After working thirteen years as a registered nurse, four of which she felt like "Hot Lips Houlihan" while serving in the United States Air Force, Lori Avocato picked up a book and said, "Hm. I can write one of these." Yeah right! Oh, she wrote several all right—seventeen to be exact—but getting them published proved to be another matter. Throughout the years, she realized it was not an easy task to write a book, much less a short, concise one.

Pete was born in Austria to Hungarian parents and emigrated to the U.S. at age 4, in 1953. He grew up in New York and suburban New Jersey and began to write about tennis during the "tennis boom" of the 1970s. Since then, he's covered every major tennis tournament multiple times, and has gone on assignment to locales such as Beijing, China, Monte Carlo, Ecuador, Moscow, Hawaii, and Australia. He was the winner of the WTA writer of the year award twice, in 1979 and 1981.

Suzanne Boothby is a Brooklyn-based wellness writer, certified health coach and cook. She is a proud graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and The Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She also has an advanced certificate in Health Coaching from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and received training as a California-certified Master Gardener.

Josie's novels are True Hollywood Lies, Impossibly Tongue-Tied, and Secret LIves of Husbands and Wives. She is also the author of two non-fiction books: Last Night I Dreamt of Cosmopolitans: A Modern's Girl's Dream Dictionary; and she is co-author, with her husband, Martin, of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Finding Mr. Right. She lives with Martin and their two children in Northern California.

Here is Josie's latest ebook:  True Hollywood Lies

Debra Fulghum Bruce, PhD, is an award-winning medical writer and author or co-author of 89 health trade books. Alumnus of the Year for the University of South Florida, Dr. Bruce is a Sharecare.com Expert and has written for WebMD.com, Oprah.com, RealAge.com, and AOL Health.

Mark Cuban has been an entrepreneur his whole life, from humble beginnings selling garbage bags and powdered milk door-to-door to becoming a multi-billion dollar businessman. Throughout his career, Cuban has risen to success by founding his own companies, including HDNet, Broadcast.com and MicroSolutions, as well as investing in startups, such as Mahalo, JungleCents.com, motionloft.com, Filesanywhere.com, Naked Pizza and 140Fire.com.

Hailing from basketball's epicenter, the great state of Indiana, Carson Cunningham memorized Georgetown's starting five in Kindergarten. Over the next twelve years or so, he played all the time with his buddies, stopping occasionally—oftentimes only because his parents forced him to – to read the books and magazines and newspapers laying around his house. Before he knew it, he'd become an all-state player in Indiana, a runner-up for PAC-10 Freshman of the Year honors, and then, after transferring to Purdue, a two-time Academic All-American.

 Dusko Doder is a former Washington Post reporter, editor and foreign correspondent. He is also author of several non-fiction books including Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, and a Gorbachev biography, Heretic in the Kremlin. He is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and holds two advance degrees from Columbia University.

Born in 1947 in Revere, Massachusetts, Dr. Fournier graduated from Merrimack College and Tufts University School of Medicine.  His residency training at the hospitals affiliated with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine was followed by two years voluntary service in the National Health Service Corps on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Bradlee Frazer is an author, speaker, blogger and Boise, Idaho native who loves the blues, Ray Bradbury short stories and his wife, daughter and dogs. He is also the lawyer who successfully registered the color blue as a trademark for the iconic artificial turf in Boise State University’s football stadium.

Writing has always been my "thing," despite that D I got in handwriting in second grade (thanks a lot Mrs. Whatever Your Name Was). Early on I learned I could boost my flagging math grades by writing extra-credit reports. I figured if I couldn't compute, at least I could snow-job my way into a better grade. Ah, the fine art of fiction writing. As I grew up, void of more remunerative skills, I pursued a writing-related career. I wrote and edited for my college newspaper, worked in radio, was even a TV news reporter (don't ask).

Nancy Goodman is a writer, coach, and expert on emotional eating and weight loss. A stay-at-home mother of three, Goodman struggled with binge eating, sought help, and learned what was behind it. Angered by the media’s focus on food and diet, she was determined to help people make the connection between food and feelings. She is also the author of IT WAS FOOD VS. ME…AND I WON.

Gary Grossman, author of EXECUTIVE ACTIONS and the sequel, EXECUTIVE TREASON, is a print and television journalist, an Emmy Award-winning network television producer, and a film and TV historian.

His career has included stints producing for NBC News, ABC, CBS NBC, Fox, PBS, and more than 27 cable networks.

Kent Harrington is a 4th generation San Franciscan, born to an Irish-Jewish father and Guatemalan mother. Kent's early eduction was spent at the Palo Alto Military Academy, where he was sent at an early age. He attended San Francisco State University and received a degree in Spanish literature. After living both in Spain and Latin America he returned to the Bay Area and began his career as a novelist. His first published work was the well-received noir thriller DARK RIDE. He is the author of 7 books, 5 of which will be released in e-book editions by Diversion Books in 2011.

Bruce Henderson is the author or coauthor of more than twenty nonfiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller And the Sea Will Tell (with Vincent Bugliosi), which was made into a highly rated network miniseries.

A native son of San Francisco, Roger Herst has written nine novels, a series of scholarly articles and lectured extensively in academic and non-academic circles. He is an ordained Reform Rabbi with a doctorate in Middle Eastern History, holding undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew Union College. His home for the past 30 years has been Washington, DC where he lives with his physician wife. A son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons reside in Seattle.

Mingo Kane was born and raised in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. After high school he entered the United States Army and served with Bravo Company 1st/75th (Airborne) Rangers. Mingo has since enjoyed a host of different and often unique occupations: Bouncer, Security Specialist, first class high voltage lineman and now a full time writer.

When he’s not writing Mingo can be found hunting and trapping the mountains near his cabin or on one of the many waterways fly fishing.

Scott Kramer is a veteran golf writer based in the golf equipment capital of Carlsbad, Calif. In his 20-plus years covering the golf industry, the former senior editor of GOLF Magazine has lowered his playing index to 5.1, raised his IQ on the sophisticated technology used to make golf equipment, and stayed even keel on his propensity to miss short putts. But he always brings game to his columns, which appear in various national and international consumer and trade magazines, as well as in countless websites.

Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg was born in Queens, New York where she trained with Teresa Aubel, Nicholas Orloff, Norman Walker, and Barbara Walczack. She continued her studies on scholarship at the School of American Ballet before joining Miami City Ballet as an apprentice in 1994 at the age of 17. She moved steadily through the ranks and was named Principal dancer in 2001. Ms.

Ray Krueger is the deputy managing editor of the New York Times News Service, the wire service of the New York Times, and has written about tennis and mixed martial arts both for the paper and its website. He is also one of the founding writer/editors of the Times' tennis blog, Straight Sets. Previously, he wrote for the New York Daily News, the Jersey Journal and Reuters and has also worked for CBS Radio and Sportsticker.

After stints at Kentucky and Oklahoma, Mike Leach took over a sub-par Texas Tech program that had one of the worst graduation rates in all of major college football. A decade later, Leach had guided Tech to unprecedented on-field success and the highest graduation rate of any public university in major college football. He is now a TV analyst for CBS College Sports and hosts the daily College Football Playbook show on SiriusXM. He is native of Cody, Wyoming, and graduated from Brigham Young University. He earned his J.D. from Pepperdine Law School in 1986.

Buddy Levy is the author of Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell, 2008); American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005, Berkley Books, 2006); and Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998). As a freelance journalist he has covered adventure sports and lifestyle around the world, including several Eco-Challenges and other adventure expeditions in Argentina, Borneo, Europe, Greenland, Morocco, and the Philippines.

Author Melissa Macdonald is a mother to two boys, Cameron and Cooper, and like most women experienced difficulties breastfeeding. "I was in tears a lot of the time and couldn't understand why I was failing at what was meant to be such an easy thing to do." She has interviewed hundreds of women who shared with her their stories of feeding their babies with both breast and bottle, and the highs and lows that come with it.