Welcome to Issue 66 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
It’s May—my favorite month—my birthday month and also a month I always associate with King Arthur since Mordred was born May 1 and Guinevere loved to go a-Maying. But it’s also the month when we start to get ready for summer, so let’s start planning our summer reading.
First, though, if you’re an author and you live anywhere near Marquette, Michigan, please join us for the 20th annual Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Conference on Saturday, May 20 at Peter White Public Library in Marquette. This year we will have sessions ranging on topics from writing query letters and traditional publishing to freelance writing, graphic novels, science fiction, and more. Check out the full conference schedule and register at www.uppaa.org.
At the conference, we will also be releasing the first issue of the annual U.P. Reader—a magazine anthology of works by Upper Michigan authors filled with short stories, essays, and poems, including a short story by yours truly. U.P. Reader will also be available at Amazon beginning May 13.
And now on to this month’s great books, beginning with the winner of this year’s Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction in association with the Reader Views Literary Awards. Whether you want to be relentless, ridiculously awesome, or just entertained, you’ll find a book here to enjoy.
Happy reading!
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“...it rained in the afternoon, which as I had no book to read, I have a headache to-day.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, written in an 1870 letter when he was eleven
Winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Award for Best Historical Fiction, Michelle Cox’s debut novel A Girl Like You tells the story of teenager Henrietta Von Harmon who enters the workforce in 1930s Chicago and soon finds herself working undercover for the police to solve crimes.
I instantly fell in love with Henrietta because of her innocence and sweet nature but also because of her willingness to help support her family and for her strength of character in difficult situations. Henrietta’s father lost his job like so many others during the Great Depression, and unable to cope with the situation, he committed suicide. Henrietta’s mother was left to support her young children, but Henrietta, as the oldest, knew she had to help out, so she got a job at fifteen cleaning up at a bar. Now, a couple of years later, realizing how badly her family needs the money, she decides to get a job as a taxi dancer at a local dance hall. A taxi dancer is a woman men pay to dance with, and it’s not a pleasant job. The men can be unsavory and Henrietta’s boss, Mama Leone, is brusque and, despite her claims, doesn’t mind if the girls have a little hanky-panky on the side. Occasionally, there is a handsome man to dance with, but the one Henrietta likes the most asks too many questions.
As if things couldn’t get worse for Henrietta, one morning Mama Leone is found murdered….
To read more, visit A Girl Like You.
Jim Besaw’s new novel The Ultimatum will have readers on the edge of their seats, gripped with fear for the future, filled with worry over what terrorists might do next, and ultimately, finding themselves questioning many things about the world we live in today.
The novel opens when a nuclear bomb is set off in a remote, uninhabited area of the United States. For days, Americans question who could have set off the bomb, and the U.S. Government cannot seem to come up with any better answers than the general public as it searches for terrorist cells and other public enemies.
Then comes the “ultimatum” letter. A letter from the dispatchers of the bomb, with the threat that another bomb will be detonated, this time in a populated area, if the government does not meet the demands of the terrorists who have written the letter. Those terrorists turn out to be a group of Radical Muslim Extremists, and their demands include that roughly 10 percent of the U.S. Congress be represented by Muslims, that U.S. troops leave all Islamic countries, and that Sharia Law be incorporated into all United States laws.
To read more, visit The Ultimatum.
If you ever wondered what it takes to be a champion, look no further. Egan Inoue is a champion not only in one but in three sports, and he has won eleven world championship titles. From being racquetball world champion, Egan went on to pursue Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts, and when not in the ring or on the court, he has pursued sports like hunting the ulua fish, and being a successful entrepreneur by opening multiple training centers. And now, he’s even written a book—Becoming Relentless. In fact, it’s questionable whether there’s anything Egan couldn’t do if he put his relentless mind to it.
But Egan Inoue would tell you that all his success can be achieved by almost anyone. It just takes relentless determination, the ability to commit to a training schedule, and belief in oneself—all qualities that can be cultivated. Like everyone else, Egan has experienced times when he had doubts or when naysayers tried to dissuade him from his goals, but each time, he has silenced those voices and pushed through to achieve his goals.
To read more, visit Becoming Relentless.
Ripple Marketing by David Skultety is a concise and up-to-date book on everything that network marketing offers the aspiring entrepreneur who wants to work part-time to earn a few extra dollars, have a home-based business, or go all the way to create a full-time, lifelong, and fulfilling business career.
We’ve all heard bad things about network marketing, but despite those stories, the truth is that it works for many, many people, and it works because people make the effort to make it work. David Skultety himself has led two different network marketing teams, taking them from 1 to 100,000 in membership, so if anyone knows about the benefits and the woes of network marketing, it’s him, and in this new book, he reveals how people can use network marketing to their advantage, avoid its pitfalls, and reap its rewards.
The book begins with a foreword by David Litt, a network marketing corporate executive, who states “There are people in my life who have lots of money and very little time. There are people in my life who have lots of time and very little money. But the only people in my life who have lots of money and lots of time are my friends who are network marketing professionals like David [Skultety].”
To read more, visit Ripple Marketing.
In Becoming Ridiculously Awesome: Who Doesn’t Want That?, Meredith Herrenbruck takes readers on a wild rocketship journey, helping them overcome past obstacles, reshape their current lives, and plan for their futures.
As the book’s title suggests, we all would like to become ridiculously awesome, but too often, life gets in the way. We may have experienced traumatic events that have held us back or wounds to our self-esteem that keep us from going forward. We may not believe we can succeed at what we want, and yet we still can’t let go of that yearning. Meredith has been there; she has done years of work healing her own past and studying various methods to unblock what holds her back. As she shares early in the book, she was herself sexually abused as a child and had to learn to overcome those obstacles. Now she wants to share everything she has learned with her readers. She lays out her goals for helping others in the introduction by saying: “In this book, I will help you unblock what stops you from moving forward in life and achieving the success you always wanted.”
To read more, visit Becoming Ridiculously Awesome.
