What It Really Takes to Publish a Cookbook with Erin Clarke from Well Plated by Erin

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are thrilled to welcome back Erin Clark from the Food Blog, well Plated by Erin. Chances are you are familiar with Erin because she is an OG food blogger and we had her on the podcast over nine years ago. At that time, she joined us to chat more about rebranding her food blog, but today she’s here to talk about publishing a cookbook. Erin has published two cookbooks, the Well Plated Cookbook, and more recently well Plated Every day. In this episode, she dives into the behind the scenes journey of traditionally publishing a cookbook. Erin explains why a compelling cookbook proposal is essential in the cookbook publishing process. She shares more about how it helps you effectively pitch to publishers and how it forces you to test out your concept and whether or not you’re really up to the challenge of writing a cookbook.

Yet she also talks more about the patience and consistency required to publish a cookbook and how it can be challenging to adjust to the timeline of publishing a cookbook after you’re used to the timeline of social media, email marketing and sharing recipes on your blog. Bjork and Erin also chat about the marketing side of cookbook creation, how Erin mapped out her social media strategy, how she documented the cookbook process in social media, and how she created excitement to drive sales and her audience that it was worth paying for a cookbook when they were used to getting her recipes for free. Even if you’re not sure that writing a cookbook is something you might be interested in, this is a really awesome episode for just thinking through marketing strategy, sales, and how to refine your recipe development process. Without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Erin Clarke: So happy to be here, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, welcome back to the podcast. The first time that we talked in the podcast was nine years ago, which we are approaching the mark now where we can have decade long conversations with creators. It was back in 2016. We were talking about the process of rebranding your site and just what that was like, the considerations with that. So give us the quick little, if anybody wants to go back and listen to that, they can give us a quick little snippet into what that season was and what you were rebranding from and to.

Erin Clarke: Yes. Well, sometimes I like to pretend that this side of my blog did not exist. Kind of like how we might discover some of our old photos and be like, what did I actually take that? But when I started my blog in the dinosaur ages, it was called the Law Student’s Wife. It was on blogger, and I just started it as a random hobby after I got married and apparently was very excited about that and my husband Ben, started law school. We moved and I was so bored and didn’t know anyone, so I started my blog as a way just to kind of chronicle my adventures. It wasn’t even entirely recipes at that point, and blogging was very small back then. I feel like it was almost a different, it was in a lot of ways a different internet and just being along for the ride and seeing how all of us that kind of started back then went from these one woman, one man shows into having what I almost feel like the word blog hasn’t caught up with what we do now.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. I’m

Erin Clarke: Always trying to figure out how to explain to people what I do. I run a recipe website and a media outlet. We all wear so many different hats, and for me, when I rebranded two well Plated, that was when I was ready to take my blog full time. That was when income started to become a possibility. You guys on Pinch of Yum started sharing your income reports, which I know was super motivating for a lot of people, myself included. And so I felt like I needed a name that could take what was a hobby and turn it into a brand. And really everything I’ve done since then, I think you can view through that lens. And it’s been incredibly interesting for me having started way, way back in the day when what we were doing was sharing personal stories to live through this period where then suddenly we weren’t supposed to be about the personal story.

It was all supposed to be about the information and the SEO, and now we’re almost coming back to where it was at the beginning where we are trying to get into that human side of things again, and that is what can set websites apart. So I mean, I hate to use the word journey because I feel like we throw it around a lot and it feels really trite, but it is, I think the best way that we can recap where we have all been and express the idea that we try to figure out where we’re going, but we ultimately have no idea, especially,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s such a truth to the multiple iterations, multiple chapters, and what it requires is continually showing up and being willing to shift, change, adjust, look for other revenue opportunities. We’re going to be focusing on talking about a cookbook, but what I would like to point out is what a massive success that rebrand and then the decade of work has been for you. You have a site that gets multiple millions in page views. You’ve published multiple cookbooks, and I think at this point, one of the things that’s so great to have these conversations with people who have been creating for decades is it’s like a living example of what we often talk about, which is people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. And it’s fun to have some of these relationships and connections where people have been creating for a decade.

And when you do that, you can create a really significant thing, not only from the reach, but also from a revenue perspective. You have multiple full-time employees on the team, but it all starts with the seed of an idea. And for you, it was this almost like journal that evolved into a business that has now evolved into multiple different things. On the podcast, we talk a lot about the world of search, the world of SEO, the world of traffic, of which you would have a lot of advice and insight on that maybe we’ll have to have you back on talk about that. But today we’re going to be talking about cookbooks. Tell us a little bit about, and to speak the word journey, your cookbook journey. I know that you’ve had some experiences there, and then we will talk through best practices, mindsets and expectations as it relates to cookbooks.

Erin Clarke: So I want to point out that I went the traditional publishing route, and that is where you have an agent, you write a proposal that goes out to publishers. You have all the phone calls with editors, and then ultimately in the dream scenario, multiple editors are interested in your book. You bid on it, you have phone calls with each other and kind of feel out, okay, do I want to work with you? Do you want to work with me? And then at the end of the day, you have a deal and you write a cookbook. So that was the route that I went. It is a very long process, and that was something that, and I think this is kind of how I would summarize a lot of writing a cookbook. You hear things and we don’t have children, but I imagine there are probably some similarities to having kids in that. You hear that it’s really hard, you hear that it’s going to be a struggle to balance things and that you’re going to be working all the time, and you know that intuitively, but you really don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: You don’t know what it feels like.

Erin Clarke: And I will say it is just as hard and terrible as everyone says it is, but it’s also one of the best and most rewarding things that I’ve ever done.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about when the hard parts of it is it, if you had to boil it down to a few things, what about it makes it so hard?

Erin Clarke: I think just print in general. It is a very different medium. When we publish recipes online, the feedback is swift and it is direct. If people liked your recipe, if they didn’t, if you forgot to say when to add the extra edition of kosher salt, Martha in Oklahoma has made it, and Martha is going to let you know a set, and then it’s a real easy fix. You just pull up that recipe card, you apologize to Dear Martha, and then we all fix it. You fix it, and you move on with your life. Print is forever. And so as someone that is a perfectionist, that was a really big, it felt like a burden for me almost to the point that I really got into some places where it was practically debilitating because I was so hyper fixated on not making mistakes. So that I think is just the biggest thing straight off the bat.

You also have to remember there’s no immediacy in cookbook publishing. So from the day when I wrote my first book from the day I turned in my completed manuscript, all of the photos, it was 12 months before that book could hit shelves, and since then, that was pre pandemic that I turned it in. Then when my second book came out, that timeline had shifted to be more between 12 and 14 months just with the way that supply chains had changed post covid. So no, I love the immediate gratification of blogging, and granted, it’s not quite as immediate as it used to be. When blogging was me taking a photo of our dinner with my Verizon flip phone underneath our kitchen light right before we ate and then uploading it the next morning, that was immediate. Now we have a little more lead time with more robust recipe testing. A lot of us outsource our photography, but still you can reasonably get a blog post up, but then if you really rush things, you could probably do it within a week with the recipes that you’re developing for your book. Those come out at least a year later. Realistically, it’s two years after you’re developing them because you develop them, you write the book, you turn it in, you edit the book, you print it. And so there’s this need to think about the timelessness of your recipes versus the trendiness of recipes. And that is a really important consideration with your recipe selection as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the things I know Lindsay talks about that she loves so much as a creator is you have an inspired thing that you are creating. You’re excited about it, you share it with your audience, they react to it that exists, and then you move on to the next thing. And even for her, if she has a recipe that she created three months ago and now she’s publishing it, it’s kind of like this is no longer an inspired piece of content to her because she’s onto the next thing that she’s excited about. So I would imagine that part of the difficulty is even going back to these recipes that are two plus years old, a year plus old, depending on when you publish it and being re-inspired around those recipes to reshare those or to talk about them in an excited way. Can you talk about almost like the marketing component of what it looks like to have a cookbook and the things that you learned along the way as it relates to the marketing of it?

Erin Clarke: After I finished my first book, which sold really well, I was done. I wrote that book being like, this was my one and done. I gave everything that I had to, it has all my personal stories. I gave a hundred percent to my marketing plan. I did it all. I’m tired, I’m done. And then couple years later,

Bjork Ostrom: You kind forget.

Erin Clarke: Yeah, you kind of forget. And then I just felt this, for me, books have always been a really wonderful creative outlet because you don’t have to write for SEO, you get to call a recipe whatever you want. And the focus is just, for me, it was like, is this one of the most delicious things I’ve ever cooked? I feel good about someone spending money on it and is it going to delight and teach? And so having that be the focus of writing a book is really fun. Ultimately, I did come around and decide to write a second book one because I felt like I had just more creative ideas that I wanted to share. It started as just this little note on my phone that was like, absolutely, this is not a book. But

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the seed of the idea, but it might be someday.

Erin Clarke: And then fast forward, that note is like 200 recipes long. I was like, I think it’s time to write another book.

Bjork Ostrom: But

Erin Clarke: I just realized it was so much easier the second time around because I had learned so much with my first book. And I’ll say, if you are an organized type a person that is really going to help you write a book, because the amount of documentation that I did and consistency to help me along the way, really paid dividends when it came time to bust out and execute, especially the marketing plan, because at that point, I had a team that was helping me get things out on social and stick to a schedule. And so having all of that laid out was incredibly impactful.

Bjork Ostrom: This was a team that you had an internal team, it wasn’t like the publisher.

Erin Clarke: Correct. The internal team. And so I will say that just to touch on the marketing, a nice thing about going the traditional publishing route is that if you have a larger publisher, so I publish both of my books with Avery. They are an imprint of Penguin Random House, so they have very robust resources. Your PR person will get you in touch. They’ll be kind of a connector to some of the larger platforms. So for example, with both my books I did Good Morning America, I had some features in People Magazine, Midwest Living, things like that. Those big publications, your PR person at your publisher will pitch you to those. But when it comes to selling the copies, it ultimately is on you, the author to sell your own book, which is in some ways incredibly frustrating because you already are taking a much smaller cut of the book sales than your publisher is, and you have to sell it on top of that. It’s like, yes, actually you do. I like to tell people that are thinking about it once you turn in the book, you’re halfway done.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Which I’m sure a lot of people are at the point where they’re just burnt out, they’ve been working hard on it, they feel like they’re finally done. It’s like, well, actually this isn’t a half marathon. It’s a full marathon and you’re at mile 13.

Erin Clarke: Yes, exactly. What I did for my marketing plan was I studied what other bloggers did that had successful cookbook releases. I made this whole plug and play spreadsheet and I wrote down all different kinds of promotional things that they did on their blogs, on their social media, and I backed out the number of weeks that it was from their release date. And then I developed this super plan with a formula where I could type in my publish date and then it would spit out when we needed to have each of these posts

Bjork Ostrom: Done. Oh, wow.

Erin Clarke: And that plan took me a really long time to put together, but then it just gave us a roadmap to follow. And that was so helpful because when it’s approaching launch date, it is just a hot mess. Everybody’s all up in your inbox. There’s so many different things to keep track of. And having that was really useful. And then when I wrote the second book, I could, there were so many systems that I put into place with the first book that I could then wash and repeat with the second one.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. What in that process was most helpful? Was there something in the marketing plan that you had that you could point to and say, this was one thing that I’m really glad that I did.

Erin Clarke: Writing all of the captions in advance and picking out all of the assets in advance. So I had a Dropbox folder. I’d set up a campaign, like each kind of promotion, I called a campaign, and every single one of those had a folder with, if it was a carousel, it had all the recipes uploaded to it. If it was a reel, we put the reel there. We wrote out all the captions beforehand. I have a copywriter on my team, she’s great. So she helped me write some of it. And then I personally wrote a lot of them too, just because it was just like cookbooks are so intensely personal to me, and I had something really specific that I wanted to say,

Bjork Ostrom: And

Erin Clarke: That was instrumental in helping us get the posts up in a timely manner. And also was really helpful because I had taken all of the, I hired a photographer and did a variety of different promotional photos with me holding the book, things like that. And I didn’t have to say, wait, okay, which ones have I shared? Which ones have I not shared? Which did we put into emails? Which did we not? I just had them all in a giant folder, and then I literally dragged them into these different campaign folders so that when it was time to go, we could just run with it.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s so awesome. It reminds me of that idea of, we’ve talked about this before, but if you’re cutting down a tree and it’s like spend and you have eight hours, spend seven hours sharpening the ax and then one hour actually cutting the tree, it feels similar in that you’d think the work is pressing publish and sending the stuff, but it’s actually the critical thinking around planning and preparing. Where is stuff going to go? What is it going to be? When is that going to get launched? As opposed to showing up each day and being like, okay, what should I share today? But that’s hard work to do because it’s not urgent in the moment. Whereas creators, we always have these urgent things that could be done. So can you talk about what it was like to both write a cookbook, but then also to keep the day-to-day going with all of the stuff that you’re publishing online?

Erin Clarke: I mean, something’s going to give, and I will say that I absolutely went through some really low periods where I felt so down because I just felt like I was failing at everything. Because when you have a million things to do, you can’t do everything well. So I felt like I was showing up halfway to my blog. I was showing up halfway to my cookbook. I was barely showing up at all at home. The fact that I managed to write a second cookbook without getting a divorce is great, feeling very, very

Bjork Ostrom: Accomplished. It’s on your LinkedIn

Erin Clarke: And having supportive family and friends and Ben is super supportive. That obviously goes a huge way. But I think communicating to your team, to your friends and family that this is a really stressful time. Here is why. Please grant me some grace really can go a long way. I also found that for me to work effectively, I needed to have days where I was doing entirely blog or I was doing entirely cookbook. My original thought was, okay, well I’ll do my well plated blog work during the day, and then in the evening I can test recipes for the book. But it was almost just two different mentalities that I needed to be in, and I had a lot more success where I just really nailed it in. So when I got to the phase where we were testing the recipes, I had, I don’t normally work with a kitchen assistant, but for when I’m testing cookbooks, I do.

And I worked with the same one for both. My friend Maggie, she is amazing. I now cannot imagine doing this book without her. But we would test 10 recipes a day. We would be testing five for the first time, and five would be a repeat of ones that we had tested the week prior. And so I would spend usually a day writing all 10 recipes, like researching those, working on them, getting the groceries, and then we would have an entire day where we tested and then I would spend about half of the next day recording all of our notes and any changes that I wanted to make for the following time. And then, so we always did that five old, five new every single week until we finish the book. And I would say that was probably a six, pretty intense six month process of testing everything. And that was the only way that made it so much more efficient than when I would kind of do one-offs here or one-offs there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s like laser focused on the single task at hand as opposed to trying to fit it into the margins here and there. When you do that though, naturally what’s going to happen is you aren’t going to be doing the things that you otherwise would’ve been doing that day. And to your point, you probably have to scale back in order to do something else. I would imagine some people go in with the mindset of, Hey, I’m going to do this cookbook, but I’m also going to continue to publish at the same frequency. And to your point, it’s like you just can’t do that. There’s no room to continue to do it,

Erin Clarke: And I think that’s a great time to take advantage of. So something that I did with my first book, I just tried to keep doing it all. I still look back on that chapter and I don’t actually know how I functioned because I think I was still posting two or three new recipes a week granted back then. So I would’ve been testing my book in, I want to say 2017, my first book. So I will say the demands were not as great, I don’t think as they are now.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. From a piece of content what you would need from a piece of content that you publish. Yeah,

Erin Clarke: Absolutely. But by the time I got around to my second book that was there, so we scaled back to one new recipe a week and then just used it as an opportunity to refresh old content

Bjork Ostrom: As

Erin Clarke: That does take some old content is so old, you might as well be doing a new post. But for some of the content that just needed little tweaks here and there, we’d really just leaned into what we already have so that we could keep having things coming fresh to the audience. And then I really brought my social media and blog audience behind the scenes with me to understand all of the work that I was doing and what goes into writing a book.

And I think that’s an important marketing strategy too. A huge difference between my first and my second book from the publisher’s perspective was the publisher really wanted me to wait until just the last couple of weeks before launch and then have a massive marketing push where the first time around they just sort of let me do what I want and share when I wanted to share it. I kind of took that advice with a grain of salt and I’m glad that I did. And my advice would be I think you can start sharing pretty much as soon as you have stuff to share because it’s going to take a lot of repetition before someone converts to a sale. And then something else that was super important to me and really key with my marketing is to let people know why they needed to spend $30 for my book when Well, plated has something like 1400 recipes that are free for you to access.

And so really communicating that value proposition, these are not recipes that you’re going to find on my website. These are recipes that I’m more excited about than anyone that I have ever done, including all of these different cool variations. I actually did a whole series on my blog that was into the cookbook writing process and explained everything that went into just deciding the table of contents, then how we test recipes, then how we photograph them. I wrote a whole post on the editing process, which is the least pleasant surprise that there is for first time authors. And I think being able to see all of the love and passion that went into it and how much it takes to write a cookbook, both A, helps boost your sales and then B explains to your audience why you’re not churning out two to three reels a week like you used to. It’s because taking on this massive grand opus on the side.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and part of it too is this idea of anything can be content. And so if you are documenting, not just creating, you are documenting what’s happening day to day, the documentation process can be a really fascinating thing for people who are interested and invested in what you’re doing. I think one of the questions that people would have who haven’t gone through the process of publishing a cookbook maybe interested in it is they would hear you reflect on it. They would start to understand, man, the level of effort involved and sacrifice. And then the question would be for what? And we know that there’s an advance, we know that there’s royalties, but can you talk about in your stance on the business of cookbooks as it relates to your overall business, how that all fits together and what that looks like?

Erin Clarke: The number one thing I tell people when they are thinking about writing a cookbook is do not write a cookbook for money. And unless you are, I think there’s some exceptions there. Like IA Garden, I think she can probably keep writing as many cookbooks as she wants forever, and they’ll always go to the New York Times bestseller list. We are not IA Garden. And so you have to think about the fact that it’s nice if you can make royalties beyond your advance. My first book makes royalties, which is wonderful when those checks show up. My second book, I haven’t earned out my advance yet, and it’s not like those royalty checks are ever going to come close to outpacing the income that I make elsewhere with Well plated. What I do think cookbooks give you, and what is hard to attach a monetary value to is the brand legitimacy and awareness.

And you can indirectly relate that to website traffic in the sense that it helps establish you as an authority in your space. Like Google sees that you have the author markup, it allows you to do things like claim your knowledge panel on Google, which is like if you search Aaron Clark and the little panel that pops it to the side, like I’m the official Aaron Clark that Google has decided. And the reason that I was able to claim that is because I have published cookbook to point back to. Now getting verified on Instagram isn’t quite the process that it used to be, but prior to them kind of opening that up, the only way you could get a blue check mark was if you published a cookbook and your editor went to bat for you. So it adds all of these layers of legitimacy, and then I think that will eventually lead to backlinks. So for example, there’s Aaron Clark has mentioned in the context of Good Morning America, like I was featured on today, you get these media placements that you wouldn’t have without a book that you can surmise and directly feeds into your site having more authority that hopefully feeds into some of your post ranking better, and then that ultimately leads to traffic. So I do think from a brand perspective, it is invaluable to write a book, but if you’re looking for it to help you pay your mortgage, I would encourage you to explore other opportunities.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of those things where it will get you access into places that you otherwise couldn’t access. To your point, good Morning America, could somebody who hasn’t published a cookbook get onto Good Morning America? Maybe, but they probably wouldn’t be able to do it just by having a blog or a following on Instagram. You’d have to have some other unique creative take that would be interesting enough for Good Morning America to say, Hey, we want you to come on and talk about this. A cookbook is an avenue into some of those worlds that is, it’s a well established path. It’s not going to be this weird thing where somebody’s like, wait, why is somebody coming on who’s an Instagram creator? It’s cool, they have a lot of followers, but what are we going to talk about? And it provides such a great talking point for so many different places.

And to your point, we don’t understand the general lift from a search perspective or even from a traffic perspective that comes from that, but it’s undeniable that there is one. And so not only do you get the benefit of the advance and the potential royalties that would come as that continues to sell, but you also get the general lift for your brand that comes from publishing that, which makes a lot of sense. How about for somebody who hasn’t published a cookbook, but they’re starting to think about it, how would they know if they are getting to the point where it might make sense for them to start that conversation? Is it followers? Is it email subscribers, traffic? Would you have any advice for people having been through it twice now?

Erin Clarke: The very first thing that you should do is write your book proposal. And this is going to be really helpful whether you are, if you’re self-publishing, you don’t technically have to have a book proposal, but I think that it will help you understand if you actually have a unique angle to offer. Because I want the traditional publishing route. I have an agent and she was constantly pushing me during the proposal writing process and saying, but what’s the hook? I don’t understand what the hook is. She didn’t have her little soundbite that she could take to editors to get them super jazzed about this cookbook from this first time author, Erin Clark. And until we really had that narrowed down, she wasn’t able to take it to them. And really ultimately, I was the one that needed to come from, I was the one that needed to have that perspective and define it.

So until your proposal will include things like what the hook is for your book, it will include comparable titles to prove that there is, people have liked similar books to mind, so this is why we know this is something this market is interested in. And then the other thing that I think you absolutely have to have, whether you are self-publishing or writing a proposal to go the traditional publishing route is your table of contents really get that table of contents as final as you can, and then that will be your roadmap when you are developing the book. Truly, my table of contents was the Bible when we were trying to move forward. And I can go more into if people want further details, I’m happy to explain how we decided what recipes we made each day, but until I had that table of contents nailed down, it really shows you, okay, do I actually have a unique idea for a cookbook and the recipes to support it or not?

So maybe you’ll be going through it and you’re like, wow, I’m actually really light on breakfast. Or I would go through it and be like, okay, I didn’t realize I have such an obsession with sweet potatoes, but I do because for some reason, 30% of this book is about sweet potatoes or has this as an ingredient, so we need to dial that back and try to have a bigger variety of things. Or you’ll look at your table of contents and be like, you know what? I’m missing a really great potluck salad. And some of that fine tuning your editor will help you with as well. But just really sitting down and having the discipline to write a proposal will also help cue you in if you have the discipline to sit down and write a cookbook. Because if you can’t get through the proposal, you might not be ready for a cookbook yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good test. So you have this proposal and then you’re putting it in front of publishers that the proposal is almost the product, the product that in the sense that the publishers are seeing if they want to buy that product or not. Can you talk about that process at all and how you go through that process? Who facilitates it and maybe setting expectations around how that all plays out?

Erin Clarke: Well, the first step is to find a literary agent. I was introduced to my agent by Gina from Skinny Taste, which I will be forever grateful for. I was actually introduced before I was ready, Gina and I were on a retreat together. She said, Erin, are you thinking about writing a cookbook? I was like, yeah, I’ve kind of started working on a proposal, but not quite there yet. She’s like, oh, well, you should work with Janice, my agent. I’m like, huh, Janice wouldn’t want to work with me. But then next thing I know, I have an email from Gina Janice cc saying, Erin and Janice have spoken to you both. Happy to connect you here. And I was like, oh, I need to get this proposal together

Yesterday. So that lit a fire. But normally that would not. Maybe if you have a friend that has an agent they can introduce you to, that’s wonderful. But really the proposal is, like you said, the product, and really to get an agent interested in you, they’re going to want to see that proposal very far along to make sure that you the hook and that you have a pretty clear vision for what you want your book to be. The table of contents is part of that vision. And then that it also includes a pretty significant sample of the writing. So if you think about the beginning of books, a lot of people will have kind of their introduction, what this book is about. A lot of authors will include their favorite pantry tools, tips for using the book. The entire introduction from my first book was in my proposal, and we did change it not quite a bit.

It had some tweaks, but part of why that is so important is because the publisher buys, I would say, the proposal gets you the phone call, and if they’re having a phone call with you, it’s because they’re interested in your product. And then if they go from the phone call to making you an author, it’s offer, it’s because they’re interested in you, but before you get them interested in you, you need to get them interested in the product. And so it will also include things like, these are my friends in the blogger community that I think would help support this book. You’re really building your case.

Bjork Ostrom: The

Erin Clarke: Nice thing about the proposal is it makes it easier when you write the book, but then ultimately when you turn it in, you don’t get your whole advance on day one, you get a chunk of it, and then your editor has the opportunity to accept or deny your book, your manuscript after you’ve turned it in. But if you’ve written the proposal, everybody’s on the same page about what your book’s going to be, and then when you turn in the book, it matches. And so everyone’s expectations are in line. What you don’t want us to turn in a book to your editor and your editor to be like, this is not what I bought. And proposals really ensure that that doesn’t happen.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about, so you’ve said editor and then publisher. Is the editor the individual at the publishing house that you’re working

Erin Clarke: With? Right. I’m so glad you asked that because I did not understand that at all. The first go around, so your editor is, your editor controls the purse strings at the publisher, and your editor is the person that you’re going to be in the trenches with initially. And then as you go through the publishing process, they turn into more of the quarterback and you’re not working with them. I thought it was going to be like me and my editor holding hands, emailing every single day, and my editor is wonderful. I love her, but now I understand that’s not her role, but she is who initially needs to understand the vision for your book, and she is, who is going to decide yes or no? The publisher will allot their dollars for this. Something very, another really interesting thing that I didn’t understand was when we got to the phone call part, I think I had phone calls with maybe 10 different editors, and I didn’t understand at that point that all publishers at this point have really consolidated behind the scenes. So you might have a call with, I might be mixing up houses here, but let’s say you have a call with 10 Speed Press and Rodelle. Well, if Rodelle wants to bid on you, the editor that you might have loved over at 10 speed, we’ll just let the roelle editor have it because they’re both a part of the same larger

Bjork Ostrom: Parent company.

Erin Clarke: Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh,

Erin Clarke: Interesting. It’s kind of like your editor is at the publisher, but they are in charge of the publisher’s funding for whatever they’ve been allotted, and they’re the one that you want to make sure, and that’s kind of where you get to the phone call. At this point, you’re trying to sell them on you, but you’re also trying to feel out, okay, are my editor and I on the same page about what the vision for this book is going to be? Because ultimately, the editor has the say in the book, but if you have someone that you get along really well with and have a great rapport with, they’re going to let you have a, and I feel very fortunate that I’ve had a wonderful publishing experience. I did both of my books with the same editor at the same publishing team, and I really feel like it is, our visions were so well aligned, and I did have a lot of meaningful say, and I think part of that is because I put so much time into my proposal

Bjork Ostrom: And you did the work upfront so that it was all aligned. And so when you get to the point where you’re starting to actually put all of that together, it’s not like you’re coming to the table and something’s way different. The expectations were set and communicated clearly, which makes sense. How much of the actual process of then promoting the cookbook feels like a co-owned product versus you owning a product? Or maybe another way to say it is, is there any sense or expectations that you could help communicate when you are going through the process of launching a cookbook where it’s like you, but it’s also you and a publisher, and the publisher wants it to be successful, and so do you feel any pressure to make it successful because there’s other people involved? Does that make sense? For a lot of us, we have businesses that we own fully own. We don’t have business partners, but when you’re publishing a cookbook, you kind of have a business partner because it’s somebody else who’s equally invested in the success of it. Did you feel like that at all, or does it feel like it’s kind of your thing and if it’s successful, it’s great for the publisher? What was that like?

Erin Clarke: That is an excellent question. I’m reflecting on that now. One thing that I struggled with because I’m such a numbers and goal-oriented person, was there was never, okay, Aaron, we expect you to have this many pre-sales and we expect,

Bjork Ostrom: Here’s what success looks like. Yeah,

Erin Clarke: Yes. That was not there. And I think with first time authors, at least when it was my first book, when they look at you, all I see is upside and it’s just very untested. So everyone’s just curious how it’s going to do. My publisher said that my presale numbers weren’t what, I didn’t feel like they were great, and my publisher was thrilled. So I was like, oh, okay. I guess I just constantly felt like I had this feeling of, okay, I guess everyone is happy. And then the second book, it was like, okay, you’re selling as much or better as you did your first book, so that’s good. I think I was harder on myself than my publisher ever was on me. They will. But I will say as far as the heavy lifting and the marketing that is on you, my publisher did send, Hey, these are some suggested promotions that we think you should do.

And I worked that into my crazy marketing spreadsheet timeline that I was telling you about, and then they also can offer support where I knew I wanted to have these giveaways and part of planning that in advance, I knew, okay, well, I need to contact these brand partners. And I was able to tell my publisher weeks in advance, I want these graphics made, could you help me with these graphics? So they’re able to help me with the graphic design side of things. So I would say they’re there to support, but as far as giving me any kind of, okay, we want you to sell X thousand in pre-sales, there was no number like that at all. It was just very, and a lot of publishing, especially the first time around, just feels incredibly murky,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially when you’re used to having such clear metrics like you’re on Instagram and you can see your previous content, how is it performed? Is this above or below? How many followers do people have page views? You have the kind of this general, but it feels like it’s a world where those numbers are not as easy to understand or define, or there aren’t those markers like, Hey, this is what success looks like, which I could imagine would be difficult to not have those kind of clear directives from them. So having gone through it twice now, number one, would you do it again? Would you publish another cookbook? So that’s the first question. You can answer that. Now

Erin Clarke: I do have a third note on my phone.

Bjork Ostrom: I

Erin Clarke: Promised. I promised Ben I would take a little bit of a break, and I think I’m trying to enjoy, it was so funny. One of the questions that I got asked a lot on my tour for my second book was, oh, what’s next? Or what do you want to do now that this book is done? And I’m like, I really just want to sit and watch some reality tv. I haven’t done that in a year and a half. Just can I or watch succession. I hear that’s a really great show. I have no

Bjork Ostrom: Idea,

Erin Clarke: But I’m at the point now where I think we’re all just, there’s a natural restlessness, and that’s part of this business too, is you’re constantly thinking about evolving and what comes next. I will say I’m not ready for a third book yet, but I do enjoy the creativity of making things outside of SEO. I just launched a Substack a couple of weeks ago, so for the moment, that’s been kind of my fun creative outlet. But once you have gone through that first book, and I have one, this is how in the well Plated cookbook universe, we describe how we cut carrots and how much they weigh and what volume it is developing all of those processes. The first time is brutal. The second, third, I imagine fourth times it’s still really hard, but you’re building on top of a foundation that you’ve set. So it was not nearly as difficult the second time around.

Bjork Ostrom: It gets easier every time, which makes sense. It was difficult. I’m not going to

Erin Clarke: Say like, oh yeah, it was a cakewalk. I hardly noticed I was making it,

Bjork Ostrom: But

Erin Clarke: It just did not feel as all encompassing as it did the first time.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And then how about if you were to go back in the beginning, what are the things that you would do differently? What are the things that you learned, maybe advice that you’d give to people who are thinking about doing it? If you had a little time machine and you could hop in that and go back, what would you tell yourself?

Erin Clarke: The first thing that I would do is just get that consistency in terms of how I write my ingredients and specific language that I use. I would have that right off the bat and then I would keep it. Now I have a whole document lexicon that I can easily just search through, but it’s keeping that consistency in language on our blog. Sometimes you might say place rack in the center of the oven, or is it going to be in the center of the oven or is it going to be your oven? Is it going to be place the rack, or is it going to be position, the rack? These are little things that don’t ultimately make or break the success of a recipe. But for writing a cookbook at a professional level, and I now absolutely writing a cookbook, feel comfortable saying, I’m a professional recipe developer, and part of that professionalism comes from that consistency.

So I would say you’re writing your recipes on day one. Start thinking about how for every single ingredient, every repetitive step, how are you going to express this? Because I almost lost my mind copy editing my first book. I love to tell this story. At one point I was in Whole Foods, and I am probably banned from this Whole Foods in Milwaukee. I was running around like a mad person weighing, grabbing every bunch of kale, counting the number of stems in the kale, weighing the kale. I had a notebook I was typing. I was like writing down. I just had to know. I just had to know, okay, if I’m calling for a medium bunch of gloss kale, that is how many stems, how many cups, how much does it weigh? And there were inconsistencies when I was editing the manuscript, when I wrote the second book, boom. I knew exactly

Bjork Ostrom: You had that

Erin Clarke: What one bunch of kale means. And for us that are more experienced cooks, the amount of kale in a recipe is not actually going to make it or break it. So maybe that’s why most cookbooks don’t go into that level of detail. But I also want to rank for that person that is a little more insecure and really needs that kind of extra level of handholding so that they feel successful from beginning all the way through the end of the recipe that just makes you feel good. And then you get to the end and you’re like, wow, that was my kale salad.

Bjork Ostrom: That

Erin Clarke: Was my stir fry. Aaron kind of started it out, but by the end, you have that ownership and that confidence is what I really want to give people. And so if you can write with that intent from the beginning, you will save yourself hours of stress and emergency trips to Whole Foods,

Bjork Ostrom: Which we’ve all had before. I think the thing, the big takeaway for me, or one of the takeaways in our conversation is, and it ties into how we started, which is this idea of showing up for a decade and what does that look like and how do you do that well? And one of the ways that you can do that well is by doing the slow, methodical work that creates a strong foundation for your future self. And we could always be scrambling. There’s always something that’s urgent. But to do that slow work of going in and weighing the kale to make sure that every time in the future where you reference that you feel really good about it pays dividends. And like any investment dividends really pay off years in advance. It’s not the next day, but it’s really as it compounds over time. And I think that’s such a huge part of showing up every day for a decade is the compounding effect. And your story’s a great story of that in alignment and in service of that idea of a cookbook creating all of these additional benefits. We will link to both of those in the show notes, but if anybody else wanted to check those out, can you talk about your cookbooks and then where people can follow you online?

Erin Clarke: So my cookbooks are available everywhere books are sold. So Amazon Target, hopefully your local bookstore. I have a variety of different resources for people that want to, if you want to seek out an indie place to purchase them, there’s some wonderful websites that let you do that as well. And then I am at, well Plated everywhere, so Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, now, Substack, all the places.

Bjork Ostrom: Are there any old handles from your old blog and instances that live on,

Erin Clarke: Oh, I still have them all.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. We won’t link to those in the show

Erin Clarke: Notes. Yes, didn’t know,

Bjork Ostrom: But people can check out that interview from nine years ago if they want to see that as well. So Aaron, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast after all these years.

Erin Clarke: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode, and we’ll see you back here next week.