or something, but every good chef has a name now. The Galloping Gourmet was a chef when I was a young kid, and he was kind of well known. A little wine for the recipe in a little wine for the Chef.

So his show was a blast after the 1st 20 minutes started getting more and more fun. I've actually recently watching old episode, and that was hilarious. Lose the guy's having a really good time. So different chefs. There is the naked chef. You have this nickname. You can also build a brand around your product of your messaging, and you can invent your own diet and given a cool name a lot of these diets are all the same. They have different names. We call Whole 35 2 Diet.

There's different variations on Hey Leo and I told you you could even come up with one called the Alkaline Diet. That could be that hasn't got really popular yet, but I think it's coming. And of course, any doctor or a serious chef knows that. That's all. That's all just words. So having a brand or having something about your books is very, very important, because if it's just called like Italian cooking, it's very hard to stand out from the crowd.

And as a chef, we want you as someone doing cookbooks you want to create a Siri's. The money comes from continuity from the branding is you have to have something that sticks. Everything I do is call to serve no master so that it's easy to remember if you Google serve no master, everything like the 1st 10 pages of Google's All Me. I think you used to be. When I first started out, there was some competition, but that's all gone because there's I mean, there's a band.

I think there was a band called Serving a master in early two thousands. I think there's a song called Master. Their Idea. Japanese. Well, there's a couple of things that exist that came before me that used the same phrase, but they never tip their became famous. And so my job is to create as much real estate. So my Facebook page or Twitter, my linked in and stuff all comes up first.

If you type in nets, you want to be someone who's usually search will easily remember well and create a brand, and it can come from different things. It doesn't have to be always super positive. It could be kind of neutral. The naked chef, I don't think cooks naked, you know, I've never seen him on TV naked, so you just create a name, and whatever it is, it's something helps you remember it. Also, it could be your cooking style.

That's gonna be the name of your serious, but it depends where you want to go. If you want to be a chef who gets TV shows and kind of goes in that direction, Having a chef name was very, very valuable. Once you've worked on your branding, Step two is to know your expertise. There are chefs who know everything about baking. As you know, I had those TV shows where people just make cupcakes or just make cakes. And baking is very different than cooking.

So if you watch, like cooking TV show cooking movies, people are experts in different aspects of the kitchen because it takes a long time to master it. Just like in the Shaolin Temple, there's different weapons. You know, there's the sticks and the circles and the different swords. Nobody knows how to use all of them. Most people are master of one different weapon because it takes a really long time to learn it. It's the same thing for cooking.

That's why people who do chocolate on Lee do chocolate to become a master chocolate tier. And yes, I've watched the national championships on TV kind of boring because it's a little slow. They're not talking. They're so focused. But the ending is really cool. Watching the final part of their creations and stuff. That's amazing. They're people that only know how to work in one thing, so I know what you're good at. Your expertise could be breakfast. Your expertise could be cooking for guests. Now that's great.

That's actually a really wide open market right now. Event cooking. There's a couple of new event categories and Amazon. I'm very excited about that air blowing up there really wide opportunity. How to cook for your family on Thanksgiving. Had it fixed your family on Christmas. How have an emergency dinner? One of the ideas I've been swirling is, and this probably project to do with where the chefs that I'm talking to him right? I pitched this idea to him. Hope he likes it.

Probably three or four books and serious is the idea of your wife or husband home. Whatever you get to call like three o'clock from your spouse and okay, I'm coming home and bring the boss. And the boss is bringing his wife, whose husband whatever. Okay, that moment where you've gotta put together like an awesome dinner, But there's not that much time on the clock. You got two or three hours to put it all together, which include shopping, preparation, making a look awesome.

And there's this feeling when you have one of those dinners, you have to impress my family well in the middle of nowhere. But We did one of those dinners less, maybe a year, year and 1/2 ago. I still remember it because we put so much effort into it, and this is just for two people that we just met. There were just neighbors are visiting for a little while, but I think that's a really cool space. It's kind of space that's growing at Amazon.

There's not a specific category for it, but the categories of last minute cooking the categories of emergency cooking in the categories these areas are growing, so there's a lot of ways you could become an expert. It doesn't have to just be healthy. Can be okay. Health is a very strong spaces. Well, but finding your expertise in tiny rant it can all make sense.

You could have been me, the emergency chef, The last minute chef and the cover of your cookbooks could look like that box that says Break glass in case of emergency. And that could become your branding. That's just one of my ideas. More welcome to steal it, Of course, a 50 people. Let's step aside, all steal it, then you suddenly create your own market. But that could be your branding. That could be your area of expertise.

Now the third step of becoming Korean cookbooks is to draw a line in the sand you cannot cook for. Everyone are several schools of cooking thought one end of the spectrum is absolute healthy. I want time bought. When I was younger, I wanted to build a healthy about the American Heart Association Cookbook. The recipes were dog food. I would say they were designed to taste horrible, so every time when it was like tastes a little better or be a little healthier, they always air towards healthy.

And you end up with the recipes that basically rescues. A doctor tells you you have to go on after two or three heart attacks. So they created cookbook that just tastes terrible. And if you have that couple who worked on it, I'm sorry. But you know, I'm telling the truth. So I was not the target market.

Okay, you could find where your line is on the spectrum faras healthiness as faras flavor as faras specific moves there, people that swear by soupy and people that hate Sufi if you don't know what Sylvia's, it's coming soon. He is about to become a very, very hot topic and cookbooks as well. There are already two cookbooks in the topic, trending recently. Someone invented about 2 2.5 years ago at Home Sylvia Machine, which is new. They were even on Shark Tank recently, even on the television show.

So how they raise a bunch of money. So it's growing. I actually have a friend who owns one was asked about it. Go Hey, you're a cook. Do you have this at home? So everything's I actually d'oh So that could be an area that's growing. I've never had anything cooked. Masoudi I actually didn't know how to spell until I looked it up. It's s o U s of the i. D. I hope that's still right.

That's I remember looking at the other day, but that was your thing. You could be the I hate servi or the I only used to be person. Fine. There are a lot of people really hot. Topic is Crock pots are slow cooking. I don't I've never owned one of those. I don't know how those devices work. I don't understand the idea of pressure cooking. I mean, I know use pressure to make diamonds. See, I'm willing to share with you a little bit. My ignorance.

I don't know a lot about cook. I know some basic things I know a lot about stir frying. I know a lot of Asian cooking that's inside my wheelhouse. You know, I've actually made my own egg rolls. I've made my own a lot of Asian dishes that are pretty complicated I've made. But when it comes to these complicated Western European devices, it's simply not something I really learned you. I lived in Japan for a long time. I've lived in Asia now for almost five years.

That's what I know about. So those types of devices I know a little bit better. I know that the best part of a take is a cheek. I know that if you live in Japan when you're a guest, they offer you. You have to eat it because it's considered the delicacy of the best part.

But I don't know how to operate a severe machine, Okay, but you can become someone when you have to say, become someone who really is clear about what you are for what you're against. There are a lot of diets out there, you can say, Look, I'm really against these diets. I have a problem with these systems and here's why. I don't think they're good for you.

I'm against no carb arm against five to I'm against hold 30 Whatever you can pick once and say, This is what I believe in. This is what I don't and your recipes fall that light, And that way people will become bigger believers in you. You don't want to just be generic cookbook because guess what?

If I want to learn how to do French cooking, I noted by the Julia Child's book, If I just want a generic super hard French cooking book, okay, there's no reason for me to buy a newer book because there's a book out that has, I think, three or 42 recipes in it. What am I ever gonna really want to make my own aspect? Probably not. It's very advanced cooking, but you can't just be generic cause it's not enough because there are two generic answers.

So it's about being a specialist. That's what people get excited by the brand and the things you stand for, things you believe in. There's a reason I talk about my perspective and education all the time, and I don't hate teachers. I was a teacher for 10 years. My problem is the system and the rules for what teachers are allowed to do. I think actually, people who go into teaching, they should be treated the way they're in Japan and Japan. Being a teacher is revered.

If people know you're a teacher and you walk down the street, they treat you with respect. They bowed you, their honored to talk to you. They're honored, have you in the store. They'll give you discounts and treat you with respect its opposite of America. And it's unfortunate there's a reason that jabs you are so smart and that's one of them. That's why I love teaching high school there for two years, so but I have my clear stance. I don't believe college is very good.

Lot of it's because of ships in the market and ships and what they teach In college, I've lived more skill based, learning in and measuring success in different ways, the most educational systems. But I'm very clear about how I stand. In fact, a lot of my followers, a surprising large percentage of my fans or high school principals and high school teachers. You think those people would hate me, but they don't because I think what they do is the thought of being a high school principal.

That's like the hardest job I could imagine. I can't think of anything more stressful than having 500 kids that you're in charge of making sure they don't hurt each other, hurt themselves or do something stupid. And that means 1000 parents who, at any given time, at least one of them is always mad at you. That's a lot of stress, of a lot of pressure that I couldn't do.

But because I have a clear line in the sand about what I believe in, what I don't I don't hide stuff I've mentioned quite a few times. I don't like when entertainment podcasts become political. I think it's inappropriate thing. It's dumb. I was trying to listen today, actually had to delete whether podcast I was listening to, because the stuff they were saying was so inappropriate yet again.

These guys who have a podcast, they were talking about a movie they started about two people who weren't in the movie. They started hating on one actor because of his political views. At the same time, they have no problem there actor who actually did something horrible to a child. And when I say that hormone he was convicted. Okay, for me, don't talk about politics if you're gonna be that much of a hypocrite, and I also don't think it's appropriate.

I don't talk about political views on this. Podcast was not a political thing. It's on it all. My political view is make money wherever you want, but I guess that's my politics. So when I see things that I don't like, I talk about them. I have my lines in the sand, and when you have those as a cook, they're very valuable. I believe in this. I don't believe in that. Have a big problem. Paleo Tell me why Have a big problem with Tito?

Tell me why that's really valuable. You could be the anti trend cook. That's fine. Once you've drawn your line your sand, you need to figure out what you can sell your audience and when I mean there is, ask people what they want and then give it to them. If you have an existing audience of people who buy cookbooks, that's what you really need. An audience of buyers or audience people who at least they're grabbing recipes off your blogged.

If you have a over 1000 people once have 1000 people. You can really get good polling data. Just say, Hey, where do you really struggle in the kitchen? What would be your perfect cookbook? And you could discover a lot of things that for some people, the perfect cookbook is the Bachelor in his twenties, Man's guide to healthy but delicious eating.

There's a group of people that's all they want, And if your audience turned out to be 22 to 25 year old single guys, that's the book they want. However, if your audience is all 32 year old first time mothers who all have 3 to 5 year old Children, they probably wanna cookbook. That's about how to deal with a fussy eating child. As my daughter is about to turn four next week, one of the things we deal with is the challenge of her fussy eating.

Her mother is an amazing inner She grew up very close to the Earth, very natural and not because she's a hippie or environmentalist, but because she grew up in an environment where you grow your own animals and grow our own food. Not by choice, but by necessity. So she eats fish. It's very healthy. I don't even a fish. I wish I could give me a better fish eaters. I'm not so healthy. So I want my daughter to follow. My wife isn't You're not me.

Now eat okay. I eat better than 99% of Americans and I eat better than I have for most of my life. But I would say I'm a B B minus on my diet. My wife's in the A minus to a rate. She's not perfect, either. No, it's perfect. It's just way better than me.

So deal with the fussy eating child is something I'm very aware of it in touch with now because my daughter hated taste until about a month ago, so the main thing she would eat if you came into our house, you would think we were monsters. She mostly likes to eat plain white rice on a plate with some water under it. So not only is it white rice, it's like watering. And the other thing she likes to eat is ramen without the flavor packed.

Put it so you come to the house. It looks like Oh my God, she's people repeating their daughter, playing Robin and plain white rice where they monsters. Is she in jail? But you will put like anything else in front of it. She'd throw it away and she wouldn't like the taste. She hated the flavor of everything she learned to, like, catch up a little bit six months ago. But again, that's not very sophisticated. Saw says it.

So that's something that we've gone through, and even now she's beginning to enjoy new flavors. She's actually entering the next phase, which is exciting, but your audience will have different needs. So ask them. What they want is very valuable, because everyone's different things. You might find that your whole audiences paleo, in which case you'll have to go look up what paleo means, because I don't know all of the rules. I know it's supposed to be eat like a cave man, but I know he came in.

I think it's only eat meat and vegetables. But about, huh? Never said so. You looked up. The other thing you could do is to gather intelligence. So you actually reverse in here. If you don't have an audience, you take your expertise. You look on Amazon. Find those books that are doing well within your area of expertise. So if your area of expertise is hola or any other type of something really specific, right, so you look for the file.

Let's just settle you look at the five Best. A long coat looks at what you look for us. The books that are making the most money right, the most successful ones. And then you can look at them and see what types of recipes they have, what type of audience they have. How many recipes? Aaron. A book. Very important. Ready 10 or during 500. What percentage of the book is stories? And what percentage of the book is content?

Do you need the part at the front of the book? We explain your measurement systems. Do you have to teach people at the front of your book the precursor ingredients, For example, with an Asian cookbook, you can after the beginning. Explain how to make chicken stock or how to make certain sauces that then become a key ingredient in the recipe.

How to make red bean paste People know where they don't know, and if you don't know how to do it, you can't have a recipe where that's ingredient. You have to teach you to front the book, so you need to know the sophistication of your audience. And you could find that by just looking at the competition. Go. Okay, here's these other books or doing. Here's what they have here, so they don't have you read the reviews and you say, Here's your luxuries of people didn't love.

As you can gather competitive intelligence, you could gather impression on your audience without having the audience yourself. Yet this is what I do in every other market. You can also look and see what's working better in your space is at a health book or a cookbook. A lot of books about fighting diabetes start off with a lot of principles and end up with 50 or 100 recipes of the back 21 day cooking guide.

I know this because I've worked on a lot of projects, so these were really, really big space is one of the spaces. Is eating well after 40 you up for 15 after 60 being healthy in your sixties? That might be a total health book rather than just a cookbook. So this will help you to determine the path you're gonna take in what you write. What you create in order to take your book across the finish line covered a lot of ground. We're almost there.

The next idea is planning outta Siri's. The only way you're ever gonna make money just having multiple books or having other revenue streams. What are you going to sell the people after they buy your book? If you only have one cookbook and it's all the way, you're driving revenue. Every single dollar you make is from a brand new person. You have to constantly be in customer acquisition. It's almost impossible for you to monetize.

But if you have 10 cookbooks, someone comes in there by 10 7 making $5 per customer. You want making 10 20 or 50 and that can help you be much more profitable, or what you can do is have a cookbook And then when people go to your website, they could pay more and get the video versions of each lesson. And now that I've said that, I wish, I think that's the one thing that's not in my notebook today. I wish I thought about the other day.

I'm actually gonna email one of the chefs I'm talking to in five minutes and tell him that exact idea because I think it's actually brilliant. Some people learn by hearing some people are by seeing that's a great way to have something else. Or you can sell T shirts or you consult sauces having something else. You're gonna go in the back end. That's how you can have an eye to profit in the future. I know we've had a little bit of a long lesson today.

I'm pretty excited. Hopefully, the background was hasn't been too much, but I think this is really, really valuable. So you've been thinking about going into cookbooks. This is how you could do it. And that's how you can turn cookbooks into cold, hard cash. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race.

Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Follow me at facebook dot com Backslash serve no master.