Best Beauty Tip of All – SMILE!

We women, and increasingly men, spend lots of the green stuff to improve our looks. It doesn’t stop with creams, treatments, makeup and hair products. It escalates, the older we get - to botox, fillers and plastic surgery.

Yet, the one thing that makes the biggest difference in our appearance, we often forget about or neglect – our smiles.

Seriously, how often have you really not noticed someone only to be blown away the minute their face is altered by a big, warm smile. If they are an older person, like me, you may see the wrinkles around the mouth stretch out and disappear. It’s a rare person that can smile engagingly and not have that brightness reach their eyes. So, suddenly, a furrowed brow and pinched look are transformed into the glory of happiness and therefore a little bit of beauty appears right before our eyes.

The other advantage to frequently smiling is that it exercises your face muscles, bringing a glow back to your face. There’s nothing like the aliveness of skin that’s enhanced by a rosy glow.

Okay, sure, this all sounds a little Pollyanna to you. I don’t blame you. But I do challenge you. Sit in front of a good mirror for ten minutes and practice breaking into a smile. See how many years evaporate from your visage and how over the full ten minutes of smiling, you somehow manage to fake it till you make it and suddenly find that the smile isn’t an effort anymore.

I’m telling you – it’s cheap, it’s easy and everybody loves it – your smile. Cherish it, but use it.

To Self-Publish or Not to Self-Publish, That Was the Question

I’ve been away for quite a while. After trying for nearly a year to get an agent interested in my first novel, Red Mojo Mama, I decided to self-publish it. This turns out to be one of the best decisions I ever made but it’s been quite a learning curve, one that’s not complete by any means.

First, why did I decide to self-publish? It was mainly because I was stuck in waiting mode and couldn’t move on. I realized that there was certainly more than one book in me. At best, I would be completing something and at worst, I wouldn’t sell many copies. Not many copies sounded much better to me than no copies.

To date, I’ve sold about 44 copies. But I’ve barely begun marketing “Red”. I was sidelined by family situations for almost two months. Also, there’s a remarkable statistic – only 1/3 of all books published sell more than 100 copies – which I stumbled across in a book I bought to guide me through the marketing process “Plug Your Book”. As the author, Steve Weber, so aptly points out, with publishing through an established publisher, if your book is slow out of the gate – selling 500 or less – it disappears from their line-up. With self-publishing, you can keep that book online – selling slowly but surely forever.

Going forward, with the new fiction titles I’m working on, I will still try to find an agent and therefore a publisher. But I’ve got a non-fiction book that I’ll be putting online as soon as I can get it revised.

I encourage anyone who just needs to see a book of theirs in print, and feels strongly that this first book is just the beginning AND who has already tried for a significant period of time to interest an agent, to jump in and self-publish it.