In an interview for Success magazine, fashion designer, film-maker, actor, opera director and cabaret artist Isaac Mizrahi said, “My piano teacher said, ‘You have to choose what you want. You can’t continue to study the piano for eight hours a day and be an actor and design clothes.’ I listened to what he said and he made sense, but I couldn’t relate to that model. I am not a specialist.”  He says he’s had insomnia since he was twelve but a lot of his inspiration comes to him in dream... Read Full Story

If you'd like to start off the New Year having already reached one of your most cherished goals, join my Breakthrough Strategy 60-Day Program. You'll get group coaching and support and everything you need in order to set and achieve your goal. The next program starts in January 2010--for more information email BstormUK@aol.com. Read Full Story

Can what works for music work for poetry as well? The people behind poetryspeaks.com hope so. At their website you can search for poems by topics, by poet, or by name of the poem. You’ll also find the biographies of poets, be able to listen to (or watch, in the case of videos) 30 seconds of any poetry products for sale on the site, and upload your own poetry and get feedback on it. Regarding this last function, the site says: “Discover and be discovered! YourMic is your online stage for poe... Read Full Story

Yes, I’m also sick of all the ways the media are spinning out the story of the (non) Balloon Boy, but we can’t deny that it’s a story that gripped the world. Whenever a story does that, I’m interested to consider what elements made it so compelling and this time there are two levels of story to learn from.The original story was a simple one, with familiar elements: a child in danger a ticking clock—how long can the balloon stay aloft? a mystery: is he really in there? someone whose emotions ... Read Full Story

I just finished reading “The Disenchanted,” a fictionalized version of the time a young Budd Schulberg (the author of the book) spent with F. Scott Fitzgerald toward the end of the latter’s life. Fitzgerald, broke and suffering from alcoholism, took on the job of collaborating on a movie script about a winter carnival. Unfortunately it all ended badly.  Knowing the background of the novel makes it worth a read. The book starts from the point of view of Schulberg’s alter ego, Shep, and... Read Full Story

According to the blogger Destructive Anachronism, the formula for post-print literature may be “high quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia.” This was referenced in an article in the New York Times about a new quarterly literary magazine called “Electric Literature.”  The publishers are making the magazine available on paper, as an ebook, on the Kindle, on the iPod and as an audiomag. They’re augmenting it with YouTube videos featuring collaborations between their writers ... Read Full Story

Simon & Schuster is going to sell individual chapters of medical books. People can search for an answer to their questions on the Ask Dr Oz site, and then purchase a related chapter—and go on to buy the entire book if they like.  S & S’s chief digital officer said, “We plan to expand both the chapter selling model and use of our e-commerce widget in other content categories.”  This could be a way to go a step beyond the “look inside” feature at sites like Amazon: let the ... Read Full Story

A fascinating story in the Independent about Vivian Maier, a French nanny whose hobby was photography—maybe that’s an understatement, it seems more of a calling. A young Chicago real estate agent named John Maloof happened to buy much of her archive for a few hundred dollars, not really knowing what it contained. He ended up with 20,000 negatives and a thousand rolls of undeveloped film, each with 12-14 images, mostly of Chicago and New York.  He put some of them online and it has ca... Read Full Story

Writing on his Fast Company blog, Adam Pennenberg said this about book reviews:  “Book reviews don't sell books anymore. All they do is act as marketing fragments for publishers and authors to spin for promotion.   Good reviews help, at best, incrementally, and bad reviews hurt, at worst, incrementally. They're published then they disappear, living on as pithy testimonials on authors' Web sites, or on the back covers or in the fronts of paperback editions.   It wasn't alwa... Read Full Story

In this final (at least for now) segment on building your platform, let’s look at how you can make people aware of what you’re offering them. It’s one thing to make a video or write a special report, but it’s another to actually get people to watch or read it. Here are six ways to get the word out:  Write articles for distribution services like ezinearticles.com. They don’t charge you for uploading your articles, and in your bio box you can include a link to a blog, a website, a podc... Read Full Story