Frederic Patenaude Raw Foods Diet

In the last few Do What You Love E-mail Tips I’ve been talking about how you could be creating and selling health food recipe books for a living.

I’ve been publishing recipe books and recipe collections since 2000. I’ve tried everything. I first had a recipe book published by an American company. It eventually got translated and is now distributed in French speaking countries. The book is “the Sunfood Cuisine”.

Since then, I’ve published several *smaller* books myself, either as a “physical book”, as on “ebook” or as part of a membership program.

I much prefer creating shorter, to-the point recipe books, and I think that’s what you should also do.

And remember, you don’t have to create the recipes yourself.

About half of the recipes in my book “Instant Raw Sensations” came from contributors. I didn’t have to pay anything for that. The same for my recipe book “70 Healthy Salad Dressings“.

There’s all kinds of ways you could do that. You could write to the top restaurants in your niche (raw food, vegan, etc.) and ask them to contribute their favorite recipes. I’m sure such a compilation would be an instant best-seller. The restaurants would be thrilled just to get the publicity.

*Why Recipe Books Sell*

Highly targeted recipe books (vegan, raw, etc.) sell very easily. There’s many reasons for that.

First of all, people who buy them are health conscious. They are not satisfied with what’s available in other books. So that’s why it’s important to create a recipe book highly targeted to their needs.

Another *very important* reason is that people who buy recipe books tend to collect them.

Just ask yourself: how many recipe books do you have? Or how many recipe book does your mother have? Or your girlfriend? Or your health-food friends?

People don’t just get one. They get dozens.

That’s really important stuff to know.

Instead of having one big recipe book, you could break it down into smaller chunks, and sell several shorter recipe books.

People would be thrilled with the content. In my experience people enjoy smaller books better. They don’t have to wonder what recipes to try, and have to sort through hundreds.

Writing shorter recipe books is much easier for you. You can easily get a recipe book with about 50 recipes done in less than a month. You could even do it in a couple weeks. Or try to beat my record to get one done in exactly 4 hours and half (and still produce a quality product, I must add).

In short, writing and selling your own recipe books is a great way to make a living doing what you love, work in the natural health movement, have your own products, have something available on your website, and it can be very lucrative to do it as well.

One Response to “Why Recipe Books Sell”

1. Diane OConnor says:

   September 25, 2008 at 7:31 pm

   Yes Please! Can you send me more information about your course on how to make a living writing and selling health food recipe books. I have quite a few allergies and have been “scheming” up ways to make desserts that don’t have dairy, wheat, sugar, chocolate, nuts or glutten in them. I’m wondering if others would like to know how I do this. I am looking to create some kind of extra income that is in alignment with health consciousness. Thank you

   Diane O’Connor
   diane.oconnor@att.net

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