After Robert James Waller's longtime publisher Warner passed on his new novel, he decided to sell ''A Thousand Country Roads, An Epilogue to The Bridges of Madison County'' to John M. Hardy Publishing, a tiny Houston-based press whose owners run a bookstore near his West Texas ranch. ''Money is not a major consideration to Robert,'' says Waller's agent, Aaron Priest, ''and we just figured we'd have more control over everything working locally with a small company.'' A small company that's just stumbled into something big: ''We said there'd be a 25,000-copy first printing,'' says Hardy Publishing's president, Mike Hardy. ''Everybody's telling us that's a laughably small number, so we're revising it upward.'' ''Roads'' will be out in the spring.
