TikTok landed in the U.S. in 2018, and two years later, as the pandemic took hold and people found themselves spending more time in their kitchens, food content on the platform took off.
Page Street Publishing editorial director Marissa Giambelluca, for one, began posting home cooking videos in 2021. She’s also discovered potential authors via TikTok: Giambelluca reached out to Alessandra Fontana, a home baker in Milan, Italy, after Fontana, who has 2.6 million followers, popped up in her feed in March 2023.
Artisan Italian Baking at Home (Nov.), Fontana’s collection of classic Italian bakes including ciabatta, pizza, and biscotti, is one of many TikTok-derived cookbooks hitting shelves this fall. PW spoke with the editors of five of them about the tricky path from influencer to author.
They ate
While social media can generate leads for editors, they’re mindful that not every influencer, no matter their star power, will shine in cookbook form.
“I look at TikTokkers all day long,” says Dan Rosenberg, editorial director at Harvard Common Press. “A lot of ‘food people’ on TikTok are consumers of food; the number of people who are on TikTok to cook food is a minority.” When assessing whether a content creator would make a good cookbook author, Rosenberg considers, “Do this person’s followers expect him or her to cook as opposed to eat?”
In the case of September’s Insanely Good Ramen Meals by Ivan McCombs, a former social media manager who lives in Los Angeles, the answer is yes: Ramen King Ivan, as his 10.8 million followers know him, doctors packaged ramen with inexpensive, easy-to-find ingredients, or uses the instant noodles in atypical ways—in corn dog batter, in place of lasagna noodles, or as the base for a sandwich. “It’s global food with a heavy Asian influence, which is extremely popular now,” Rosenberg says.
The brevity of in-app recorded videos means that McCombs, like many other creators, doesn’t reveal full recipes online. That’s one element the cookbook offers his fans, whom Rosebenberg describes as budget-conscious zoomers who’ve been “watching food videos on Tasty since they were 12 and are used to cooking on an induction cooktop and doing hacks of packaged products.”
Larry Canam, a home bartender in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has amassed 6.7 million TikTok followers with a vibe that Brandon Buechley, associate editor at DK, calls “very Grandpa-coded. He brings comfort.” Commenter requests for nonalcoholic drinks led to the weekly series that lends its name to his forthcoming book: Milkshake Monday (Oct.), written with David Canam, Larry’s son, who helped him get his start on the platform. Buechley, who says he typically acquires books “more traditionally,” via agent submissions, reached out to the Canams based on a tip from one of his coworkers.
“It’s important to find someone who has dedicated followers who are hungry for specific content,” Buechley says. “Milkshake Monday is Larry’s most popular series, and there’s a lot of interactivity between him and his followers.” The book’s 80-plus recipes—churro milkshake and piña colada happy hour milkshake, to name two—all include QR codes to the corresponding TikToks “to showcase Larry’s personality even more,” Buechley says.
Gallery Books senior editor Molly Gregory says that figuring out why a TikTok cook resonates with followers is the key to a successful transition to the page. “Why, precisely, has a content creator found an audience? Is their brand substantive enough to be turned into a 200-page book? Do they have a personal story that fans find interesting and compelling?” Her author Nadia Caterina Munno has 3.7 million followers and an alluring backstory: she was born in Rome and comes from a long line of professional pasta-makers. Now living in South Florida, she turned to full-time influencing in 2020 after her takedown of what she called a “blasphemous lasagna” went viral.
Munno made the leap to print with 2022’s The Pasta Queen: A Just Gorgeous Cookbook, which PW’s starred review called “infectiously jubilant,” and extends her fashion-forward, high-energy brand with November’s The Pasta Queen: The Art of Italian Cooking, written with Anna Francese Gass. Where her first book focused on pasta, her second ranges over a variety of courses and dishes: stuffed baked potatoes with cheese and guanciale, baked salt cod filets with tomato sauce and olives, and sautéed dandelion greens.
Trend set
As cookbook editors trawl TikTok for the Next Big Thing, sky-high metrics will almost always impress. “At a certain level, you don’t need anybody from outside the fan base to buy a book,” Rosenberg says. His example: if only 1% of McCombs’s nearly 11 million followers bought his book, “that would be a very good number of books sold. That said, our approach is always to address all potential audiences.” Originally, Rosenberg wanted to title the book The Ramen King Ivan Cookbook, “but that’s going to be completely opaque to people who haven’t seen the channel before. So, we flipped it and made it the subtitle.”
Editors are there to help TikTokkers think through these issues. “When people are passionate about something, it comes through pretty organically,” Giambelluca says. “I ask questions as their editor, but also as a consumer: for instance, how do you make focaccia approachable without dulling down the flavor? My job is to make the book digestible and interesting to people who don’t know who Alessandra [Fontana] is. My responsibility is to stay true to what she does, but also serve the reader.”
Harvest executive editor Sarah Pelz points out that the culinary influencer-to-cookbook author pipeline isn’t that novel. “Back in the day, when it was blog-to-book, publishers asked, ‘There’s all this content online; what’s going to bring readers to the book?’ ” she says. “That conversation has evolved, and yet it’s the same.”
Harvest author Owen Han’s 4.3 million followers tune in for his inventive takes on sandwiches. In his forthcoming debut, Stacked (Oct.), he shares some fan favorites but mostly new recipes, like bacon and egg biscuits with sriracha honey, and bao with hoisin pork burnt ends. The book leads with Han’s personal history. “He learned to cook in his grandmother’s small village in Italy,” Pelz says. “His father’s side is of Chinese origin, and he grew up seeing his father making these beautiful Chinese meals for him and his friends. He started posting on TikTok on a whim during Covid; he’d lost his father fairly recently, and his whole life changed during a time when so many people were suffering. You can get a sense of someone through social media, but the book is a deeper dive.”
It’s this promise of connection that makes a book appeal to a wide range of readers, Pelz says. “All of this, going back to blogs and other forms of social media, has always been about an author having a relationship with their fans.”
Pooja Makhijani is a writer and editor in New Jersey.
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