Skinny Prots

Here's a secret about the diet publishing business: You don't make money by selling books.

The profitable part of the diet business is speaking fees and advertising on your blog, says Linda Berson, author of “Green Scene Diet.”

She's learned this as part of her mission to improve her own health and that of her husband, Buz Berson, who had open-heart surgery to unclog a coronary artery in December 2007.

The Bersons were successful residential real estate executives who sold their Charlotte County brokerage firm to Century 21 in March 2007, just nine months before Buz's surgery.

After that near-fatal event, Linda Berson researched all she could about nutrition and health. The result: She became a vegan, giving up all animal food products in favor of plants. “I decided we were going to live in the solution,” she says. “I knew nothing about nutrition and didn't cook.”

A tenacious and successful saleswoman who earned enough money from photocopier sales to buy her first Mercedes a year after graduating college, Linda Berson started handing out notebooks filled with vegan information to close family and friends. She estimates she put together 100 such notebooks and was encouraged to write a book.

Berson says the material on the subject is scattered, and many authors today are doctors who don't consider whether the food actually tastes good. What's more, these books are often too clinical to be understood by ordinary people. By contrast, “Green Scene Diet” contains recipes that give readers practical advice and simple explanations of the benefits of plant nutrition.

“There wasn't a book to make it easy,” says Berson, who's won endorsement from top doctors in the field, including Cleveland Clinic surgeon and author Caldwell Esselstyn. “I wanted it to be credible; I'm really just the messenger.”

Berson estimates she's spent $30,000 to develop a website and publish 1,000 copies of her book (it's available on Amazon.com). While she's on a personal mission to promote healthy nutrition, this isn't a charity. “To get heard, it has to be a business,” she acknowledges.

In the diet business, publishers seek out authors who have a following. One of the ways to do that is to write a blog, and Berson recently started doing that. “I need 1,000 followers to get a national publisher,” says Berson, who laughs about chatting up shoppers in the leafy greens aisle at Whole Foods in Naples. Plus, once your blog has a following, you can sell advertising on it.

Berson also organizes “noshes,” which are gatherings at peoples' homes where each guest brings a different vegan dish for others to try. Because Southwest Florida is a seasonal destination, she hopes people will start their own noshes where they summer using her materials.

As word spreads, Berson plans to target media, such as magazines and websites that promote the vegan lifestyle. She notes that comedian and television talk show host Ellen DeGeneres is a vegan and hopes to be on her daytime show.

Once she's established as an expert, she reasons that she'll be able to charge for public speaking. She says corporations and other organizations might pay you as much as $500 to $1,000 per engagement.

But Berson is quick to remind you that this is much more than a business. “We've healed people in our lives,” she says.