Flashes of Panic

I doubt there are more than three people reading this who aren’t already aware that The Runner’s Cookbook was published last weekend. (I’ve placed the apostrophe differently in the title of this post for reasons which will become apparent.)

I’ve been a reluctant and grumpy consultant to this whole process, as A discovered that nine years of working in the publishing industry does not mean that I can provide an intelligent explanation of things like “bleed.” Mostly I tried to stay well out of the way. She’d been looking forward to the publishing date with the idea that once the book was produced and published, the work would be over, but instead the past week has been a whirlwind of email (to be expected when you send email to nearly everyone you know), a few telephone interviews, and all sorts of unanticipated questions. (This is not unlike her discovery that collecting all the recipes, which involved contacting about 250 top-level runners, was not in fact the hard part of the production process.)

How, for example, do you make the book available at running stores, who (a) don’t generally order books through “normal” channels (if everything goes well, the book will be available on Amazon one of these days, but running stores tend not to have accounts with Ingram), (b) want to buy the books at a discount (with the printer taking a fixed amount from every sale, whose share does that discount come from?) and/or (c) even while meaning well, can’t close the gap in knowledge between what A knows and what they know about how this could work?

I told her the other day that like any course you’d take in college, she’s learned some things through the process, but she’s also learned a slew of other things she never knew she didn’t know, and might not have wanted to bother with if she had.