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This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on July 19, 2007 Sign up now!

by John Sellers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 7/19/2007

What would Kitty do? That was the question on the minds of staffers at Roaring Brook, as they sought to breathe new life into Bad Kitty, Nick Bruel's 2005 alphabet book starring a particularly naughty cat. With Bad Kitty continuing to sell strong two years after publication (around 65,000 copies are currently in print) and with a sequel, Poor Puppy, due out at the end of the month, how to keep a backlist title fresh?

Many publishers might break out a paperback, but not here. "Paperback editions usually come out when sales of the hardcover have peaked," says Neal Porter, editorial director of Roaring Brook's Neal Porter Books. "[Sales] haven't let up since the book's inception. We wanted to extend its life in hardcover."

So rather than potentially cannibalizing steady hardcover sales by introducing a paperback, Roaring Brook hit upon the idea of a capitalizing on Kitty's mischievous nature with a "cat-nipped" hardcover edition. This new version of Bad Kitty features two sizeable bite marks courtesy of the eponymous feline. 

Lauren Wohl, associate publisher at Roaring Brook, credits Bad Kitty's staying power to several sources, including book fair sales of Scholastic's paperback edition (which often led buyers to the hardcover sold in bookstores), handselling support by booksellers, Book of the Year nominations across the country (in Colorado, Illinois, Tennessee and North and South Carolina) and an appeal that went beyond the usual audiences for "cat books" or abecedarians.

Wohl recalls being surprised to find Bad Kitty in a bookstore's Halloween display, and she realized that "this book is having a lot of different lives at different stores." Roaring Brook has been featuring Kitty in online ads year-round, suggesting it as a gift for Christmas, Easter or Halloween, in recognition that Kitty had the potential to be, in Wohl's words, "a cat for all seasons."

The cat-nipped edition, which Wohl believes will attract attention in both bookstores and the gift market, goes on sale July 24 (with a first printing of 50,000 copies), the same day as Poor Puppy, which has an initial print run of 65,000. The original hardcover edition of Bad Kitty will remain on sale, as well.

The release of this new edition gave Bruel the opportunity to make a few changes to the book itself. The cat-nipped edition features new endpapers, as well as a new piece of art. During Kitty's destructive tour of the alphabet, instead of having "damaged the dishes," Kitty now "devoured my new book," chomping into Bad Kitty in a bit of self-referential humor.

So what's next for Kitty and Puppy? According to Porter, Bruel is at work on another book starring Kitty, How to Give Kitty a Bath, aimed at slightly older readers. "It will be somewhere between 80 and 100 pages—really a leap up to the next reading level," Porter says.

And it's easy to imagine that if Bad Kitty's cat-nipped edition proves successful, a "dog-eared" version of Poor Puppy may not be far behind….