The Alinea Post-Mortem: An Untraditional Model Succeeds

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 1/20/2009 9:00:00 AM

Although cookbook publishers are slowly warming up to putting content online, California indie Ten Speed Press made a bold move last year when it announced it would publish Alinea, a book from the chefs at the acclaimed Chicago restaurant of the same name, in an open access model. Authors Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas delivered finished designed pages to Ten Speed, with photos, recipes and text, instead of a traditional manuscript; and Achatz opted to forego an advance and receive a higher than usual royalty rate. Alinea pubbed in October 2008, but anyone who preordered a copy of the $50 hardcover was given early access to Alinea Mosaic, a site with videos, recipes, photos and text (some of which were in the book). The unorthodox publishing strategy seemed to work: by the holidays, Alinea was popping up many best of ’08 lists, amid a season of books that included a number of high-end cookbooks. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble named it the second-best cookbook of 2008. Aaron Wehner, acting publisher of Ten Speed Press, said the house has 60,000 copies in print.

“We’re really pleased with how the book did,” Wehner said. The publisher acknowledged the challenging climate for high-end books, but said, “Alinea was leading the charge. It outsold the [Thomas] Keller book [Under Pressure] and the Ferran Adrià book [A Day at elBulli]. It was the bestselling high-end cookbook of the holiday season.”

Alinea was priced at $50, reasonable for a luxury cookbook (others this season listed for as much as $250). Amazon offers it for $31.50. Wehner said one of the decisions he and his colleagues agonized over was pricing. “We’re thankful we decided to take a little bit of a hit on our margin and price it at $50, as opposed to the normal pricing, which would’ve been an $80 to $100 book,” he said (Wehner said the book cost $10 to print). “What we lost in margins we made up for in volume.” Wehner said that in the last weeks before Christmas, Nielsen BookScan reported 2,200 copies sold a week, and that Entertainment Weekly reported Alinea was the top-selling cookbook at venerable New York cookbook shop Kitchen Arts and Letters this holiday season.

Positive buzz, especially online, helped propel sales. Food bloggers clamored for the book, and a woman who cooked her way through a 1999 high-end cookbook, The French Laundry Cookbook,and blogged about it at FrenchLaundryatHome.com, has made Alinea her new project. (Wehner did express some apprehension about the home cook attempting one recipe that requires 20-odd ingredients, but seemed hopeful the blogger knows what she’s in for.)

“It was a really interesting season,” Wehner said, referring to the economic crisis and the high volume of expensive cookbooks on the market. “Last season was not nearly as dynamic of a cookbook season, and suddenly, this year, there was a clutch of highly anticipated books. We held our breath in August when we had 45,000 copies of the book on the high seas and the news was getting worse and worse. But we’re really happy about where we ended up.”