I'm 58.

Clearly age isn't a hot button issue for me but according to some of my writer friends it should be. They claim I would be better off confessing to serial murders than confessing my age in a public forum. They say I'll regret it, that my career will shrivel up and die the second readers and editors discover I'm no longer the thirty-two year old I was when I published my first book.

Don't bother doing the math. Unless I sold my first book when I was five and married while still in utero, there pretty much has to be an AARP card hidden away somewhere on my person.

Like I said, I'm 58 and I don't care who knows it. However even I have to admit the case against full disclosure might be more compelling than I would have thought.

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In 1997, when I received my contributor's copy of Elf Magic, an anthology that included my short story “Kind Hunter,” I was delighted with the cover illustration by John Howe. It matched my main character perfectly, and I came to think of it as having been drawn from my story. (Note, I don't know if Mr. Howe even read the anthology, so this is merely my assumption.)

Recently I was looking through some photographs of a vacation we took near Ruidoso, New Mexico, some years ago. My husband pointed out the similarity between this photo of me sitting on an interesting tree and the Elf Magic cover.

Wow! Could Mr. Howe have somehow received a psychic impression of this image, and used it in his design? [Read more...]

Welcome Eric Maisel-creativity coach, therapist, and the author of more than 30 books, including Creativity for Life, The Van Gogh Blues, Fearless Creating, A Writer's Paris, A Writer's San Francisco and Coaching The Artist Within. He writes a monthly column for Art Calendar Magazine and hosts The Joy of Living Creatively on the Personal Life Media Network.

Hello, everybody:

Creativity isn't a trait or a set of traits: it arises because a person feels the need to be herself, to know what she knows, to love what she loves, and to do what she needs to do. Children don't draw because they have fingers or sing because they have vocal chords. They draw because they have a giraffe inside that needs to get out and they sing because they are bursting with song.

What distinguishes the creative person from other people is the creative person's felt sense of individuality. Many people are born conventional and find it quite easy to follow the crowd; only a portion of our species is born with a strong desire to assert their individuality. All the personality traits that creative people manifest, the more than seventy-five traits that have been described in the creativity literature, flow from this single core quality: the need to assert individuality. [Read more...]

Welcome Leslie Wainger, book doctor and editor. During her career in publishing, she has edited New York Times, Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestsellers. If you need help with a new manuscript, Leslie may be just the person you should know...

Most people who've been in publishing for a while - and that means all the NINC members reading this, obviously - have come across the term "book doctor" at some point. And most of those people have moved on, thinking quite correctly that the manuscripts they're writing/editing/representing don't need any doctoring. But there are times when the objective eye of a book doctor can be helpful - and not only for unpublished authors, though they do make up the majority of my clientele and most likely other book doctors' clientele, too.

Lots of writers publish that first book and never look back. There may be a snag here or there, a book that gets turned down or a move to another publisher or agent, but essentially things go smoothly, and if not everybody can become a New York Times bestseller, neither can everybody who wants to sell a book or make a living writing succeed, so if you're selling regularly and making that living, you're way ahead of most of the world.

But there are times when there's more than a snag, and there can be a lot of different causes. [Read more...]

Welcome Sheila Clover English, a multi-award winning producer of book commercials, the CEO of Circle of Seven Productions and Executive Producer of Reader's Entertainment TV. She is a member of the Downloadable Media Association as well as the Internet Content Syndication Council.

Her company has been in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and on NPR as well as featured in technology circles such as TubeMogul University, Ask the Experts and The Robert Scoble Show, because of her innovative video distribution network. She started producing book trailers in 2002 at which time she trademarked the term "book trailer".

Effective Book Trailers

A famous saying in the marketing world is - "50% of all of your marketing efforts work. You just don't know which 50%."

People invest in a single, national USA Today ad for $10,000 and do it routinely. Why? At the end of the day it's on the bottom of the bird cage. But, it is a national ad. It is in the book section. A lot of people will see it. So, to many, it is worth $10,000. A NY Times ad can be as little as $4000 if you have the right connections. There's prestige in being seen in the Times, but is it selling books?

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