In 2017, the Dallas food blogger Urvashi Pitre published the “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook.” By any measure, it was a hit, selling more than 100,000 copies.
But under the contract she signed with her publisher, Callisto Media, Ms. Pitre received no advance, the payment often given to an author when a book deal is signed. Callisto had asked her to develop 50 recipes in three months, but offered no budget for recipe development or testing. She said it takes her 12 hours to perfect a single recipe, and her grocery bill when testing is around $1,500 a month.
She fronted all those costs. Over the last two years, Ms. Pitre said she has made $15,000 — minus the cost of her expenses — solely from milestone payments, fixed bonuses given out if book sales exceed a certain number.
Ms. Pitre’s experience is not unique, and Callisto Media is not the only small publisher offering such deals. Many chefs and writers are asked to write cookbooks and food books for very little, and sometimes nothing. In the current publishing landscape, there is an expectation that people will do a lot more for a lot less.
In July, the Baltimore cookbook author Allison Robicelli was approached by Reedy Press to write a book about standout restaurants in Washington, D.C., or Baltimore, for no pay up front, and with no budget for travel or dining. Any payment would come later in the form of royalties (a percentage of sales on each copy sold) of 10 percent.
She shared this information on Twitter, and received more than 2,000 responses, many from writers who had received similar offers. (Ms. Robicelli turned hers down.)
“This is all so unbelievable,” one Twitter user replied. “No money is a joke. Who would do this for nothing!?” Another wrote, “As a hopeful book-writer, I had to stop reading this tweet because it made me sick to my stomach.”
Ms. Robicelli, 39, said she wasn’t surprised by the reaction. “What is surprising is that we haven’t been speaking out about this before,” she said. “Nobody wants to talk about how hard it is to get by as a writer.”
Josh Stevens, the publisher of Reedy Press, said the company does not offer money up front because the books “ultimately have a limited audience.”
“It is mainly a cost factor for us,” he added.
He said that a book like the one Ms. Robicelli was asked to write wouldn’t require an author to dine out or travel. When pressed on what options an author has to write a book about restaurants with no dining budget, Mr. Stevens said that “some authors may work something out with the establishments.” He later clarified: “I don’t know, maybe they give them some comped meals.”
Still many writers do accept these offers in exchange for the credentials they believe being published will provide, even if they lose money on the deal. Ms. Pitre, 53, jumped at the opportunity. “I thought, ‘I will do it for the experience,’” she said.
And, without her deal with Callisto, Ms. Pitre said, she never would have signed with an agent, or landed the two-book, six-figure deal she made with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017 after “Indian Instant Pot” was a hit. (Her contract prohibits her from disclosing the exact amount.)
“The sad truth is that this is a logical steppingstone for someone who is a nobody to get a book,” she said. “There is no other avenue.”
The cookbook business is not struggling. A spokesman for NPD BookScan said sales of print cookbooks grew 24 percent in 2018 over the previous year, compared with 6 percent growth in 2016. These meager deals could be a response to that growth.
Alison Fargis, a literary agent and partner at Stonesong, and Stacey Glick, a vice president and literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, both in New York, said they have seen a significant increase in these offers in recent years.
Ms. Glick described companies like Callisto Media as “data-driven publishers that look at a trend, come up with an idea and hire freelancers” — like Ms. Pitre — “to do books quickly so they can get out into the market and take advantage of that trend when there is not a lot of competition.” (Callisto did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
In more traditional publishing deals, an author receives an advance — Ms. Glick said her books’ advances have ranged from a few thousand dollars to $400,000 — and royalties once the book sales surpass the amount of the advance. The time between the agreement and publication can range from a year to several, she said. (It is normal for publishers to not cover expenses like recipe development and testing, and frequently even photography.)
With these smaller publishing companies, there isn’t always an advance, and if there is, it’s often less than $10,000. Royalties aren’t always offered, and most expenses aren’t covered. The timeline is months, not years, and there is much less emphasis on design and photography. Authors are occasionally asked to sign nondisclosure agreements before even viewing a contract.
“In pretty much all cases, I have tried to discourage my authors from taking these deals,” Ms. Glick said. But she has sold books to both Callisto Media and Tiller Press (a division of Simon & Schuster that she said follows a similar model). “There are certain exceptions when an author is starting to grow their following, and it might be a good opportunity for them to get their name associated with a book.”
Mark Rotella, a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, said that what these books offer seems incongruous with the appeal of a cookbook for most people.
“I find that people who do use cookbooks buy them for the design elements, the voice, the illustrations,” he said. “Unless they want something quick like, ‘I just got this pressure cooker, and I need to get a bunch of recipes to get me started,’ and they do a search on Amazon and go with the cheapest one that gets delivered the quickest.”
Often the writers approached for these deals are bloggers like Ms. Pitre, who lack a print platform and are used to giving content away free.
Two years ago, Lauren McDuffie, an Indianapolis writer who runs the food blog Harvest & Honey, said she was asked by Quantum Publishing, based in London, to write a spice cookbook. The payment was described as a “modest fee” in an email she received from the publisher. There were no royalties.
“There is something really legitimizing about having a book deal, and you hear all the time about how hard it is to get,” Ms. McDuffie said. She had just won an award for her blog from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. “But then I found myself wondering if I was being taken advantage of.” She never found out what the “modest fee” was, even after pressing, and turned the offer down.
Kim Pham and Phil Shen, who run the blog Behind the Food Carts, wrote the 2014 cookbook “Food Truck Road Trip” for Page Street Publishing. Mr. Shen said they received a four-figure advance. (He declined to reveal the exact amount.) They raised money through Kickstarter to cover the majority of travel costs.
The book sold well enough that the publisher wanted a follow-up. “We couldn’t justify the time and energy to do another one versus the cost of it,” Mr. Shen said. “It wasn’t something we could live off of.”
The Philadelphia chef Kiki Aranita said that in 2018, Page Street Publishing offered her just $8,000 to write a cookbook on Hawaiian food, with royalties of 10 percent on the first 25,000 copies. (She was raised in Oahu, and her restaurant, Poi Dog, centers on casual Hawaiian fare.)
“I was mortified, but on the other hand excited that a publisher was interested in someone writing about Hawaiian food on the mainland,” she added. When she had tried to pitch a similar cookbook before, she said, “one thing I heard over and over was that Hawaiian food is niche and not easy to market.”
She said people of color may be more vulnerable to these deals, because editors may believe their food to be outside the mainstream and hard to sell to a large audience. On the other hand, she added, the offers are so low that only people of means can even afford to take them.
“I am pretty jaded after going through the whole process,” Ms. Aranita said. (She declined the deal.)
Will Kiester, the publisher of Page Street, said that in these deals, the company “breaks even at the same time that the author breaks even.”
“The math is just the math,” he said. “I could pay everybody more if books sold 20,000 copies a year instead of 10,000 copies a year.”
Mr. Kiester said Page Street has a standard deal structure based on the author’s following on either Instagram or Facebook (whichever is larger), with engagement being considered as well. An author with a following of 50,000 accounts would receive a $9,000 advance, for example, while an author with a following of 1,000,000 would receive a $15,000 advance. All authors receive the same royalty rate of 10 percent of net sales. A photography budget of $7,000 is provided. (Ms. Glick described this as “very low” for photography, in her experience.)
Publishers who offer these deals highlight the prestige of being published. But that’s not worth what it used to be, said Deanna Fox, a food writer in Albany. She said she was asked by a “fairly large legacy newspaper” to produce a cookbook from its recipe database for free in 2016. (She did not name the company because she still does some freelance work for it.)
There was some talk between her and the newspaper of giving her a percentage of sales. “But it was also a book they weren’t really selling,” she said. “They were including it with previous subscriptions as a value-added thing.”
Being an author “doesn’t make you the next Julia Child or Martha Stewart,” Ms. Fox said. “When you think about the time it takes to write a cookbook aside all the other endeavors you can do to promote yourself” — like cultivating a social media presence, or writing for food publications — “it doesn’t make sense. Do you really get more contacts? Do you really establish yourself as an expert?”
These deals can also encourage secrecy in an already opaque business, where information about author compensation is not widely available.
Aaron Hutcherson, a New York food writer and recipe developer, said that in 2018 he was approached by Callisto Media to write a cookbook of 100 recipes in about eight weeks. When he explained that this wasn’t enough time to develop 100 recipes, he was told that the company had “a proprietary formula, or something that can help to create recipes,” he said.
Mr. Hutcherson and several other writers said they were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements after initial discussions with publishers. (He didn’t sign his, or accept the deal.) Ms. Glick, the literary agent, said an NDA in this situation was “absolutely out of the ordinary.”
Kristy Mucci, a food writer and private chef in New York, said she received an offer this year from Tiller Press for $8,000, and royalties, to write a cookbook about California cuisine. She was told that the publishing company didn’t typically work with agents, which meant she would have to negotiate for herself. (A spokeswoman for Tiller Press declined to comment.)
Ms. Mucci later sold a cookbook, through an agent, to Chronicle Books for $80,000, plus royalties. But she’s not entirely content.
“Half of that goes to photos, and then a lot of it goes toward ingredients,” she sighed. “It’s not a whole lot in the end.”
For some who go into the process with eyes wide open, writing a cookbook, even for very little, can be valuable.
When Barbara Schieving, a blogger living in the Salt Lake City suburbs, wrote her first cookbook, “Simply Sweet Dream Puffs,” for Liberty Street, and said she received an advance of about $12,000. (Her contract prohibits her from disclosing the exact amount.)
“I do feel underpaid,” she said. But, she added, being an author “gives you more authority, and increases traffic to your site, which is by far more valuable than revenue from a cookbook.”
“Bloggers who are doing cookbooks just for the money are making a mistake,” she added.
A few authors have responded to this reality by turning to self-publishing. Nick Kokonas, an owner of the Alinea Group of restaurants in Chicago, wrote a well-read Medium post in 2017 about why he and his team had decided to self-publish “The Aviary Cocktail Book” in 2018.
He explained that even with the $250,000 advance that he negotiated for the 2008 cookbook “Alinea,” traditional publishing is set up so that most authors never see money beyond an advance, and much of that amount goes toward expenses.
Mr. Kokonas said the Aviary book cost him $630,000 for development and an initial print run, and revenue has been over $3.2 million, with more than 42,000 copies sold. He said more self-published cookbooks are on the way.
Kevin Pang, who recently left his post as editor in chief of the online food publication the Takeout, is collaborating with chefs and restaurants to self-publish shorter, magazine-like cookbooks with just a few recipes. His first partnership is with Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark of the Chicago restaurant Parachute.
“The idea is to have lower overhead, a faster production period, a smaller footprint,” he wrote in an email, with the hopes of earning profits of $5 to $7 per book. He has turned down a number of offers to write cookbooks with chefs through traditional publishing. “The way the system is structured it feels more like they’re repaying a debt,” he said.
Ms. Robicelli, the author who wrote about her deal on Twitter, plans to self-publish her next cookbook.
By forcing writers to develop, test and market their books with minimal resources, she said, publishing companies have indirectly created their own competition.
“If authors are doing work they thought publishers were going to do,” she said, “why does anyone need publishers anymore?”
