Here's a usually reliable recipe for producing a best-selling book.
For your main ingredient, take a brand new celebrity like Pippa Middleton, and give her a quick £400k advance.
In a separate bowl, throw together some fluffy seasonal content - party tips can work - before baking it altogether with a huge marketing campaign.
Pippa Middleton celebrating the release of Celebrate
Keep on the boil, then serve for delicious boost to your Christmas sales figures.
Only in the case of the Princess's sister, the soufflé has fallen rather flat.
Realistically, any book authored by a famous posh girl that contains such patronizing pearls as 'cupboards, drawers or boxes should be packed full of useful odds and ends' was always going to be savaged by the critics.
But the public have decided not to celebrate with Pippa either - Celebrate has only reached 177th on the Amazon best-seller list with December looming, and in its first week sold only 2000 copies.
So far, she's being beaten by Peppa Pig's Christmas Wish. Without taking anything away from a very talented pig, this is not the sort of return Penguin was hoping for. In response, the publishers have already discounted Celebrate from £25 to £12.50.
One rather dubious mark of the book's success has been the emergence of a genuinely funny Twitter parody account, 'Pippa Middleton Tips':
To be fair to Pippa, she hasn't taken criticism of her debut book lightly, penning a response that argued:
"I could have written a book that showcased the most extravagant or elaborate of occasions- after all, I spent three years working for an events company planning parties - but I wanted to produce something that was achievable; something that people would have on their shelves for years; something that was not too fussy - just simple and comforting."
Pippa at her book launch:
Pippa Middleton
