Publish a Cookbook
Do you have a bunch of delicious recipes stored away that you want to share with the world? Then it’s time to write a cookbook – it’s the perfect gift for all the people who keep asking you for the recipe for whatever you just served them! Also, it’s a pretty cool way to organize all your own favourite recipes in one place. Use this cookbook layout for what we consider to be the optimal results.
Template Ideas
High heat
This exclusive template doesn’t cut any corners. It’ll serve as your trusted kitchen companion for decades to come. It’s more expensive to print and ship than the other alternatives however.
Medium heat
This no-nonsense template is a lighter version of Heavy Duty, making it cheaper to print without sacrificing the large size for easy reading.
Low heat
Not as flashy as the other two, but cheaper to make and ship. Works great as a kitchen diary where you simply collect your recipes. Skip photos altogether to make it even cheaper.
Cookbook Cover Ideas
Generally speaking, there are two types of cookbook covers. The ones with food on the cover, and the ones with the chef on the cover. Unless you’re semi-famous, we’d suggest sticking to food. Slapping your most photogenic dish on the front cover will attract far more casual browsers than your face will, no matter how good your skin routine is. Cookbooks are for food.
You can of course get a bit creative with how you present the food on the cover. A nice counterpoint to your standard fancily-plated social media food pic is a more artistic rendition, much like you’d see on an Ottolenghi book.
Tease
People want to cook things they like to eat, so it makes sense to show off your star dish on the cover of your cookbook to attract the right kind of cook.
Obviously, to pull this off you’re going to want a stellar food picture to use. There’s nothing less appetizing than a bad food pic. If you’re not much of a photographer, consider asking a friend who is, or perhaps even hiring a professional.
Minimalist
Cookbooks with a scrumptious dish on the front cover are all well and good, but they’re also the norm. If you want to move away from that, you can always try starting at the other end of the spectrum.
Honestly, you can’t go wrong with a clean, minimalist aesthetic these days. Naturally, with a cover like this you’re going to have to communicate the focus of your book through the title, colours, and potentially, the visuals.
Old School
If you look up older cookbooks, you’ll find that their covers often don’t feature any pictures or food-related visuals at all. The same is true for cookbooks with a particular focus on technique or theory.
Our example here is quite colourful, but you could easily strip it down and just have text on a single-colour background. As you won’t have a clear visual doing the heavy lifting for you, it’s probably a good idea to think about what you want to communicate with your cover and how best to do that using only text and colour.
You can also get helpful tips on formatting your manuscript and designing your cover on our blog!
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