Blown Away

I'm overwhelmed by your response to my call for recipe testers... literally

Not gonna lie: I am straight up flabbergasted at your response to my call for recipe testers for my upcoming cookbook Borderlands.

I expected maybe 50 of you to volunteer. More than 375 of you stepped up — several hundred more than I’ve ever had for a book in the past. This is far more testers than I have recipes, but it opens up the rare opportunity for multiple people to test recipes, making them even better.

The number is frankly overwhelming. It took me two full days to catalog everyone, their food allergies, what they have available to cook, whether they can eat chiles and so on. So if you missed it, I am sorry, but I have all I can handle. Stay tuned for other ways you can help out.

That cataloging revealed all sorts of fascinating nuggets.

For starters, the sheer number of Latino and German surnames is amazing. Not going to try to interpret that, but it’s kinda cool.

Another wild thing is how many of you from coastal North Carolina, Maine and New Hampshire responded. I mean, I get that there are lots of Californians (where I used to live), Minnesotans (where I live now), and Texans (the book covers Tejas). But I frankly did not know I had such support in northern New England or Tidewater. Now I do, so I’ll definitely add that to the book tour list!

The international audience is super cool, too. There are a bunch of testers from Canada, a few from Mexico, Guatemala, San Salvador, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and England.

To that end, I was excited at how many of you offered to host me in an event, or on your podcast or radio show. In this modern age of fractured media, every little bit helps — I’ll need everyone’s help to get the word out that this book even exists, not to mention reviews and word of mouth, etc. More on that in the coming months, but if you want to host me for an event, let me know.

Basically unless I am going to be somewhere anyway, I’d need to be able to sell 50 books or more. That’s the minimum in sales to offset costs like lodging and gas, etc.

Not exactly sure how much the book will be yet, but likely around $35 to $40: It’s going to be the biggest book I’ve ever written, at close to 400 pages.

The kinds of events I’ve done that have been fun and valuable have included:

• Book talks, live or via Zoom

• Cooking demos

• Restaurant events, where we cook from the book and copies are part of the ticket

• In the past I’ve set up special trips to fish or hunt. I’m not totally sure how that would work with this book, But I’ll listen to ideas.

• Got another idea? I’m all ears.

When the tour route goes up, I’ll post it here.

Advance sales for the book should go up on my website soon, and Amazon shortly after. Amazon will be the only source for the book outside the US, at least for now. I am working on this; my distributor Chelsea Green was bought out by the mega-publisher Penguin Random House, and I’m too small potatoes to be worth their effort. So they dropped me. I’ll still be able to ship books to a local bookstore (or any kind of store), but it will be directly from me, not through the normal channels.

For all of you who have responded to the call, 100,000 thank yous. I will be in touch very soon with recipes for you. You should know I am still writing the book, so all these recipes — except for those already on Hunter Angler Gardener Cook — are true drafts, so you’re getting in on the ground floor.

Each day I wake up raring to work in Borderlands. Deadlines are approaching quickly, and as a former newspaper reporter, they always stoke the fire in me. I’m writing, testing, reaching out to potential event locations, media contacts, you name it. It’s almost here, ladies and gentlemen!

In the words of one of my dearest friends: Let’s goooooooo!