Hello and welcome to another dose of my thoughts on blogging, entrepreneurship, and our industry in general. My goal with these newsletters is to help you feel less lonely in our space, and occasionally teach you something about self-publishing cookbooks.

let's chat -

The moment I had the idea for this cookbook, I knew it should be traditionally published. I know, sounds weird coming from someone who’s self-published two cookbooks and teaches a whole program about self-publishing cookbooks.

But I’ve never been anti-traditional publishing. There are just a lot of things I don’t like about it. Let’s break those down:

• The timeline. It takes sooo long to traditionally publish a cookbook. The typical timeline is 2 years.
• The lack of creative control. Ultimately, the publisher makes the creative decisions, from the design to the photography to the cover.
• The royalty split. The publisher keeps a good chunk of the change, and I wanted to keep those hard earned dollars.

So, why didn’t those things matter for this cookbook?

• I needed a long timeline for this cookbook. I was 6 months pregnant and had no intentions of working before my son was at least 3 months old. No rush this time!
• This book was not going to be a reflection of me or my brand. I was okay with giving up creative control because really, there was only one direction to go.
• I needed to share the workload without fronting the cost myself. I didn’t have the time to do the photography and design this time, or the project management for that matter. Not to mention, I was going to be taking a break from working for maternity leave, and did not want to hire out myself.
• I wanted this cookbook to be as widely distributed as possible, and that’s what the sales team at a publishing house does. In the case of this cookbook, the right person just needs to see it to know if they’d enjoy it or not. It needed to be everywhere!

It was easy to give up control of this book because it’s such a wild departure from me, my brand, and anything I’ve done before. In fact, my agent and I discussed making this “work for hire” or leaving my name off it entirely. We opted not to go that route in the end, but let’s be real: no one buying this cookbook is interested in Chelsea Cole, and I am just fine with that for this one!

I’m so glad I got the opportunity to work with a publishing house and really get a feel for the process. It’s been an amazing learning experience, and certainly informed how I’ll think about writing cookbooks going forward.

​A Feast of Thorns and Roses is available for pre-order and will be out April 1st!

Stay tuned - next I’ll be telling you about how the book deal came to be.
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talk soon,

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