Good news: this is one of the oldest fundraisers in America. The Library of Congress traces the genre back to Maria J. Moss’s A Poetical Cook-Book, sold at Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair in June 1864 to help wounded Union soldiers. By the end of World War I, more than 5,000 charitable cookbooks had been published.

Less good news: nobody tells you the math. So I pulled the current price charts of three fundraising-cookbook printers plus Amazon KDP, put them in a Python script, and ran the numbers for a typical group.

Short answer: collect 150 recipes from 50 people, order 200 copies, sell them at $12. The print bill is $650. Copy number 55 pays the printer. Everything after that is your fundraiser.

Step 1: Size the book from the people, not the recipes

Every printer I checked says the same thing about who buys these books: the contributors. Morris Press Cookbooks, which bills itself as “The Nation’s #1 Cookbook Publisher,” writes on its no-risk guarantee page that recipe contributors “are built-in buyers, purchasing an average of 3 cookbooks each.” Its sister brand Simply Cookbooks repeats the same figure.

That turns the planning into one multiplication:

• 50 contributors x 3 recipes = 150 recipes.
• 50 contributors x 3 copies = 150 books sold before you approach a single neighbor.
• Add a modest 50 outside sales (bake sale table, Christmas fair, parish office), and you need 200 copies.

Fifty is not a random number either. Morris guarantees that sales will cover the printing bill, but only if an order of 100 to 200 books has recipes from at least 50 different adults, their names are printed with their recipes, and you don’t sell below the suggested price. Bigger orders need more people: 150 contributors for up to 500 books, 200 for up to 1,000.

Step 2: Know what the printers actually charge

Here is the base cost per book for a 150-recipe soft cover. Simply Cookbooks says most books average two recipes per page, so 150 recipes is about 75 recipe pages; I add 20 pages for the title page, contents, index and dividers, giving about 95 pages.

Three things jump out:

1. Below 100 copies, it gets expensive. Simply Cookbooks (minimum 12 books) charges $22.25 a book for 12 copies of an 81-100 page book and $7.60 at 96 copies.
2. Morris and Fundcraft are nearly identical. At 200 copies, Morris charges $3.25 and Fundcraft $3.43. Both suggest a $12 cover price for books up to 150 recipes.
3. KDP is the cheapest per copy, with a catch. Amazon’s printing cost table charges a flat $2.30 for any black-ink paperback of 24 to 110 pages on Amazon.com. But KDP paperbacks are bound with glue, so the book won’t lie flat on the counter the way a plastic-coil cookbook does.

Step 3: Avoid the 100-copy trap

The cautious instinct is to order the minimum. Here is why that is usually the expensive choice.

At Morris, 100 copies cost $475. 200 copies cost $650. The second hundred books cost you $175, or $1.75 a book, and each one sells for $12.

If your 50 contributors really do buy three each, a 100-copy order sells out to your own members. Your fundraiser tops out at $725. With 200 copies, the contributors alone bring in $1,150 and a sell-out brings in $1,750.

Morris’s ordering page says it plainly: “Don’t underestimate sales; order plenty of books,” because “a smaller reprint later will cost more.”

The calculator

Here is the core of the script, small enough to paste into any Python shell. The full version, fundraiser.py, parses the Morris table directly from the saved page and adds the Fundcraft, Simply and KDP prices.

import math

# Morris Press soft cover, up to 150 recipes (prices effective Feb 1, 2025)
MORRIS_150 = {100: 4.75, 200: 3.25, 300: 3.15, 400: 2.95, 500: 2.75}
KDP_UNDER_110_PAGES = 2.30          # Amazon.com black-ink paperback, flat fee

def fundraiser(copies, price=12.00, contributors=50, per_book=None):
    per_book = per_book or MORRIS_150[copies]
    bill = copies * per_book
    return {
        "bill": round(bill, 2),
        "break_even_copy": math.ceil(bill / price),
        "profit_contributors_only": round(min(contributors * 3, copies) * price - bill, 2),
        "profit_sold_out": round(copies * price - bill, 2),
    }

print("Morris 100:", fundraiser(100))
print("Morris 200:", fundraiser(200))
print("KDP    200:", fundraiser(200, per_book=KDP_UNDER_110_PAGES))

Output:

Morris 100: {'bill': 475.0, 'break_even_copy': 40, 'profit_contributors_only': 725.0, 'profit_sold_out': 725.0}
Morris 200: {'bill': 650.0, 'break_even_copy': 55, 'profit_contributors_only': 1150.0, 'profit_sold_out': 1750.0}
KDP    200: {'bill': 460.0, 'break_even_copy': 39, 'profit_contributors_only': 1340.0, 'profit_sold_out': 1940.0}

All figures are before shipping and sales tax, which every printer adds to the invoice. If you’ve read my KDP royalty calculator post, this is the same idea pointed at a church basement instead of an Amazon listing.

Step 4: Decide how many recipes to ask for

More recipes make a thicker book, and a thicker book costs more to print. But the suggested cover price rises faster than the cost.

At 200 copies, going from 150 to 300 recipes raises Morris’s base cost from $3.25 to $4.25 (+$1.00) while the suggested price rises from $12 to $15 (+$3.00). Your margin per book grows from $8.75 to $10.75.

The real limit is people, not pages. Ask each contributor for three to six recipes and you land between 150 and 300. Asking 50 people for six recipes each is a lot of nagging; asking 100 people for three gives you more recipes and more built-in buyers.

Step 5: Watch the money come in

Here is the 200-copy plan as a running total. The red area is the hole you dig when the invoice arrives; the teal area is the fundraiser.

The good part for nonprofits: you usually don’t pay up front. Morris’s payment terms let approved nonprofit organizations skip prepayment, with half the bill due 37 days after the invoice and the rest at 90 days, interest-free. Families, individuals and businesses pay half when they order. Two more details from the same page: orders can run 10% over or under what you ordered, and you’re invoiced only for books received, minus 3% free books.

Step 6: Work backward from your sale date

If you want books for a Christmas sale, the calendar matters more than the recipes. Morris’s production page lists 20-25 business days when you type the recipes yourself with its online tool type n save, and 35-45 business days if the company types them.

For an estimated December 15 ship date, it needs a complete type n save order by November 6 (RUSH: November 13, at a 20% upcharge with a $200 minimum). The deadline for orders the company typesets has already passed. As I write this on October 19, that leaves 18 days:

1. This week: send the recipe collection form with a hard deadline. Three recipes, one per category, name printed.
2. Next week: chase the stragglers. Pick a cover and divider set.
3. Week three: type everything into type n save (it also takes 25 cents off every book, up to $300, per Morris’s discount page), write the front pages, proofread, submit.

Step 7: Mind two rules before you print

Copyright. The U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 33 says “a mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable,” but a recipe that creatively explains a dish can be protected, as can photos. In practice: Aunt Linda’s lasagna is fine; Aunt Linda’s lasagna retyped word for word from a magazine, with the magazine’s headnote and photo, is not. Ask contributors to write the steps in their own words.

AI disclosure on Amazon. If you go the KDP route, Amazon’s content guidelines require you to disclose AI-generated text or images when you publish. AI-assisted editing, where you wrote the text and a tool polished it, doesn’t need disclosure.

Where software actually helps

The recipes are the easy part: your contributors write them. The pages that stall volunteer committees are the others: the group’s history, the dedication, the “about our school” story, the tribute to the member who started the bake sale in 1987.

That is where writing tools earn their keep. Morris’s type n save handles recipe entry and layout for its books. For the KDP route, Reedsy Studio is free and exports print-ready PDF and EPUB files. And ImagineYourBook is an AI book-writing tool that turns a prompt or a page of notes into a ~10,000-word draft with Word and EPUB export, which is handy for turning a committee’s scribbled memories into a first draft of those front pages. Whatever you use, have a real member edit it, and if it goes to Amazon, follow the disclosure rule above.

If the book is more family heirloom than fundraiser, my guide to writing your life story for your grandchildren covers printing a handful of hardcovers. And if your church group is also planning a devotional, see how long a daily devotional should be.

When KDP beats the fundraising printers

KDP wins on three points: no minimum order, no inventory risk, and the lowest per-copy price. You can order up to 999 author copies at a time and pay the print cost per copy, plus shipping and tax at checkout. The book also keeps selling online: at a $12 list price, KDP’s royalty formula pays 60% minus the $2.30 print cost, or $4.90 per Amazon sale.

The trade-offs: the book must be live, public and for sale on Amazon before you can order author copies. It’s glue-bound, not coil. You do your own layout. And you get no sales guarantee and no 90-day credit. For a full breakdown of self-publishing costs, the @iyb7 piece How Much Does It Cost to Self-Publish a Book? is a good companion.

Limitations

• Prices are the printers’ published 2024-2025 charts as checked on October 19, 2026. Seasonal coupons, cover upgrades, shipping and tax all change the real invoice. Get a quote before you commit.
• The three-copies-per-contributor figure comes from the printers, not from an independent survey. Treat it as a planning number, not a promise.
• The ~95-page estimate assumes two recipes per page plus 20 pages of front and back matter. Long recipes or photos push the page count, and the price tier, up.
• Fundcraft’s chart is an image; I transcribed the four rows I used by hand.

The takeaway

A fundraising cookbook is a people project with a spreadsheet attached. Get 50 adults to send three recipes each, order 200 copies rather than the 100-copy minimum, price it at the printer’s suggested $12, and the print bill is paid by copy 55. If your group is tiny or wants zero inventory, KDP author copies at $2.30 each are the cheapest path, as long as you can live with a glued spine. And if you want books before Christmas, the date that matters this year is November 6.

The post How to Create a Cookbook for Fundraising: 150 Recipes, 200 Copies, Break Even at Copy 55 appeared first on Be on the Right Side of Change.