I Say It’s Spinach, And I Say The Hell With It

Because I was on a business trip last Friday, I didn’t see Motoko Rich and Jeffrey Trachtenberg covering the Jessica Seinfeld story, including the controversy over whether her Deceptively Delicious is too similar to Missy Chase Lapine‘s The Sneaky Chef, which Seinfeld’s publisher, Collins had rejected a month before buying her book. (Trachtenberg gets the timeline: Lapine was rejected because the Collins editor she met had seen a similar proposal recently; Seinfeld met with a second editor who liked that she was a celebrity in addition to the book’s other merits—and, as Rich adds, being repped by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh didn’t hurt.) But my colleagues at FishbowlLA have been keeping an eye on the story, including USA Today‘s pickup, in which Lapine expresses a little more frustration over the fact that Seinfeld got on the Oprah Winfrey show and she didn’t, even though she and her Running Press publicists pitched the show’s producers five times.