http://awesomegang.com

Where Awesome Book Readers Meet Awesome Writers

1. Adventures in Veterinary Medicine: What Working in Veterinary Hospitals Taught Me About Live, Love and Myself - Ingrid King is the award-winning author of "Buckley’s Story: Lessons from a Feline Master Teacher" and "Purrs of Wisdom: Conscious Living, Feline Style." She is a former veterinary hospital manager turned writer. Her popular blog, The Conscious Cat, a comprehensive resource for conscious living, health, and happiness for cats and their humans, has won multiple awards, including DogTime Media’s 2012 Pettie for Best Cat Blog, 2011 Pettie for Best Overall Pet Blog and About.com’s 2012 Readers Choice Award for Best Website About Cats. For more information about Ingrid, please visit www.ConsciousCat.com.
   
2. His Wrath, Her Honor - Nick Banes is spiteful, rude, malicious, perverted, and downright hateful...And his fury for the charitable but vulnerable Simone Silver knows no bounds. Early spring thunderstorms turn their tumultuous working relationship into a full-blown battle of wits and wills. Fueled with fire and lust, Nick torments Simone until she begins to unravel. Will he find his humanity and save her from herself, or will he let the flames consume her?
   
3. Super Shorts - A USNavy veteran from El Paso, TX; Communications Technician 3rd Class, awarded Navy Unit Commendation and Meritorious Unit Commendation, National Service Medal and Vietnam Service Medal, two stars; a weekly columnist U.T. El Paso’s student newspaper, The Prospector, for 3 years; a graduate of UTEP; an insurance agent, long term care and small-employer medical; a top-ten-ranked (western half of USA) masters racewalker, two consecutive years in 90's; three-time Diplomat of the Year, Clear Lake Area Chamber of Commerce; a father of a very creative son, Stephen Charles "Tzoul Shine" Emerson; A c/w dancer, two-steps, waltzes, & polkas.
   
4. Knock Knock Jokes for Kids: 301 Hilarious and Funny Knock Knock Jokes - Lizzy Burbank is a wife, a mother of two, and a children's book writer. For much of her career, she taught children at various levels; including a private pre-school as well as a prestigious special education school in New York City. After retiring from her teaching career, Lizzy pursued one of her true passions, writing and publishing children's works. Her first work was "Jokes for Kids: 299 Funny and Hilarious Jokes for Kids" a children's joke book. This was the first book in what has become the Jokes for Kids series. Lizzy has endured numerous long road trips with her children over the years; she understands the importance of having a fun time killer for the kids. She has written these books for parents and kids alike.
   
5. Feral: Book I of the Werecat Saga - BORN AND RAISED in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jami Lynn Saunders may not be old enough to drink, but she can write most young authors under the table. Writing since the tender age of nine, she now has 10 years of solid experience under her belt. After receiving repetitive rejection letters in her attempts to publish her teen romance novels (and often told that there "isn't a market for it"), she decided to take a different route following a conversation with 711 Press co-owner Jaime Vendera. His advice? "Rent a ton of movies and use the inspiration to write a series in the genre of whichever movies you love the most." After two weeks of steady Netflix streaming and Redbox runs, she rekindled her love of dark, apocalyptic horror films. Among her favorite movies of inspiration included the Resident Evil series, Mad Max, Pumpkin Head, I am Legend, Underworld, The Lost Boys, and Dawn of the Dead. A hundred movies in, she managed to plumb the depths of her imagination, bringing forth the idea for her forthcoming Werecat Saga, which was quickly picked up by 711 Press. The Werecat Saga features three books: Feral, Rabid, and Nocturnal. In her first full-fledged apocalyptic saga, Jami creates a world like no other, full of humans and creatures such as Ferals and the Werecats, creatures born out of a biological fallout that nearly wiped out all civilization. Focusing on "werecats" was a way for her to honor some of her favorite movies, while seperating her stories from the typical vampire/werewolf/zombie fare. The werecat was a creature brought to fruition when she fell in love with Nastassja Kinski's character in the 1982 film, Cat People. Combining the premise of the cat people with the werewolves of The Howling and Underworld, a unique species was born, which was a creature possessing a human mind and gifted with the ability to morph into a cat-like creature. Jami plans to continue writing and expanding her cast of unique monsters and characters for years to come. Who knows, you may even see a few teen romances from her as well. . . .
   
6. How To Choose A Sweetheart - From lowly beginnings as the co-editor and producer of The Rue Bella magazine, I've been able to grow as a writer and extend my efforts to short-stories, novellas and a novel. My work has been included in some of the biggest and best anthologies and magazines around (Mammoth's Best British Crime; Crimespree; Protectors; Speedloader; Crimefactory; True Brit Grit; Both Barrels; Off The Record; Grimm Tales) In those collections, I've appeared alongside such greats as George Pelecanos; Kate Atkinson; Stuart MacBride; Alexander McCall Smith; Bateman; Val McDermid; Peter James; Mark Billingham; Seamus Heaney; Ian Rankin; Joe Lansdale; Scott Wolven; Zoe Sharp; Allan Guthrie; Reed Farrel Coleman; Ray Banks and a list of other notables that have me pinch myself when I think our work is considered related in any way, shape or form. As well as writing, I'm a Support For Learning Teacher and am the proud father of 3 young children. The bulk of my work is listed below: Nigel Bird Bibliography As Editor: 2012 Pulp Ink 2 published by Snubnose Press (co-edited by Chris Rhatigan) 2011 Pulp Ink published by Needle Press (co-edited by Chris Rhatigan) 2011 Where The Wild Things Were (The Best Of The Rue Bella) 1998 - 2003 The Rue Bella Magazine volumes 1 to 9 (co-edited by Geoff Bird) Novels: 2012 In Loco Parentis Novellas: 2013 The Rocks Below 2012 Mr Suit 2012 Smoke Short Story Anthologies including my work: 2013 Lee (the Lee Marvin anthology) published by Crime Factory 2012 Nightfalls (story Greene Day) published by Dark Valentine Press 2012 Both Barrels (story, The Rhythm Of Life)published by Shotgun Honey 2012 Protectors (Stories To Benefit Protect) (story, Baby's In Blue) published by Goombah Gumbo Press 2012 Crimefactory 11 (story, Horse) published by Crime Factory 2011 True Brit Grit (story, Stones In Me Pockets) published by Guilty Conscience 2011 Off The Record (story, Super Trouper) published by Guilty Conscience 2011 Grimm Tales (story, Sing A Song Of Sixpence) published by Untreed Reads 2011 Pulp Ink (story, A Whole Lot Of Rosie) published by Needle Publications 2011 Speedloader (story, You Dirty Rat) published by Snubnose Press 2011 Mammoth Best British Crime 9 (story, Sisterhood) published by Robinson 2011 Mammoth Best British Crime 8 (story, An Arm And A Leg) published by Robinson 2010 Caught By Darkness (an anthology of Dark Tales) published by Pill Hill Press Short Story (Individual) 2012 Sleeps With The Fishes 2011 Into Thin Air published by Untreed Reads Short Story Collections (Individual) 2011 With Love And Squalor 2011 Beat On The Brat (and other stories) 2011 Dirty Old Town (and other stories) Poetry Collections (Individual) 2011 The Day My Coat Stuck On My Head 2011 Busted Flat Magazines 2011 Voluted Tales (story, Fisher Of Men) 2010 Needle Magazine (story, Beat On The Brat) 2010 Crimespree Magazine (story, An Arm And A Leg) 2010 Dark Valentine Magazine (story, Silver Street) 2009 The Reader Magazine (story, Into Thin Air)
   
7. Memoir of an Unlikely Savior by Peter VanDenBeemt - - I was born in Philadelphia, PA. - For my first three years of school I attended Overbrook School for the Blind, a boarding school with classes for the “partially sighted.” - I attended “normal” schools starting with fourth grade. - When I was twelve my father joined IBM and we moved to Poughkeepsie, NY. - When I was fourteen IBM transferred my father to Zurich, Switzerland where I attended Institute Minerva. - When I was eighteen we returned to the U.S. and I started Lehigh University, majoring in Engineering Physics. - I left school for a year in the middle of my junior year to work for Bell Labs in Whippany, NJ. - I went to graduate school at Boston University and received a master’s degree in physics, then left after two years in their Ph.D. program. - At 26 I moved to Los Angeles and changed my life. Between bouts of creativity I worked intermittently as a software engineer to earn a living. - Along with the bouts of creativity, I strenuously pursued psychological and spiritual awareness. - When I could, I retired and moved to Thailand to write full-time.
   
8. Myths and Motifs of The Mortal Instruments - Valerie Estelle Frankel has won a Dream Realm Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and a USA Book News National Best Book Award for her Henry Potty parodies. She’s the author of many books on pop culture, including From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey in Myth and Legend, Buffy and the Heroine’s Journey, Katniss the Cattail: An Unauthorized Guide to Names and Symbols in The Hunger Games, Teaching with Harry Potter, and Harry Potter: Still Recruiting. Once a lecturer at San Jose State University, she’s a frequent speaker on fantasy, myth, pop culture, and the heroine’s journey. Come explore her latest research at www.vefrankel.com.
   
9. The Workings of Energy in the Human Energy Field: A Psychic’s Perspective - Zorica Gojkovic received her Ph.D. in English. She wrote a dissertation about the evolution of consciousness in the novel and the relationship of this evolution to mysticism and physics. Throughout the years she was afforded numerous opportunities to study consciousness from various perspectives, including working as a psychic reader. Information in this book came from work with clients and is intended to help each person to find more peace and more contentment from the knowledge of how energy works. She lives in Marin County, California.
   
10. Beyond Academics: Preparation for College and for Life - Lee Binz is The HomeScholar, www.TheHomeScholar.com. Her mission is "helping parents homeschool high school." Lee and her husband Matt homeschooled their two boys from elementary through High School. Upon their graduation, both boys received four-year, full-tuition scholarships from their first choice university. This enables Lee to pursue her dream job - encouraging parents to homeschool their children through high school. Lee is the author of Setting the Records Straight: How to Craft Homeschool Transcripts and Course Descriptions for College Admission and Scholarships, and The Easy Truth About Homeschool Transcripts (Kindle Book). Her help with homeschool transcripts and course descriptions teach parents how to create high school transcripts for every homeschooling style. Lee offers individual consultations and her online Gold Care Club is the world's most convenient high school support group. She loves speaking at homeschool conventions and her dynamic presentations leave parents feeling confident and capable. Lee has a variety of free resources available to everyone, with support to match any parent's learning style. She has a free monthly newsletter, free weekly office hours, free daily blog posts, and free mini-courses and webinars. Her articles are free for use by homeschool support groups, so they can encourage other parents to homeschool through high school. You can find Lee online and on Facebook. For help, please email Lee@TheHomeScholar.com.
    
11. How to look after your kitten – Pet Care for Children - How to look after your kitten is an easy to read and informative book will provide children aged eight to ten vital information on how to look after their new kitten. This book is aimed at young children who need some easy to understand information about all aspects of kitten care.
    
12. Sorbet Recipes: 50 Low Fat Sorbet Recipes Made With Delicious Summer Fruits - We are a professional publishing company who only publish non-fiction books. We believe in helping others learning something new. We want to help educate society and teach our readers something new in life. We love sharing our knowledge and publishing educational books. All of our books are straight forward and easy to read. Once you read one page, you won't stop reading!
    
13. Children’s book: Tigers: Facts and pictures of the world’s largest cats by Roni Shwartz - Roni Shwartz is a travel enthusiast and writer, who loves to travel the world and share his experiences with others through words and pictures. He spent 15 years overseas, mostly in Africa, Australia and New Zealand, where he had the opportunity to visit some of the world's most amazing national parks and marine reserves, and to actually meet some of the most fascinating creatures on earth. Roni also visited many of the world's major cities and historic sites, including palaces, fortresses and old monasteries, and he writes about them too, in his blogs and eBooks. As a kid, Roni always dreamed about traveling to faraway places and exploring every corner of the world. And now, when he is a father himself to two sweet and curious boys, he is trying to share his passion for travel and nature with his own kids, as well as with every other child in the world, so they can too enjoy the beautiful pictures, learn amazing facts about our world, and dream about the day they will explore all these fascinating places themselves...
    
14. HOW TO START A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL READ: How to create a website, write about a topic you love, develop a loyal readership, and make six figures doing it. - Owner of makemoneyfromhomelionsclub.com. Mike Omar is a big fan of entrepreneurship and primarily interested in helping others create small businesses (that can eventually grow into large businesses!). He has been self employed for over five years and has done business consulting on the side for several business start-ups. His best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs: "Always be working on side projects outside of your regular job until the day you can quit, always make sure you are progressing, and if you haven't done so already, START NOW!"
    
15. Inspector Hobbes and the Blood: unhuman I – A fast paced comedy crime fantasy - Wilkie Martin's novel Inspector Hobbes and the Blood, was shortlisted for the Impress Prize for New Writers in 2012 under its original title: Inspector Hobbes. As well as novels, Wilkie writes short stories and silly poems, some of which are on YouTube. Like his characters, he relishes a good curry, which he enjoys cooking. In his spare time, he is a qualified scuba-diving instructor, and a guitar twanger who should be stopped.
    
16. Origami Magic by The Hutch Boyz - Written by an 11-year-old boy for his 8-year-old brother, and inspired by his little brother’s real battles with school bullies. Through it all he never forgot his love of origami, and eventually found a new group of friends who stopped teasing him and realized that origami is super cool.
    
17. Destin Truhart and the Book of Secrets - For as long as Terrie Knowles can remember, she has been daydreaming. She didn’t learn until later in life that what she was really doing was pre-writing scenes. When she joined this realization with her love of words and fantasy, she began writing her own stories. While she has written many stories that will forever remain hidden in a locked drawer, she has allowed one of them to finally emerge — Destin Truhart and the Book of Secrets. Terrie lives in Michigan with her artist husband and two sons.
    
18. Queen of the Court - Melanie Howard and Andrea Leidolf are writers whose work has appeared in numerous national publications including SELF, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, GQ and SPY.
    
19. The Story of Babalou Roy - Amelia Fergusson
    
20. Jump Rope Workouts: Cardio fitness for increased stamina, lean muscle building and fat burning - Anthony Anholt has been interested and involved in athletics and fitness for his entire life. His specialty is “gymless” workouts, or exercise systems that do not require any kind of special equipment. He is also interested in enhancing performance in all sports, but particularly basketball. This is his fourth book.
    
21. The Great Barrington Train Wreck by Robert Trainor - Over the past seven years (since I retired at the age of 60), I've written five novels, all of which you can find in the Kindle Store. What I am attempting to do in my books, besides writing entertaining and original plots, is to present themes and dilemmas that are thought provoking and don't have any easy, simplistic answers. I do my very best to fairly present both sides of an issue--such as having a negative character express my own personal views, while a more positive character will express intelligent opposition to those views. All of this occurs, of course, in relation to the plots that are contained in the books, which are intended to mirror or illustrate the underlying philosophy. For instance, in The Road Map to the Universe, the protagonist feels that because the universe is so enormous, our lives here on earth are meaningless and that we all suffer from taking ourselves far too seriously. Do humans really have any significance, or is that just a self-serving illusion of the ego? And then, when the plot is resolved, one realizes that many of the incidents that occurred during the book were essentially mirages created by ego-driven motivations. There! I've just given you an important clue to solving the murder mystery that is at the center of this book. I spend a great deal of time revising my novels. After finishing the first draft, I go through the book about ten times--first page to last page. Each journey through the book is slow and painstaking--no more than ten or fifteen pages a day. Sometimes, one or two pages will take a whole day. From my experience, the kind of errors that pop up on some of the later readings can be rather surprising, if not downright alarming! I particularly look for inaccurate punctuation, repetitive sentence structure, and inaccurate or repetitive vocabulary; however, you will not need a dictionary to read my books. I also do not permit unclear sentences to stand--I can't imagine that any reader will want to read a sentence twice because I couldn't find a way to explain myself. I also spent numerous hours formatting these novels so that they would convert to Kindle. As you probably all know, it isn't just a matter of hitting the upload button, and all I can say is that these books (after doing this, that, and the other thing) looked great on the Kindle Previewer, so I'm hopeful that they converted properly. My thanks to Charles Spender and his $0.99 book, Formatting of Kindle Books, which was quite helpful.
    
22. THE GIRL FROM LONG GUYLAND - Lara Reznik, a native New Yorker, attended college at the University of New Mexico. As an English major, Lara studied under esteemed authors Rudolfo Anaya and the late Tony Hillerman, and attended a summer program at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Ambidextrous from birth, she preferred her right-brained creative side, but discovered she could make a better living with her left-brain skills, so entered the I.T. field in 1985. Lara published her first novel, The Girl From Long Guyland in November 2012. The novel ranked #1 during its recent Kindle promotion and has over 80,000 Kindle downloads. In addition to her novels, Lara has written and optioned three screenplays that have garnered semifinalist and finalist wins in the Austin Heart of Film, Southwest Writers, TV Writer, Chesterfield and Writer's Digest contests. Currently, Lara is working on a new novel based on her screenplay, The M&M Boys.