Every year, I’m shocked at how little attention nutrition gets in the campaigns for cancer prevention and treatment.

It wasn’t that long ago that a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. Thankfully today, the trend is survival. But the main message to the more than 11 million cancer survivors continues to be watch and wait.

I wanted to change that, so I teamed up with my father, a cancer physician for more than 25 years, to write a book that would guide cancer survivors to use their diet and lifestyle to get healthy and remain cancer free. The future of healthcare in our country has to be prevention and it’s time to learn what foods, drinks, and habits will keep us healthy and use less medicine.

The traditional medical community is slowly warming up to this message. Places like the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) assign an integrative approach to fighting cancer. Along with traditional tools like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, they also employ nutritional support, naturopathic medicine, mind-body medicine and spiritual support. Their motto for cancer survivors is, “Celebrate Life.” Each year they plant a tree in honor of every CTCA cancer patient who has reached the five-year mark since they began treatment.

In my book, The After Cancer Diet, I teach simple steps to getting healthier. Readers will learn how to eat real food, find more sweetness in life (and less in food), develop a regular exercise routine, detox the body and lead a happier life with more creativity and joy. The book also includes recipes for healthy mocktails—festive cocktails without alcohol—and discusses research that links yoga to significant improvements in sleep, quality of life and stress reduction for cancer survivors.

To check out the book go to:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Cancer-Diet-Healthier-ebook/dp/B005Q52XY0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ykWtiQSRM0

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 No-Cost, Low-Cost Weapons for Selling Your Work, by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, Michael Larsen and David L. Hancock. Morgan James Publishing, 2010.

For many writers, “marketing” is a scary word. After all, your expertise is in writing books, not moving units (or whatever lingo those marketing people are using these days). For all the workshops and MFA programs out there purporting to help you write a book, there are remarkably few courses on how to sell the books you’ve written. The world of press releases and lead times can be intimidating to the uninitiated, if not downright impossible.

Lucky for self-published and traditionally published authors alike, there’s Guerrilla Marketing for Writers, an accessible, no-frills guide to book publicity filled with tips to help you move those units out of your garage and into readers’ hands.

While some of the information covered is fairly basic (writing press releases, contacting reviewers, the importance of building a platform), Guerrilla Marketing for Writers goes one step beyond other book publicity manuals with its focus on technologies like Twitter for building an audience for your book. “Guerrilla tactics” such as posting a (highly re-tweetable!) tip or quote of the day are easy, fun, and accessible for even novice guerrilla marketers.

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers encourages writers not to underestimate the power of the personal touch, which—let’s face it—can be an easy thing to lose sight of in our rush to send to send out a bazillion review copies. The authors write: “The more technology we have in our lives, the more we crave human contact—a major advantage guerrillas exploit every chance they can get.” Sending handwritten thank-you notes to radio hosts and personal responses to readers’ comments may not sound like a marketing tactic, but it can give your personal brand a bigger boost than a whole box of business cards.

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers is also one of the only book publicity manuals I’ve encountered that includes equally valuable advice for both fiction and non-fiction authors, providing a list of the most effective guerrilla tactics for each category in order of importance.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the publicity jungle, Guerrilla Marketing for Writers is the perfect book to get you going and keep you going for the long haul. Whether you’re looking to boost flagging book sales or launch a full-scale publicity campaign, guerrilla tips will help you stay motivated and think outside the box.

5/5 Highly recommended.

We so often read about India as one of the world’s next great superpowers, as the media hails the nation as an economic “tiger” on the scale of China. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger tells the flip side of that story: It is a tale of the unfortunate millions the boom years have left far, far behind told through the life experiences of one man. The storyteller, the fictional Balram Halwai, is strange—clearly bereft of morality and quite possibly psychotic—and yet he endears himself to the reader. You may even find yourself secretly cheering his successes even when they are won in delinquent, corrupt or horrific ways. With The White Tiger, Adiga has provided a too-close-for-comfort look at India’s dark underbelly.

One of my favorite parts of BEA each year is the time I spend mingling among the publishers’ displays, on a mission to nowhere in particular but instead to wherever my inspired heart decides to take me. What new book will I discover next? The mystery of the answer gives half the pleasure.

Here are three of the many titles that caught my eye at BEA this year.

The Crabby Cook: Recipes and Rants by Jessica Harper

I love the idea of a cookbook that contains recipes as well as a sassy narrative, but maybe that’s because I love memoirs as much as I love food. The Crabby Cook, by movie actress, singer, and children’s book author Jessica Harper, focuses on the theme of feeding a family of eaters with tastes so individual that they could drive a mom crazy. The result is a compendium of comfort-food recipes that children will be happy with, but with a twist to keep the adults interested too. Entrees include Gobble-It-Up Turkey Chili, Sorta Mac ’n Cheese, Healthy Shmealthy Muffins, and Lazy Ass Minestrone. Ingredient lists are simple; cooking steps are well within the realm of manageable. Sounds great to a busy mom like me.

Creative Is a Verb by Patti Digh

Patti Digh has done it again. After her inspiring book Life is a Verb, based on her blog 37days.com, which was inspired by her stepfather’s death by lung cancer a mere 37 days after diagnosis, Digh gives us more thought-provoking and inspiring essays to ponder. Essays in Creative Is a Verb include “Put Down Your Clever,” “See the Pencil,” and “Throw More Pots” and are followed by exercises to help the reader unleash his or her creativity. More beautiful artwork from Digh’s blog followers graces the pages too, lending creative inspiration of their own.

Film+Travel: Europe—Traveling the World Through Your Favorite Movies by Museyon Guides

Just when you thought they couldn’t possibly come up with another good idea for a travel book, Museyon Guides has. From Hitchcock’s London to Italy’s Cinecittà Studios, movie aficionados get taken in Film+Travel: Europe on a journey where celluloid meets pavement, where imagination and reality intermingle. Film enthusiasts and armchair travelers alike may never have to leave home to enjoy this part-travel guide, part film-history book, which takes readers through the landscape of Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, The United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Russia—through the lens of film. Those who enjoy Film+Travel Europe may also want to check out the other books in the series: Film+Travel: North America, South America and Film+Travel: Asia, Oceana, Africa.

The organizers of BEA continue to seek new ways to keep the publishing audience interested and to maintain the conference’s relevance. But while workshop topics and conference length may flip-flop to meet the perceived and changing demands of the marketplace, one thing remains the same: books, regardless of form—electronic or paper—are lovable.

Authored by the first American to complete the 20 years of study required to earn the degree of geshe, or master of Buddhist learning, Roach put his decades of Buddhist practice to work in the global diamond business of New York City, and this is his story. His effort to maintain a monk’s patience, generosity and peace in the down-and-dirty Diamond District provide an amazing tale—and, surprisingly, a path anyone could follow toward financial success and personal contentment.

It’s a big claim, one that many authors have tried to make. Whether his path works or not may be up to us, the reader. But Roach writes with equal dexterity on matters of business and Buddhism, making this book both a fascinating read and an education.

When I first picked it up, I was turned off by Gilbert’s glib style. But I pressed on, curious about what made the book so popular. After my second read, I think I’d boil it down to this: It’s supremely organized, full of surprising (but not flowery) language, and—above all—it’s honest. Wonderfully, brutally honest.

For writers of travelogues, memoir or creative nonfiction, this last element is perhaps the most important. No matter how open one might be as a person—after all, some natural instinct drives us to write our personal stories—as a writer, with the blank page in front of you and the echo of several dozen voices in your head (or is that just me?), it’s hard not to consider how your mother, father, partner or friend might react to particular details about your own life. Or theirs.

That’s what I found courageous about Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert doesn’t hold back about the stuff that might embarrass the rest of us—crying until she had created a pool of tears and snot on the bathroom floor; confessing that, at 31, she really didn’t want a baby; sharing her messy emotional process as she tried to recover from divorce. And somehow, she makes all of that funny.

Her adventures and misadventures through Italy, India and Indonesia offer an amazing escape and some really good life lessons along the way.

When it comes to living your life the best way possible, how can you beat her advice? Eat, pray, love, she says.

Sounds good to me.

Click here to purchase Eat, Pray, Love on Amazon.