Cooking blog by an amateur yields a franchise and a husband

As fate would have it, the fourth person to write a comment was Alex Perelman, her future husband. Deb Perelman says the comment was enough to get her to agree to a drink and to realise that a dating website was not in her long-term plans.

Increasingly, she turned to writing about the recipes she was trying as her interest in cooking deepened in parallel to her relationship. Nine years later, Perelman, who never trained as a chef or even worked in a restaurant, has an established cooking blog, SmittenKitchen.com, and she’s extended her franchise with ‘The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook’, published in October by Knopf. The book made its debut at No. 2 on The New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover advice and miscellaneous.

Transferring readers—even loyal ones—from a blog to a book is tricky business. Editors say there is no magic formula for knowing which bloggers have audiences that are invested enough in them to purchase an expensive hardcover when much of the material is available free online.

In 2005, a book by a blogger named Julie Powell about her year cooking her way through a Julia Child tome led to a 2009 film, Julie & Julia, and a spate of cookbooks spawned from

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