So You Want To Write a Cookbook So so so many people tell me they have a cookbook to write, asking for advice, and I almost always do my best to discourage them, with Asian delicacy and Germanic firmness, I hope. Because I believe that there are too many cookbooks out there already and the ones so often published add nothing new. So when writer and educator Dianne Jacob asked me what does define a successful cookbook, it got me thinking. She's written an excellent post collating many, many responses from people in the industry. The responses are surprising in their diversity. The first and obvious answer is, a book is successful if it makes money for the publisher and author.  And there are many ways this can happen, meaning that a book that sells 10,000 copies can be a resounding success while a book that sells 30,000 copies can be called a flop. Thomas Keller's books, notably Ad Hoc At Home , sell in the hundreds of thousands and are a success simply by that fact: the sheer numbers make them enormously influential regardless of the cash they earn. That means more than money to Keller, the impact they've made. These books are very expensive to produce. The current one, The Bouchon Bakery Cookbook , due out next fall, has involved three chefs, one writer, two recipe writer-developer-testers, a photographer (and countless ancillary chefs in addition to the main ones). It involved chefs on either coast and a writer