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Pulp Friction
White's Thighs Fail to Set Fires
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WHITE WASHED You on Top, Kate (inset)
Sex sells—but that doesn't mean people want their noses rubbed in it. Perhaps that's why Cosmopolitan editor Kate White is taking the unusual step of renaming her saucy self-help book How to Set His Thighs on Fire: 86 Red-Hot Lessons on Love, Life, Men, and (Especially) Sex.

The paperback edition, out in June, will have a substantially less incendiary (and less painful) title, You on Top: Smart, Sexy Skills Every Woman Needs to Set the World on Fire, along with a considerably more demure cover design.

Why risk wasting all the advertising and promotion already invested in the book by changing its title a full year after publication? "I got a number of e-mails from women saying that the existing title didn't reflect all the career stuff and life lessons in the book in addition to the relationship material," says White. (By "relationship material" she presumably means such offerings as "the special touches that double a man's pleasure in bed" and "the most ignored moan zone on a man's body.")

White denies that the book's modest sales performance—Nielsen Bookscan has recorded fewer than 7,000 copies sold since it was published last summer‐was a factor. "It didn't have anything to do with sales, though you always hope for bigger sales in paperback."

And any disappointment she might be feeling is no doubt offset by the success of her best-selling Bailey Weggins mystery series. Lethally Blond, White's fifth book in the series, is out May 23.

By Jeff Bercovici   04/10/07 10:36 AM
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