What a souper book!

 The 5:2 Fast Diet: Soup Recipes
$.99 on Amazon, £.77 on Amazon.UK

Yes, it's an excuse to use a dreadful pun!

Way back when Jay and I started this blog, we were looking with envy at the piles of cash being turned in by Fifty Shades of Grey, and deciding that we, with our demonstrated ability to write technical engineering documents with literally tens of readers, could quite clearly do much better. And earn even bigger piles of money, naturally. 

Having flirted briefly with erotica (Jay is still far too embarrassed to show me what she wrote!), so far we have two children's books in progress, a thriller in the early stages, and a very long list of plot ideas (some of which made sense when scribbled down, probably after a rather inadvisable quantity of wine had been consumed, but are utterly incomprehensible now), our actual successes to date have been with two cookbooks to support the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet. 

Yes! You did read that right: two cookbooks! Following on from our 5:2 Breakfasts cookbook, which we're delighted to say has sold steadily since its launch, we've followed up with a book all about soups. Again, it's geared towards the 5:2 diet, so it's not a place to find rich buttery high-calorie mixtures, but any cookbook that gives you 84 recipes for under a dollar has to be worth a look. You might be interested in the diet plan as well. 

So please buy, enjoy, and let us know how you like it!

Writing, My Ass

I’m not a good dieter. I don’t like tracking calories or eating from restrictive food lists or ingesting lab-created zero-calorie chemicals. But nor do I care for the way mindlessly inhaling chips (brain food, you know) while writing has dramatically increased the size of my ass. Dilemma.

That’s why I’m drawn to the 5:2 Diet. Unlike conventional weight loss plans, the 5:2 requires dieting commitment only 2 days per week. Yep, just 2 days. And on those 2 days one can eat absolutely anything one wants – chips, chocolate, champagne* – as long as the total calories for the day is less than 500 (600 for men). So there is some measure of calorie counting, but it’s minimal compared to most diets. Plus, following this sort of intermittent fasting can potentially forestall all sorts of age-related diseases.

Calorie counting twice weekly I can cope with, but “diet foods,” I cannot. Partly because they’re gross, but also because I’m trying desperately to shed my role as a short order cook in which I prepare a different meal for each member of the family. Having at least some of us all enjoying the same foods for at least some of our meals clears up a tremendous amount of time. (All of you who regularly partake of the same meal, well, bully for you.)

Buy from Amazon: Only $.99

So with these thoughts swirling in mind – the size of my ass, writing, brain food, cooking – Nik and I took a short break from our novels and put together a cookbook of 5:2 Diet friendly recipes. The focus is on real ingredients and tasty meals, the type of recipes that don’t feel like diet foods. Muffins, waffles, breakfast casseroles, and my absolute favorites, eggs benedict and huevos rancheros. Stuff that at least one of my sons will eat (both of them if it’s muffins).

We’ve got plans for another handful of cookbooks, too. Writing up the recipes is a nice mental diversion for when my characters start wandering about aimlessly, waiting for me to give them direction (they’re as bad as children, I swear) when I’m mired down with other things. And although I have some ways to go, developing healthy, low calorie recipes has really helped to focus on better nutrition during the writing process.

So stay tuned for book two, we’re hoping to release it by the end of May.

In the meantime, here’s a bonus recipe that I’m betting will bring even my youngest to the family breakfast table:

Chocolate Chip Pancakes

Makes: 8 pancakes

Calories: 140 calories in 2 pancakes (about 88 g per serving**)

The key to keeping these pancakes light and airy is the beaten egg white. Use an electric mixer and whip until stiff peaks form.

2/3 cup flour

2 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt

½ Tbsp. sugar

2 egg whites

2/3 cup milk, fat-free

1/8 cup mini chocolate chips

Spray oil

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the sugar, then add the milk and whisk until very smooth. In a separate bowl, sprinkle the egg whites with a pinch of salt and whip into peaks. Fold the egg whites gently into the batter, stirring until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Spray a griddle with cooking spray and heat to medium. Pour a scant ¼ cup of batter per pancake and cook.

* If you want to blow your calorie allotment on chips, chocolate, and champagne, here's what you get for 500 calories:

  - Chocolate: About 3-1/3 ounces

  - Chips: About 3-1/3 ounces

  - Champagne: About 23 ounces (5.5 flutes)

** How much is 88 grams? Well, one serving of frozen waffles (2 waffles) is about 70 grams and 180 calories. So two of these pancakes are about 25% more food, but with about 20% less calories. And way tastier!

One book you can judge by its cover!

The 5:2 Fast Diet: Breakfast Recipes (buy here for only $0.99!)

When we launched our cookbook a few months ago, Jay turned her artistic efforts to the production of a cover. It was OK, but real didn’t stack up against the professionally-designed covers that pop up in an Amazon results list: and let’s face it, there is the temptation to assume that a book with a substandard cover will have substandard content….

So for the princely sum of $10, Jay commissioned a designer somewhere in Eastern Europe to come up with an alternative. In our poll of cover designs last month, it came out top of the choices that we threw into the mix.

And here it is! Our spanking new cover, which offsets the book to perfection. We’re already storming up the sales rankings on the Amazon UK store, and hopefully this will give us a boost in the US. The book sells almost 50 times faster in the UK than in the US at present!

As ever, all feedback gratefully appreciated.

More on judging a book by its cover: We need your help! #52Diet #Cooking

We need your help!

We’ve recently published our first book - yay! It’s not one of the almost half-dozen of novels we have in the works (see the sidebar to the right for progress on some of these), but a collection of breakfast recipes for followers of the 5:2 Diet, or anyone looking for low-calorie meal ideas. (See our announcement here: How to lose weight whilst drinking champagne and eating cakes.)

Formatting was a nightmare and we made our share of newbie e-publishing blunders, but we persevered, stumbling our way through the process, and ended up with something that reads well and looks okay.

Well, looks okay as long as you bypass the cover.

And therein lies the problem. Our cover is crap. 

But luckily, I had some time on my hands over winter break to consider alternate designs.  At the end of this post is an array of new cover concepts that we're considering. Some are professionally-designed (more on this experience in a future post) while others were put together with Gimp (and a healthy dose of cursing). Ignore the watermarks on the photos – once we select a final design we'll replace with high res.

Please use the voting buttons at the end of the post to select the design (or designs) that appeals most to you, and those that turn you off. For marketing purposes, please indicate which Amazon you shop at most regularly. If you have any suggestions or other thoughts to share, please leave a comment.

Thank you and happy voting!

How to lose weight whilst drinking champagne and eating cakes

For those of you who have been following the progress of our writings on our book projects, Jay and I have been harbouring a deep, dark secret.

You see, we've been working on a book without telling you about it.

From Amazon: The 5:2 Fast Diet: Breakfast Recipes

Sorry, but there it is. In between the three main projects we have on the go, we spontaneously decided to write a cookbook. Not just any cookbook, but one for the 5:2 intermittent fast diet, that lets you eat what you want for five days a week as long as you're prepared to restrict your calorie intake on the other two.

If you want to know more, buy the book! It has background on the diet and a range of breakfast recipes to go with it. In fact, you don't need to be on the diet to try some of the recipes!

We're launching the book at a steal of a price, just $0.99 in the US and £0.77 in the UK. Buy it, tell all your friends, and if we sell enough we'll do lunch and dinner recipes as well. And please, tell us what you think as well.

A Thousand Words is Worth not Having to Draw a Picture

I’m a dreadful artist, always have been. I always used to say, when writing stuff at work, that I’d rather write an extra thousand words than have to supply a picture. The graphic artists, after experiencing my attempts at sketching, tended to agree...

I rather felt that I’d discovered an example of too much information full stop when I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones recently. The arrived with a wodgy manual. Now, admittedly, it contains instructions in multiple languages, but it’s still 14 pages for each. 14 pages! I doubt that very few of the purchasers ever make it to the fact that the maximum operating temperature is 104˚F.

Compare that to the insert with an Amazon Kindle, bought about the same time. A bit of a difference here. Whilst I’ll admit that the Kindle has the advantage of being its own instruction manual, in these days of the Internet, are big thick paper manuals really needed for something as straightforward as a pair of headphones?