About Us
Happy About, a California corporation, is a quick-to-market book publisher that has the distribution channels of the big guys and the customer service of Nordstrom. Happy About® books deliver wisdom. Our books are smaller, compact, high-impact reads that are typically 80-150 pages and are delivered in paperback, eBook, or podbook format. We are looking for authors to publish, companies that want books written for them and charitable institutions that are looking to communicate a message.

If you have feedback for us, please share. If you'd like to contribute to a book in progress or suggest a new title, we welcome your input. Go to our Link2Us page to find images to use to link to our site.

We're experimenting with a monthly hour-long radio show featuring our authors. Let us know what you think.

NOTE: We have a new Happy About toolbar you can use to explore Happy About as well as search the Internet with Google. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of Guerilla Marketing, with more than 14 million copies of his books sold worldwide will author a book or two for a Happy About marketing series. He has written a monthly column for Entrepreneur Magazine, articles for Inc. Magazine, and online columns published monthly on the Microsoft Website.

Jay taught guerrilla marketing for ten years at the University of California in Berkeley extension. He was SVP at J. Walter Thompson and Creative Director and Board Member at Leo Burnett Advertising. He has been written about in Business Week, Fortune, Small Business Entrepreneur, Inc., Wall St Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Revenue Magazine, Business 2.0, Bottom Line, Salt Lake City Enterprise, Chicago Tribune, National Enquirer (really), and Cosmopolitan. Stay tuned for content from Jay.

We are delighted to have Jay as a Happy About® content contributor.

Laura Lowell, Executive Editor of the 42 Rules Series, is passionate about helping companies be heard; to get the right message to the right customer at the right time. As a sought after consultant, author, and speaker in Silicon Valley, Laura has shared her pragmatic approach to marketing with hundreds of individuals and companies. Prior to launching Impact Marketing Group, Laura held executive positions with Hewlett-Packard, Intel and IBM. Her degree in International Relations prepared her for work assignments in Hong Kong and London. She received her MBA from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business with an emphasis on marketing and entrepreneurship. She lives in Los Gatos, California with her husband Rick, their two daughters, and their dog.

Linda Eve Diamond spent nearly fifteen years in the corporate training field, where she developed, customized and delivered training programs in all areas of communication. She has authored and co-authored five business and educational books: "Teambuilding That Gets Results" (Sourcebooks, 2007), "Perfect Phrases for Building Strong Teams" (McGraw-Hill, 2007), "Perfect Phrases for Motivating and Rewarding Employees" (McGraw-Hill, 2006), "TABEL Level A Workbook" (McGraw-Hill, 2007), "Executive Writing: American Style" (Apocryphile Press, 2007), and published poetry book titled: "The Human Experience" (ASJA Press, 2007). She currently serves on the executive board of the International Listening Association and is the creator of the popular website, http://ListenersUnite.com

Barbara von Halle, Executive Editor of the upcoming KPI Business/IT Transformation Series, is the founder of Knowledge Partners, Inc. (KPI) and a business rules pioneer. She is responsible for evolving KPI’s business rule management methods and tools (KPI STEP ™ License) and well as evolving their rule maturity model (KPI RMM™).

She serves as the Chair Person for Brainstorm’s Business Rules Symposium, and sits on the editorial board of the Business Rules Bulletin (electronic publication) as well as the BPM Strategies Magazine. In 1996, she received the honored Outstanding Individual Achievement Award from the International Data Management Association.

She is co-author of The Handbook of Relational Database Design (Addison-Wesley), which is beyond its 20th printing, co-editor of The Handbook of Data Management (Auerbach), and co-author of Business Rules Applied (Jon Wiley & Sons). She served as the leading columnist for 5 years in Database Programming and Design Magazine and the publisher, Miller Freeman, often displays “The Best of Barbara von Halle” on their Website.

Manoj Khanna is the executive editor of the upcoming Happy About Open Source series. He is an author, entrepreneur and an open source evangelist. Manoj is the founder of Dextrus Prosoft, an open source technology and services company working towards bringing usable and cost-effective open source technologies. Dextrus Prosoft is currently partnered with leading open source companies to provide its customers innovative, efficient, tested and trusted open source solutions. Its current portfolio of partners include, SpikeSource, Atlassian, SugarCRM, Pentaho, ActiveGrid, Sleepycat Software (now Oracle) and Jahia.

Manoj has previously consulted for companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), Hughes Software Systems, SBC Inc., and Wells Fargo. His interests include open source software development, open source project management, open source collaboration, program management, project management, agile development, rapid prototyping, unified processes, and open source workflows.

Scott Allen, Executive Editor of the Happy About LinkedIn Series, is one of the world’s top experts on virtual business relationships and the use of social software for business.

He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, a contributing author to Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture, and a monthly columnist for FastCompany.com. He is also the About.com Entrepreneurs Guide, providing free resources and guidance to help entrepreneurs as they start and grow their business.

He has over 20 years experience as a technology entrepreneur, executive and consultant and has delivered enterprise solutions for clients including IBM and Amazon.

Angelika Blendstrup, Ph.D., Co-Executive Editor of the Happy About International Business Communications series is the founder and principal of Blendstrup & Associates. She is a business communications coach who helps foreign-born executives with problems understanding the complexities of
American business culture and the English language to communicate skillfully and effectively. In particular, she helps improve their written and oral communication skills, prepares them for media interviews and works on reducing their accents.

Angelika holds a Ph.D. in Bilingual, Bicultural Education from Stanford University. She speaks five languages and has taught US business communications skills to international executives both privately as well as in companies in the Silicon Valley such as DreamWorks, Sun Microsystems,
Microsoft, Oracle and Roche.

Catherine Kitcho, Author of "Happy About Being a Baby Boomer: Facing our Newfound Longevity", has been a baby boomer all her life and has been fascinated by the social, political and cultural impacts that this generation has had upon American life. The first wave of baby boomers is now turning 60. Now that life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last 2 decades, baby boomers must face the fact that we will be around an extra 30 or so years. This raises significant issues: how healthy are we going to be during those extra decades, and will we be able to get health insurance? Also, how much money will it take just for the basics of living 30 more years (and will we be able to afford our current lifestyle)? These questions need to be answered before we can determine what else we will be able to do with our "extra decades".

The consummate baby boomer, Catherine Kitcho has had many trailblazing careers since she first graduated from college: engineer, remote sensing specialist, project manager, business owner, and currently, a marketing consultant known as "The Launch Doctor" (see www.launchdoctor.com). Catherine is the author of three business books, a cookbook, and a humorous novel. She also has written many articles, humorous essays and stories that can be found at her Pelepubs website. Her philosophy of life is to keep things simple and realistic, and to have a good laugh at least once a day.