Make Your Cookbook the "First" or Best if You Want a Bestseller, says Anne Byrn

The author of 16 cookbooks, including New York Times bestsellers, has loads of advice for writers.

Bestselling author Anne Byrn. (Photo by Emily Dorio.)

How time flies! I first interviewed cookbook author Anne Byrn for Will Write for Food 20 years ago. She sold millions of cookbooks based on her first cookbook, The Cake Mix Doctor, and I wanted to know how she came up with the idea.

Back then she made a batch of doctored cake-mix cupcakes for her kids and wrote a story about it for the newspaper where she worked. The paper added a sentence asking readers to send in their own cake-mix recipes, and it received 500 responses in just one week. Her books based on cake mixes sold more than 4 million copies and made her a New York Times bestselling author.

To date, Anne has authored 16 cookbooks. A native Southerner who lives in Nashville, her most recent is Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories, which came out last year. Publishers Weekly called it a “masterful and extensive collection,” and the American Library Association named it one of 12 Essential Cookbooks 2025. It’s a scholarly book in that the stories are beautifully researched and reported. It’s full of well-written and irresistible recipes too.

Fortunately for paid subscribers, you can enter to win a copy of her book. Entries are open to readers in the U.S. and Canada. Leave a comment below or at the end. I’ll keep comments open for a week and then I’ll pick the winner using Random.org.

Anne’s latest book features the baking of 14 southern states, from pre-Civil War to today. It’s full of recipes for biscuits, cornbread, cakes and rolls, and includes historical research that highlights the contributions of women during wartime and African-American women.

Anne is also the author of a top Substack newsletter, Between the Layers, which she describes as “An honest weekly conversation about life, through the lens of baking and cooking.” It has almost 30,000 subscribers. The newsletter comes out weekly and is quite different from her books in that she covers controversial topics such as gun violence.

Here’s Anne on storytelling, making a living, and how to come up with a book idea:

Q. I know it’s not polite to talk about money, but you sold more than 4 million copies of your Cake Mix Doctor cookbooks, which means you became a multi-millionaire. Did you see that coming?

A. You don’t become a millionaire that way. I sold over 5,000 copies on QVC at in under seven minutes. Also, that income has been amortized over a long period of time, since 2000. That’s 25 years.

The first five years were the most lucrative. I have three children and The Cake Mix Doctor put them through school, camp and everything else that a child requires.

The cookbook that jumpstarted Anne’s career as a cookbook author, published in 1999.

Q. What was the appeal of those cookbooks?

A. They were original. When you’re the first or you’re the best, you’re gonna have a success. Those recipes had been printed for years in newspapers. Being a newspaper journalist, I knew the appeal because they were the most requested recipes.

I had a newspaper column in 1998, and that’s when it started. It felt natural because I was that cook with three small children. I had a newborn. They were recipes that I grew up on. I wrote at the end of my columns: “These are my recipes. Now tell me about yours.” Faxes and letters piled on my desk, and I got stacks of mail. Then I wrote more columns, interviewed cooks, and thought it might be a book. When I contacted some newspaper friends about my idea to write a cookbook, they all said yes, nobody’s done cookbooks using cake mixes.