Cristyne Nicholas, president and CEO of NYC & Company, has been a saleswoman for much of her life.

There was the lemonade stand when she was 8, which she diversified to include iced tea to stymie a competitor. She took advantage of the Arab oil embargo, alleviating motorists’ misery by selling cold sodas at gas stations. While at Rutgers University, she worked as a waitress, selling “specials of the day.” She’s been a bicycle messenger and she’s delivered newspapers.

She’s sold Republican Party platforms to Democratic constituencies. She sold Mayor Giuliani’s programs when she was his communications director.

Now, as head of a 70-year-old nonprofit organization, the Brooklyn-born Ms. Nicholas is selling New York to the rest of America and the world.

And since getting the job in October 1999, she’s done very well indeed. Last year, nearly 40 million tourists came to the city, some 2 million more than in 2003. About 6 million of them came from abroad. They brought $3 billion in revenues to New York’s tourism industry, and sustained more than 300,000 jobs in all five boroughs.

So what’s it like selling the Big Apple? What else does it take besides breaking bread at countless breakfasts and lunches; cajoling corporate titans to support her plans; making speeches at endless galas; attending scores of industry conventions; creating ad campaigns; managing a staff of 75 in New York; maintaining offices in Munich and London, and representations in Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Washington – and riding atop an elephant when the circus comes to town?

“I’ll do just about anything for New York City,” Ms. Nicholas said over lunch. “But I won’t jump out of planes.”

No? But even one of her former bosses, President George H.W. Bush – whose election drive she helped manage in Maryland – has been diving from planes.

“Well,” said Ms. Nicholas, “I’m quite confident that I have a variety of talents. But jumping out of planes isn’t one of them. I’m just not a daredevil.”

As the city’s chief tourism and hospitality salesperson, she’s not required to jump out of planes, but she needs to be in them quite a bit. On her schedule may be China, which she’s designated as a major target because of the country’s increasing prosperity. She may also visit India, another economically dynamic country whose citizens Ms. Nicholas wants to woo more. She plans to be in Singapore in July when the International Olympic Committee announces which city will get to host the 2012 Summer Games.

The Olympics are expected to bring billions in revenues to the host city. However, that city may also have to spend at least $5 billion preparing for the games.

Ms. Nicholas is enthusiastic about New York’s prospects in Singapore. Her immediate concerns, however, are a little closer to home. From today through May 7, more than 5,500 tourism-industry representatives will gather at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the 37th Annual International Pow Wow. The travel industry show, she said, is expected to generate an additional $400 million annually in direct visitor spending.

Ms. Nicholas hopes to increase the number of international visitors to 7.3 million by 2008 and grow New York’s tourism industry well beyond its current annual revenues of $25 billion. (Of the city’s foreign visitors, a million come from Britain annually; 900,000 from Canada, and 400,000 each from Japan, France, and Germany.)

They may seem like nice numbers, but the ambitious Ms. Nicholas has something far loftier in mind. At an international trade show in London, she was struck by splashy booths for Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., and a couple of other American cities. “I said to myself, ‘My goodness, these destinations seem to have a lot more money to promote themselves than we do,’ ” Ms. Nicholas said.

That’s when her competitiveness kicked in.

“I said, ‘But we’re New York – we can compete.’ “

And compete New York does: It’s the no. 1 arrival destination for an overwhelming number of foreign tourists to America. New York, after all, is New York. Ms. Nicholas roped in Hideki Matsui, the Yankees stars, to plug the city in his native Japan. There’s Broadway. There are the museums and other cultural institutions with which Ms. Nicholas has developed partnerships.

There’s the just-completed annual Tribeca Film Festival, which figured prominently in the city’s efforts to resuscitate tourism after September 11, 2001. There’s the high-end shopping, which is especially attractive to Europeans and Japanese because of the dollar’s decline. There’s Restaurant Week in summer and winter, which Ms. Nicholas helped expand to “make top-level dining affordable and less intimidating” to everyday New Yorkers and tourists at more than 200 establishments. There are visitor kiosks she enhanced in Midtown Manhattan, Harlem, Chinatown, and new ones she plans to place in Queens. There’s her emphasis on the city’s extraordinary ethnic diversity.

One would think that with its stellar attractions – and a history that goes back to 1524 when a Florentine nobleman, Giovanni da Verrazano, discovered Manhattan – New York would be the no.1 American city for conventions. But it’s far behind Las Vegas, Chicago, and Orlando.

Ms. Nicholas thinks her budget is at least partly to blame.

NYC & Company’s annual budget is around $14.5 million, most of which comes from the city. Its 1,700 members, many of them businesses, contribute between $425 and $5,000 in annual fees. Las Vegas spends $170 million annually to promote itself. Reno, Nev., and Orlando also have larger budgets.

So Ms. Nicholas is trying to rope in more funds, and in this she has a valuable ally in her organization’s chairman, Jonathan Tisch. American Express, Coca-Cola, Merrill Lynch, and Time Warner, among others, have become committed corporate sponsors.

All this takes relentless work. It takes time. It means early mornings and late nights. Where does her energy come from?

“I try to run often,” Ms. Nicholas said. “That gives me incredible energy.”

There’s also Super Gabby.

Super Gabby?

“Gabby is Gabriella, my basset hound,” Ms. Nicholas said, with a fond smile. The screensaver on her office computer features a picture of Gabriella in a cape, looking like a character out of the comics; hence the sobriquet Super Gabby. “Just thinking of her fills me with great love.”

There’s Nick Nicholas, her husband, who writes about golf. They are both marathoners.

There’s her father, Joseph Lategano, known as “Coach Joe” because he coaches and mentors youths in basketball and soccer in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he moved from the family’s Long Island home after retirement. Ms. Nicholas says she’s very close to him and her older sister Barbara.

Perhaps the person she was closest to was her mother, Mary, a legal assistant, who encouraged her to read and secretly hoped that Ms. Nicholas would become a lawyer.

“She was awfully proud of everything I did,” Ms. Nicholas said.

She died March 18, at age 71.

“I find it very difficult to speak about her in the past tense,” Ms. Nicholas said.