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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?
I’ve got three books that I hope to read over these last couple winter months. I love to read, but I sometimes also have to give myself goals and deadlines for reading otherwise I may never get a book finished. Here’s what I have in mind…be looking for my thoughts on each of these once I’ve finished them.
First, I’d like to finally read The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, a book that has been on my bookshelf for quite sometime now, but that I’ve been too intimidated to start. As much as I respect Lewis, I sometimes have a hard time starting one of his books for fear that it will be too over my head and I won’t have the motivation to finish it. I read all of The Chronicles of Narnia and thourally enjoyed those books, but they were also written for children, so right up my alley. I started Screwtape this morning though, and I’m excited by how approachable it seems to be. And more so, how relevant it is! Originally published in the early 40s, you would expect it to be out of touch. But, 40 pages in, I’m already learning from it and amazed by how much I relate to it. I can’t wait to keep reading.
Second, I’d like to re-read The Broken Hearth by William J. Bennett. This may seem like an odd choice, but it’s a book I read about 5 or 6 years ago and remember really appreciating Bennett’s insight and reasoning and feel I could use a refresher on what he had to say. It was recommended reading to me when I was training to be a counselor at Rocketown, and it describes, with a great deal of well-grounded understanding, the breakdown of the American Family, what Bennett describes as the fundamental crisis of our time. Bennett, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, is also the Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute and, most impressively to me, one of the only conservative regular contributors to CNN.
Last on the list is The Search for God and Guinness, by Stephen Mansfield. Mansfield is an author I have really enjoyed working with in the past, promoting some of his other books. But, this is not a title that I had originally intended on reading. While the subject matter seemed intriguing, I wasn’t sure that it was something I wanted to dedicate my time to finishing. Then I got to listen to Mansfield give a talk about this book at one of Dave Ramsey‘s staff devotionals…and that is when I got interested. The story of the Guinness family, and the mission behind the beer empire that they built, is one that I think will be not only interesting, but also personally motivating and inspiring. Mansfield is a great story teller and has a knack for digging up good historical tales, I look forward to making time for this one.
I’d love to hear what you are reading…and would gladly welcome suggestions for my Spring reading list.
I just started reading the Twilight series, for the second time. Now I’m a book person, I love to read, so it’s not completely out of the norm for me to read a book more than once. But a series of 4 books that have a minimum of 500 pages a piece, that’s all together different.
Since I work for a book publisher, I’m always considering what it is that makes a book stand out – what makes it good enough for a lot of people to purchase it and tell their friends about it. According to PublishersWeekly.com, 560,626 books were published in 2008. So for a book to stand out in that crowd, it has to be pretty significant. The million dollar question is, what makes a book special? When it came to the Twilight series, it was the compelling, can’t stop reading it story – even for non-sci-fi/non-vampire-loving people like me. I’ve never been into these kinds of books, but as anyone who has picked this series up will tell you, this was different.
The movie version of New Moon, the second book in the series, comes out in a week – November 20, 2009 – and I’m trying very hard to keep my expectations low. I was very underwhelmed with the movie version of Twilight, thus the low expectations for New Moon, but I’m ever hopeful that this one will do the book justice.
Here you can watch one of the trailers (there are several out there):
And just to make light of this whole phenomenon a bit, check out this hilarious SNL spoof.
One of the books I have been marketing for the past couple months is by Donald Miller and is titled A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Recently Don and Thomas Nelson’s CEO, Mike Hyatt, sat down and recorded an interview. Part three of that interview is posted above. If you have a chance to watch the whole video, it’s great food for thought, but if I could specifically draw your attention to about 2:55 in the video, I’d love for you to hear what is quite possibly the best, most practical definition of forgiveness that I have ever heard.
Don shares a definition that his pastor shared with him saying that forgiveness is “taking the burden that somebody has given you and carrying it without ever holding them responsible. So the burden doesn’t go away, but emotionally you are no longer holding this person responsible for what you were carrying.”
Now maybe for you, that’s nothing new, that’s how you’ve always known forgiveness should look and you’ve been living it for years. For me, it was a radical shift of perspective and gave me practical application of how to walk out the act of forgiving someone. Because if you’ve ever been really wounded by someone, you know how desperately challenging it can be to put whatever someone did to you behind you and mend your relationship with that person. Even years down the road that past hurt can rear it’s head and all the sudden you’re struggling with feelings of anger and resentment that you thought were long gone. May I propose that this is actually quite normal? Possibly even part of the healing process? But, what if, when those feelings came back you were able to say, that’s okay, I’m not over it, but I’m not going to hold it against this person anymore. Instead, I’m going to carry it, I’m going to release them of responsibility. Thinking of forgiveness this way, for me, just made sense. It was something I could wrap my small mind around.
I know I have so much room to grow in this area before I’m anywhere near mastering the concept and likely never will this side of heaven. But this definition gave me a fresh perspective…I hope it’s of value to you as well.
Tribes by Seth Godin
I had the chance to read Tribes by Seth Godin over Labor Day weekend. A very small, easily digestible book, it’s something you can read in a day or two without a challenge and a book that every marketer should take a few minutes to read. Appropriately, the book doesn’t have a traditional chapter layout, rather it’s more like a collection of blog posts, each one no more than a page, two at the most. Briefly, here are a few things I learned.
Terms that Godin redefines in the book:
- “A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea….A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate…Tribes are about faith – about belief in an idea and in a community.”
- A leader can be anyone. A leader is necessary for a tribe to exist and vice versa, you can’t be a leader without a tribe. “Leadership is about creating change you believe in.” “Leaders don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.”
- A manager – is not a leader. Though by traditional definition the two usually go hand in hand, Godin suggests that they are quite different. “Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.” “Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done…managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world.” “Managers manage by using the authority the factory gives them. You listen to your manager or you lose your job. A manager can’t make change because that’s not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory.”
- A factory: “any organization that cranks out a product or a service, does it with measurable output, and tries to reduce costs as it goes…any job where your boss tells you what to do and how to do it.”
- Heretics are the new leaders. They are the ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
- The status quo - the way it’s always been.
- A movement
- A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build
- A connection between and among the leader and the tribe
- Something to do – the fewer limits, the better
Tribes reward innovation and initiators are happier. People want change and they want something to believe in…but the fear of failure and criticism keep leaders from being leaders. Godin suggests that they’re really isn’t so much to be afraid of, but we’ve be trained to think that there is, that heretics and upstarts will be burned at the stake. But that mindset is history and one that we have to put behind us. Innovators and leaders today are rewarded for their efforts and any good that will come out of the business world today will come from the heretic willing to stand up and fill the void left by the business as usual management style of the factory. Change is good, but more importantly, it’s inevitable. So why not be a part of the change as opposed to fighting it and becoming obsolete?
“How was your day?” Godin asks this question repeatedly throughout the book to make a point. Life is short and it would be a heck of a lot nicer if we enjoyed the way we spent the majority of it – if we liked our jobs. He tells a story of being on vacation and, unable to sleep, he gets up to check email. He overhears someone criticize him for his inability to take a break from work. His response? “Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?” What if we had jobs that we were passionate about, doing something we loved and felt was making a difference? Would we have a different perspective of vacation then?
I gave the definition of a heretic above, but I want to wrap up by honing in of this idea a bit more. The heretic, and what they stand for, really stuck with me. Godin says that “heretics are engaged, passionate, and more powerful and happier than everyone else…[they] must believe. More than anyone else in an organization, it’s the person who’s challenging the status quo…and not just punching a clock, who must have confidence in her beliefs. Can you image Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It’s nice to get paid. It’s essential to believe.” What is it you believe in? And if you truly, passionately believe it to be true, how are you sharing it with others – are you effectively leading your tribe?
Get your own copy of Tribes here – I’d love to hear what you think of it.
Africa is definitely a hot topic these days. Everyone is taking an interest in the suffering of its people, raising money to support basic needs not being met there, visiting orphanages and refuge camps. Every now and then I meet someone who has personally encountered the suffering of Africa’s people and who has made radical life changes because of what they witnessed. Sam Childers is one of those people.
Sam was the ultimate trouble maker, bad boy, rebel without a cause till Jesus got a hold of his life and began to transform his heart. His first trip to Africa was purely on business as a contractor, but while there he couldn’t help but witness the devastation of an entire generation of children and he left a changed man on a mission. His work over the last ten years, his dedication to children and families beyond his own, the way he has risked his life and security for the betterment of someone else is nothing short of miraculous. He has let God use him in incredible ways.
If you’re anything like me, you always have a stack of books you want to get to, so I understand not wanting to add another one to the pile. I single this one out because it touched my heart, it made me reflect on how much I have and how much I have to give, and it gave me a good does of perspective. It made me consider the poverty and need of others and and taste the life of suffering and fear that I have never had to experience. It was something I needed to hear and to me, that makes it a book worth passing on. If nothing else, check out the video and maybe visit machinegunpreacher.org.
