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It's been a really long time since I've been graded for my work; the last grade I received came somewhere around my final day of college in 1985. But now, my all-time favorite magazine, Entertainment Weekly - which I read from cover to cover every week - reviewed my new book in a beautiful 2-page spread, and at the end I got a grade. Just as with every movie, TV show, or book that I'm revved about, once I picked up the issue I jumped right to the end of the review to check out the report card and was stoked at what I saw: Book reviewer Jennifer Reese gave Top Secret Recipes Unlocked a solid B.

So, of course I went back to the beginning to read the review and saw that Jennifer and her crew put Top Secret Recipes Unlocked to the test. I like that. They cooked several items from the book to determine if the clone recipes I created matched up with the original brand-name stuff:

"Although Wilbur promises the reader clones of brand-name food, in the recipes we tested here, he failed to deliver a single decent facsimile. This was simultaneously funny and kind of sad."

Alright, I know. This may look like I'm getting slammed, but you have to keep reading:

"His problem isn't that the recipes he's devised aren't good enough, it's that they're too good. It appears to be all but impossible to make anything at home that is as expensive, stale, and artificialtasting as what you can buy."

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Todd Wilbur, author of Top Secret Recipes Unlocked, is our guest blogger during the week of November 23nd. If you have any questions for Todd Wilbur, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on Top Secret Recipes Unlocked:

More than 4 million Top Secret Recipes books sold!

The kitchen clone recipe king is back with a new Top bestselling Top Secret Restaurant Recipes collection-the first book since his bestselling Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2. Wilbur takes readers behind the scenes, revealing the key ingredients in some of our favorite foods such as Starbucks' Peppermint Brownie, Krispy Kreme's original glazed donuts, Panera Bread's cranberry walnut bagel and Wendy's Garden Sensations Manadarin Chicken Salad. The book will feature 115 new recipes, including 40 previously unpublished recipes such as:

•Panera Bread French Onion Soup

•Burger King Onion Rings

•Chick-Fil-A Honey Roasted BBQ Sauce

•McDonald's Cinnamon Melts

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Putnam Launches Major Publicity Campaign for Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow

Putnam will launch one of the biggest publicity campaigns Sue Grafton has ever had for her latest book, U is for Undertow, due out on December 1st. National media includes features in USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Readers Digest, Time.com, AARP Magazine and Costco Connection. Coverage is also confirmed in People, Washington Post, Portland Oregonian, Tampa Tribune, Southern Living Magazine, Kansas City Star, Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Sue will be on the road the first two weeks of December doing major talks and book signings in eight cities, including New York, Louisville, Atlanta, Kansas City, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, with radio and print interviews in every market.

Grafton has been interviewed for Barnes & Noble's prestigious video series “Tagged!” She has also been interviewed as part of Borders author feature series, Borders Presents.

Over the past 25 years Sue Grafton, one of the most popular and highly-acclaimed mystery writers of the 21st Century and #1 New York Times bestselling alphabet mystery series, has become iconic…notably, her one-of-a-kind female private investigator Kinsey Millhone has become a cultural phenomenon. Grafton’s novels have earned her numerous awards, critical raves, and editions in twenty-six languages and twenty-eight countries. This year, Sue was also named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

In U is for Undertow, Kinsey investigates the disappearance of a little girl in the California coastal town of Santa Teresa. When a fragile young man shows up at Kinsey’s door in 1988, claiming that he saw two men burying a suspicious bundle twenty-one years earlier, she doesn’t know whether to believe him or not. Using multiple points of view, shifting between the booming ’80s and the freewheeling ’60s, Grafton has crafted an adult boy-who-cried-wolf story that is guaranteed to keep readers up late.
 

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Portfolio/ Sentinel Lands a Record Three Titles on The New York Times Bestseller Lists in the Same Week

For the first time in its seven year history, Portfolio / Sentinel achieves three New York Times bestsellers in the same week. A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee is #3 on the hardcover nonfiction list; Do The Right Thing, also by Mike Huckabee, is #18 on the paperback nonfiction list; and The Dollar Meltdown by Charles Goyette is #10 on the hardcover advice, how-to and miscellaneous list.

The surprise bestseller is The Dollar Meltdown, which explains why too much government spending is going to cause extreme inflation, and what investors should do about it. It has been embraced by conservative radio hosts and bloggers, as well as Congressman Ron Paul. Glenn Beck had Goyette on his Fox News show twice, and the book has quickly grown from 12,000 in print to about 35,000. "I can't say we predicted that the dollar would plunge and gold would spike just when we reached pub date," says Portfolio President and Publisher Adrian Zackheim. "If I were THAT smart about finance, I'd be telecommuting from my private island in the Caribbean."

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Walter Bagdzinski Wins 2009 Rainbow Award at Penguin Group (USA) Sales Conference Awards Dinner and Wendy Pearl, Lee Swenka, Todd Jones and Bob DeMarco Named PGI Sales Reps of the Year

Walter Bagdzinski, Director of Inventory Management for Penguin Group (USA), received the 2009 Rainbow Award at this week’s Penguin Group Sales Conference Awards & Celebration Dinner at the Hyatt Regency in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Every year at this time, the Penguin Group (USA) hardcover, paperback and young readers sales teams collectively present the Rainbow Award to an individual outside of sales they feel contributed the most during the year to the teams’ success.

Norman Lidofsky and Dick Heffernan acknowledged that Walter Bagdzinski “figures out solutions to everything you ask him,” created, among many other processes, the Early Ship Program, “makes it work,” and expertly keeps track of release dates, itineraries and the “back-end of our business that is so important to the success of all of our books.” Walter received loud cheers as he came to the podium and was congratulated by Norman and Dick (pictured above).