Publishing a Fan Cookbook for A Court of Thorns and Roses with Chelsea Cole

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey, 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 welcoming back Chelsea Cole from A Duck’s Oven. This is actually her third episode on our podcast and we’re really thrilled to have her back. In her previous two interviews, she shared her wisdom on topics like self-publishing a cookbook, and creating content within her sous vide niche. But today she’s back on the podcast with a bit of a 180 to discuss her first traditionally published cookbook in a totally different niche. She has created a fan cookbook for the A Court of Thorns and Roses or ACOTAR series. In this interview, Bjork and Chelsea discuss cookbook publishing and how it can be a part of your overall business strategy. And Chelsea also shares how she chose the subject matter for her new cookbook and what it was like to develop a cookbook for a very devoted fan base. Chelsea explains more about the royalty structure for cookbooks, how cookbooks can be a source of passive income for food creators, and how she’s thinking about her current reinvention as a food creator. It’s a super fun interview. I didn’t know much about fan cookbooks before this, but this interview makes me want to buy a million fan cookbooks and write one of my own. It just sounds like a lot of fun and I know you’ll enjoy learning more about it. So without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Chelsea, welcome back to the podcast.

Chelsea Cole: Thank you. I’m so excited to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ve talked a lot about cookbooks and we’ve talked about on the previous episodes, we’ve talked about cookbooks within the context of self-publishing, but today we’re going to be talking about going the traditional publishing route and cookbooks in general, how they can be part of your business strategy as somebody who publishes content online. And we’re going to be digging into that. But before we do it, for those who weren’t able to listen to those past interviews that we’ve done around self-publishing, give us an overview of who you are and what you do. What is your business and what’s your backstory?

Chelsea Cole: So I have been blogging for 14 years now, which feels crazy, at a duck seven.com originally started my food blog back in college and it was like, Hey, if you’re a college student, you don’t have to just eat pizza, blah, blah, blah, and kind of morphed into a general food blog. And then in 2017, I discovered sous vide cooking, fell head over heels in love with it and pivoted to niching really hardcore into sous vide. And at that time, what I discovered about the sous vide community was it was dominated by men and it was people who were very into the science of sous vide, which part that is a really fun part of it, but also it wasn’t very inviting. It was not inviting space,

Bjork Ostrom: Really opinionated people, this is how you do it, this is how you don’t do it, as opposed to this welcoming community.

Chelsea Cole: And I just wanted to create a space where people could ask questions without feeling like their heads might get bitten off and just make it a little bit more approachable for an everyday home cook because it can be an amazing tool for everyday home cooks versus food nerds.

And so I was doing a little bit of that on my blog, but there was no cookbooks in the space that did that. And I had the idea for my first cookbook. I wanted it to be an approachable sobe cookbook. I didn’t want to wait for a book deal. I wanted it to be done as soon as possible. So I looked into self-publishing and self-published my first cookbook in 2018 and published another one in 2021 and never looked back. I launched Sous Vide School since then online. And since then I’ve also developed a program called The Cookbook Lab that teaches food bloggers and others how to self-publish their own cookbooks as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So you are an online business owner. You also have books that you’ve published, you’ve done some courses in terms of the makeup of all of those things. What would you consider yourself to be, and then in the pie chart of your businesses, how does all that stuff land?

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, so I usually say I’m a cookbook author and food blogger. It’s the easiest, I don’t know, to tell other people. And then, yeah, it’s honestly hard to say. My first son, my child was born a year and a half ago. Congratulations. So things have really changed. Thank you. Congratulations.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Life has changed very much so if we talk about being the CEO of our lives, when you have kids, it’s like there’s a new division within the CEO of your life, and that is a very important time consuming. It becomes the number one priority. It’s just such a huge shift.

Chelsea Cole: It is. As a matter of fact, grandma’s here right now hanging out with him so I can be doing this. And so that’s been a huge shift, but I would say it’s probably something, honestly, blogging has not, I have been very lucky these past couple of years and not been hit hard by updates. I’ve barely blogged and my traffic has gone up, but I’m planning on that changing this year in terms of the barely blogging piece. And so I feel like lately, cookbook author has been, for the past year has been the primary thing, and then blog and running the course has been roughly 20 each carrying about 20% of my time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so it’s interesting when we talk about blogging or creating content online, I think sometimes we all think of it as if we’re coming to it the same approach, but so often our mindset with it is different. Some people think about it as I am publishing content online, and the purpose of that content that I publish online is to monetize it with ads. There are other people who publish content online ads are maybe kind of nice to have, but they have a product that they’re selling. And a lot of times, I think especially for a niche, the more niche that you get, like Sufi maybe being an example, the harder it is to get scale with traffic.

And so then you need to look at what is the value of each visitor and creating products. So when somebody visits instead of that visit being worth, I don’t know, 4 cents, maybe suddenly the value of that goes up if you have a product and one out of a hundred people buys that product and you can start to play the numbers game a little bit different. All that to say, I think one of the things that’s important for us to think about as creators is what are we trying to do? Who are we? What are we selling? And in your case, it’s cookbooks and everything that you do around that supports that. And you’ve probably made some intentional decisions because of your niche, because of the size of the audience is a very passionate but smaller group of people as opposed to general recipe content. Everybody’s making recipes, but there’s also more competition.

So there’s all these different variables. So I think it’s important just to point that out as we have these conversations for other people to think strategically, is getting as much traffic the best thing possible or is it smart for us to think about how can we, let’s say traffic stays the same, how can we increase the revenue from our business within the world of food? Cookbooks are a great way to do that because a product, you can sell the product. You went through the process of doing self-publishing and now with this most recent one, you did traditional publishing. Tell us around wrestling with that decision going back and forth, you have a course on, there’s maybe a little bit of an identity piece, but then you went traditional route. What was that like and how did you wrestle with that decision?

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, so I’ve never been fully traditional publishing, but I have taught, there’s a few reasons why I prefer self-publishing. And I would say for depending on the type of book I still prefer, but the speed of the process With traditional publishing, it is so slow. It is two years minimum. And with self-publishing, it’s as fast or slow as you want it to be, which is great. I love have that. And then it’s also creative control. I think many of us who are business owners, we like control and relinquishing that is really hard. And I talked to friends who were like, I hate the cover of my cookbook. I didn’t get to choose it. And people who don’t even the titles of their cookbooks, I know other people whose books were pulled from being sold because the publisher was like, eh, we’re not making enough sales.

We’re going to pull it. And that was really heartbreaking and hard. So I love that sense of control. And so the reason I felt like traditional publishing was the right fit for my new book is a few fold. One, it has nothing to do with my niche, it has nothing to do with my brand. It was just like I had the idea and knew it was a very good idea that needed to happen. And I also knew that it needed to be, for this particular book, it needed to be distributed at scale. And with self-publishing, that is very, very hard to do. That is one of the big benefits of a publisher. And then the other thing for me, when I had the idea, I was six months pregnant and knew that I could not take on the workload of self-publishing the entire book by myself. I could create the book, I could create the recipes and write all the content, but I wasn’t sure I could do much beyond that. And so a publisher will do the illustrations. Part of the negotiation with my contract was I did not do the photography because I knew I just wouldn’t have, my manuscript was due when my son was six months old.

Smart. So I knew I wouldn’t have the bandwidth for that. So for all of those reasons, it was just the right fit to go traditional.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So can you talk about the book? I’m sure people are curious to know when you say that it’s not connected to your brand, usually people would think, Hey, this is something that you’re selling through your site and maybe you are to some degree or you anticipate that you will, what is it? And tell us how you came up with the idea.

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, so I was on Facebook one night and I saw my cousin post about how she’d just gotten the Sims cookbook, and I was like,

Bjork Ostrom: The Sims game.

Chelsea Cole: And I was like, what is that? I didn’t know there was cookbooks that that is so strange. And I started looking into it. I was just curious. And sure enough, there’s Game of Thrones cookbook, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, anything that has a fandom probably has a

Bjork Ostrom: Cookbook. I just saw at Target, Disney World Cookbook, if you want to make the things that you get at Disney World.

Chelsea Cole: Yep, exactly. And I was like, I wonder if there’s a cookbook for A Court of Thorns and Roses, yet it’s been this massively popular book series, and I had just finished the book series myself, and I knew that it had this rabid huge fan base. And so I did a quick Google search and there was no cookbook. And I was like, well, I guess that’s what I’m going to be doing now. I just knew it had to

Bjork Ostrom: Exist. Yeah. So is the book series is like, how would you describe it? Well, Wikipedia describes it as a fantasy romance series. Is that accurate? Yes.

Chelsea Cole: Okay. So romantic is the term that’s been coined.

Bjork Ostrom: Love

Chelsea Cole: It. And so I always say it’s like Romance Lord of the Rings is kind of how to think about it.

And I think for a lot of millennial women, it’s been the first book series that was fun to read since Twilight Hunger Games, that kind of era of books. And yeah, it’s just been insanely popular. The other thing that was so appealing to me about the idea of making a cookbook for it is unlike Game of Thrones, Lord, all these other things that I, Minecraft, there’s Minecraft Cookbook, the target audience for a Court of Thrones and Roses is millennial women who are also the target audience for a lot of cookbooks. So I’m like, the overlap is this could just be a very, very big thing. And something fans would be really, I hope, really, really excited about.

Bjork Ostrom: So point being that these are people who are probably going to be cooking things as opposed to a Mr. Beast cookbook where it’s like, it might be 14-year-old boys and girls. I don’t know who Mr. Beasts audience is, but it’s like, oh, this, not only is it something that you’ve seen in the marketplace like cookbooks based on a series or a passion area for people, but it’s also the target market is people who probably are going to be cooking things.

What is that like to go into? Well, so you have this idea. I think one of the things that would be exciting for a lot of people is the fact that it maybe isn’t connected to a personal brand. It allows a different type of creativity and maybe feels a little bit different to approach it than it would if you’re putting this out as your cookbook. And it almost allows it to be an adjacent thing to your brand, but it’s still supported by your brand. You can talk about it in emails and social and stuff, but it’s kind of co-branded. So when you had that idea, how do you even go about moving that forward? Do you just send a bunch of emails to agents or

Chelsea Cole: What

Bjork Ostrom: Did that look like?

Chelsea Cole: It’s funny that you say that. I actually at first was like, is this a for hire project versus, because one of the nice things about this book is I don’t matter, which takes a lot of the pressure off and almost allows creativity in a whole new way, which is really nice. But yeah, so

Bjork Ostrom: You matter in so far as like you are creating the recipes, those need to be good. You need to understand the series, the recipes that are in it. But you’re saying you don’t matter

Chelsea Cole: My personality.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. It’s not you have to have, it’s not like you are the product.

Chelsea Cole: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: The product is the product. And I think sometimes for creators, there’s maybe a little bit of a sense of relief when you get a chance to not be the product.

Chelsea Cole: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: That probably feels good.

Chelsea Cole: Immense. Yeah, that was definitely the case for me and especially again at that time in my life. So actually I had this idea, did all this research that in the course of an hour on my couch, and I know a literary agent who, she’s a cookbook literary agent, probably a lot of the listeners know her, Sally Eckes, and I’ve done things with her in the past, and she’s come and talked to cookbook lab students. So she and I had a connection and I just emailed her and I was like, I have this idea. Do you think this has legs? Should I pursue it? And literally within the week she had me on the phone with an editor at a publishing house who specializes in these books. So she was like, yes, definitely. So she quickly emailed an editor who she had in mind. And so usually, again, this is a very slow process. Usually all things in cookbook publishing are very slow, but given the way this unfolded, I had a week to create a cookbook proposal.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you know why they were so eager to move on it? Is it because the series was especially hot at a certain point and they wanted to make sure to capture that audience?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: The books came out between 2015 and 2021. So it’s not like they’re new.

Chelsea Cole: Nope. It

Bjork Ostrom: Was just, or are there more recent ones?

Chelsea Cole: There’s going to be another one coming out in the next

Bjork Ostrom: Weeks, so that’s why.

Chelsea Cole: Yeah. And they also wanted to make sure this book was first to market. So already there’s a cocktail book associated to the series coming out at the same time as my book. And so this will be the first cookbook, but they just wanted to make sure it was first to market and essentially get that ball rolling again. The process is so very slow.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. What was that? So when is it your son was six months.

Chelsea Cole: I was six months pregnant with him.

Bjork Ostrom: Six months pregnant. Okay. So you’re doing the cookbook process while also having a baby? Yeah. So can you talk about that? Because I feel like people often talk about doing a cookbook, being a really stressful thing, also raising a human into the world from zero to 12 months old, 18 months old, 18 years old, it doesn’t matter the age really, but especially that first year or two is really stressful and difficult. What was that like?

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, so I ended up, we got that ball rolling. There was a lot of back and forth, signed the contract when I was about eight months pregnant. And so part of that process involved, the contract process was interesting. The advance was not nearly what I wanted, I

Bjork Ostrom: Think. And did you have a back and forth on that? Here’s what I want, here’s what we can do, and what helped you get to the point where you felt okay, not taking as much as you wanted?

Chelsea Cole: Usually these days, most food bloggers who do a cookbook are also expected to do their own photography, which is a massive amount of work. I know it from both of my other cookbooks. If you hire that out, it can run anywhere from 15 to a hundred thousand dollars depending on the amount of photos and the photography you work with. And so I said, fine, I’ll accept this advance, but I am not doing the photography and you’re responsible for hiring and paying the photographer. And so that to me made it a lot more palatable. And then I also negotiated a royalty structure that I felt really good about because I’m pretty confident this will sell well. And so the royalty structure was important to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about, and not specifically, and I know that you said because of the agreement, you can’t talk about specifics, but can you talk about generally how that works with an advance, paying an advance back royalty structure and advice for other people who are maybe thinking about negotiating a contract?

Chelsea Cole: So I think in any case, get as big of an in advance as you can because book sales are just not guaranteed. So I know how many books I need to sell to earn out my advance, which that number to me feels very doable. And so once you earn out your advance, you start earning royalties. And the way, I don’t remember the exact structure off the top of my head, but it’s something like for the first 10,000 books you sell outside of your advance, you earn this percentage, and then for the next 10,000, it’s a higher percentage. And then for all sales after that, it’s the highest percentage. And then you can also negotiate rates for international copies of the book. That can be different for ebook copies, all that good stuff. And a really good agent should be able to navigate all of that for you and tell you exactly what you’re doing. And Sally AKIs is a very good agent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Shout out Ally. We had her on, it’ll be two years ago.

Chelsea Cole: Oh, nice.

Bjork Ostrom: So if anybody’s interested in checking that out as episode 3 91, we should have her back on. So can you talk about, it’s interesting because kind of three, it seems like three people at play here, or three brands, it’s you, you’re working with an agent, maybe it’s four, you’re working with a publisher, and then you’re also working with a trademarked series that has ownership over how that name is used and where it’s used. How does that play out in a situation like this? Because important for it, and my guess is everybody gets some of the benefit of this thing that’s created in the world. Was that something that Sally navigated for you or was that something Yeah, what did that look like?

Chelsea Cole: That was mostly the publishing house. And so Sally and I, Sally has never had before me, had never represented a book like this where it’s like a fan cookbook is kind of what we call, so it was some learning curve for her as well. And part of the reason we went with this, or she thought of this publishing house, it’s called Inside Editions, they’re an imprint of Simon and Schuster is because they specialize in all of these fan cookbooks. And so we just kind of said, you guys know what you’re doing? You’ve done a lot of these. I just said I want to put in the contract that I don’t get sued. Sure. So you guys know how this works. We’re going to let you

Bjork Ostrom: Don’t get sued for creating content that’s trademarked or somebody Yeah,

Chelsea Cole: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Associated with a trademark brand or whatever. So they’ve worked out some licensing probably for that, that allowed them to do it.

So essentially, from a high level, we’ve talked about this before in the podcast, but the difference with self-publishing and traditional publishing was self-publishing, fronting all the costs, but then you’re getting also all the benefit of any of the books that you sell. There’s also the costs of the book. You need to make sure that you understand printing on demand versus getting multiple books printed thousands and then hoping that you sell those. But with traditional publishing, you get it in advance. That advance is negotiated. It could be a lot or it could be not that much. And my guess is the more that you get into a specialty book or a book that’s similar to this, that it wouldn’t be necessarily a huge advance because there’s maybe some risk to knowing how well it will sell. Does that feel accurate if it’s not associated as much with your brand? But then the benefit can be long-term that you have some sort of residual income that comes in after you earn out your advance, meaning you pay back the money that they paid you, and then you start to hit those different tranches of payouts. What does that look like? You don’t know because you’re not there yet, it hasn’t been published, but how does that work in terms of, is it a quarterly check that you get? Is it once a month? What does that process look like in so far as you understand how that’ll go

Chelsea Cole: Every six months is how it works. And then your advance is paid out in three installments. So one, when you sign the deal, when you turn in your manuscript, and then when the book is published.

Bjork Ostrom: So they pay you in those three installments and then you pay that advance back after the book is published and it starts to sell. And my guess is you get a report on how much you’ve paid back.

Chelsea Cole: And so luckily, even after we announced, I’ll get to see pre-order sales, which is nice. And so yeah, I’ll get reports on how it’s selling, and then once I’ve earned out that advance, the publishing house will start paying me. And that happens every six months.

Bjork Ostrom: And the great thing about that is I have a friend who wrote the personal MBA, his name is Josh Kaufman, and it’s this mega successful book. And he talks about this idea that there’s not a lot of forms of truly passive income, but book publishing is not passive at first at all because it’s a ton of work. But then it really is about as passive as you can get. You’re not having to go out and deliver a service or you’re not having to keep software updated. You probably are being strategic about mentioning it and especially when it launches to mention it in your email and on social and things like that. But it does move into this passive category where every six months for who knows how long you’ll probably get these checks from this cookbook. Is that part of the ideal for you as you think of yourself as a cookbook author, is to build in some of these residual payments that are coming in with yourself publishing? It’s obviously real time, traditional publishing is every six months. Is that part of how you think about it as you build your business?

Chelsea Cole: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the driving motivators for me to make sure that these books are really good. And in addition, I saw this as kind of a door opener for me. I had so much fun writing this book. It was

Unlike anything else I’d ever done. It was really fun to just immerse myself in the fantasy world in a completely different way and think of recipes. And the writing was incredibly challenging, but also very, very fun. And I’d love to keep doing these projects. And it’s a little scary because I want to make sure the fans feel like I’ve done the book justice. So that part is like I’m terrified for it, but I hope that I did a good enough job that people are recommending it and it gets good reviews and it keeps up those perpetual sales again and again and again. And one of the nice things too about this is one of my hopes is that in the future, because there’s more books coming, I get to do a volume two of the cookbook once we get a few more books in the series. And then I’ve got other for other fan cookbooks that I would love to write in the future. So just making sure that I did a really good job to keep those sales up and to give me more opportunities in the future.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Did you get an advanced copy of the book before it’s published to know? I

Chelsea Cole: Will, but not yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So the recipes that you have for this cookbook are from the previous books? Is that how that works?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. So it’s not recipes that are a part or could be a part of this book that will be released. Okay. And this is specific question, just out of curiosity, are there actual recipes they talk about or you are creating the recipes based on a scene and assuming that recipe is a part of it, it’s an actual recipe.

Chelsea Cole: Yeah. Well, it’s both. So for example, it’s funny because we are officially announcing very, very soon, but we haven’t yet. But sleuths have found the cookbook, and I can see all this in Facebook groups. I can see people talking about it, which is very

Bjork Ostrom: Funny. I found it pre-list on Amazon or something.

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, exactly. So right now it’s available for pre-order on Target and Amazon and stuff. And so they found the listings and some people will be like, they barely even mentioned food, what’s going to be in here? And I’m like, reread it, because I had to reread it through this lens multiple times and it’s like there was tons of food mentioned. And so there’ll be mention of lemon curd tartlets, and so I develop a recipe for lemon curd tartlets. And then, so there’s a lot of recipes of things that are directly mentioned. Everyone will, who’s read the series, will know what I’m talking about. There’s a very famous soup in the series, but it’s funny because it’s portrayed as like a canned soup, but the type of soup isn’t specified. So I had the daunting responsibility of deciding what that soup should be.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. Big deal.

Chelsea Cole: It was very scary. And then there’s other dishes that are inspired by characters in places, and there’s a whole cocktail section and all of the cocktails are inspired by a main character. It was totally unlike anything I’ve ever done in terms of creativity, but it was so fun.

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I think one of the things I like most about your story here is you talked at the beginning that you’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I think so much of us continuing to do the work that we’re doing, we’ve been at a similar amount 14 years with Pinch of Yum, a little bit less with Food Blogger Pro. And what we’re doing here is continuing to find ways to show up and be inspired or to feel like you’re doing something that’s creative and sometimes that takes a reinvention

And an evolution of what you’re doing. And for you, it sounds like potentially one of the things that’s really exciting at this point in your career is that you’ve developed a really solid set of skills in a bunch of different areas, digital marketing, understanding publishing, self-publishing, understanding traditional publishing, understanding how the world of recipes works, online promotion, things like that. And you’re now doing something that is taking little bits and pieces of all of those in a new, fresh, creative way. And I think sometimes I’ll talk to people and they’ll say, I just feel burnt out, or I feel like it’s a grind. And I think sometimes the reason for that is because you’re doing the exact same thing that you’ve been doing for 5, 6, 7 years. That at one point was really fun. It was really unique. It’s like, wow, I’ve hooked up Google Analytics and I got a hundred page views, or now I had a recipe that went viral on Instagram, but eventually the novelty of that wears off and so everybody’s different in terms of what excites them and the reason that they show up and are motivated by different ways. But I think one of the ways that we are motivated is by creativity and also novelty. It’s a new thing, it’s a new challenge. Does that feel true for you in this season, especially as you talk about potentially doing more of this where you can see maybe you’re doing one of these a year and that kind of becomes your thing?

Chelsea Cole: Absolutely. It’s funny, I have literally two weeks ago had a call with my agent where I’m like, I’m having an identity crisis. How do we make this all

Bjork Ostrom: Work identity opportunity? It feels like we will reframe it. It’s

Chelsea Cole: Like it,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, finish your thought. But it feels like that’s what I was trying to get at is it’s shifting. There’s some maybe crisis parts of it. What does this mean for who I am and how I work, but also I’m really excited about this and what does that mean?

Chelsea Cole: And I think part of that fear is we have all in this community talked for years and years about the importance of niching down and having a niche. And I have seen how well that can work firsthand. It’s worked incredibly well for me. The only reason my blog does as well as it does is because of that. And so it can feel scary to be like, I am doing this thing that has literally, there is no Venn diagram, like nothing to do with what I do

Bjork Ostrom: Now, but being that you do ve and that’s your specialty, but if you look at the broader Venn diagram, it’s recipes, it’s food, it’s recipe development, it’s cookbook. So I would make the case that there is some

Chelsea Cole: Overlap. I like that. I appreciate that. It’s just been a little weird. And so we’re reframing one thing I’m in the process of is turning my socials into more Chelsea Cole versus so and just here are all of the things that I do and just kind of trying to wrap my head around that. But I think that you’re exactly right because I have felt myself kind of stale, burnt out, et cetera for several years. But this is so exciting, so fun. I am enjoying the market. I have so many cutesy fun ideas for the marketing and it’s challenged me in a way. I haven’t been challenged in a very, very long time. And I think at this point in my career where it has been going on so long, it was really important for me to find something like this and just, it was very scary. I didn’t know if it was the right move for me for many, many reasons. But so far it really seems like it has. I hope it pans out all the way, but it really seems good.

Bjork Ostrom: In what ways has it seemed like the right move? Because my guess is there are people who are listening and they feel some of those same feelings of burnt out, maybe exhausted of the routine as opposed to inspired or feeling creative or feeling excited about the work that they’re going to do. So as you’ve tested this out, what are the indicators that you are looking at to say, I think I’m heading in the right direction?

Chelsea Cole: I think that one way in which I have always thought maybe a little bit differently than some of my peers I know think is my growth in many ways in different areas has been a lot slower than other people in terms of blog traffic, in terms of social growth, et cetera. Because I’m usually trying to grow lots of things at the same time,

Because for me, that feels safer and it allows me to kind of do that dabbling that we’re talking about. And it’s worked for me. And so the way I am starting to see this even is it’s just another layer. It’s just another thing I’m layering on. I think a lot of people, they feel like they need to be super laser focused all in on one thing, and that’s just not how I work. I mentioned my blog is still going, I’m still responding to comments or new recipe goes up every now and then and it’s still going to keep going and it’s going to exist forever because it’s existed for 14 years. I’m not giving that up, but it’s not my main focus and I’m allowing my main focus to be this new thing, this new book in part for my own self, and it’s going to have a grit impact on my career as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Lindsay is doing this side show that she calls Snack Dive, and it’s with our good friend Nate, who is just down the hall from us, and he’s a video producer and does a lot of documentaries for commercial work for companies like Bumble or Sunday Red, which is Tiger Woods Company. So these really established companies has documentaries on Netflix. Lindsay has her thing with Pinch of Yum, but for both of them, they spend not an insignificant amount of time on snack Dive. And from a business perspective at this point, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. But what does make sense is it’s a creative outlet for them and it’s something that they know that they love. And I think it allows them, I think they would say this to do their other work better because they have this thing that is fun and exciting and new and novel.

And my point in saying that, and I think it relates a little bit to what you’re talking about, is that all of us have a different equation in how we show up in work, and we have different motivations and we have a different formula, and we can look at somebody else and be like, oh my goodness, they grew search traffic like crazy over the last 10 years and they’re really good at SEO. And that is because that person has maybe a really focused interest. They’re maybe obsessed with that. It feels good for them to do that. But if we try and do something that somebody else is really good at, maybe similar to a sport, if the quarterback tries to be the center or I don’t know volleyball well, but if the person who spikes the ball tries to be the person who sets the ball, that’s going to be suboptimal because they’re not good at that skillset.

And all of us, we have these skills and we have these ways that we work best. And part of it almost feels like self-awareness. And it sounds like that’s a little bit of what you’re talking about, which is the self-awareness to say, here’s how I work best, and if I’m working how I work best, that’s going to be the best version of work for me, the best version of a business for me, versus trying to look at what somebody else is doing and being like, well, they’re doing a good job with it. Maybe I should just try and replicate that. We can’t do that because it’s so personal to how we work. And even to your point about you are now in this stage of life where you have a one and a half year old that’s going to change things drastically for how you work and how you prioritize things and how you approach things. So what would your advice be for people who are trying to understand their own work better and to make decisions about how they can make that right for themselves?

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, I think thinking about things as like you don’t have to abandon one thing to start another. And I think too, if you feel something pulling at you, I have found nine times out of 10 when I pursue whatever that is and truly pursue it, give it the life that it needs, something good and exciting, new opportunities come from it. And I just have found that there’s nothing wrong with it. Even publishing, self-publishing, my first cookbook, that was not a good business decision. It took up most of my time. I had a very small platform. It certainly didn’t sell crazy amounts of books, but it opened so many new doors for me. I got so much press from it. It was a big thing. And so just following that lead and seeing where it goes, and then I know that this can maybe be a little cliche and perhaps a little annoying to hear sometimes, but even at those suboptimal times, again, my manuscript for my book was due when my son was six months old, and that was crazy. And most of my time writing was spent between the hours of four and 6:00 AM

And it happened. It was painful. And my husband took a photo where I’m holding my son while I’m sleeping and have my laptop perched on my lap and I’m writing

Bjork Ostrom: With one hand or something,

Chelsea Cole: And it’s like, it happened. I got it done. So if something is really scratching at you, just follow it and see what happens.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about that in the book, big Magic. She talks about this idea of the muse and this idea of the muse being something, it’s almost like personified. It feels like another version, not the same thing, but Steven Pressfield and the War of Art talks about the resistance as kind of this manifested thing. And he talks about it actually as it applies to writing, but Elizabeth Gilbert in the book, big Magic talks about the muse and the muse being this thing that visits us. And I’m not saying I necessarily believe this, but it’s interesting to think about as it relates to what you’re talking about, which is it’s an idea, it’s a concept. It visits us. And what she talks about is if we don’t entertain it, if we don’t pursue it, it will go somewhere else and it will visit somebody else. And even just conceptually, it’s interesting to think about that as we have that idea, that thing that is coming to us and being like, Hey, there’s something here to maybe honor that. On the flip side of it, you have this idea where people describe maybe the shadow side of that, which is shiny object syndrome. So you have the muse, which is this personified beautiful thing that visits you and you pursue it, and if you don’t, then it goes somewhere else, but then you also have the shadow of that which is shiny object.

How do you sort through that?

Chelsea Cole: For me, this didn’t happen with this book, but most of the time it’s like, okay, I need to sit with this for a couple weeks and see if I still feel this way. And that has not always happened. I own probably a dozen domain names.

Am I using any of them besides two? No. Or I’ll grab that Instagram handle just in case and kind of said, I might even do a little bit with it. When my son was first starting Solids, I was obsessed with making all his foods and having so much fun. I started separate Instagram account, did four posts, and I was like, okay, yeah, that’s enough of that. And so those things don’t always pan out, but I do like to just sit with it for a little while and see if I still feel as passionate and I have tons of ideas still. I’m a little bit of an idea machine that I’ve maybe even started business plans for and stuff like that. And again, those were things that I just sat with for a little bit and it’s like, eh, this isn’t the time. And usually if it’s going to be one of those things that’s meant to be, you’re going to keep pushing at it and finding a way to make it happen versus shiny object, which is going to get dropped pretty

Bjork Ostrom: Quickly. Yeah, it’s my friend Kevin is a child psychologist, and he talks about kids as they enter into their teenage years are trying on different personalities,

And from the outside it can look like, oh, whatever, kids are goth and then they’re whatever, all these different things. And it can kind of seem like eye roll, but what he talks about is actually they’re just trying that on and seeing how it fits. And I think there’s probably some type of business equivalent to that where if you have an idea, if you have something that you feel like might be needed in the world or you’d be excited to create, it’s almost like you can try it on, try it on and see how it fits and see if you like it and see if it is something that you can see yourself doing for 10 years. And if it is, stick with it. And if it’s not, no harm done, you’ve tried it on, it doesn’t fit, and you move on to the next thing.

Chelsea Cole: Yeah, going off of that, I say this with, or I encourage people to take this with a little bit of a grain of salt, but I think in our line of work, another important piece of that is how people receive it. So I’ve been excited because when I say, oh, I do sous vide for home cooks like approachable, sous vide cooking or something like that, a lot of times the response is, oh my gosh, I’ve been so curious about that, but I’m too scared to try it. I can tell that there is a need for that for the right person. And then when I mentioned the new cookbook, like, oh yeah, it’s A Feast of Thorns and Roses. It’s coming out soon, and people lose their minds about how excited they are. And so that’s always a really good reaction to me. Whereas I always tell people too, if they’re thinking about a cookbook, do some recipes that would be included in that cookbook and post them online and see what the reaction is. If people are asking excited questions, that’s a really good sign or messaging you about it or something like that, that’s great, even if it’s not an overwhelming amount of people, but if people are like, huh, either not really engaging with it or seem confused, then maybe it’s not the right thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. When in our world, we recipe test and part of recipe testing is you trying it, but also having other people try it and give their opinions and evolving it from there. I think one of the things I know I need to get better at, and I think all of us could be better at is idea testing

By putting something in front of people, talking about a thing, developing how you talk about it and position it, getting feedback on it, iterating on that idea. In the world of product or software, they call it product development, where you are in this early stage of, and even more so product development is kind of like, you could broadly speak about product development, but it would almost be more of customer development, I think would maybe be a better word, where you’re developing who’s the customer and who’s the product and what’s the match. And in your case, what’s interesting with it is it sounds like you did a version of that by putting it in front of somebody who really knew that world and those customers, and very quickly you were able to accelerate that. But I think that idea of testing our ideas in the wild, putting ’em in front of our friends, our neighbors, our family, seeing what their reactions are is a really good one.

So going back to traditional cookbook publishing or traditional publishing versus self-publishing, for those who know that they want to write a book, they want to do a cookbook, what would your recommendation be for them to just take the first step? I’ve talked about this before, but so much of the important things that I’ve done in the world or the things not even important, the things that have gone on to be anything, I can look back to the first step that I took with all of those. An example is Food Blogger Pro. Before I went to bed, it was late, I was tired and I was just like, I’m just going to send this email off real quick to this developer who’s done a membership site and ask him if we could jump on a call. That was the first step that launched this business. What is the first step for somebody who wants to do a cookbook? How do they get into it and how do they start that process?

Chelsea Cole: I almost want to say I think learning about the differences between traditional and self-publishing is a really good place to start, and for many reasons, I think that each path can be right for the right person. I think that the traditional publishing industry right now is very fickle, but maybe even beyond that, doing exactly what you just said and testing that idea out in the wild can be a really good first step because regardless of which path you take from traditional versus self-publishing, you need to make sure people want to buy your book. And I think on that note too, becoming very clear about why you want to write a book is important. I have had a lot of people who were interested in joining the cookbook lab who wanted to make a family cookbook, and I’m like, this is not the right place for you because I teach you how to make sure your book can be found on Amazon when people are searching for search terms and stuff like that.

So it’s like, do you want to write this cookbook because you want a family heirloom? Do you want to write this cookbook because you want to build your brand? That’s why I always encourage people to write cookbooks. Do you want to write this cookbook to make a bunch of money? And if you do, then you probably should look at other routes to make a bunch of money because this isn’t the one. And so just kind of figure that out, test that idea. I think people get weirdly protective of their ideas, which in some circumstances can be, right. I’ve been very protective about this new book, but we want it to be first to market. But I really think that people, like we’ve said, need to test it out on their audience, see how they respond. I think that’s a really, really good first place to start.

And doing market research, I teach a ton about that, which is as simple as going on Amazon and looking and see. For me, I always tell people it’s two things are a bad sign. If there are a ton of cookbooks already on the market about what you want to write a book about, or if there’s no books about what you want to write a book about. If there’s a good smallish amount, that means, okay, there’s some hunger for this topic, but it hasn’t been oversaturated. And that to me is a really, really good sweet spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So if people are interested in learning from you about what you’ve learned from self-publishing, talk about where they can go for that. And then also, I know it’s not out yet, but if for all of the listeners who are the Court of Thorns and Roses fans, where can they get the cookbook when it comes out?

Chelsea Cole: So if you want to learn about self-publishing, you can go to the cookbook lab.com, got lots of good free resources on there, and you can sign up for my newsletter there as well. The new book is called A Feast of Thorns and Roses, inspired by the A Court of Thorns and Roses cookbook series. It comes out April 1st, but it is available for pre-order pretty much anywhere you can buy books. Barnes and Noble did opt for an exclusive edition, so if you buy through them, you get a really fun insert with a menu and special recipe cards that aren’t available anywhere else.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. That’s great. Chelsea, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it, and thanks for sharing your journey through cookbook publishing, self-publishing to traditional publishing, and excited to have you back on again when you have another update.

Chelsea Cole: Yay. Thank you so much. This was great. I love telling you about it.

Emily Walker: Hey there, 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 Pope 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.