Managing One’s Time When the Press Comes Calling
Jan 4th, 2010 by MPC Press
When your new book is published, it is impossible to be overprepared for incoming calls from the press. With No More Mac and Cheese, A Bachelor’s Guide to Cooking with Ease, we heavily publicized the book when it was launched in 1990. Knowing the appeal of a wire-bound, bachelor’s cookbook written in rhyme, our publicist set up a separate phone line (no email in 1990) and braced herself for heavy demand…and then waited, and waited. Believe it or not, we were disappointed. But why? To start, we had not focused enough on local press. The Denver Post didn’t really give a #&*&$# about No More Mac & Cheese, even though plenty of bachelors live in Denver. So, we changed our approach. And then, it really began to click. With a local San Francisco author, it made sense to concentrate efforts on Bay Area television and radio, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Jose Mercury. First, a couple of great reviews were published in the Chronicle and the Tribune. Then, the local NBC television affiliate came calling. A newscaster and cameraman showed up on the doorstep of my San Francisco bachelor pad, where I lived with two roommates. They wanted to film me cooking my quesadilla and chocolate mousse recipes (page 28 and page 50, respectively). I alerted my roommates to stay out of the apartment for fear of embarrassment and I cleaned up the kitchen. I hadn’t noticed that a picture of one roommate’s girlfriends and his University of Colorado pennant had been hung behind the stove in his quest for attention sharing. The filming began and I was asked to rap (sing in my cool ghetto voice) the recipes while cooking. Fortunately, I had seen enough Julia Child episodes to know that the meals should be completed first and placed in the refrigerator for future display. So, I donned my cool “Hail to the Chef” apron and did my song and dance with the meal, and then cleverly pulled out the finished result from behind the scenes. I think the reporter was impressed, but I still wonder why most of my show was cut from the final version. Still, the media attention really did work and sales took off, and 1,000 books were sold in a matter of days. And, I still have a copy of the segment on betamax because I knew that would allow people to watch it for years to come. By the way, the word betamax can’t even be spell checked anymore, gone from the dictionary.
