Every food blogger, influencer and YouTuber these days seems to have published a cookbook. It must be lucrative, right?

Youd be surprised.

Book advances are typically minimal and costs associated with publishing and promoting a cookbook are exorbitant. So why go through the lengthy and labor-intensive process if it doesnt result in a substantial payoff? Theres actually a good reason.

We spoke with five cookbook authors about the emotional and financial rewards of publishing a cookbook.

Book Advances And Costs

Publishing houses pay an advance for the cookbook, and this can vary from $10,000 for an unknown author to closer to $100,000 for more established authors with a proven audience and some level of fame.

Liz Moody, host of the Healthier Together podcast and author of the Healthier Together Cookbook , told HuffPost that she estimates at the lowest end, for a single subject book, if the publisher doesnt care who you are and you might do your own photography, you would [get an advance around] $10,000 to $20,000. And then in the low-end for a book not just designed for SEO purposes, I would say $40,000 to $50,000. Then for a mid-sized author, around $90,000 to $100,000, and then for a really big or famous not Chrissy Teigen-famous, but bring-their-own-audience famous I would say around $150,000 to $200,000.

While those numbers might seem generous, Moody reminds us that writing this type of book is typically the work of a full-time job for upwards of a year.

Indeed, the work involved in writing, photographing, shopping for ingredients and testing the recipes is a significant time investment that forces work on other projects to be delayed or postponed. As Nikole Goncalves, author of The Healthnut Cookbook, shared: You also have to consider the time and energy youre putting into creating the book that takes away from working on other projects in your business.