Worthless Journalists

Good journalists interview people and report facts. Bad journalists interview people and ignore facts. The former are in short supply and make up 2% of the profession. The latter are a dime a dozen. And it doesn't matter whether they are writing hard news, or magazine articles. The damage is the same.

Case in point, last month I was interviewed about the Joy of Pandemic Cooking. It was for a cooking website, but it looks more like one of those nicely designed content factories with tons of affiliate marketing links included.

The interview I gave was easily an hour long and was filled with tons of info about how I wrote the book and what the purpose was and what I hoped to get out of it. Ultimately I hoped people would learn that no matter what your situation (be it food scarcity or food insecurity, or lack of food during mass panic shopping) you could still eat healthy and eat well. That was the lofty goal. Mainly, though, it was a creative exercise to keep me busy when work was scarce for everyone, and a way to share some of the recipes I'd been making during year one of the pandemic.

After chatting about the recipes and what my favorites were, the journalist asked how the book sold. I responded that he book was listed on Amazon's best short from humor category during its first week and that it sold a few hundred copies, which considering I did no promotion for it at all, and just put it out there the same way as I would a Tweet was actually a a surprise.

After a month or so of looking I finally found the article. The entire hour-long conversation was summed up thusly:

A self-published cookbook called The Joy of Pandemic Cooking, released last March, promised easy recipes for “the panic-shopper and culinary novice” newly responsible for feeding himself. Unsurprisingly, its author told me sales dropped off a few weeks into the pandemic.

What bothers me the most about this blip of a paragraph isn't just that my name wasn't even included but that I never said what the journalist is suggesting I said. Sales did not drop off.  They have been steady, and I'm still generating sales a year later.

I get the journalists of this sort have to pitch stories to their editors. But rather than suggest something I never said, I would have rather they left me out all together. In retrospect, I should be glad they didn't use my name. That's why I'm doing the journalist a favor by not using theirs. They don't need any more exposure.

Considering buying The Joy of Pandemic Cooking, or any of my other books which are also available on Apple as well as Nook and the Google Play store. I promise there are no lies in them. Except the lies we call fiction.

Also: If you aren't following me on Twitter you probably should.