The Daily Grill

The Hate Dance

Fresh from my jaunt to New York with I Hate People! co-author Jonathan Littman, we hit the streets of LA this week to bring our message to the masses. FIrst stop: Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I was able to convince a couple of street dancers (for a small donation) to let him jump in with them for a few moves...

Hating On The News

As co-author of I Hate People!, with Jonathan Littman, I was on CNN's "American Morning" last Friday when I was in New York and talked with host Carol Costello about how to deal with some of the Ten Least Wanted who drive you crazy. Here's how it went down...

Judging A Book

The first two days in New York promoting my book, I Hate People!, have been interesting, to say the least. We've been interviewed by Business Week and the New York Times. But our main focus has been creating some street visibility. Guerrilla marketing, if you will, in the form of my writing partner, Jonathan Littman, donning a pair of sandwich boards and passing out promotional items to people in places like Times Square. My job is to shoot video of these exploits, to be edited and pumped out of the web.

Seems easy enough. Except when the boards are proclaiming the message "I Hate People!" you're bound to catch more attention than most of the "sandwich men" who are passing out flyers for strip joints and electronics stores. Comments are often shouted by people in passing, ranging from "It's wrong to hate!" to "Right on! I hate people, too!"

The best moment was when we strolled down 6th Avenue and wanted to get shots of Jon in front of big media outlets. Our mistake was stepping off the sidewalk proper and onto the stretch of pavement directly in front of the News Corporation building -- the home of FOX News. My partner in crime wasn't in from of the place more than a minute when two of New York's finest emerged from the lobby (why uniformed cops were stationed there we're not sure) and told us to shut down our camera. While Jon was being asked for his ID and his hotel in New York, I was being schooled on where we could and couldn't shoot video.

Some footage will be up on YouTube shortly. I'll be sure to put up a link.

Later in the afternoon we met our editor and our agent for lunch at a restaurant inside Grand Central Station. While we celebrated the book's release, Jon and I were also aiming to lob a soft pitch to our friend from Little, Brown & Co. about our followup book idea.

Before that could happen, I got a call from a producer from CNN's American Morning show -- the show I was supposed to appear on last Monday. Now it's slated for Friday and they wanted to do what's called a pre-interview. Almost every talk show does it. You know those cards the host reads questions from? Those are thought up days before by a producer whose job is to work with the guest to figure out what's going to be asked and, in broad strokes, what the answers are going to be.

The process took so long -- with me trying to find a quiet corner of Grand Central Station, mind you -- that I never got to eat my lunch OR pitch the new book idea. One of the benefits of writing with a partner -- Jon was able to soften our editor up for a more extensive proposal later.

After lunch and my pre-interview were over, we had to jump in a cab and rush across town for an interview at the New York Times. We were hoping to see the inner workings of this legend of publishing. Alas, we got no further than a sterile little "interview room" among a bank of similar chambers. The interview was brief — the columnist we were talking to just wanted some points of our book to round out a piece she was writing about problematic coworkers — but it seemed to go well.

After that it was time for more sandwich boarding in Times Square under the threat of rain (and another cop chasing off of "the island", a central point in the tourist spot that is reserved for theater promoters to push tickets for their shows. Dropping the boards off at our hotel, we caught a great dinner where I got to introduce Jon to some visiting relatives.

The last moment of the day was glorious: discovering today's Wall Street Journal of the book already posted online and finding out that they thought we did a good job. Now that makes for a good night's sleep.

For more of our promotional exploits, please click over and visit our blog: I Hate People...But It's Nothing Personal.

The Authors of "I Hate People!" want to know...

Do You Hate People?
Take our POP QUIZ to find out!