Wow do I ever need an assistant!?! Now I know what you are thinking. How can I possibly need an assistant when I am only one person working on a single cookbook one step at a time? Well, that is exactly why I need an assistant! Why should I be the only one suffering through all this tedium? Why should be I be the only one standing at the water cooler with no one to gripe to about all my work? Okay so my watercooler is my own kitchen sink! Why should I have to have a sore back, tired eyes which are quickly developing squint lines, aching sides and stiff fingers from all this typing? Why shouldn’t I have some perky, young, overly-ambitious assistant to pawn all the boring jobs off onto, who I can become insanely jealous of their exciting social life and a little darkly paranoid that they are going to take my job someday and probably do it even better than I do!
Okay so why the sudden complaining? I am spend over four hours today already typing out email address of news organizations, magazines, news services so when I finally finish the cookbook I can send out press releases announcing that I am done! I did some research and found out of course there are lots of services to send my press releases out for me, probably to more sites that I can imagine, for only a measly, bargain basement, run out the door for the crazy discounted price of $2500 for a single press release. Yup, just one page can cost you that much money. So I said to myself well back to the drawing board and I have started doing some research on my own to build my own email list. Unfortunately, do you have any idea how many newspapers alone there are in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada to start let alone the rest of the English speaking world!! Let’s just say I will be transcribing these addresses for weeks. When I finally have the list complete, it will be probably be more valuable than the actual cookbook! Maybe I should sell it rather than recipes. Just so you have a picture of the tedium ( and I hate this kind of work with a deep seated almost pathological hatred) first I found a website that lists, by state, every newspaper in the United States. So I start with the first state, open it up, and there is a list of newspapers in that state. Then I have to click the hyperlink for each one, search their home page for their contact us page, then click it, copy the email address for the news or food editor into my Word document, then go back all the way to the list by state and go onto the next one. Newspaper by newspaper, state by state, till I get through the United States and then it is on to the United Kingdom and Canada. Can you imagine the glamour!?! I will be at this forever. I think this is one of those, I just have to do it, things to make this adventure successful, but wow, is this boring! Any volunteers to join me in some mindless work!
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