For three years, Mara Adesanya cooked dinner for strangers in her flat in Yaba. Twelve seats, one menu, no advertising beyond a quiet WhatsApp group that swelled, gradually, from her own friends to friends-of-friends to a waiting list that now stretches eight months.
The cookbook was inevitable. The question was whether the trust she had built across forty-odd dinners would translate into a credit card transaction from people who had never tasted her food.
The campaign
Pre-orders opened on the tenth of January. The book — Lagos Kitchen: A Year of Suppers — ships in May. Two tiers: the book alone at twelve thousand naira, or the book plus a seat at the launch dinner at thirty-five thousand. The dinner tier sold out in nine hours.
What’s interesting is not the speed. It’s the absence of any of the usual machinery: no influencer seeding, no paid traffic, no countdown timer on the landing page. Just an email to her list and a single Instagram post.
What to watch
Whether Mara hits her stretch goal of two thousand pre-orders by the tenth of February. Whether the dinner tier — which is, functionally, a loss leader at the price she’s charging — produces enough word-of-mouth to justify the discount. And whether anyone else in the Lagos food scene notices that the most efficient marketing channel for a cookbook in 2026 might be cooking dinner for twelve people, forty times.