My wife and I recently published a gluten-free cookbook entitled Gluten-Free with Love for people who suffer gluten intolerance due to Celiac’s Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, etc. We thought others would like to make the same comfort foods that taste like the recipes they grew up with, without the nasty side-effects from gluten intolerance. I would like to share with you how we went about publishing our work in order to start making money from the sales of the book (as well as help the people that suffered the same ways we did).
My wife has been improvising conventional recipes into gluten-free recipes for the last fifteen years, but it has only been recently that we decided to publish a cookbook for others to enjoy her delicious collection.
I discovered a inexpensive, efficient cookbook program called Living Cookbook to compile her recipes into a computer database. Living Cookbook has a lot of powerful capabilities that you can investigate for yourself on their website, but the features we were most interested in is the capability to do nutritional analysis of each recipe and to publish the database in a MS Word compatible format.
Nutritional analysis gave our cookbook a professional look and provided readers the ability to know vital nutritional information about each recipe. To export the cookbook database, we used the “Publish->Export Cookbook to MS Word..” menu option. That produces a nicely formatted MS Word document that you can manipulate like any other Word document.
Once our document looked the way we wanted it, we exported it to a portable document format (PDF) via the “File->Save as->PDF or XPS” menu option. PDF is the format that publishers prefer when submitting to them for printing.
We chose Lightning Source as our publisher/printer because of their vast distribution channels (they partner with Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Ingram Publishers) and because they print-on-demand your book very quickly upon a customer order. Print-on-demand is a very nice feature since you can offer your book online and have Lightning Source print and ship you book directly to your customer without your additional intervention.
The process for setting up a book to be printed is very straightforward and the representatives at Lightning Source are very courteous, walking you through every step of the way. I recommend having your book cover created by a professional desktop publisher (Lightning Source will refer you to one they recommend, if you like) to make it eye-catching and appealing to potential customers.
I was able to upload (send) our PDF document directly to Lightning Source’s website as well as our professional designed book cover. It was only a matter of a few days that we received a proof of a superb-looking book to review.
If you want to sell your book on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and other online book sites, Lightning Source will take care of the whole process with very little intervention from you. You do need to acquire an ISBN number for your book — but that is also a very easy process. A professional desktop publisher can make sure your ISBN is included on your book cover in the appropriate format as well.
That is really all there was to the whole process. Our book is available at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. It is a good source of passive income since we do not have to be involved in the sale of our book at this point. We created our web site at www.glutenfreeluv.com, but do not have to do any more work to make money with it, since Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com in conjunction with LightningSource.com handle all the details of ordering and shipping our book whenever a customer clicks and orders our book.
Nice set up, eh? Please let me know of any questions you may have about the process. You can do the same thing we did. Leave out the steps pertaining to doing a cookbook if you wish to create another kind of book. I will be glad to help you. Share with me your successes, too, please…
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