Helena Vybíralová could be said to be an internet self-made woman. From baking cookies for pleasure and selling cookbooks, she has gone on to have her own e-shop, which she supports on Facebook or by e-mailing. Her page has more than 10,000 fans and forms an enthusiastic community that shares her confectionery successes together. We talked about how she managed it in her beautifully landscaped garden in a small greece email list village in Hanáč.
Helen, how did you get into the pastry shop?
I’ve really enjoyed baking since I was a little girl, these recipes have been baked for generations in our house. 11 years ago I started a website cukrovi.kvalitne.cz. Every time I baked something, I added a photo and the recipe to the site. Over those 11 years, a really big number of women have learned to visit this site, especially before Christmas. Sometimes I’ll stick to the classics some of them wrote to me asking if I would like to publish the recipes in a book. It’s more convenient than using a tablet, mobile phone or computer while baking. I didn’t even think about it at first. But after my husband started a publishing house, the idea of publishing a find the best influencer evaluation tool for your campaigns cookbook started to bother me.
It seems like a good idea, as you are currently preparing your fifth cookbook. How are people reacting to them?
For the first cookbook, we had no idea
how many to publish. We knew that
cookbooks sell well, but what if mine didn’t sell and it was sitting in our warehouse? So we made the first print run of 2,500 copies of the Christmas Cookies cookbook and thought to ourselves: Hopefully it will sell within five years. A month later, we got a call from the distributor saying that the cookbooks were sold out and that they wanted a reprint. So the book was published at the end of September, and before the beginning of November, we were I’ll stick to the b2c phone list classics rushing to prepare a reprint so that it would be published in time for Christmas.
Did that surprise you?
Of course. We ended up doing three
more reprints of the first one, the Christmas one.
The total print run to date is 20,000 copies.
Then came other cookbooks, each with a
slightly higher initial print run because
we already knew roughly what we were getting into. Right now I’m finishing up my fifth cookbook with gluten-free recipes. It should be out in September.