The Philadelphia chef Kiki Aranita said that in 2018, Page Street Publishing offered her just $8,000 to write a cookbook on Hawaiian food, with royalties of 10 percent on the first 25,000 copies. (She was raised in Oahu, and her restaurant, Poi Dog, centers on casual Hawaiian fare.)

“I was mortified, but on the other hand excited that a publisher was interested in someone writing about Hawaiian food on the mainland,” she added. When she had tried to pitch a similar cookbook before, she said, “one thing I heard over and over was that Hawaiian food is niche and not easy to market.”

She said people of color may be more vulnerable to these deals, because editors may believe their food to be outside the mainstream and hard to sell to a large audience. On the other hand, she added, the offers are so low that only people of means can even afford to take them.

“I am pretty jaded after going through the whole process,” Ms. Aranita said. (She declined the deal.)

Will Kiester , the publisher of Page Street, said that in these deals, the company “breaks even at the same time that the author breaks even.”

“The math is just the math,” he said. “I could pay everybody more if books sold 20,000 copies a year instead of 10,000 copies a year.”

Mr. Kiester said Page Street has a standard deal structure based on the author’s following on either Instagram or Facebook (whichever is larger), with engagement being considered as well. An author with a following of 50,000 accounts would receive a $9,000 advance, for example, while an author with a following of 1,000,000 would receive a $15,000 advance . All authors receive the same royalty rate of 10 percent of net sales. A photography budget of $7,000 is provided. (Ms. Glick described this as “very low” for photography, in her experience.)

Publishers who offer these deals highlight the prestige of being published. But that’s not worth what it used to be, said Deanna Fox, a food writer in Albany. She said she was asked by a “fairly large legacy newspaper” to produce a cookbook from its recipe database for free in 2016. (She did not name the company because she still does some freelance work for it.)