Men in Books Aren’t Better Virtual Book Tour

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Contemporary Romance

Date Published: November 25, 2024

Publisher: The Wild Rose Press

 

 

Pressured by her looming deadline and an unfinished romance manuscript,
author Molly Covington applies her immersive research skills and goes all
in. She hires a male companion for inspiration during three days of research
in Las Vegas.

Enter sexy, confident Jared Washington—an extreme sports enthusiast
and relationship skeptic who moonlights as a Plus One male companion.
Molly’s contract puts him within arm’s reach of buying his own
business and making his dreams come true.

The chemistry between her and Jared is surprisingly easy. Before their
Vegas rendezvous comes to an end, one of them will need to lay all their
cards on the table to discover if they’ll be lucky in love.

 

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EXCERPT

Molly

 

Searching for an escort was not the same as

searching for porn.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I hit

enter on my keyboard. Holding my breath, I waited as

the list of resultsElite Males, Premium Gigolos, Stags

R Uspopulated my laptop screen. I perched on the

edge of my black leather desk chair in my home office

overlooking the Seattle harbor. All the entries sounded

like adult films. Each one screamed precisely what to

expect, which made choosing any one in particular

impossible.

With one eye shut and a tentative finger, I clicked

on the top entry, Elite Males. An obscene amount of

oiled flesh filled most of my monitor—a close-up photo

of a smooth-chested guy flexing his defined muscles

while lying on his back. The shot highlighted his torso

and prominent tattoos, capturing only his lips and chin;

he was clean-shaven, and his jaw was also, for some

reason, shiny. Ugh! Too much! The home page wasn’t

quite as bad as I’d expected but still cringe-worthy:

almost laughable. The guy in the image provided what

was supposed to be an enticing, yet exaggerated,

display, which I assumedcombined with his other

“talents” listed in the reviews that read like pornmust

have earned him his five-star rating. To each his own.

The parts of the man I could see on my screen were

considered conventionally hot. However, after reading

the list of customers’ erotic comments, I swallowed

back the bitter tang filling my mouth. I felt dirty just

looking at his imageand desperate. But I guess, for

all intents and purposes, I was. My deadline from my

publisher loomed overhead, and I had no manuscript to

submit. My stomach rolled.

“It’s been a year, Molly,” Renee had said last week

after huffing into the phone. “The editors expect

something after that advance. Your reputation will only

buy you so much time. Can you at least give me the

first fifty pages so I can appease them? Try to barter an

extension?”

Picturing Renee’s scowl was easyan otherwise

non-existent crinkle above the bridge of her button

nose, with her perpetual bold lips in full pout mode.

A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. “I’ll

get you something soon. I promise.” My hollow words

sounded more like a question as I brushed off the brittle

ends of hair that flaked onto my sweatshirt, an

inevitable consequence of straightening my Jamaican

locks with my flat iron. However, my hair wouldn’t

have done that if I hadn’t fallen asleep at the computer

the night before, attempting to muscle out some words

that never came. I should have just gone to bed at a

decent hour with my silk hair wrap.

“Look, Molly, you’ve been a real trouper since

breaking off the engagement with Enrique. But I think

gifting your cousin your non-refundable venue for her

wedding was…a mistake. Admirable, but a mistake

nonetheless.”

 

About the Author

Amanda and Lisa-Marie are a co-writing team of best friends who share
imaginary worlds, including a short story, Shivers, published in Moments
Between. Lisa Marie Potter (BIPOC) is a mom of four who grew up in
Nottingham, England, and now resides in Alaska with her husband and golden
retriever. Amanda Nelson grew up in Maryland and moved to Arizona, where she
attended college and currently lives with her husband and four kids. Both
women are members of the Author’s Guild and were part of a Manuscript
Academy Podcast featuring their writing and critique group. They also review
books on their socials, hike the Olympic National Park, and fight over the
same fictional crushes.

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Hard White Virtual Book Tour

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Literary / Historical Fiction

Date Published: 09-25-2202

Publisher: Woodpecker Lane Press

 

 

In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the life of Alice
Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the
portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced
middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime
spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote,
the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era,
and second-wave feminism. She worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling
with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to
live life on her own terms, and above all to paint.

Hard White tablet

EXCERPT

 

Hard White

  • Self Portrait (1980)

 

I start with wood and canvas, the wood assembled into a stretcher, the canvas stretched over the wood frame then primed with a ground of white gesso (chalk, glue): hard white, I call it. Hard white because it doesn’t allow for errors or a change of mind. If you go back and re-draw something, the ghost of your earlier idea is there for everyone to see. You can try to erase what you drew, but the ghost image will still be there, so why bother? You have to just work over it. But I like that. It keeps you honest. And it’s like life — our errors and changes of mind, our detours, our wrong turns are what make us who and what we are. 

Some painters like the canvas stretched loose; I like it tighter, with a little more play, a springiness under my brush. 

I begin with drawing. Drawing is the essence of painting. Drawing is seeing; seeing is the beginning of knowing the world. 

Those people who look at Jackson’s work and say, “My two-year-old could do better than that” know nothing. They don’t know how to see. They don’t understand the structure he’s created, the layers he’s applied — the same way life applies layers to us all, gradually shaping us into the people we become — so that each of his paintings builds to a symphony, that’s what makes them sing. 

In the same way, each of my paintings is layer on layer of knowing, knowing learned through hard experience, knowing myself, knowing the individual I’m painting. Insight is another word for knowing. Earned is another word for learned.

 

About the Author

Melanie Dugan

Melanie Dugan is the author of Bee Summers (“a carefully wrought
portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life.” Brenda
Schmidt, Quill & Quire), Dead Beautiful (“the writing is
gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance (“heartwarming,
amusing and…downright sexy,” Midwest Book Review), and Sometime
Daughter (“Stunning debut,” Kingston Whig-Standard). Her short
stories have been shortlisted for several awards, including the CBC Literary
award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

 

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 Novel Idea bookstore, Kingston, Ontario

 

 

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The Start-Up Puzzle Virtual Book Tour

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Nonfiction / Business

 

There’s a lot of over-promises and incorrect advice being given
online on starting a successful enterprise. This wrong advice could cost
someone their life savings and importantly ruin their life ambition and
dream. Therefore, in partnership with the Erasmus University Rotterdam, we
decided to pull together a practical how-to guide explaining the process
successful start-ups go through: The Start-up Puzzle. It explains the
different steps by using real-life examples and has an academic section
explaining the theory behind these steps, all augmented by interviews with
experts in the field of start- and scale-ups. What makes this guide unique?
Real-life examples and expert interviews augmented with a birds-eye overview
of the academic theory create a practical guide that is both understandable,
practical, and implementable.

 

The Start-Up Puzzle tablet

EXCERPT

 

Introduction

 

GIVEN MY BACKGROUND as a law graduate, let me start with a disclaimer:

This guide doesn’t pretend to cover every element of new

business creation and entrepreneurship. It is also not meant to be an

academic publication or research summary. It aims to give a practical

birds-eye overview of the common factors & deliverables that

successful start-ups seem to have focused on. The pieces of the puzzle

or the academic framework are not meant to become a tick-thebox

exercise but instead offer a holistic view to aid understanding

of the key drivers of building successful enterprises. We have chosen

and named the different pieces of the puzzle as we felt fit based on

our own experiences in the start-up and scale-up world as founders,

board members, advisors, angel investors, or acquirers of start-ups

and scale-ups. We thus accept that our puzzle pieces will stem from

our subjective biases, yet hope the simplification we have tried to capture

will aid the understanding of the whole process of starting a new

venture. We will leave it to academia to properly define the appropriate

definitions, models, and frameworks of the start-up phases. We

hope this guide will help entrepreneurs make choices about where

they want the magic and/or superpowers of their start-up to be. On

top of our own experiences, we held interviews with serial entrepreneurs,

academics, private equity, investment banking, and other subject

matter experts, with jointly more than 300 years of experience

with start-ups & scale-ups. We hope their unique perspective will not

only aid the understanding but also serve as an inspiration from those

who live and breathe start-ups day in, and day out.

We have chosen this condensed practitioner’s format as we ourselves

also would not have the time or patience to read multiple fourhundred-

page business books to get a big-picture overview of what

constitutes a successful start-up journey. Furthermore, we hope the

practical examples will inform and inspire how to overcome certain

challenges and navigate opportunities entrepreneurs will likely be

confronted with during their start-up journey. We believe this practitioner

guide can also offer food for thought for more established businesses,

as most of the reflections and observations hold for businesses

in general, not just start-ups.

About The Author

RvP is known as the go-to person to simplify & break down complex
business challenges into understandable questions you can deal with. He has
a remarkable 30+ year track record as both a senior leader in a Fortune 50
company in operational regional and local jobs, global marketing and
strategy roles, innovation and external ventures jobs – world of abundance
of resources, shortage of  entrepreneurship. On the other hand, he was
closely involved as an entrepreneur and advisor to many start &
scale-ups in FMCG, Luxury, and MedTech, a world that is often dominated by
scarcity, and thus the only way to survive is by taking risk, and coming up
with creative out of the box solutions that have never been done before.
Currently, he is active as a senior consultant, advisor to start &
scale-ups, an avid (public) speaker, a University lecturer, and a
high-altitude tour skier, Robert strives to make a difference in the lives
of those who aspire to be involved in creating new ventures, in starting
enterprises as well as big Corporates that want to be inspired by the
creativity that a culture of scarcity breeds.

 

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The Moldavian Gambit Virtual Book Tour

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Spies & Politics, Espionage, Terrorism

 

A taut, fast-paced, geopolitical techno-thriller set in the dying days of
the Soviet Union.  The Moldavia Gambit will appeal to lovers of complex
espionage, terrorism and political thrillers by authors like Tom Clancy,
Daniel Silva and Mark Greaney.

Inspired by actual events and filled with authentic technical detail, the
gripping tale races between Moscow, Moldavia, Paris, Washington, the skies
over Eastern Europe, and geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth.

 

 

The Moldavian Gambit tablet

EXCERPT

Prelude

 

With the impending implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than thirty-three thousand nuclear weapons remained stored on Soviet soil, aboard warships of the Red Fleet, or in the armories of the republics around Russia’s western and southern perimeter. Nearly 10,000 were strategic arms: warheads deployed on land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles carried by the Bears, Backfires, and Blackjacks of the strategic bomber forces. Most of the remainder were tactical nuclear weapons, generally employed on intermediate and short-range ballistic missiles or aboard dual-capable fighter-bomber aircraft.

The Soviet stockpile also included several hundred small, short-range nuclear devices ranging from nuclear mines and artillery rounds with yields of less than one kiloton to suitcase-size portable charges with yields of ten kilotons or more, comparable to the weapon that had devastated Hiroshima 46 years earlier.

In the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union faced widespread political and ethnic unrest. In the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, cries for greater autonomy were mainly peaceful. But in the Muslim republics to the south and elsewhere across the fragmenting empire, calls for secession were often complicated by the violent demands of fractious ethnic minorities.

The Russian majority of the Soviet population viewed the rapid decline of their extended motherland with a combination of fear and resentment. Dispersed throughout the calcified Soviet political and military leadership were fervent nationalists who shared this sentiment – and believed they had the means to do something about it. On August 19th 1991, the world awoke to news of a short-lived coup against the Soviet leadership, an attempted putsch that ended quickly when its leaders apparently failed to win the support of key apparatchiks in the military and security services.

In Washington, D.C., and throughout NATO Europe, the reaction to events in the Soviet Union was one of wary skepticism. While Soviet military and political leaders pointed to the abortive coup as evidence that the Soviet nuclear arsenal remained fully secure, NATO military observers remained concerned that local insurgents might somehow gain access to the nuclear genie – and with good reason.

Less than a year before, Western intelligence sources reported that the Kremlin no longer had faith in its ability to maintain control over the nuclear arms stored in its unstable republics and had begun a gradual withdrawal of the weapons to safer areas of the Rodina. On June 22nd 1990, The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page story highlighting the emerging threat. Under the sub-caption “Fear of Theft or Civil War Prompts Military Action on Short-Range Arsenal,” the article noted that:

“Rising levels of crime, thefts of conventional weapons from military bases, attacks on military units, and personnel problems within the military have accelerated the effort [to secure Soviet nuclear stockpiles]. It appears to focus, at least in part, on bringing tactical nuclear weapons such as short-range missiles, nuclear artillery, and bombs into the [politically stable] Russian Republic [and out of the more volatile western and southern republics]…

“[A major] concern involves the theft of one or more nuclear weapons that could occur if an isolated Soviet storage site were overrun by rebel forces. This became more than a speculative possibility in late January [1990] when the Kremlin suddenly dispatched elite Russian airborne units to stop fighting between armed Azerbaijani and Armenian groups around the Caspian Sea city of Baku…”

 

The highly publicized withdrawal of nuclear weapons had, in fact, begun two years before at the direction of the General Secretary, both to reassure the West that the Soviet Union intended a safe and orderly transition to a new political order and to forestall any real security risks among the unstable republics around its perimeter.

Within a year, however, a rift had developed within the Kremlin as some argued that by limiting its range of nuclear options, the Soviet Union risked encouraging aggression from Chinese and Western opportunists. Knowing that further reforms would be impossible without the continued support of the KGB and the military, the General Secretary acquiesced. Through the winter of 1990, some of the inventory was quietly returned to more secure bases along the Soviet perimeter, including one in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic…

 

 

About the Author

Brad Meslin

Brad Meslin has spent more than 35 years working at the intersection of the
aerospace and defense industry, private equity and national security.

Meslin founded and manages a leading advisory firm that performs diligence
on aerospace, defense and government services contractors active in the
defense, space, aviation and intelligence sectors in the United States,
Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.  Advising on hundreds of
transactions over more than three decades, Meslin has gained a deep
understanding of the national security programs and missions these companies
support, and the capabilities and systems they help to develop and
operate.

Dr. Meslin earned a Master’s degree in law and diplomacy and a Ph.D.
from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, with a focus on international
security.

 

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A Ten-Year Overnight Success Virtual Book Tour

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The Inspiring Story of a Business You’ve Never Heard of

 

Business Memoir

Date Published: September 10, 2024

 


 

 

This is a story for the rest of us. Those who want to grow their companies
but can’t find relatable inspiration, or guidance, in current business
literature. It’s a story about a company that you’ve never heard of, but one
that used computer algorithms to save the American taxpayer over $60 Billion
in government pandemic relief fraud. And it’s about an unlikely founder who
takes the risks and inspires his team to go from an idea to a nine-figure
exit in less than 9 years.

In A Ten-Year Overnight Success, Pondera Solutions founder, Jon Coss, takes
you with him on his journey through what he describes as the four stages of
a typical startup. You’ll share his raw emotions through the “rise and
fall of enthusiasm”, his months of desperation in the “desert of
despair”, his tempered confidence through “wiggles of hope”,
and his immense relief and sense of accomplishment marching toward the
“Promised Land”.

Jon’s story-telling narrative combines soul-searching truths with
self-deprecating humor to provide you with an inside look at what it takes
to achieve the success that less than 1% of businesses ever will. Along the
way, he offers practical, nuanced lessons that you won’t find in the typical
business book. Lessons learned in the trenches. Lessons that may not make
you the next Tesla but are sure to grow your business. Lessons that apply to
the rest of us.

A Ten-Year Overnight Success tablet

EXCERPT

Overview

 

98.7% of American companies make less than $1 million a year.

In search of inspiration, fledgling business owners read stories

about multibillion-dollar companies like Nike, Amazon,

and Tesla. In reality though, the majority of us have no chance

of achieving this level of success because only .002 percent of

companies generate even $100 million in annual sales.

This is a story for the rest of us. Those who want to grow

their companies but can’t find relatable inspiration, or guidance,

in current business literature. It’s a story about a company that

you’ve never heard of, but one that used computer algorithms

to save the American taxpayer over $60 Billion in government

pandemic relief fraud. And it’s about an unlikely founder who

takes the risks and inspires his team to go from an idea to a

nine-figure exit in less than 9 years.

In A Ten-Year Overnight Success, Pondera Solutions

founder, Jon Coss, takes you with him on his journey through

what he describes as the four stages of a typical startup.

You’ll share his raw emotions through the “rise and fall of

enthusiasm”, his months of desperation in the “desert of

despair”, his tempered confidence through “wiggles of hope”,

iv

and his immense relief and sense of accomplishment marching

toward the “Promised Land”.

Jon’s story-telling narrative combines soul-searching truths

with self-deprecating humor to provide you with an inside look

at what it takes to achieve the success that less than 1% of

businesses ever will. Along the way, he offers practical, nuanced

lessons that you won’t find in the typical business book. Lessons

learned in the trenches. Lessons that may not make you the

next Tesla but are sure to grow your business. Lessons that

apply to the rest of us.

 

About the Author

Jon Coss

Jon has provided strategic consulting to many of the world’s largest
technology companies, a nationally recognized expert in government fraud,
and an active mentor for aspiring entrepreneurs

 

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Publisher

 

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