Podcast with Rachael Bermingham

Rachael Bermingham and Kim McCosker are the co-authors of 4 ingredients. 4 Ingredients was self published by the duo. At the time, they were unknown and couldn't get a publisher.

The book has taken off and sold over 720,000 copies in Australia. Each recipe contains four ingredients and Rachael and Kim recommend this book as a must for busy people, people on a budget, people who have moved out of home, or people who are learning how to cook.

If you suddenly have guests over or if you haven't felt like doing a grocery shop or you're moving out or you're just too tired – this book might be your saving grace.

Their second book 4 Ingredients 2 has just been launched and their lifestyle show starts in September on The LifeStyle Channel.

Click play to listen.

Running time: 30.12

If you like the idea of self-publishing your own book, check out our seminar: Self-publishing: How to do it.

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for your readability.

Valerie:
Thanks for joining us today, Rachael.

Rachael:
You're welcome!

Valerie:
So how did you and Kim come up with the idea for 4 Ingredients?

Rachael:
Well, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Take one work-from-home mum who is a power planner with a degree in Finance who isn't a chef and then take another mum who works from home, who's a marketing strategist and motivational speaker, both with no cooking capabilities whatsoever and of course they go on to write Australia's number one cookbook. It makes complete sense, doesn't it, so I can understand why you're asking that question. It's on everybody's lips.

But the reason why we wrote the book was simply it was out of sheer necessity. We were both busy, busy mums, both raising beautiful children and both had a desire to whip up something fast and fabulous in the kitchen without compromising on taste for our families.

And that's really hard when you're trying to juggle 3,000 things at the same time and trying to go down the shop, you know, grab a whole stack of ingredients and then spend 4,000 hours trying to put it together as you got a little one or two-year-old hanging off your leg saying, "Mum, when's dinner?"

So it was really borne out of necessity. Kim had the concept for a fair few years and had mentioned it to a few people previously but sort of did nothing with it because she - I guess she didn't - like any idea, you know, sometimes you don't take it any further. But when she told me about it, I had written another book called Read My Lips, which is a motivational book for women on how to achieve their goals and it had only been out for two months and I gave that to Kim for her birthday present.

And I said to her – she was amazed, she was so excited that I'd written a book and she was so proud of me and everything else and I sort of said to her, "Well, you know, everybody's got a good book in them,"

And she went on to say, "Actually, I've got a good book in me, I reckon."

I said, "What is it?" And she told me about a cookbook using only a few ingredients

And I said, "Fantastic! Write it so I can have it." Completely selfish, of course.

And anyway, she said, "Oh, no, busy," she's a busy mum, life was fantastic for her, there was no need to complicate it basically and I just kept on at her because I thought it was a really good idea. Every phone call we had I said, "How's that book?" And she sort of said, "No, no, no. It's too busy," and everything else and I suppose at the end of the day, I either, inspired her or, annoyed her so much that she just thought, "Okay, well, maybe there's something in this and maybe it is a good idea."

But basically, I motivated her into action and then she turned around and she sort of said to me, “Well you've got the experience in self-publishing before and marketing before and obviously the desire and the motivation.” She said, “I'll do it but on one condition, you do it with me,” and I said, “Fine, let's do it,” and we set a plan in place and away we went.

Valerie:
Great. And you say that you haven't had that much cooking experience so how - where did all the recipes come from?

Rachael:
Well, funnily enough, isn't it funny when you start looking at things under your nose because over the years, Kim and I had collected or inadvertently - I mean, she was really collecting them whereas I was just sort of, you know, a person that cooked off my own creativity, I guess, in a way.

But Kim had started compiling a whole stack of four-ingredient recipes or recipes with only a few ingredients and over the time, I had also developed a fair few recipes of my own only using a few ingredients. So between the two of us, we had around 70 recipes before we even kicked off and then once we decided that we were going to do it, we put an email out to all our friends and family and said, "Look, this is what we're doing. Have you got a four-ingredient recipe that we can use for it?"

And once we started doing that, we had people coming out of the woodwork and every social event, every barbecue, every mum's playgroup, every – anything, anybody that came into contact with us for a good six months was asked the question and still is asked the question, "Do you have a fabulous four-ingredient recipe?"

And that wasn't the challenging part, collecting the recipes. Actually, it was the cooking of the recipes.

Valerie:
Yes.

Rachael:
Because here we were, two mums that wrote this book so we could spend more time out of the kitchen and more time with the people that we loved, which were our children and families and so forth and now we've never spent so much time in the kitchen because for book one, we actually cooked over 700 recipes in order to nail it down to just over 340 that were the best of the best and met all the criteria for book one.

And the criteria was simply that, first of all, it had to be - the recipe had to be used - using just four ingredients or fewer and had to be used with ingredients mostly found in your pantry or cupboard, that you didn't have to hop a boat to China to go and source, and the methodology also had to be explained in around about three to four sentences on average and of course, the fourth point was that it had to be under every circumstance, delicious.

Valerie:
Of course. Now you decided to self-publish. How many books have you sold so far and why did you decide to self-publish?

Rachael:
Well I'd self-published Read My Lips previously so I didn't even think about a publisher. But 4 Ingredients came along and Kim said to me, right at the very beginning, she said, "You know, we should get a publisher for this." And I said, "What a fantastic idea. Well, I have no experience in that but the internet's a wonderful thing so let's go and do some searching on the internet.”

And a lot of the publisher sites you'll find when you go into it, it says, "Okay, well, this what you do to submit your manuscript," but then if you read further down it says, "No unsolicited manuscripts are received."

Valerie:
Yes, that's right.

Rachael:
So after that was a matter of getting on the phone. I mean, we knew nothing different so we just jumped on the phone and rang every publisher in Australia and of course, you know, once they asked the first few questions, "Are you a chef?" No, we're not. "Are you famous?" Yeah, I think I might be in my house and all those basic questions.

They weren't interested at all. I mean, some people, I remember one I didn't even get my full name out, they just hung up on me so it was just, yeah, it really disheartening to start with so it wasn't for want of trying.

We did try to get a publisher but nobody wanted to know us so we went down the self-publishing route and fortunately, I'd already done that so I knew the process of - of what to do then, which was just getting your written work, source it, and then going to source an editor and going to source a formatter or a typesetter and then of course, you had to source a printer and graphic artist to do the front cover and whatnot so that was the full process.

And to date I think we're at the 18-month mark as we speak here now on the 12th of August I think it is and it's around about 18 months since the book has been out and we have printed now over 820,000 copies.

Valerie:
Great. And how many have you sold?

Rachael:
Over 720,000 copies.

Valerie:
That's amazing, isn't it?

Rachael:
Yes.

Valerie:
Does that success blow you away? Did you expect that?

Rachael:
Oh, gosh. Oh, no way. I mean, here was a book that we really just wrote because Kim and I, we desperately needed it for ourselves. I was sitting there nagging the hell out of her saying, "Come on, let's do this," because I wanted it for myself.

It's like all good things. I had a problem, I'm busy was really busy and we just wrote something that we - that solved a problem in our lives and initially, all we could afford. Kim had the idea, she put up the finances because I'd just financed Read My Lips and just self-publishing a book is minimum - $20,000 is what you're looking at to print 2,000 books initially and that's what we went to market with, which was 2,000 books.

And we sold those, well and truly within the first week of - of it being on our doorstep but marketing's a powerful thing. That's what I can say about the whole journey.

Valerie:
Definitely.

Rachael:
We still market today, you know, with my marketing plan. Kim didn't know anything about marketing but she soon learned and she's a gun at marketing as much as I am now so it's good and 80% of our business is always marketing.

Valerie:
So obviously marketing's an important part of the process and where then did your initial lot of books get sold? Was it through internet book shops? Events?

Rachael:
No. I wrote a press release, Kim and I penned out some information we thought that was going to be useful in that press release. I put the press release together and then we sent it - we tested the market, would you believe, two days before book season landed on our doorstep.

But I was keen. I was really keen to find out what the market was going to say about this book, what – if they were going to be as excited about it as what we were, if it was going to be needed as much as we needed it. I was really keen and really excited and really impatient to find out what was going to happen.

So I said to Kim - and she lived in Brisbane at the time. I live on the Sunshine Coast. And I said to her, "Okay, I think we should send this press release out to your local paper and we won't do it tomorrow, but we'll do it to your local paper and just see what happens, see what the response is."

So we sent it to her local paper and immediately, they loved the press release, they loved the story, they loved the whole concept and they did an article straight away. Well, the article went to print two days before the books got to our doorstep basically and at this point, we had only just got on - like just sourced a distributor too so they didn't have any books, of course. Nobody did.

But this article went into the paper and then all of a sudden, all these book stores in Brisbane had everybody coming in with this article underneath their arm saying, "I want this book. I want this book. Can I buy this book?" And we had calls and internet inquiries. We had stacks.

And it was by seeing that, you know, in marketing as I say, the idea is the seed. The seed will do nothing without any other ingredients. Marketing is the oxygen to any success in anything that you do. So I say to all your writers, if they don't know marketing, learn it because it's really, really important to learn. If you don't tell anybody about your good idea or your book it's not going to happen. It's going to sit there and just be that, a good idea. So it's not going to be any - anywhere near successful.

So what happened was, from that article in the Brisbane paper, a local radio station saw that, then rang us and said, "Can we do this interview with you?" And we said, "Sure! We're so excited to have an interview." It was fantastic.

So we did an interview. From that radio station interview, a local TV program saw it, or heard it rather, and then they rang us and said, "Well, can we do a segment on you?" And we said, "Sure. Fantastic." So we did that as well but in the process of that few days, one of the book buyers from Big W actually was listening in.

Valerie:
Right.

Rachael:
And they called - they rang us and - or rang the distributor and put in an order for 3,000 books there and then, which is just unheard of. Apparently, it takes three - I've heard people taking three years to get into Big W and it took us all of three days, which was accidental but fantastic. We were just so over-the-moon. We were so excited.

And it just snowballed from there and the marketing, I kept sending out the marketing and we kept following up with the marketing. Both of us were working really long hours, way, way into the morning every time our children's little eyes closed to do - have a day sleep or a night sleep, Kim and I'd be burning up the phone and burning up the laptops and our computers and doing what we could to create demand, which is what you need to do when you've got a book.

Valerie:
So would you recommend to other authors to self-publish their book?

Rachael:
Look personally I've just done my third self-published book now and I just think that it's absolutely fantastic. It's a wonderful journey but I would say this, if you're not good at speaking with people or if you're not good at selling your product then I would get somebody on board to do that for you if you're going to go down the self-publishing route.

Publishing, in itself, is fantastic because you've got a ready-made team there but you still need to create the demand. You still can't just write the book and then place it comfortably in the hands of a publisher and hope that they will do everything for you. They will do a lot for you but you will still always need to create demand.

Kim and I went out of our way last year in the first year of our book - this is will give you an indication of what we did. We did over 325 book signings, the two of us last year.

Valerie:
Wow.

Rachael:
And that was all around Australia. We paid and we self-funded all of our own flights, we self-funded all of our accommodation, all of our transfers, all of our car hire just to get to one book signing, take some three hours of cooking just to even get there, you know? And that's before all the other expenses and all the other things that we need to do.

But fortunately, we have amazing husbands who are really, really supportive and when we're gone they're at home with the children. But if we didn't have supportive people around us, there's no way we could do that. I don't have any close relatives around where I live, so for me it's a real juggling act but it's manageable if you work it properly.

So control in self-publishing is fantastic. We've got lots of control; we can do what we want to do but a publisher will obviously take a great deal of control off you. But if you're actively marketing and actively getting it out there, then it's – it's going to be a good thing for everybody concerned.

Valerie:
Yeah. So you've just done your third self-published book. Is that 4 Ingredients 2?

Rachael:
It is. How exciting! We've just finished a big, big journey. Beautiful, beautiful book. So it's 4 Ingredients 2, red cover, green four and more fantastic four-ingredient recipes. After book one, we had so many recipes left over that book two simply evolved naturally and yeah, it hit – it's already out so it's exciting.

Valerie:
And was it easier this time around?

Rachael:
I would say it was a little bit more challenging to be truthful with you because, while the process was the same, our children had grown up a little bit. They're a year older so my son, Jaxson, has dropped his day sleep so there's no more day sleep to race around in so other things were done at night.

Our publicity and our public image, I suppose, have grown significantly so where - there's more demands on us. I mean, at the beginning of all this, we were so excited to get one interview a month, basically, or a week or something. And now we do four a day - four interviews a day and last week alone we did something like six photo shoots so it's a very, very busy change to life now and fortunately the boys are home now so we're juggling parenting together which is a good thing.

So when Kim and I are out on the road we, you know, the boys are at home at - like I mentioned before. But also in all of this, I have two other businesses and I'm also writing my fourth book which is Marketing To Success, a marketing book and Kim has just had a beautiful little boy so her third child.

Valerie:
Wow.

Rachael:
But yeah, it's been challenging and a lot also of course, we've been filming our TV show. We filmed something, like I think it was two months of filming at the end of the day and they were big days. Here we were thinking that it was going to be a pretty well - a walk in the park compared to what we're used to but yeah, pretty challenging being picked up at 7:00 in the morning and not returning until 6:00 and everything else in between.

Really, really busy and cooking, cooking, cooking and making sure everything's fine and yeah, it was just - it was a fantastic experience. The LifeStyle Channel is where you can see 4 Ingredients. Please, please be kind to us. We really - we were very green.

Valerie:
And tell us how that came about.

Rachael:
Well, as the rise and rise and rise of 4 Ingredients occurred, more people kept looking and being interested and of course, we had publishers coming to approach us and ask us if they could quite kindly take on our book and things like that.

And we did talk to them because being busy mums our first priority is always going to be our families so it's not going to be 4 Ingredients, go work or anything like that. It's always going to be our families so I guess the current of having a full team, like I was talking to you about before, that could market for you, that could do all the administration, that could do all the orders and everything else was very, very attractive.

But at the end of the day, nothing's a constant, we're still better off doing what we do and we do it very, very well. Between the two of us, we're very, very good at what we do and we put in - we're very dedicated, we're very enthusiastic, we're country girls initially, so we've got a high, high work ethic. We're very, you know, loyal to our work and really get on with it. We're very productive women and efficient women.

So we met with all of these people and as we were meeting with all these publishers, all these TV production companies started approaching us too saying, "Look, you know, we love who you are. We've seen you on TV. We'd like to talk to you about doing your own show," and all this sort of stuff. And at the end of the day, I think we had about a dozen production companies approach us and LifeStyle was one of those and they were just such a great fit.

The LifeStyle Channel was all about family said that they would come to us. They would film around our current family commitments. They would film up on the Sunshine Coast, which is where we both live now. Kim has since moved up here as well and it was just perfect. Everything was just perfect so we said, "Yes. Okay, we'll go with the Lifestyle Channel and film the show." So that's a six-episode show.

Valerie:
How exciting.

Rachael:
It is! I know. Oh, gosh. Please don't say it too loudly. I'm still terrified.

Valerie:
Now obviously people look to you as an expert in food now because of the success of 4 Ingredients and now the show. Is that a bit weird for you considering that's not the way it's been in the past?

Rachael:
Well, they don't actually. Because of the marketing, we say "Look, we're not chefs. We're not even cooks. We're just busy mums who have a desire to cook up really fantastic food for our families." Sure, we've cooked more than the average person but cooking is still not really our passion.

We enjoy it a lot more than what we used to, I guess, because it's more interesting now, you know, creating different things and you get all these recipes come through on the website, which people subscribe to and they pop their own four-ingredient recipe on there and we get all these too and go, "Oh, that'll taste like - okay, I want to cook that up," so after you go and you cook that up and it's fantastic and I guess at the end of the day, we're starting to learn what will sort of work and what won't sort of work.

But we're still fairly green, really, we're still not chefs. So I - and because of the marketing has been focused on that as well, people don't come along and say, "Oh, you know, I've got this ingredient and that ingredient and what do you think I can make with it," or they - we don't get any questions like that, which is good because we don't want any more questions. We don't want any questions like that. We're not chefs. We're not a Jamie Oliver, we're not a Gordon Ramsay, we're not a Nigella Lawson. Our passion is in eating food. Let's get that right. Not cooking it.

Valerie:
So what was the hardest part of the self-publishing process or was there a hard part? Did you find it all quite easy?

Rachael:
No, I guess there's - well, you know, we're very solution focused women so we didn't really concentrate on anything that was negative but, you know, some of the - I guess having the belief in yourself and belief that it was a good idea and belief that you could do it.

Along the journey, we, you know, we had the green jacket of the 4 Ingredients and we had a whole lot of feedback. I remember Kim ringing me and saying she had just off the phone from the distributor after a few of the reps had gone into bookstores and they'd come back with some feedback about our book. And some of the feedback was, she said that the green jacket wouldn't sell. It was old-fashioned. It didn't look fantastic. There was no photos, you know, that sort of stuff.

And I just listened to her and because, remember, I had the motivation to get this book happening from Kim's brilliant idea and I just said to her, "Kim, we have had excellent instincts throughout this whole process. Let's keep our instincts strong and I think that our front cover looks fantastic, do you?" She said, "Absolutely." I said well, let's, you know, we - and like she keeps saying, she keeps saying that we are 80 percent. We represent her and I - represent 80 percent of the market so we, if we love something and we need it then surely 80 percent of other people are going to benefit from that as well.

But it was strategic. We went into book stores, we had a look on the shelves and saw what the colors were for the cookbooks and things like that. And we love green. We actually didn't even come up with the front cover. Our graphic artist, Nigel Forbes, did and we just sort of said to him, "Nigel, that's something fresh. We love red. We want it to represent food somehow," and he came up with the cover and we loved it.

As soon as he came through with it, we said, "We love it. That's exactly what we want. It's symbolic of the whole book, it's simple." There's no photos in the book because we don't want to be distracted by photos. And plus, photos in all the recipe books, they're prepped, they're primed, they're poached, they're varnished, they're, you know, they're not real food. This is real, practical, everyday cooking that makes life, you know, easier in the kitchen.

It's cooking smarter, not harder. We don't want to be - I don't have time to look at pictures and all that sort of stuff. I'm really, really busy. It's not my focus and it's not Kim's focus. So we did a lot of research in terms of what - and we, I guess, we're always guided by the fact of what we wanted, what we thought.

So we had challenges where that we had negative comments but we stayed firm in our belief. We weren't silly, we listened. We listened to people and things like that so that there were some really good points that came at us and whatnot but at the end of the day, we always did what we wanted to do and that was the green jacket and no pictures. So yeah, it worked very, very well.

Valerie:
So 4 Ingredients has pretty much spawned its own industry almost. Can you as we wrap up here, fast forward say three or five years and paint us a picture of what you'll be doing or your – or your 4 Ingredients empire by then.

Rachael:
Three or four years that's such a long time away for us. Things move so fast in our world now that I can probably tell you what will happen in two years time and that is we've got publishers approaching us from all around the world. And the latest one actually today was from a French publisher so, you know, we will get it published in the U.K. That's just a matter of time.

And everybody's just waiting on us to do that but we're waiting in and around our families. Kimmy's little fellow's still quite young and it's still too big of a trip to take all of our families over to the U.K. and launch over there but it will happen. It will happen sometime in 2009. So that's really exciting and we've already launched in New Zealand. It's number one international bestseller over there as well; has been for ages and ages since I think around about eight months now.

Valerie:
Great.

Rachael:
We will probably launch in other countries as well, no doubt about it. South Africa and Germany have already showed interest and the Asian markets and also the American markets. So we're talking to agents and publishers at the moment and it'll be a watch this space and this show, they've already made plans to sell the show internationally as well. So you could see Rachael and Kim from 4 Ingredients in the U.K. on their tube over there soon with a bit of luck.

We don't know where this ride's going to lead us. We're having fun along the way and our families are having fun. We take our families to as many destinations as we possibly can because we don't like being away from them for too long. Two days is enough.

However we're pining basically. So anything longer than that, we normally take them away with us and yeah, it's fun while it's lasting and while, you know, while we're happy and while we're doing what we want to do.

I don't know. We've just developed our own calendar and our own tea towel that's come out so all of those are available on the website, of course, which is 4Ingredients.com.au and yeah, we'll just see. We will just see; who knows, the minute we set something, something more magnificent happens and I guess that's the power of setting goals, which is really important.

You have to know what your destination is in order to make the relevant choices. And while we have a lot of ideas of what we - what we'd like to see and what we'd like to do, they always seem to end up greater than those. So having a goal, initially, is a good thing and then as they say, if you shoot for the moon, you'll still land in the stars. So you just need to be focused and take action into whatever dream or goal you have.

Valerie:
Well, congratulations on your success so far and thank you for talking to us today, Rachael.

Rachael:
Thank you so much and good luck, everyone. Happy cooking.

If you like the idea of self-publishing your own book, check out our seminar: Self-publishing: How to do it.

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