http://awesomegang.com

Where Awesome Book Readers Meet Awesome Writers

1. Fatty in the Back Seat - Deborah M. Prum began her writing career at age seven. Perched atop a chrome kitchen chair, she pecked out children’s stories on her mother’s Royal typewriter. Every plot contained a similar theme. At the outset, some disaster (plane crash, rampant disease, ravaging insects) took the lives of parents and all other authority figures. The kids ate wild berries and skinned rabbits to make clothing. Without exception, by the end of each tale, the sturdy little survivors had created a utopia and lived blissfully ever after. Unfortunately, it did not occur to Deb’s parents to call a child psychologist. Author of young adult novel, FATTY IN THE BACK SEAT, Deborah M. Prum has won five awards for her fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in many other journals and literary anthologies. FIRST KISS AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES is an eBook and audiobook collection of essays, most of which first aired on NPR-member stations. She’s written about the craft of writing for both The Writer magazine and The Writer’s Handbook. She’s given writing workshops and has taught at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.
   
2. Mr Splendiferous and the Troublesome Trolls - Rosen was born in Cornwall. She studied psychology at Oxford before moving back to the West Country. She now lives on the south coast of Devon with two imaginary cats, fantasising about getting a real one. Readers have downloaded over 200,000 copies of Rosen's books. Several titles have broken into the Amazon charts, including a number 1 humorous fiction bestseller.
   
3. Curves on the Gridiron - Skylar is the new trainer on the football team and boy can she get the player's blood pumping!
   
4. Kissing Fear Goodbye: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Living a Worry-Free Life Full of Endless Possibilities - Edward Custo is an author who truly cares about the well being of other people. That is why he created this book because he wants to reach the world with his knowledge and talents in hopes that peoples lives would be transformed for the better.
   
5. 50 Shades of Herbs: The Best Natural Remedies for Better Sex, Better Sleep, and More Energy - Michelle O’Shaughnessy was born in Florida. During her formative years, she lived in Bogota, Colombia, where she became fluent in Spanish. She began her academia in Florida, then continued at the Sorbonne Université in Paris, where she had her first facial and fell in love with skin care. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida in Anthropology and Latin American studies. She is now a Doctor of Oriental Medicine (DOM) who graduated cum laude with a master’s in Oriental Medicine from the Florida College of Integrative Medicine in Orlando, Florida. Additionally, she has received several advanced certifications in acupuncture facelifts and cosmetic acupuncture. O’Shaughnessy is the proud owner of an Aesthetic Acupuncture Clinic in Orlando. Her clinic specializes in acupuncture facelifts and is among the first to incorporate facials, Chinese herbs, acupuncture and skin care to help improve skin care concerns including acne, rosacea, anti-aging, rashes, psoriasis as well as women’s general health. She also owns Healing Herbal Soups, a line of medicinal soups that are made with herbs and vegetables to bring the body back to health. They are also cooked in alkaline water while healing vibrational music is played during the whole process. O’Shaughnessy has a strong passion for studying traditional Chinese medicine and herbal remedies for bringing the body back to health naturally. She completed an internship in China at the “Chinese PLA General Hospital,” the largest military hospital in Beijing. She is a board member of FSOMA Florida State Oriental Medicine Association and is a faculty member where she teaches Food Therapy and other classes to graduate students at the Florida College of Integrative Medicine. O’Shaughnessy has been an esthetician for more than 18 years. She has worked for Sothys USA as a national trainer as well as Babor.
   
6. The Marenon Chronicles Collection - Jason D. Morrow is the author of The Marenon Chronicles and The Starborn Saga. A writer since a young age, Jason enjoys playing guitar, making fun videos, and spending time with his lovely wife, Emily, and their dog, Winnie.
   
7. How To Write A Novel – Simple and Powerful 4 Steps To Your First Novel - Ray Johnson is an entrepreneur and a full-time Sr. Database Administrator in the IT Department of a Fortune 100 company. He has done Masters in Computer Science from a reputed university in India. He is a very ambitious person, known for his positive and optimistic attitude among his friends and family. He is a voracious reader and he has read at least 1000 books, mostly non-fiction. He loves to read and write non-fiction books. His is extremely passionate about Psychology, Hypnotism, NLP(Neuro Linguistic Programming), History and Relationship. When he is not reading and writing, he enjoys spending time with his 8 years old son. He lives in Bay Area.
   
8. College Majors That Will Leave You Broke – Be Aware before You Dare - I'm Mycheal Scott, I love the subject of psychology, business, and how to move people. I have a BA in psychology, school of science and mathematics @ Rowan University in South Jersey. Helping people is great pleasure in my life, and I feel like we are all here to serve! Thank you
   
9. Dance Your Ass Off: Chronicles of a Part Time Stripper by Ciara Spanx - Ciara Spanx is a body positive, cat loving aries dancer with a moon in libra and a taste for bright colors. When not shaking her bubble butt for money, she likes to get dirt under her nails working in the garden. If she had to eat her way out of a room full of something, it would be pickled dilly beans.
   
10. The New Grown Ups Disney World Guide Book - Author of fiction, screen scripts, her own onging blog, and articles, Peggy Bechko loves to play like a big kid at Disney world. Poke around the web, come visit, give her your opinions and grab those books, free or reasonably priced. Oh, and for those who love such details, she was born in Michigan, raised in Indiana and Florida and moved to the Southwest US where she enjoys the sunshine today. A professional writer since she was 20 there's always something new coming down the pipeline. Come to my facebook page or twitter and say hi!
    
11. Zen and Sex (a Romantic Comedy) - Dermot Davis is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and author. His creative work encompasses varied genres and styles: drama, comedy, and, more recently, sci-fi; with a special focus on human themes and characters transformed by life experience. A sometimes actor, he was formerly a child actor in Dublin, Ireland and the co-founder of the Laughing Gravy Theatre (which performed Irish literary works as well as original stage plays of Mr. Davis) where he and other members of the troupe toured the US (culminating with being invited artists-in-residence at the prestigious Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC). He is an award-winning finalist in the 2013 International Book Awards and also a finalist in the 2013 Readers' Favorite Book Award Contest.
    
12. THE RAVAGERS by Clint Gleason - The fiercest predator on planet Tuhrelevim converges on Captain Nev and his squad’s location! As they desperately fight for survival against a relentless, brutal, and cunning enemy, devastating secrets of their mission are revealed.
    
13. The Little Things and Such: Motivational Poems You Know and Love Now with Reflection Questions - As an entrepreneur, inventor, and public speaker, Roger Edwards' life is a journey of self-discovery. He has always had a desire to help others. Roger learned early on how to make choices that would assure success instead of failure, hope instead of despair. This instilled in him a strong determination to lead others to a smoother, more fulfilling path. He began a public service career in housing administration until he transitioned into corporate leadership training to utilize his talents and experience as a mentor. Roger holds a Masters in Education and is a second Masters in Strategic Leadership. He is currently working toward his Doctorate in Executive Leadership.
    
14. VRANIGA PART 1-4 by Clint Gleason - Fed up with the treacherous work at the Shallows Post, a post-hand capitalizes on opportunity and joins a group of thieves intent on robbing fellow Vranigans of precious Vor. A war erupts and plunges the landscape into turmoil, catapulting surrounding clans into a desperate struggle for survival and giving rise to a ruler so heinous, no Vranigan is safe…
    
15. Abra-Cadaver by Matt Drabble - Born in Bath, England in 1974, a self-professed "funny onion", equal parts sport loving jock and comic book geek. From an early age reading so many works of varied authors I took the somewhat foolhardy decision to attempt my own novel. I now have five novels on Amazon, "Asylum - 13 Tales of Terror", "Gated", "Rapture Falls" and "Vengeance has Fangs" and my newest novel "Abra-Cadaver" Perhaps one day I will be able to list my publishing achievements and literary awards but for now I simply hope to have produced an interesting piece of work that entertains with a modicum of intelligence. I have always been an avid fan of the Horror/Supernatural genres and find that many great works in this field are automatically dismissed due to their subject matter.
    
16. Who Am I? The Chronicles of Cain By Dion E. Cheese - Dion Cheese is an aspiring writer from Plainfield, New Jersey, with vivid hopes of mainstream success within the broad literature arena having a natural ability and strong passion for writing due to his creative background. In the early ’90s, he has been a featured rap artist in Black Beat and Teen Machine. He was mentored by his older sibling DJ Cheese (King Kut) who was signed to Profile Records in the late ’80s, touring with famous groups such as Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Will Smith, and the likes thereof. Dion has learned to push himself in this creative field while serving what initially was a twenty-year sentence in 1997 (later reduced to sixteen years) in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He started writing his first novel, Who Am I? The Chronicles of Cain, while doing disciplinary time in late 2010. He presently is pursuing his dreams on the outside as a unique author who takes a whole new approach to the field of writing, taking well-known subjects such as the drug trade and inanimate objects, breathing life into them through the power of the pen.
    
17. Falling (Bits and Pieces, Book 1) - For years, Shirley Miranda had an idea, a scene replaying over and over in her head. But the scene never quite ended. Unlike the other stories she started and finished all in her head, this one just paused in the middle of it. Shirley began writing fan-fiction when she was 11 years-old, many years before the term was coined or the internet to post it on. With no place to share it with, she mentally "wrote" many of them out. But one scene with her own original characters never got beyond that paused moment. With the encouragement of her husband, she put pen to paper (and fingers to keyboard), and began writing out the scene. It was clear from that moment on that it wasn't just one scene with two characters, they had a story to tell. This story couldn't be completed in one scene or even two. While her first love had been scriptwriting (as many of her fan-fiction tales were written), it wasn't meant to be told as such, or even a short story. The flood gates opened and her characters had so much to say and do beyond that one original moment. Shirley Miranda currently teaches high school math and computer science in San Diego. Even during her prior career of software engineering, Shirley volunteered to work with high school students interested in math and science. It was what caused her to switch to education. Falling (Book #1 in The Bits and Pieces Series) is Shirley Miranda's first novel.
    
18. WRETCHED by Clint Gleason - When an ex-soldier and a group of friends encounter deadly creatures in Europe, their pleasant vacation transforms into screams of terror, an urgent search for weapons, a frantic struggle to stay alive, and a discovery in the depths of an abandoned military base that could lead to the end of mankind.
    
19. The Road Map to the Universe 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.