How To Publish A Cookbook In Australia: From Recipe Cards To Printed Book

By Tasman Publishers 23 October 2026 12 min read

To publish a cookbook in Australia, test every recipe, then edit them into one consistent style using Australian metric measures. Sort out photos or illustrations, design the layout, and choose a binding that opens flat in the kitchen. Then print on demand or order a print run, adding an ISBN only if the book will be sold through shops or libraries.

Most cookbooks start the same way. A shoebox of recipe cards, a few splattered printouts and a phone full of photos of Nanna's handwriting. Turning that into a book people actually cook from takes more than typing it up, because a cookbook isn't read like a novel. It's used. Someone will prop it open with a wooden spoon, follow it with flour on their hands, and blame the book if the sponge sinks.

This guide covers how to publish a cookbook in Australia from first draft to finished copies, including the parts most guides to cookbook publishing in Australia skip: recipe testing, Australian measures, copyright and the binding that won't snap shut halfway through a recipe.

Start With The Kind Of Cookbook You're Making

Before you edit a single recipe, be clear about who the book is for. It changes almost every decision that follows.

A family recipe book

If you're working out how to make a family recipe book, the audience is small and the goal is keeping the recipes alive. You might want twenty copies for siblings and cousins. Stories and old photos matter as much as the food, and you probably don't need an ISBN or retail listing. Family recipe book printing usually means print on demand or a small run.

A fundraiser or community cookbook

A fundraiser cookbook has a different job: it has to sell at a margin. A school fundraiser recipe book, a CWA branch collection or a footy club cookbook usually has dozens of contributors, which makes consistency the hardest part. Every family writes recipes differently. A community cookbook also needs a simple permissions process (more on that below) and a firm deadline for submissions, or it'll drag on for a year.

A retail or brand cookbook

Restaurants, cafes, food creators and chefs want a book that looks like it belongs in a bookshop or on the venue's counter. Expect more photography, tighter design, an ISBN, retail metadata and probably a larger print run. The bar for recipe accuracy is higher too, because strangers are paying for it.

Gather And Test Every Recipe

Recipe testing is the step people most want to skip, and the one readers notice first. A recipe that "always works" for you often relies on things you never wrote down: your oven runs hot, you know what "a good handful" means, you use a particular tin.

Cook from the page, not from memory. Follow the recipe exactly as written. If you have to improvise, the recipe needs fixing.
Get someone else to test it. A friend in another kitchen, with another oven, is the best test there is.
Weigh what you can. Grams are more reliable than cups, especially for flour and sugar in baking.
Write down the tin size, oven setting and a visual cue. "Bake 35 minutes, until golden and a skewer comes out clean" beats "bake until done".
Check the yield. If it says it serves six, make sure it does.

For a community book, ask each contributor to confirm they've cooked their recipe recently. You'd be amazed how many "famous" recipes are missing an ingredient.

Write Every Recipe The Same Way

This is where cookbook editing earns its keep. Recipe editing isn't proofreading. It's making sure recipe one and recipe ninety read like they came from the same book, so the reader never has to relearn how you write.

A good recipe style sheet settles things like:

Ingredients listed in the order they're used, with nothing in the method that's missing from the list
One way of writing quantities (g, mL, cups) and abbreviations, used everywhere
Oven temperatures given for conventional and fan-forced
Tin and tray sizes in centimetres
"Serves" and "makes" written the same way on every recipe
Where tips, substitutions, storage notes and dietary tags sit on the page

Watch out for the Australian tablespoon

Here's a trap that catches plenty of home cooks. The Australian tablespoon is 20 mL, or four 5 mL teaspoons. Much of the rest of the world, including the US and UK, uses a tablespoon of about 15 mL, and many spoons sold in Australian shops are 15 mL too. In a soup, an extra 5 mL won't matter. For baking powder or bicarb, it can. Say clearly in your introduction or conversion chart which spoon your recipes use, and if you expect overseas readers, give weights for the ingredients where it counts. The Australian metric cup is 250 mL.

If you're unsure how to write a cookbook recipe from scratch, a simple test helps: could a confident cook who's never met you get the same result? If not, it needs another pass.

Who Owns The Recipes? Copyright For Cookbooks

Copyright is automatic in Australia, so there's nothing to register. But it doesn't protect everything in a recipe. In general:

A plain list of ingredients and quantities usually isn't protected. It's treated as information, and the idea of a dish isn't protected either.
Cooking techniques aren't protected. Nobody owns roasting or creaming butter and sugar.
Your written method, headnotes and stories usually are. Once written in your own words, they can be a literary work.
Photos and illustrations are protected separately as artistic works, whether or not the recipe text is.

In practice that means you shouldn't copy a method word for word from another book or a website. If someone else's recipe inspired yours, rewrite the method in your own words and credit it ("adapted from"). For a community cookbook, get each contributor to agree in writing that their recipe and any photo can be printed in the book. Don't lift photos from the internet. This is general information, not legal advice, so talk to a lawyer if a commercial book is borrowing heavily from other sources.

Photos, Illustrations Or Neither

Food photography sells a cookbook, but you don't need a professional shoot to make a good one.

A photo that looks fine on a phone can fall apart in print. For a full page you need high-resolution files, ideally straight from the camera rather than resized or sent through a messaging app. Daylight beats a flash. A plain background beats a busy tablecloth. A slightly overhead angle suits most plated dishes.

No photos at all? That's fine. Plenty of good cookbooks use photos on some recipes and typographic pages on others. You can also license images from a food photography library for the dishes that need them, or commission original illustration for section openers, endpapers or a hand-drawn feel that suits a heritage collection.

Got A Pile Of Recipes And No Plan? Tell us how many recipes you have, if you have photos and how the book will be used. We'll come back with a page plan and a fixed quote. Get a fixed quote or call +61 8 7111 2944.

Cookbook Layout And Design

Cookbook layout and design is mostly about the recipe page. Can the reader keep their place with sticky fingers? The layouts that work best put the ingredients and method side by side, keep serves and times in the same spot on every recipe, and place each photo facing the recipe it belongs to.

Plan your page count early, because it drives the print cost. As a rough guide:

A recipe with a full-page photo takes two pages
A recipe without a photo takes one
Section openers take one or two pages each
Your introduction and story take two to six
The index and conversion charts take three to six

So a 60-recipe book with photos on most recipes usually lands between 120 and 160 pages. The interior should be set by a designer who understands print (see our formatting service), and the cover design needs a spine sized to that final count.

Choosing A Binding For A Kitchen Book

Binding decides whether the book stays open at the recipe you're cooking, how long it lasts and what it costs to print.

Binding	Opens flat?	Best for	Durability in the kitchen
Lay-flat softcover (such as Otabind)	Yes, at most spreads	Retail and brand cookbooks that need a printed spine and a bench-friendly open	Good. The cover floats free of the spine, so it doesn't fight you.
Wire-o or spiral	Yes, and folds right back	Family, fundraiser and everyday working cookbooks	Very good for daily use. A standard wire-o has no printed spine, so it's harder to spot on a shelf.
Perfect bound (standard paperback)	No, it tends to spring shut	Retail paperbacks and books that are read more than cooked from	Fair. Fine on a shelf, but the spine can crack if forced open flat.
Hardback (case bound)	Better than a paperback, best when sewn	Gift books, heirloom family collections and premium restaurant books	Excellent. The most durable choice, and a sewn hardback is built to last for years.

For a lay-flat cookbook binding on a budget, wire-o or spiral bound cookbook printing is the usual answer, and it's why so many community cookbooks look the way they do. For a short fundraiser book with few pages, saddle stitching (stapled through the fold) is the economical option.

Paper And Printing: Print On Demand Or A Print Run?

Paper matters more in a cookbook than in a novel. A silk or matte coated stock wipes clean more easily than uncoated paper and keeps food photos sharp without the glare of high gloss. Lighter stock keeps postage down if you're mailing fundraiser copies interstate.

Then there's how many copies to print. Cookbook printing in Australia usually comes down to two routes:

Print on demand prints copies as they're ordered. There's no stock in the garage and no money tied up, which suits family recipe book printing and first editions. The cost per copy is higher, and binding choices can be more limited.
A print run (offset printing) costs less per copy and makes sense when you know you'll sell or give away a set number, such as a fundraiser or a restaurant book. Local printers are quicker to proof with; overseas printing can suit very large runs if you can wait for freight.

Always check a printed proof before the full run. Colours on screen and on coated paper aren't the same, and a proof is the cheapest place to find a typo in a quantity.

Do You Need An ISBN, And Where Will It Sell?

If the book will only be given to family, or sold by the school or club itself, you don't need an ISBN. If you want it in bookshops, libraries or online stores, you do, and you should buy it in your own name from Thorpe-Bowker. Our guide on how to get an ISBN in Australia covers the steps and the free ISBN trap.

Plenty of cookbooks sell best direct, at markets, the restaurant counter or the school fete, where you keep the most from each sale.

What Moves The Cost Of Publishing A Cookbook

There's no single price for a cookbook. These are the things that move the cost:

Number of recipes and pages: more recipes means more editing, more layout and more paper.
Photos: how many, whether they need retouching, and whether any must be licensed or shot.
Colour printing: full-colour photos throughout cost more to print than a mostly text interior.
Paper and binding: coated stock, wire-o, lay-flat and hardback each change the print cost.
Print run: print on demand or a set quantity, and how many copies.
Recipe editing: tidy, tested recipes need less work than handwritten cards from forty contributors.
Turnaround: a book needed for a fundraiser date or Christmas may need extra hands.

Our publishing costs page explains how pricing works more generally. For your book, the simplest way to find out is a free, fixed quote based on your actual recipes.

How Tasman Publishers Helps You Self Publish A Cookbook In Australia

If you'd rather self publish a cookbook in Australia without managing every step yourself, that's what our cookbook publishing service is for. We read every recipe, count the pages and photos, and quote a fixed price before any work starts. Our editors standardise ingredients, quantities, temperatures and steps against a style sheet built for your book (see book editing). We can transcribe handwritten cards, work with your photos or a licensed food photography library, and add an index, conversion charts and dietary tags based on what you tell us.

You approve a sample recipe spread before the full book is set, and proofs before anything is printed. We quote six binding styles, from saddle stitch and wire-o to lay-flat and hardcover with a dust jacket, with print on demand and print runs quoted side by side. If you want the book in stores, we register ISBNs in your own name. You keep your copyright and your royalties.

See how a full project works on our book publishing page, or tell us about your recipes and we'll send you a page plan and a fixed quote.

Cookbook Publishing Questions

How much does it cost to publish a cookbook in Australia?

It depends on the book. The biggest factors are the number of recipes and photos, colour printing, the paper and binding, how many copies you print, how much editing the recipes need and how quickly you need them. A small family book and a retail cookbook are very different projects. Send us the details for a free, fixed quote.

How many recipes do I need for a cookbook?

There's no minimum. Most cookbooks run between 40 and 100 recipes, and family collections and fundraisers often work well at 30 to 50. It's better to publish 35 recipes you've tested properly than pad the book out to 80. The layout should be planned around what you actually have.

Can I include recipes from other cookbooks or websites?

Not word for word without permission. In Australia a plain list of ingredients generally isn't protected by copyright, but the written method, headnotes and photos usually are. If a recipe inspired yours, write the method in your own words and credit it as adapted from the original. For anything commercial, get legal advice.

What is the best binding for a cookbook?

For a book you'll cook from every day, choose a binding that opens flat: wire-o or spiral, a lay-flat softcover, or a sewn hardback. Standard perfect binding looks neat and suits retail shelves, but it tends to spring shut on the bench. Saddle stitching suits short fundraiser books.

Do I need an ISBN for a family or fundraiser cookbook?

Only if the book will be sold through bookshops, libraries or online retailers. A family recipe book printed for relatives, or a fundraiser sold by the school or club itself, doesn't need one. If you plan to sell it more widely later, buy your own ISBN from Thorpe-Bowker in your own name.