Gourmet Nutrition Draws a Crowd
Executive Summary:
The first run of 10,000 Gourmet Nutrition 2.0 cookbooks has arrived in our Indiana warehouse, hot off the press. Most of them are spoken for by pre-order customers, so be sure to order yours right away before they’re sold out. To find out more about the book, and to order, go to:
http://www.gourmetnutrition.com/
The Crowd
“Are you planning a dinner party?” said the waitress, somewhat sarcastically.
Quite honestly, the service was a little rude, but then again, I wasn’t the typical restaurant patron. For one thing, I was eating alone, and that’s never really a pleasant experience. The hostess kind of looked at me like, “Oh, you poor, poor man.” And the waitress was the same way, coming by the table to remove the extra plates and cutlery. So much for making me feel at home.
And then of course there was the fact that I was taking up a four-seat table, furiously scribbling notes all over a full-color cookbook. Better here than my office, I’d figured, but now I was starting to question that decision.
“Are you planning a dinner party?” she repeated, in case I didn’t get it the first time. Why else would someone be marking up a cookbook?
“Actually I’m editing the book.”
The first color proof of Gourmet Nutrition 2.0, in fact.Now, prior to that day, I hadn’t really seen anything in print. The modern book creation process is all virtual: Word docs, PDFs, JPGs, etc. Sent around the world at high speed, viewed in 2-D on your computer screen. And that’s all well and good, but I’ve always felt that I appreciate things so much more when I can hold them in my hands. I know some people like e-books, but for me, nothing can replace a real, tangible document. And now, after months and months of work by a lot of talented people, Gourmet Nutrition was finally just that: a real book.
And this book was AWESOME. I had hoped it would be good, but this was above and beyond that. There are cookbooks, and there are nutrition books, but there’s nothing like GN 2.
So I decided to take it to a nice Italian restaurant around the corner from here so that I could take a break and prepare myself for the long editing process still to come: at that point, we still hadn’t picked a cover and every one of the 288 pages had to be double-checked. But I didn’t really expect an entire restaurant to help me do it.
Turns out the waitress has a Masters degree in Fine Art and hopes to own her own restaurant one day; she drops the sarcastic tone when she actually sees the book, and she sits down and offers to help me edit it. She likes the shot of the Poached Pears, but thinks it’s maybe too busy for the cover and looks too “desserty” to represent a nutrition book. I take that as a compliment.
The general manager comes out to see why the waitress is neglecting her other customers; soon she too is oohing and aahing over the meals. She thinks we should try to get the Pesto Chicken Pizza on the cover.
Next to me are two couples from Ohio; they apologize for eavesdropping but want to see it too. Turns out they’ve all vowed to complete a triathlon in 2008 and offer to buy my coverless laser-printed proof right there on the spot. I tell them to wait for the real version, straight from the printing press, because it’ll be better than the cookbooks on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.
The restaurant is open-concept, and the chef, overseeing the commotion from his exposed kitchen, comes over to see what’s going on. He seems nice enough, but a little skeptical. A high-performance nutrition cookbook? This food can’t be any good. But scanning through the book, he keeps stopping to ask me questions. Who shot these photos? (I.e., they’re great.) Who came up with this Vegetable Fettuccini idea (I.e., strips of vegetables cut to mimic fettuccini? That’s really cool.) And so forth. He walks back to his kitchen, turning his head to say, “Compliments to the chef.” (So Mike & Kristina, there you go!)
Before long, half the restaurant is gathered around the table, opining on which photo to choose for the cover, which meals to feature in the free sample we’d be posting online, etc. And by the time I left, I had a dozen pre-orders and an invite to return once the book had come off the press.
Yesterday, the truck carrying all the books arrived safely in our warehouse in Indiana and started shipping out in the afternoon, so Phil and I gathered the crew to celebrate. Mike and Kristina, my co-authors, are on the other side of the continent unfortunately, but Carm, the book designer, Paul, the tireless printer, and Jason, the fashion-turned-food photographer all came to my place to break bread. Or at least the low-carb equivalent of bread.
We made our favorites from Gourmet Nutrition, and it struck me: GN makes for a pretty good dinner party.
PS: The new Gourmet Nutrition is a book you really have to hold in your hands to appreciate. So we make it easy to pick up, no risk at all. Try it out for up to 45 days, and if you don’t think it’s the best cookbook you’ve seen so far, just return it for a 100% refund.
http://www.gourmetnutrition.com/