UNITED STATES – Three years ago, B. Dylan Hollis was an unemployed musician in Wyoming who had never baked anything outside a home economics class, much less written a recipe.

In August, his debut cookbook, Baking Yesteryear, became the best-selling book in the United States. Not just the best-selling cookbook – the No. 1 book.

Baking Yesteryear, which features vintage American recipes, sold 150,000 copies on its first day and was one of the most pre-ordered books in the history of its publisher Penguin Random House, just behind memoirs by the Obamas and Britain’s Prince Harry.

Hollis has no political career or royal family drama propelling his book.

What he does have is 10.2 million followers on TikTok, where he has been posting cooking videos since 2020.

“I feel as if I have stolen someone else’s job,” he said with a chuckle in a recent video interview from his home in Laramie.

Hollis, 28, has big, curious eyes and a shapely swoop of hair, and peppers his rapid-fire speech with quaint expressions like “Oh, heavens.”

Like many people, he got bored during the pandemic and began baking. Instead of making sourdough, he channelled his love of all things antique into preparing recipes from old community cookbooks.

His August 2020 TikTok video about pork cake received millions of views, and less than two years later, he signed a cookbook deal for what he would only describe as a “grand amount of money”.

He is one of several TikTok creators, many of them with little or no professional cooking experience, who have gone from tinkering in their home kitchens to topping bestseller lists in a remarkably short time.

In the process, they have shot a jolt of energy into a sagging cookbook market.

Overall sales of cookbooks have fallen 14.5 per cent from a year ago, according to consumer analytics company Circana, and the top 50 cookbooks sold an average of 96,000 copies in the past 12 months.

By comparison, An Unapologetic Cookbook by American chef Joshua Weissman (seven million TikTok followers) has sold 316,000 copies.

The Korean Vegan by American lawyer-blogger Joanne Lee Molinaro (three million followers) has sold 102,000 and won a James Beard award.

And Hollis’ Baking Yesteryear has sold more than 165,000. (Those impressive figures, though, are far from the million-plus sales of an established superstar such as American personality Joanna Gaines.)

No one is more surprised than Hollis.

“I have been baking for only two years,” said Hollis, who divides his time between Wyoming and Bermuda, where he grew up.

“To be known for baking without being trained or even particularly well versed in the topic – now that is a very peculiar notion. You have to ask yourself, ‘Who deserves to publish a cookbook?’” he said.

The answer is changing rapidly.

TikTok has altered what people look for in a cookbook or a cookbook author, said Ms Vanessa Santos, executive vice-president of publicity firm Mona Creative, which represents several cookbook writers.

“A recipe doesn’t need to be all that new or perfect,” she said. “It is really just: Are they connecting with a personality?”

Not everyone agrees, even cookbook authors with big fan bases of their own.

“When you do a 20-second video making a cake, it is really entertaining and interesting,” said David Lebovitz, 64, a Paris-based cookbook author who started his food blog in 1999 and publishes a popular newsletter on Substack.

“But once again, people want solid recipes.”

Hollis is far from being the first amateur cook to snag a major book deal.

The Internet long ago democratised the notion of who can be an author, and publishers have sought to translate online followings – from food blogs in the 1990s and 2000s to Instagram accounts in the 2010s – into cookbook success.

“But nothing has converted quite as well as TikTok to actual sales,” said Ms Kristen McLean, an analyst at Circana.

And publishers are ponying up.

TikTok creators are receiving the kind of advances that celebrity television hosts might get – “definitely in the high six- or even over six-figure range”, said Mr Anthony Mattero, an agent at Creative Artists Agency who represents several TikTok creators.

“TikTok is the greatest selling machine right now,” said Nadia Caterina Munno, 40, who parlayed her TikTok audience of 3.1 million followers into a deal for a cookbook, The Pasta Queen.

Released in November 2022, it debuted at No. 5 on The New York Times’ “Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous” list.

But Hollis worries that the more of his fellow TikTok creators get cookbook deals, the less credible their books may become. The field may become too saturated.

“Everyone and their dog is about to have a cookbook,” he said, “and who knows what that is going to do?”

Then again, Hollis is already thinking about his next cookbook. NYTIMES