@pippatips facing legal action from Pippa Middleton

Someone is sore about being outsold by their parody.

The creators of the @pippatips Twitter account are facing legal action from Pippa Middleton, according to the Independent. The account, which parodies Pippa Middleton’s terrible party book Celebrate with helpful advice like “smoke can be sign of a new pope or that something is on fire“, “beat stress by not worrying about stuff” and “remember to write 2013 instead of 2012 now it’s no longer 2012“, led to a book being published in June this year.

When One is Expecting: A Posh Person’s Guide to Pregnancy and Parenting isn’t doing too badly – in fact, it’s outselling Pippa’s own book on Amazon.co.uk, coming in at a respectable #961 in the charts compared to #3,370 for Celebrate – which might be what prompted Harbottle & Lewis to take action. According to the Indy, they’ve written to the book’s publishers to demand that @pippatips be deleted.

At the time of writing, the account is still there – although it’s been dormant of late, not tweeting since 14 June – and the new burst of publicity might do the book a world of good. Getting it back in the front of people’s minds just as Babygeddon is about to hit… you couldn’t get for a better Streisand Effect than that if you tried, could you?

Still, in case they get their wish, here are my favourite Pippa tips, archived for posterity:

#PippaTip: when driving at night lights aren’t only a legal requirement, but a fun way of seeing the road and other things

— Pippa Middleton Tips (@Pippatips) November 5, 2012

#PippaTip: if you’re shopping on a budget, try purchasing things that cost less to buy

— Pippa Middleton Tips (@Pippatips) April 16, 2013

#PippaTip: breakfast is a yummy way to get rid of hunger after waking. Toast (re-cooked bread), cereal or eggs with bacon are always winners

— Pippa Middleton Tips (@Pippatips) November 9, 2012

#PippaTip: avoid awkward silences by talking

— Pippa Middleton Tips (@Pippatips) April 26, 2013

#PippaTip: the weekend is a good opportunity to do things you don’t have time to during the week

— Pippa Middleton Tips (@Pippatips) April 6, 2013

Update:

Sad news: realPippa probably is outselling fakePippa by around 200 times, according to @iucounu who looked up the numbers on Bookscan, the main database for book sales in the UK. That means that fakePippa is getting more of her sales from Amazon, while realPippa is doing much better in physical bookshops. In a way, that’s unsurprising: in bookstores, Celebrate isn’t right next to a bunch of one-star reviews; and a book launched from a twitter account was always going to do well in an online bookshop.

But it does make realPippa’s nastygram just that bit more vindictive.