No doubt about it: Everyone loves a beautiful cookbook. But photography’s importance has developed to a point where it is on a par with the recipes themselves.
The average cookbook lover probably doesn’t understand the wholesale cost of photos and how they have skewed costs, especially for the author. I am not advocating lower fees from the talented people who make the beautiful photos! Professional photography is what makes the difference between a good cookbook and a great one. But like many financial realities today, the question is sustainability. How long can this go on?
How Many Photos?
Readers have come to prefer (if not expect) a photo for every recipe, but this is impractical for many reasons. Regardless, it is becoming common practice.
The expected number of photos in a book has changed radically over the years, as have the number of recipes and pages. Most cookbooks today average seventy to ninety recipes. Not long ago, that number was a hundred or more. But there is rarely room for that many recipes and their photos unless the page count increases, and pages cost money.
In the recent past, the page math was still an issue, but the paper was matte, which is much less costly than the glossy surface needed for photos. Most cookbooks had a photo insert of sixteen images, and two inserts for a total of thirty-two pictures was considered extravagant.
Now, the four-color cookbook rules the roost. Note that some of the biggest perennial best sellers, such as Joy of Cooking, and the first books of Julia and Marcella (the Cher and Beyoncé of cookbooks) were black-and-white text with few photos. Only towards the end of Marcella’s career did photos come into play. (I will be posting about my take on the history of illustrated cookbooks soon. It all started in my hometown, San Francisco.)
Cookbooks (and books in general) are printed onto “brochures” of paper called standards, which hold sixteen pages each. These are then bound together to make a book. (The main difference is glued versus stitched.) Therefore, the total number of pages is a multiple of sixteen, so 256 or 272 pages per book are common, which hopefully keeps the retail cost at $35 to $ 40 per book.
Why these particular page counts? Paper and ink are not free, and their costs affect the book’s final price. When writing a cookbook, very few authors consider the final page count, which creates a big problem. I admit it: Even I have overwritten, which only leads to grief—cutting favorite recipes and photos to fit the allotted page count.
Not every photo is a “hero” shot, which is what professionals call that a mouthwatering photo of the recipe at hand. There are also “lifestyle” photos, especially for influencer books where the brand may be based as much on lifestyle as on cooking prowess. Someone has to take those images of the author chopping an onion, rolling out dough, or playing with their dog. Chapter opener shots also have to be budgeted. And the cover shot, which can sometimes be pulled from an interior photo but usually needs its own session because the title text has to be carefully placed. These additions can be included in the original seventy-five photos or budgeted beyond the base price.
All of this leaves fewer pages for the actual recipes. And you must also allow for the front and back matter. Front matter is everything from the first blank page in the book (the back of the front piece), title page, copyright page, dedication page, table of contents, foreword (optional), introduction, and first chapter with basic info like equipment, glossary, and so on. Back matter will include acknowledgments and the index (which usually require a separate professional who, of course, is paid, sometimes by the author). These too eat up page count like a pig at a trough.
For a book with 75 recipes, if each photo takes up a page, you are down 75 pages from the final page count at the outset. If a recipe is on the long side, it can take up two pages. So, that is three pages times 75 recipes for 225 pages before any other text is written. If it sounds complicated, it is.
Who Pays?
It may surprise you to learn that the author pays for cookbook photos. This is not the way it always was.
Until about fifteen years ago, publishers commonly absorbed the photo budget. But as consumers demanded more photos and budgets changed, publishers decided to pass the entire cost to the author. Not a portion—the entire amount. Now a generous publisher might tack an extra $25,000 onto the author advance to cover photos, but the average photo budget can run two or three (or more) times that amount, even back in the day. But usually, it falls entirely on the author to produce the photos. How they get them is their business. Many authors, especially bloggers, are now qualified to do their own photos, and while that saves them some money, it is a time suck.
It is the rare cookbook author who does not dig into their own pocket to cover the various costs for the entire book, as the photo budget can easily eat up the book’s entire advance or close to it. Branded books (an influencer is a brand) garner higher advances, so they can afford the high cost of outsourced photos. But if you are a first-time author with a $60,000 advance, the photo budget will take it all, leaving you nothing for living expenses, much less research and testing costs. You will end up losing money before the book is published, especially as you will be paying your agent, taxes on new income, and groceries for testing recipes.
The average cost of a single photo in a fully outsourced cookbook is anywhere from $600 to $900 or more. I have worked up many photo budgets for my books and clients. Prices do change by location (LA is more expensive than St. Louis), and the author can sometimes negotiate lower prices on a few line items.
The main way for an author to save on photo costs is to be their own food and/or prop stylist. As I mentioned, authors are increasingly their own photographers. But shooting your own book can add weeks or months to your deadline. Some authors I know shoot as they go along with development. However, if at the end of the process, you need to change ingredients or some other elements, you have to backtrack with a new photo.
Bottom Line
To me, the ideal is a fully outsourced shoot because I like the ideas that other team members bring to the food. But I rarely had the budget, which called for creativity.
The best way to save money on a shoot is for the author to provide some of the services that s/he would normally outsource. For me, these are food and prop styling. However, the cost trade-off takes its toll on the amount of work required of the author. Even something seemingly innocuous, like collecting props, takes time.
Big cities like LA and New York have prop rental businesses for the media trade, so you can rent tableware and other items. (Again, this is a cost that adds up quickly when you are renting each fork or napkin.) To save money, you must be creative with what may seem dishonest but is a necessary evil.
The most common solution is to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of tableware at the local Home Goods or Home Sense, then return it after the shoot. Keep that receipt safe! You (or whoever you hire to clean up and wash dishes) must wash everything carefully and keep the sales tags intact. I do keep some stuff. But I now have a basement full of plates, napkins, glasses, and other retained housewares that I’ll sell for pennies on the dollar at my next garage sale.
Here is a sample photo budget for a current cookbook. The average schedule is eight shots per workday, with a setup every forty-five minutes. This means everyone on the team must be ready to go at 8 AM sharp and adjust to the loss of natural light by mid-afternoon in the winter months. So, if you are the food stylist, you are usually not just working that 8-to-6 shift—there is a lot of prep to do for the next day, and you can hope to freeze or otherwise store some items ahead of time. Experienced assistants are a must—and for a complicated shoot (if, for example, the recipes have a lot of sides or sauces), the stylist might require two helpers.
The next time you buy a beautiful cookbook, keep the bottom line in mind.
Cookbook Photography Costs Per Day (10-hour day; overtime X 1½)
Photographer per day (average 1500.00) 1250.00-2000.00
(Add 1 day if needed for prep and wrap)
Photo assistant 450.00
*Food Stylist 800.00
*Assistant 400.00
*Prop Stylist 800.00
*Assistant 400.00
*Add 2 prep and 1 wrap days.
Studio Rental and overhead (average cost) 1,600.00
Photography Equipment Rentals TBD
(some photographers include in their fee)
Meals (per person, per day: 75.00) Breakfast, lunch, and snacks
6-7 crew, 1 author 600.00
Add coffee and serving items to grocery list if studio does not provide
Grocery and Prop Costs Per Photo
Groceries 50.00 per setup X 8 per day 400.00
Props (rental) 50.00 per setup X 8 per day 400.00
Daily Total 5,850.00
X 10 Days 58,500.00
80 photos for the book, per photo: 731.25
Additional:
Parking, makeup, hair, and fashion stylists for lifestyle, as needed
No Authors Allowed
It may surprise you to know that authors are often not allowed on the photo set, giving the photography team free rein. Yeah, there are exceptions, but most of my publishers had a “no authors allowed” rule in stone.
In one of my bestselling books, where I was the recipe developer for a brand, I saw the daily photos in the digital community lightbox and questioned the practicality of serving a Caesar salad on a slate blackboard. Who does that? And how does one serve the slippery salad from a flat surface? This book was not about aspirational entertaining, but everyday food. The photo team loved the contrast of green on black. They won. It certainly soured my client relationship. I loved my editor, but she had a lot of people on the team that she would have had to engage with to make the change, and she was forced to pick her battles and choose sides. And keep her job!
It also shows how you can be in business for decades, but unpleasant surprises can still be in store despite one’s experience.
Cookbooks that tell stories are in demand. Words still are important to most editors and readers. However, I recently researched the sales of food books with and without illustrations. Many well-reviewed non-illustrated books tanked in sales.
Influencers whose books are simply a collection of recipes without a point of view may sell well their first week of publication and garner the coveted “New York Times Best Seller” stamp, but then they drop off the sales charts. That’s because if an influencer has five million followers, and a small amount buy the book after being prompted to do so through their posts, you can still sell a lot of books on that publication day. But, for a book to resonate, readers need to relate to the words, the photos, and the recipes. Caroline Chambers is one influencer whose books seem to have made a lasting impression.
No matter what, we all love those photos, and the talented folks who create them deserve to be paid. The question is: how do we make it all work? Many good cookbooks never see the light of day because of economics. Consumers just want pretty pictures and don’t care how much they cost the author. That isn’t going to change any time soon, but I hope this podcast helped you understand how photos get between the covers.
If you are a cookbook creator, what are your best practices for saving some money on photo budgets? Let us know in the comments.
Below is a great reel from the young authors of The Diaspora Co. Spice Cookbook, with more real-life lessons about book budgets.
My people will call your people.
Rick
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