Charity Cookbooks
A Step-by-Step Guide
Countless fundraising cookbooks are published around the world and they all have one thing in common: they all take an enormous amount of time to put together and sell.
Green Bean Books has published one fundraising book — Babka, Boulou & Blintzes. Take a look here. The book has almost sold out and raised just under £20,000 for Chai Cancer Care to date.
And, despite threatening to never publish another fundraising cookbook again, a second is on the way — The Essential Cheesecake Book. You can see details here.
For whatever reason, cookbook projects are hard to resist, and also good ways to earn money for charities if they are done in the right way.
The main cost is the time involved which is almost always much, much, much more time than people anticipate.
The second key cost is the printing of books, especially if they are printed in relative low numbers (less than 200 copies) and they are colour throughout (let’s face it – who wants to look at series of black and white photos!).
The more of a book you print, the cheaper the individual unit cost — but it’s easy to get seduced by the cheaper figures and then end up with boxes of books that you can’t sell and have to store somewhere.
The aim of this section of the Green Bean website is to give you a step-by-step guide to independently publishing a successful fundraising cookbook. If you’re never published a cookbook before, hopefully there will be a few useful tips here.
Ultimately, we’d like to have a free dedicated website which allows people to upload recipes and images into a variety of templates (the same way you’d create a family photobook) — but we haven’t got the IT know-how to do that just yet! If you know anyone that does, please get in touch.
But, for starters, here are the three sections:
(a) Collecting and editing recipes
(b) Printing your cookbook
(c) Marketing and selling your cookbook