TVNewser blogger and “Lunch at Michael’s” columnist Diane Clehane has an interview with Deborah Norville on mediabistro.com’s main site this week, which probably doesn’t sound much like fodder for a book publishing blog—until you remember that her latest book, Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work For You, is a New York Times bestseller. And nestled among all the stories about working in television, from NBC to CBS to Inside Edition, she explains how that book came together:
“I had a little extra time on my hands and it just occurred to me that when I looked for the silver lining, I felt my life went better. I’m enough of a cynic doing this for 30 years that I thought, it’s better because you want it to be. So, I thought, ‘I’ll see if there’s anything to it or if I’m just blowing smoke.’ I put on the research hat. I started going into the academic journals. There’s a lot of garbage out there, but when you do sift through it, you do get to some kernels of valid, properly executed studies. That was how it happened. It was really idle curiosity. It wasn’t something I did every day. It was really over the course of two years, and once I started getting into something, it was like peeling back an onion.”