Cookbooks have become mainstream. It is the best selling segment of the market in most of the countries. For instance, in the US, cookbooks have become number one in libraries ahead of anything else, even fiction. So cookbooks have become more important than any other type of books.

The trends in cookbooks are very similar to books.

 

First: Publishers are losing and authors are winning in the share of how much money they are making. It gets more and more easy and more and more important for authors to do the work of the publishers. Therefore publishers have to work much harder to keep the authors. Actually the authors are finding out that they can make more money without the publishers. And it is a big temptation for all the authors to publish their own books. Especially in the western countries - United States, Australia and other countries authors are going private and self-publishing. In the United States it is now four self-published books to one book published normally. Five years ago there were less self-published books than normal books.

 

So publishers have to worry about their future. Not because of the ebook - they have to worry that the authors are going to beat them. The big authors do not need the publishers and the small authors are not wanted by the publishers. So if you are a small author and want to be published, you have to publish yourself because the publisher don‘t want to take the risk. And if you are a very big author you have to publish yourself to have a bigger share of the benefit.

 

The ebook and digital publishing are much less important for cookbooks than for the rest of the market. It is true for all practical books, gardening, health and so on. There are some apps that are very interesting, but it is not there yet. Nobody has found something that touches the public. Digital is less than one percent in the cookbook segment. For fiction, it has gone up to 8 to 10 percent.

The specific trends for cookbooks are very clear now. A very big section are wine books.

They sell extremly well and are increasing the most. For my own studies the sales for wine books have been multiplying by two in the last four years worldwide.

The second trend in the world of drink books is the matching of food and drinks. You see them all over the world.

For cookbooks in general the biggest trend is easy recipes. That is what sells: Recipes you can do at home. This segment is approximately half of the whole market. And it is a stable trend.

It is always important to include a touch of cooking quickly in all those books. People buy cookbooks for quick recipes and they want them to be easy, because they don‘t have any technique. That‘s for the authors and publishers something to think about. The people who cook don‘t understand the gastronomy word and know very little about what you learn in cookery schools. So authors and publishers have to be very careful about what they are doing.

Easy, quick recipes is really 50 percent of the cookbook market and then everything else has broken down in 50 to 60 categories.

 

What is new? Instead of being a vegetarian their whole life, people are going to eat vegetarian two or three times a week. The same with Italian or Asian cuisine. People eat the way they feel good and healthy .

When we are talking about trends we have to realize that there is a very big difference between the trends in the east and in the west.

 

When people in the west say that the meal is good, it means that it tastes good, is good to the mouth and stomach. In the east „The meal was good" means „It was good for my health". And this is completely different.

 

All the kids in China know what to eat if they feel sick in the stomach, have a flu or whatever. In the east the first role of food is for health not to fill up your stomach. This is important to understand.

If you do a cookbook in the west without thinking about health, it is very difficult to sell foreign rights to China, Japan or India. You have to be conscious of the health aspect.

 

The U.S. is still the number one market, but is also very strange for people from foreign countries. It is very closed to outsiders, difficult to sell there. The U.S. publishers don‘t buy books as they used to. The solution might be to avoid selling to bookstores and find your own selling-network via internet and other distribution ways. The idea of selling a foreign book to a US-publisher used to be good, because you could get advances of 50,000 to 100,000 dollars sometimes, but this is totally gone. The way to sell in America is via internet.

 

What about China? The retail price of a book is much smaller than in the west. At the same time you don‘t have the very big printings that people would expect in China. The first print of a book in China is more or less 6,000 to 10,000. That‘s for the first printing. If it works, they will sell a lot, but of course to very low retail prices and low printings compared to the population.

Other interesting markets are Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. France is also a very difficult market for foreigners. They translate very few books.

The German market is twice the UK and four times the French market. The Germans are used to have their own design and high quality books. This makes it difficult for foreigners. But Germany is buying foreign rights very openly.

 

Finally, I recommend the book "Merchants of Culture, the publishing business in the twenty-first century" by John B.Thompson (Polity, 2010).