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Alinea's Grant Achatz Turns Down Lots of Money to Write a Book His Way

Posted by Ed Levine, September 25, 2007 at 8:30 AM

Grant Achatz (pictured), the acclaimed chef-owner of Alinea battling cancer (his spokesperson just announced that nearly 80 percent of his tumor has been shrunken by chemotherapy), is writing a cookbook. No man-bites-dog news there. But that's where the similarity to a traditional cookbook publishing model and arrangement ends.

In a move that looks to the movie business for inspiration, Achatz and his business partner, Nick Kokonas, have produced a trailer for the book that shows us just how far they're willing to push the publishing envelope in the direction of the internet.

The deal they have constructed allows Achatz to use the internet to publish and promote the book in ways the publishing world can barely fathom.

Usually a chef of Achatz's stature receives an advance of somewhere between $500,000 and a million dollars to write a book. Once the book is published, the publishing house must recoup all its costs (the advance, printing, photographs, binding, marketing) before an author begins to receive any royalties (up to 15 percent of the list retail price of the book).

Achatz and Kokonas are foregoing the process outlined above. They have made a deal with Ten Speed Press, a mainstream cookbook publisher, to print and distribute a book that Achatz and his partners will hand over as finished designed pages, with photos, recipes, and text. Under the arrangement, Achatz will forgo the up to million dollar payment he might have received up front in a traditional publishing deal. Instead, he is receiving a much higher royalty rate that Ten Speed will begin to pay with the first book sold.

What Achatz and Kokonas receive in return is a level of control and freedom that is unprecedented in the annals of book publishing. And it is that freedom and control that is allowing them to utilize the internet as they see fit to create an online Alinea community as the book is being written.

The book is being physically published in fall 2008. But anyone who plunks down fifty bucks now will have early access to a website, the Alinea Mosaic, that will actually allow users to watch and download videos, recipes, photos, and text (some of which will be in the book) as they are completed along the way. Then, once the book is published, anyone who buys it will also have access to the Alinea Mosaic.

Why did Achatz and Kokonas head down this path, forgoing at least in the near term a hefty sum of money?

Kokonas: "Grant and I regard this whole process as an exercise in mass customization. We wanted to do the book our way. The publishers we talked to would have imposed their vision and their way of thinking on us. We didn't want that. One of the key components to us is the online component. On the internet, you can create something rich and hopefully special. When we explained to the conventional publishers what we wanted to do, they all thought we were nuts. They thought that if we put big chunks of the book online, we would be cannibalizing our own sales. But I have tons of cookbooks at home, and I go on the web all the time for cooking and food info, and those are two distinct interactions, and one doesn't come at the expense of the other.

"What we are trying to do here is much more than publishing a book, because with the website, we're going to be adding to the book continuously after the publication date. What we're most excited about is the chance to build an Alinea community. We've already started to do that with the restaurant, and now with the book and the website, we can take that community to a whole new level."

If Achatz and Kokonas are right, cookbook publishing will never be the same.

Photograph from alinea-restaurant.com

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Tags: Alinea, cookbooks, Grant Achatz, publishing