It’s a little curious to me how many celebrities are putting out cookbooks these days. Not chef celebrities, just straight up celebrities. And if you’re wondering what in the world I’m referring to? Just browse’s Amazon.com’s 100 bestsellers today and you’ll see a few of them…
Gwyneth’s book is sitting pretty at #6 on Amazon right now with Eva and Sheryl at numbers 52 and 90, respectively. Is this a new trend? It’s certainly not something I’ve noticed in the past. I remember Alicia Silverstone putting out her cookbook a few years back…
But that didn’t seem too unusual to me since her book was full of vegetarian recipes and her advocacy for animals is something she’s made pretty widely known for years. Where as many of the “cooks” listed above, well, I haven’t ever really known them for their cooking. Just for their uncanny ability to stay really slim, believing they always had a chef at home helping them out. Granted, I haven’t picked up a single one of these books, so maybe I don’t have room to have an opinion, I’m just putting the question out there…do we really need celebrity cookbooks? Or should they leave room on the shelf for all the real chefs to get published. Maybe there is room in the world for both?
All my curiosity on this new trend aside, as a book marketer, I have to give a gold start to Paltrow’s marketing team. They organized a partnership with the very popular One Kings Lane who sold a limited number of signed copies of the book, cohosted a dinner party for 60 people with the Oscar-winning author (which she has documented on her beautiful blog), and then offered the same table settings, serveware, and tabletop accessories used at the party for sale on their site! I, for one, an impressed. Marketing partnership well done.
So will you be purchasing any of these celebrity cookbooks? And if yes, I’m just curious, what motivated you to buy?
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 14, 2011 at 5:04 PM
Siobhan
I don’t trust skinny cooks. They obviosuly don’t enjoy eating!
April 15, 2011 at 8:49 AM
Susan Ellingburg
I suppose it’s faintly possible that the occasional celeb enjoys cooking–I do, and I’m famous in my own mind–but I’m not inclined to waste money on a cookbook by someone who doesn’t look like they eat more than once a week. I see Sheryl Crow has a chef-y looking guy on the cover with her, so that gives her book a smidge more credibility in my view. If the book is more stories than recipes, it might be interesting on that level. But my hard-earned foodie dollars go to books by actual chefs (whose food I’ve seen or tried) or by people who clearly know yummy when they pull it out of the oven, like grandmas and church ladies. :0)