Breathing life into Nutrition

Catherine Saxelby's classic  Nutrition for Life is in its fifth edition and 20th year, which is an astonishing achievement by any publishing standard. It holds lessons for aspiring authors on how to deliver the message and maintain currency, which Catherine is happy to explain here.

Getting started
After I qualified as a dietitian, and became a working wife, I realised that there had to be a better way to tell busy people about healthy eating than the nutrition textbook approach. I'd always loved women's magazines (I'd fallen under their easy-reading spell when I was a teenager and in need of escapism!). My concept was to make nutrition as accessible as a Women's Weekly cookbook. I wanted to create a book on healthy eating with full colour throughout and lots of photographs that would allow the reader to start at any point. I felt that there had to be a lot of women like me out there who would be happy to dip in and out reading short features on food and health that grabbed their attention.

Getting published
I was already working on a book project on school canteens for Jo Rogers and Nutrition Australia (then the Australian Nutrition Foundation), and that led me to Bill Templeman of Reed Books. I put my idea to him and he liked it, and took a punt with an unknown author and an unusual project. Reed treated it as a one-shot 'bookazine' and printed 40,000 copies, distributing it to newsagents Australia-wide via Gordon and Gotch. It was priced  competitively at $5.95 - value for money for the 112 pages of colour and issues. It took off.  It was reprinted in 1987, 1988 and again in 1993 (the second edition), 1994 and 1997 with new sections on food labels, ethnic eating and sports nutrition. The cover stayed almost the same, with new pictures dropped into the existing layout. And it kept on selling. TAFE and OTEN (Distance Learning) adapted it as their nutrition text for hospitality and catering students. Then came the 'Dark Ages'. It wasn't just books that were bought and sold in the 1990s. Publishing companies were too. Reed Books was broken up and Nutrition for Life virtually disappeared for a year or so.

A new life for Nutrition for Life
In 1998, Sandy Grant and Julie Pinkham (both ex-Reed) set up Hardie Grant and  approached me to produce a new edition. They gave the book a much needed facelift, with a different cover featuring a big green pear, more photos and more material. So in 1999, now priced at $14.95, the third edition was born. Edition number four came in 2002.This time I grouped the loose-knit topics into eight sections and gave it more of a book feel. The GI was growing in popularity and I added it to the diabetes section, as well as material on antioxidants, folate and functional foods. The latest 2006 edition covers all those headline issues we love to read about - celebrity diets including the CSIRO diet, detox, portion size, arthritis, food labelling and super foods.

How has Nutrition for Life survived?
I think it has survived two decades due to a unique combination of things:

• Flexibility.The original vision of independent topics allowed me to update and add to the text to change and gave it flexibility over the years. And because I was always writing for magazines, I had relevant material to update the book with.
• Reader trust. Nutrition for Life was always trusted. I made sure that the text was  accurate and checked by experts in their own areas - more than 20 dietitians and  +nutrition/health lecturers have helped me over the years, for which I am truly grateful.
• Up to date. Because of its format, it's been easier to revise and include the latest scientific developments - this is more difficult to do in a conventional book.
• Attractive. The use of colour throughout and the full-colour photography has always kept it lively and interesting - and I have been lucky that some of the leading food photographers and stylists have worked on this book over the past 20 years, including Maureen Simpson, Libby Cardwell, Michelle Norianto, Lovoni Welsh, Per Ericson, Quentin Bacon and Andrew Elton.