She was mindful that when her own mum died, in the early 80s, many of the family recipes had been lost. And she was keen to ensure the same thing wouldn’t happen with her own treasured recipes.

“My mum died and so her recipes sort of died with her,’’ Ward, now 70, explains.

“And I thought about all the lovely recipes I use, and I thought it would be great if my kids knew how to make them. So I wrote them all down and suddenly it was bigger than Ben-Hur.’’

She never imagined the seemingly simple family project would lead her to become a self-published cookbook author, with her 650-page hardcover book – Food Gardening, Cooking and Family – released in May this year.

Ward started writing the book in 2021 as a way to ease herself into retirement, after 40 years as a medical practice manager.

“When I was working full-time, everyone said ‘what will you do when you retire?’ and I said ‘I’ll write a book’ and they all thought ‘nonsense’,’’ Ward says.

“So I retired, and set to it. I just sat down and wrote, basically for three months, I just wrote out all the recipes I could remember from my mum. Then I went through all my own recipe cards and wrote out those recipes. And then I thought ‘Actually, I really should have photographs with this’.’’

Ward considered herself “absolutely useless at photography” but was determined to learn, so she picked up her husband’s point-and-shoot camera, cooked quarter batches of each recipe, and started taking photos.

“I just did it in sections,’’ she explains of baking food to be photographed for the book.

“One month I decided I’d do all the cakes and biscuits, so I bombarded my family with cakes and biscuits – but they didn’t mind, they were sad when it all ended. I’d give boxes of biscuits away, I’d take cakes into work and things like that, so I didn’t have to eat them all.’’

Her Blackmans Bay home has a thriving garden, with Ward using a lot of her own produce in her cooking, so she decided to add sections about gardening and food preserving to the book.

She was planning to print the book for her three children and five grandchildren (she has a sixth grandchild due soon) but realised there might be wider appeal.

“I thought, ‘I’ve put all this effort into it, and there’s all this info here that the greater community would love’,’’ she explains.

“People kept asking me how to grow stuff or how to make this cake. So I thought I should explore publishers.’’

Ultimately Ward self-published the book, using a Victorian firm to print 200 copies (debwardbooks.wixsite.com/home). She has been thrilled to sell more than a third of those so far, with six copies of the $120 book also for loan as part of the Libraries Tasmania collection.

“I was standing in my driveway, with a big pallet of boxes – I opened one up and there was my book – I was amazed,’’ Ward recalls of seeing her published book for the first time.

“It was extraordinary to look at this and think ‘wow, this is actually a book, its heavy and it has gravitas and it’s mine.’’

And most of all, her extended family have embraced the publication.

“They love it, yes they do, which is really nice,’’ Ward says.

“They’ll ring up and say ‘Granny, I was just doing that recipe on page whatever, and it’s lovely’. And I think it’s lovely that they can use the recipes (of my mother’s) that I used to love, or that I invented along the way with a growing family.’’

Ward is one of a growing number of Tasmanians finding joy in self-publishing.

Book stores report that self-publishing is skyrocketing, while events like the Tassie Indie Author Book Fair – which began in 2019 – continue to grow as an increasing number of independent authors seek outlets for promoting books and sharing knowledge.

Surge in self-publishing

Fullers Bookshop director Tim Jarvis says there has been a huge surge in self-publishing in Tasmania in recent years, fuelled largely by the pandemic and our increasing accessibility to technology which has made publishing a book easier than ever before.

“It has been a surge – in the past five years in particular,” Jarvis says.

“Some of it has been coming out of Covid I think – it was accelerating a trend that had already started.’’

Having greater access to digital photography, as well as layout programs and online publishing platforms, also meant self-publishing was far more achievable for the average Tasmanian than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago.

“It’s now really easy to self-publish a book, but it used to be quite hard,’’ Jarvis says.

“The barrier to entry is lower so a lot more people are doing it.’’

Sites like IngramSpark allow people to publish their own book, promote it with international sellers like Amazon, and produce copies on a print-on-demand basis, which is often more cost effective and means authors don’t end up with huge piles of books in their spare room or garage, waiting to be sold.

The ease of publishing means Tasmanians are sharing their creative ideas more than ever before, bringing some interesting reads into the market.

“There’s a lot of great local stuff that gets published by those channels that would have really struggled to find print before,’’ Jarvis says.

The result of more self-publishing is that his store gets approached “several times a day” by enthusiastic self-publishers wanting to have their books stocked at Fullers, but Jarvis says it would be impossible to stock them all.

He says some self-published Tassie authors have been quite successful, selling 25,000 copies or more, while others sell just a handful of copies.

“Some things really take off but I think self-publishing is like sending a message in a bottle out into an ocean saturated with messages in bottles. It’s a big market out there,’’ he says.

Self-published books often have a higher price point than books produced by major publishing companies, meaning they don’t necessarily suit all budgets.

Jarvis says Christmas is the biggest time of the year for book sales – self-published or otherwise – and cookbooks are also popular at this time of year. In the three weeks of December leading up to Christmas, his Hobart store does as much trade as it would typically do in a three-month period of regular trading.

Bread architect documents gluten free journey

Chris Stafferton is a former naval architect who has reinvented himself as a bread architect, self-publishing a cookbook inspired by his own health journey of eating gluten free.

The now 68-year-old was suffering from a range of health issues and tried various elimination diets before his doctor suggested in 2006 that he cut out gluten.

“Very quickly things turned around and I was much better,’’ Stafferton recalls.

A few months later his youngest of three daughters, then aged 11, was also advised to cut gluten from her diet.

“It wasn’t just ‘poor little old me, what do I do for bread?’ – I thought ‘okay, you’re a dad, your daughter needs to have food to take to school and all that sort of thing, what are you going to do about it?’,’’ he says.

Stafferton started tinkering until he developed what he considered to be a “reasonable” gluten-free loaf.

But it was seedy, and his daughter didn’t like that.

So Stafferton kept working on it.

“Eventually I started making some pretty darn good bread,’' he says.

“Some friends said ‘this is good ... you need to let other people get hold of it’.’’

He created an Etsy store in 2011, and he began selling recipes for $3 each, something he continues to do to this day.

And the popularity of those recipes led him to publish a cookbook, Promise & Fulfillment: formulas for real bread without gluten, in 2019.

The 212-page hardback features Stafferton’s own photos and 60 gluten-free recipes, including basic bread, baguettes, flatbread, seeded bread, fruit bread, rolls, crispbreads, soda bread and viennoiserie (breakfast pastries), as well as plenty of useful information for successfully baking without gluten.

He has since earned a name for himself as the ‘Bread Architect’, offering recipes and online coaching advice to novice and experienced bakers across the globe (breadarchitect.com @breadarchitect).

Born and raised in Melbourne, Stafferton had a successful career as a naval architect before moving to Tasmania 20 years ago, where he initially worked as a church minister at Latrobe, in the state’s North West.

More recently he moved to the state’s south, and has started a gluten-free micro bakery at his Old Beach home.

Stafferton describes the $54.50 book as a public service, more than a major income stream.

“What you get is very, very small – it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, by any stretch of the imagination,’’ he says of the income from self-publishing.

He enjoyed the process of creating the book – he publishes through IngramSpark and has sold a few thousand copies.

“I’ve always done jobs and worked at things that have steep learning curves, that’s the nature of my job as an engineer,’’ he says.

“It has been a fascinating time. Have I always enjoyed it? Sometimes I’ve torn my hair out. But overall it has been a good experience.’’

Cook’s string of awards

Eloise Emmett is one of Tasmania’s more successful self-published authors, having won a string of local, national and international awards for her six cookbooks, which she has sold about 20,000 copies of.

The 47-year-old mother of three began her career as a qualified chef – and earlier this year opened The Little Norfolk Bay Bistro at Taranna on the Tasman Peninsula – but is equally well known for her work as an author, cooking teacher, food stylist, publisher and photographer (eloiseemmett.com).

Emmett has helped many Tasmanians publish cookbooks, while also producing books of her own – her titles include The Real Food for Kids Cookbook (2015), Seafood Everyday (2016), The Tasmania Pantry (2017), The Tasmania Pantry 2 (2020), Packed (2022) and Celebrate (2022).

Emmett never set out to become an author, but she is passionate about educating people about cooking and the benefits of eating fresh, healthy food and says writing books has been a great way to connect with people and spread this message.

Emmett’s first foray into publishing was in 2013, when she teamed up with Alice Bennett and Katharine Burke to produce Bream Creek Farmers Market, The Cook Book, with a portion of proceeds supporting Dunalley Primary School following the devastating bushfires in January 2013.

Soon after, Emmett started cooking regularly with young children at the school as part of the Launching Into Learning program, and had an idea for a book of her own.

“I got to the end of the year and was putting all the recipes together in a little folder for the kids, and I thought ‘This would make a really good cookbook’,’’ she says.

That book came out in 2015 and Emmett has continued to publish since, enrolling at TAFE in 2016 to complete her Diploma in Visual Arts – Photography to improve her photographic skills for subsequent books.

Emmett, a former head chef at well-known eateries including Astor Grill and T42, also spent seven years running her own restaurant, The Mussel Boys, at Taranna, from 2004-2011, which respected food writer and restaurant critic Graeme Phillips praised at the time for being “one of the best country eateries in the state” due to its inspirational menu and emphasis on using fresh local produce.

She made the difficult decision to close the restaurant following the birth of her eldest daughter, Maggie, now 16, who was followed by daughter Stephanie, now 13, and son Oscar, now 10.

Earlier this year, Emmett opened The Little Norfolk Bay Bistro on the same site as The Mussel Boys, creating premium dishes made with locally sourced ingredients and freshly caught seafood.

She admits she has “three or four little ideas” that she’d possibly like to explore for books in the future.

She enjoys the process of putting a book together, and says it’s a great feeling to hold a book you’ve published in your hands for the first time.

Emmett says the main benefit to self-publishing is that she can include exactly what she likes in her books, and isn’t bound by the restrictions a publisher might place on her.

She says many years ago, the only self-publishing option would have been to publish 20,000 books in China. But there are now some excellent self-publishing and print-on-demand options, making self-publishing more attainable, while improved technology – including the availability of online tutorials for things like photography – have also contributed to the boom in self-publishing.

Emmett believes the self-publishing model works best within businesses – like a vineyard or a farm or a restaurant – where books can be sold directly to visitors onsite, allowing for easier promotion and avoiding the overheads of selling in a bookstore.

She says anyone interested in self-publishing needed to realise there wasn’t a lot of money to be made, and would-be authors needed to ensure they were passionate about the book they planned to publish, as well as being committed to things like marketing, which a lot of budding authors initially overlook.

“It’s more of a hobby,’’ Emmett says.

“You’re doing it for a passion, and you want to get a message out there and help a few people.’’

Festival inspires book publishing pursuit

Janice Sutton’s involvement with Koonya Garlic Festival – an event she was a founder of – inspired her to publish her first book.

That book – Garlic Feast – released in 2016, went on to be named Australia Cookbook of the Year in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, the first of many accolades for the self-published title.

Sutton has since published two other cookbooks – Tomato: know, sow, grow, feast which she co-wrote with Penny Woodward and Karen Sutherland in 2018; and Winter Wild, published in 2021 which celebrates Dark Mofo’s spectacular Winter Feast and other wintry events in Tasmania.

The Koonya resident is now in the process of pulling together an expanded and revised edition of Garlic Feast to be released in late 2025 or early 2026.

“Garlic Feast has a special place in my heart,’’ Sutton says.

“It contains the energy, love and passion of our community here on the Tasman Peninsula, and it has taken our gorgeous little garlic festival to the world stage. I am a passionate foodie, but I am also passionate about community. Indeed it is my love of community (and community events) and the stories behind the food that often inspire the creative projects and voluntary work I do.’’

Born in the UK, Sutton began her career as a BBC National Radio researcher and producer, and in addition to publishing her own books she recently set up a small indie publishing company called Magpie Publications (janicesutton.com).

“Pulling together a cookbook, for me, isn’t dissimilar from producing a national radio documentary series or magazine program – the gathering of experts, the sharing of their knowledge, wisdom, stories and inspiration,” Sutton says.

“I don’t want my books to be a celebration of me, but a celebration of others, ostensibly. I love the challenge of the creative process, being involved not only in the written elements, but also the photography and design – the whole shebang!’’

Although she admits the process wasn’t as easy as she first anticipated.

“What I wasn’t fully prepared for was how much work was involved in producing a cookbook,’’ she says.

“Although I had done a great deal of research ahead of time, I had completely underestimated the amount of work involved in pulling a cookbook together the size of Garlic Feast, and certainly the size of Winter Wild.’’

The self-confessed “control freak” says self-publishing is the best model for her – she values the input of others, and has collaborated with various writers and photographers for her books – but ultimately likes having control over what is published.

“I didn’t go to a publisher,’’ she says.

“I didn’t even contemplate it. I chose to self-publish because I wanted total creative control over the process, for it is having that level of involvement and control that makes writing a book, especially a cookbook, so much more rewarding.’’

She suggests others embarking on a self-publishing journey would be wise to seek help when needed.

“It is important to be open to feedback, to have a mentor perhaps, particularly if it is your first cookbook project,’’ she says.

“It is also important to have a budget, to know who your audience is, and marketing will be a huge part of the book’s potential commercial success. The premise of the book is very important too, its concept, and it needs to flow and make sense. The book’s cover is also important and shouldn’t be underestimated as it can impact the book’s commercial appeal and viability. Distribution, too, is an issue for self-publishers. Perhaps not here in Tasmania so much, as the independent bookshops in Tasmania are incredibly supportive of local authors, including self-publishers. However, if you want to get your book distributed further afield, you will need a distributor.’’

Sutton “strives for excellence” when it comes to producing books, and is humbled by the awards her books have received.

“It isn’t money or awards that ultimately motivate me, however – it’s the creative process, the journey of discovery that I embark upon, the unravelling, the challenges and surprises, the magic that can happen in the quiet spaces, and most of all, the wonderful people behind the food that I get to work with and their inspiring stories, as well as the talented creatives I collaborate with, that truly motivate me,’’ she says.

“This is why I write. Working alongside so many talented creatives has been so incredibly inspiring and has enriched my life beyond measure. I have met and made so many wonderful new friends. You cannot place a price on that!’’