Hating

My second book, How to Stay Bitter Through the Happiest Times of Your Life, is being published this June. It's a sequel of sorts to my first book, How to Heal the Hurt by Hating, which was published in September, 1998. (What? So I'm not that prolific.) Villard, the publisher for How to Stay Bitter, is going to re-publish HTHTHBH at the same time. Even though HTHTHBH hasn't gone out of print, they're going to give it a new cover and package it with the second book. The people at Villard explained that they didn't feel that HTHTHBH reached its full potential the first time around. It sold okay. Somewhere around 18,000 copies. That sounds sort of respectable. Sort of. Sometimes. Anyway, all of this makes me think of my favorite story about HTHTHBH, which is that a close friend of mine went into a large chain bookstore a couple months after HTHTHBH hit the shelves. She went up to the information kiosk and asked the informant where she might find How to Heal the Hurt by Hating. The informant typed the information into his computer and then said, "No, we don't have a book by an author named Hating." Maybe that's why my first book didn't reach its full potential the first time around.