Welcome to Issue 101 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
Happy Spring, Everyone!
With spring always comes the announcement of the winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Historical Fiction, which I sponsor through the Reader Views Literary Awards. I won the award in 2009 for my novel Narrow Lives and have sponsored it ever since.
This year’s winner is: An Enemy Like Me by Teri M. Brown—a powerful novel about a German-American family during World War II. I’m sure you’ll love it. Read more about it below along with descriptions of several other great books I recently had the privilege of being involved in helping to bring to print.
Enjoy the spring and get working on that summer reading list. Summer will be here before you know it! Hopefully, some of the books below you can add to your TBR (To Be Read) pile.
Tyler
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Teri M. Brown’s novel, An Enemy Like Me, has won the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction in this year’s Reader Views Literary Awards. That’s no surprise. It’s been racking up award after award, including First Place for Historical Fiction in the 2023 Royal Dragonfly Book Awards, First Place for Fiction in the Firebird Book Awards, and the BREW Fiction Book Excellence Award for Military Romance of the Year. And that is just a very short list of the accolades it is receiving.
An Enemy Like Me immediately captures the reader’s attention and makes them fall in love with the characters. It’s a multigenerational story with multiple viewpoints that capture the perspectives of Jacob Miller, his wife Bonnie, and their son William, who is four when his father goes off to fight in World War II for the United States. The narrative fills us in on the family’s history from 1917-2016, including the lives of Jacob and Bonnie’s parents and William’s children, but the main focus is on how Jacob and Bonnie meet, fall in love, have William, and then cope while Jacob is gone to fight for his country.
Jacob is patriotic, but that isn’t enough when you are German-American and the country you were born in is at war with the country where your parents were born. Because Jacob is American-born, he has more advantages than other German-Americans. He soon finds his German immigrant friends are being arrested for being suspected as Nazi sympathizers. Because Jacob is married and a father, he is not drafted, but he decides he must prove his love for his country by joining the service, despite his wife and mother’s protests. He might be German, but he cannot condone what the Nazis are doing to his ancestral land.
To read more, visit An Enemy Like Me.
Get ready for a true sea adventure! Victoria Bullock’s Somewhat Mystical: A Story of Fantasy and Magic is just about the most magical novel you will ever read. Written for all ages, it will delight young and old, teaching the young to dream and the old to dream again, and at the heart of this amazing book is the reminder that, ultimately, all is always well.
The story opens when a young girl of six is found floating in the sea by a pod of dolphins. She has fallen overboard from her parents’ boat during a storm and been lost. The dolphins, fearing she will die, quickly come to her rescue, bringing her to Rock Island, home of the walruses. The island’s inhabitants name her Seasil because she loves the sea. Soon Seasil has recovered and is quite happy living on Rock Island, enjoying eating raw fish like the walruses, picking flowers, and even winning over the gruff Father Walrus.
But Seasil’s adventures have only just begun. In time, her walrus and dolphin friends realize they must help her return to her human family. Seasil is taken by the dolphin pod to where she will be sighted by a ship.
To read more, visit Somewhat Mystical.
In The Subscription Playbook: How to Build a Rock-Solid Recurring Revenue Stream, Australian entrepreneur Robert Coorey reveals that a subscription-based business is the way to go if you want to build a solid base of clients who will keep coming back to you so you aren’t worried from day to day if you will stay in business.
Coorey knows from experience that a subscription business provides stability and peace of mind for the business owner. He once owned a “results-based agency” which had highly irregular income. If you have a business where you rely on customers but they only need you once or irregularly, you risk having highs and lows and even going out of business. A subscription-based business, however, provides a steady stream of income from multiple sources.
Examples of subscription-based businesses abound, and Coorey discusses many of the best-known in this book, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Dropbox. They all have customers who subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis and in exchange are offered a wide range of services or products to choose from. To be successful in business, you need to do the same, and Coorey is here to show you how.
To read more, visit The Subscription Playbook.
Michael W. McCright’s new book Together i Can: A Guide to Attaining Peace, Joy, and Serenity in This Lifetime suggests that if we remove our egos, becoming lowercased “i” instead of uppercased “I,” we will discover we can do more and find greater peace and joy in the process.
The Together i Can Philosophy originated when Michael discovered the unfairness of “we.” It’s a situation many of us have been in. We’re assigned to be part of a group for a project. One or two people do all the work, but the entire group takes credit, saying, “Look what we accomplished.” Michael states: “I concluded I could never have accomplished the entire task I was assigned by myself. I recognized it takes a team working together. However, with that togetherness comes the demand for individual responsibility within the group. Hence, the change from ‘Together we can’ to ‘Together i Can,’ signifying that individual responsibility.”
Michael also realized that letting pride control our lives leads to becoming a doormat for others. He had to change, becoming a small “i” person, one who acts with humility and takes responsibility. To do a job properly, we need others’ help, but we also can’t take credit for what we’ve done.
To read more, visit Together i Can.
In The Truth Behind Excuses: Underperformance Explained, Amara Emuwa, PhD and executive and leadership coach, takes a deep dive into the reasons people make excuses. The result is an eye-opening look at not only why we come up with excuses ourselves but why we put up with excuses from other people, from friends to coworkers, and how we can move past excuses to being more productive and more honest with each other.
Emuwa begins the book by describing a coaching experience she had. She had assigned reading to a group she was going to coach. None of the group members read the books, but they all had excuses for why they hadn’t. Emuwa was astonished by their failure to follow-through on the assignment. The experience led her to dig deeper into why people make excuses and how excuses result in underperformance in the workplace as well as in our personal lives. While I admit Emuwa’s conclusions, supported by extensive research by behavioral psychologists, are all logical, I had never really thought about what lay beneath the excuses people make. The cause is more than just being lazy or unreliable. Excuses are calculated to protect people’s self-image.
To read more, visit The Truth Behind Excuses.
At the center of M. Taylor’s new book Remembering Your Ancestral Fire: A Biracial Man’s Unlikely Journey of Self-Discovery, Heeding the Call of the Djembe is the djembe, a West-African drum that Taylor learned to play as a way to connect with his African roots. Taylor is a biracial man with an African-American father and a Caucasian mother. He looks white but has Afro-like hair. He was also adopted, so his youth was largely a quest for identity. And then he discovered the djembe drum. In this book, he shares stories about his life before and after the West African djembe entered his life, why it entered his life, his numerous trips to Africa, the role his ancestors played in his life trajectory, his unique perspective of being biracial, and how he has become a djembe ambassador teaching drumming to countless people in the United States as well as traveling to other countries, including Ireland, China, and Japan, to share the djembe with other cultures.
One thing that really stood out for me in reading Taylor’s story was his struggles with being biracial and trying to figure out where he fit in.
To read more, visit Remembering Your Ancestral Fires.
Becoming a Legacy Leader: A 10-Step Manager’s Guide to Unlocking Limitless Opportunities is a dynamic new book by Zana Kenjar, who has spent years leading teams in various roles. The book devotes a chapter to each of the ten steps, which include Building Your Champion Mindset, Developing a Risk-Management Culture, and Becoming a Profit-Driven Leader. At the heart of the book is how to cultivate a strong relationship with those you lead by getting to know your team members individually and inspiring them to do more than they may believe they can. A bonus chapter is targeted to immigrants, helping them to adapt to working in the United States and providing tools to leaders for how to help them in the process. Kenjar is herself an immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager and is now a proud US citizen.
Kenjar begins by addressing how many people want to be promoted to their first or next leadership position but often wait years and feel stuck because they don’t actively try to help themselves. Kenjar shares her own story of being overlooked for a leadership position only to learn from the leader who took the position how she could best help herself advance in her career.
To read more, visit Becoming a Legacy Leader.
