Breakfast in Bridgetown

Well, according to Gordon Ramsey, it’s scrambled eggs, toast, mushrooms and tomatoes. And he says his scrambled eggs are “sublime.” I’ll have to give this a shot, but it will be tough to beat Jenny’s slow-cooked, garlic and rosemary eggs.

Still, Mr. Ramsey is an entertaining fellow!

Just had a chat with a potential author and found myself — in typical wordy fashion — explaining the costs of a book. I was trying to explain that the typical author contract for something like a guidebook is 10 or 12% of “net sales,” which sounds like more than it is. That’s because a publisher’s “net sales” are to distributors, who typically get 50-55% off the cover price, so they can sell them to the bookstores for 40% off the cover price.

In the case of a $10 book, it breaks down like this:

$4 to the bookstore (because they get 10 from the public and paid 6 to the distributor)
$1 to the distributor (got 6 from the bookstore and paid 5 to the publisher)
$2 or 3 to the publisher (got 5 from the distributor (“net sales”) but paid 2 or 3 to the author, designer, printer, and so on.)
$2 or 3 to the author, designer, printer, etc. — the publisher’s overhead.

In self-publishing, you get all of the $5 from the distributor, but you have to pay all the overhead, so what you’re left with is the $2 or 3 per $10 book. BUT if you sell them directly to the public (online, in markets, face-to-face,) then you spend the $2 or $3 to produce it and get all of the $10. That’s what I’m aiming for!

All I want for Christmas …

Not just a different artisan bacon delivered to my home every month, but also “informative notes” on the bacon, a membeship card, a ball point pen, a bacon comic book and a little rubber toy pig! My cup (and my cholesterol count) runneth over …

So I’m researching a story about lard for the Memphis Flyer, and I’ve found some fascinating stuff on the Internet.

Lard, according to Wikipedia, is rendered pig fat, and “rendered” pretty much means slowly cooked down into a spreadable for. Lard basically looks like Crisco, which is an all-vegetable substitute for it.

The health stuff gets confusing (I’m working on that), but it sounds like real lard is at least as good for you in some ways as butter, but the lard you get in stores is loaded with preservatives, some of which are suspected to be carcinogens. (Also, a 25-pound bucket of lard from WalMart contains 105,000 calories and 11,200 grams of saturated fat! No wonder every restaurant and bakery I talk to swears they wouldn’t let the stuff through their doors!

Apparently the way to go is to make it yourself, which I may try one day.