Giveaway | Amazon | $20 Gift Card | Closed

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I am promoting a giveaway that an author is hosting. The prize is a $20 gift card for Amazon (for those books that are just screaming at you to buy them). 

The giveaway starts today (2nd May 2016) and it lasts for two whole weeks. The giveaway ends on the 16th May 2016 so you have plenty of time to claim your stakes in a chance to win this gift card. 

This giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere. This is a international giveaway (YAY entries for all). Nobody likes to hear about a giveaway that doesn't include their country/town. 

There are no rules to entering this giveaway (who likes rules?!?). 

This is probably the easiest giveaway to participate in; just click the link above, don't have to worry about rules and you don't lose anything by just taking a chance. Who knows, you might even win!!

To gain entries, there are just a few simple things that can be done (the more you do, the more entries you have!)

1. Sign up to Matt Abraham's newsletter = 3 entries
(literally 3 entries for the most simple of tasks)
2. Follow Matt's Bookbub page = 3 entries
(these are the most simple and quick things to do)
3. Like Matt's Facebook page = 1 entry
(Everyone likes to like pages on Facebook)
4. Follow Matt on twitter = 1 entry
(Again everyone loves to follow important people on twitter)

Do all of the four things listed above and you will have eight entries into the giveaway. That's eight more entries than those who don't enter. You're already ahead with the chance to win.

There is nothing to lose by entering this giveaway. It's completely free to enter and it takes pretty much no time at all to gain entries. 

Book Promo & Author Bio | Steve Lawson | Giant Killers

Giant Killers: Overcoming Obstacles and Seizing Opportunities
by Steve Lawson
Published December 1st 2014

SYNOPSIS
It seemed a lopsided battle. On one side, a small shepherd with a sling and five stones. On the other, a heavily armored ten-foot giant whose taunts and challenges immobilized an army of seasoned warriors.
The story of David and Goliath has become an almost universal underdog story; but in reality, Goliath never stood a chance.
In "Giant Killers," emotional intelligence speaker, consultant, and author Steve Lawson identifies the five vital emotional and social skills David possessed: identity, discipline, graciousness, action, and hope. When combined with the power of God's grace, these strengths made it possible for David to defeat Goliath, build a mighty army out of social rejects, and establish the greatest kingdom in the history of Israel.
We all face giants in our lives, if not as literally as David did. But like David, we can overcome any challenge, seizing with confidence the opportunities God places in our path. "Giant Killers" teaches you how to do so, providing a foundation on which you can build success after success. It all begins with you-and your willingness to trust in God's grace.

Goodreads

On Amazon

About Steve Lawson

A former small-business owner and church planter, Steve Lawson recently stepped down as the senior pastor of Grace Community Church in Greenville, Texas, to focus on his writing, speaking, and leadership training activities.

He holds a doctor of strategic leadership degree from Regent University, a master of divinity degree from The King’s University, an MBA from Amberton University, and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of North Texas.

Lawson owns Leadership Transformation Inc., providing emotional intelligence training and consulting to organizations of all sizes. More information on his consulting services is available at www.leadershiptransformation.net. An avid blogger and writer, Lawson is available for speaking engagements in churches, seminars, and conferences. You can contact him at www.stevelawson.us.

He and his wife, Karen, live in Greenville, Texas. They are the parents of three grown daughters.

Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

Follow the entire GIANT KILLERS Tour Here

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Book Promo & Author Bio | Contessa Jackson | My Tesstimony

My Tesstimony: I'm Glad That I Don't Look Like What I've Been Through

SYNOPSIS

Each of us has a journey to go through in life. For some, that path seems easy, and everything in the lives of these blessed ones seems to fall into place effortlessly. For others, the path to a happy, successful life is paved with struggle and hardship.

I am one of those who have had to struggle. I wrote this book not simply to gain your sympathy or to draw attention to my pain, but to encourage others who've had to walk the same difficult roads in their lives. God, our Creator, did not design us to suffer through lives of pain and hurt, but has a much more joyful and important purpose for each of us. Discovering this fact helped me turn the path of my life around 180 degrees!

Through reading along with my personal journey, I want others to discover the pursuit of hope. We can all use hope in our lives. Even the most affluent need hope, because there is always something inside that makes us feel bad, and we can all identify with feeling bad.

The good news is that in taking this journey with me, you've already begun the healing process. Together, with healed hearts and a newfound sense of purpose, we can go on to inspire and motivate others. Our lives can and do make a difference. With the help of our loving God, we can decrease the struggle and hardship in our own lives and the lives of others and increase the joy!

Goodreads

On Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Contessa T. Walker – Jackson lives by the mantras “can’t give up now” and “there’s nothing too hard for God.” Tess is the CEO & Owner of Exclusively By Tess, LLC, a full service event planning firm. Tess is also an entrepreneur, team builder, author, civic leader, product specialist, mentor, visionary, mastermind, speaker, educator, and new blog series – Tessology Tuesdays. She has worked behind the scenes at the Steve Harvey Neighborhood Awards and BET Hip Hop Awards, just to name a few. Tess holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education, a Master of Arts in Educational Administration and Supervision, a Master of Arts in Early Childhood Education, and is a Certified Specialist in Event & Party Planning. In addition, Tess is the Founder & Owner of Teacher’s PETS Inc., a non-profit organization founded in 2008. Tess started a K-12 Academy (Teacher’s PETS Academy), which provided one-on-one instruction using the A.C.E. Curriculum. It hosted students that could not excel in the regular classroom setting, whether it was the public or the private sector; it was designed for the student who needed the special one-on-one instruction and boost. Teacher’s PETS Inc. is an organization and it collaborates with partner corporations to raise funds and organize volunteer work for helping provide children who experience extreme economic and domestic hardship with financial and education support. In addition, to sponsor and support hunger relief programs and to provide educational camps and workshops. Tess continues to fuel her passions and ambition as the published author of My TESStimony, through which she portrays her journey as a business-woman, wife, mother and lover of life. The book’s universal mandate is that “a virtuous woman is a woman of strength”—which supports her own ventures as an entrepreneur, civic leader and mentor to many. Tess is also the author of The Royal Experience – Everyday Etiquette & Modern Day CourTESSy. This syllabus/book was created to help launch poised, polished, and elegant young ladies into a successful pattern for life. Tess is also a product specialist and currently has a perfume line, Impress with Tess, which celebrates youth and femininity in its top notes that bring the aquatic nuances with pure and sharp notes of water lily, apple, freshly-sweet mandarin, and apricot. Tess’ next mission is to build a private dream school (Child Development Center & K-12 Academy) that will allow students free tuition, as well as Teacher’s PETS Inc. Performing Arts Theater, a 1,500-seat facility open to all as a venue to host plays, concerts, conferences, seminars, and formal training. Furthermore, she is looking to launch a banquet hall under her own banner, as the Exclusively By Tess Event Center; along with the Teacher’s PETS Academy Family Life Center.

Website /  Facebook  /  Twitter  /  Google + 

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Book Promo & Excerpt | Donna Dechen Birdwell | Ways Of The Serpent

Book Description:
It’s 2125. Aging is a thing of the past but personal memories and desires are now under corporate management. Jenda Swain is a youthful 111 years old, content with her professional career, when a disturbing encounter with an old woman forces her to question her own identity, to begin searching for the woman she once was and might yet become. Her journey takes her into the arms of an activist artist who has a quest of his own; answers come together as their world falls apart.

Author Bio:
Donna Dechen Birdwell has created a dystopian world as only an anthropologist can, with sensitivity and insight deriving from years of observation and dedicated study of the human condition. Donna is deeply convinced that storytelling is essential to our nature and that imagination is our most precious human trait. Donna is also an artist and former journalist and a native Texan.

Website: http://donnadechenbirdwell.com/

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Donna-Birdwell/e/B00ZA8E3UK/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wideworldhome/?fref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/wideworldhome

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14073644.Donna_Birdwell

NetGalley: http://netgal.ly/Tv3CHr



Excerpt:

1.

The café was down a couple of side streets, in an area of Dallas Jenda never went to, but she thought she might have been there once before. She couldn't remember. Without looking at the menu, she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with fried potatoes and sweet tea. It was plain food. She was halfway through her meal, savoring the anonymity afforded by this out-of-the-way eatery as much as the greasy fare, when she noticed the woman who had turned on her stool at the café’s counter to stare. 
The woman was old. That in itself was disturbing. Nobody got old anymore, not since Chulel – the drug that prevented aging – had come on the market a hundred years ago. Jenda, at 111, was as fresh and vigorous as she had been in 2035 when, at the age of 22, she had received her first annual Chulel treatment. Jenda’s grandmother was 165, but appeared no older than she had been when she began taking Chulel in her mid-sixties. What was this old woman doing in Jenda’s world? 

Jenda turned away, but she could still feel the woman’s dark eyes boring into her, probing. Jenda couldn't help herself; she looked again. When the woman saw her looking, she smiled.

“Zujo!” Jenda swore, quickly returning her attention to her unfinished sandwich. It was too late. Taking the look as an invitation, the woman dropped down from her counter stool and shuffled over to Jenda's table. 
“You're Jenda Swain,” she said, cocking her head to one side and narrowing her eyes. “God, you look the same as you did in high school.” 

“Excuse me?” Jenda sat up straighter and used her best business voice.  

“Of course you don't remember,” the woman said, dragging out the chair across from Jenda and sitting down heavily. “Nobody remembers much of anything anymore.” She shrugged and looked down at her hands. Jenda looked, too. The woman's hands were wrinkled, misshapen, and covered in brown and red splotches. “I remember you, though,” she continued, looking up into Jenda’s face. “My god, you were a firebrand back then. I idolized you and your boyfriend, you know. Such temerity! The things you did...” The woman refused to turn away. “Do you still paint? You always had your mom's gift for art.” 

“I think you must have made some mistake,” Jenda said quietly, fighting to modulate her voice against the tightening in her throat. “You may know my name, but you clearly don't know me. Nothing you are saying makes any sense at all.” Jenda felt her cheeks warm as she flashed on an image of herself with an easel and paintbrush. Her last bite of sandwich seemed to have lodged somewhere near the base of her esophagus. “Now, would you please go on your way? Leave me alone.” Jenda blinked, shuttering herself away from this intrusive presence.  

The woman's face clouded and she leaned forward, looking Jenda squarely in the eye. “You need to ask more questions.” She spoke the words clearly and forcefully. Then she pushed her chair away from the table with a loud scraping noise. As she leaned over to pick up the leather bag she had dropped under the chair, the pendant around her neck clanked on the tabletop. It was an old fashioned timepiece, the kind with a round face with numbers and moving hands. Jenda reflexively reached up to grasp her own necklace, a cluster of plexiform flowers in the latest style from her favorite recyclables boutique. The woman took in a deep breath, as if rising from the chair had taxed her strength. She looked at Jenda again. “You’re the one who doesn't know who Jenda Swain is.” Her voice was gentle, maybe sad. Then she turned and walked out the front door. 

Jenda’s impulse to run after the woman and ask her name was unexpected. Holding it in check, she sat rigidly, staring at her cold, greasy food. She swallowed hard, trying to dislodge that last bite of sandwich. Her hands trembled. She quickly finished her dilute, not-so-sweet tea. Looking up and down the street as she exited, she saw no sign of the woman. 

Jenda looked back over her shoulder as she made her way back to the main street, back to reality. What possessed me to go to that café anyway? she scolded herself, shoving her fists deeper into the pockets of her fashionable jacket. 
All afternoon at her desk in the Dallas offices of Your Journal, Jenda’s mind wandered, pacing back and forth across the odd feelings, trying to tamp them down. How did the old woman know Jenda’s name? What was that about idolizing her in high school? What boyfriend? Firebrand? Ridiculous. Jenda’s personal records with Your Journal clearly indicated that her high school career had been quietly unremarkable. She had been a good student with good marks who never made trouble. The woman must have gotten Jenda mixed up with someone else. That was it. Old people did that sometimes, didn't they? But Jenda had enjoyed painting in high school. And her mother had been a sculptor of some note before the accident. 

“Are you okay, Jenda?” It was her office mate, Weldon. 
“What?” Jenda started, “No, no, I'm fine,” she said. “Maybe something I had at lunch disagreed with me.” She gave Weldon a wan smile. It was nearly quitting time. 
Jenda’s discomfort followed her home. It’s just an attack of cognitive dissonance, she told herself. There was a pill for that. But when she got home, she didn't take the pill. Instead she poured a glass of wine and pulled up Your Journal on her home screen, accessing her high school years. There wasn't much, but the pictures were all precisely as Jenda remembered them – she had the same golden blond hair, the same flawless fair skin. She stopped for a moment to examine the picture of herself with an easel and paintbrush. Why had she ever stopped painting? To make a living, she reminded herself, and a contribution. She had majored in art at Perry University, but her course of study focused on digital design and graphic psychology. With that, she had secured her position at Your Journal. That was ninety years ago. 

Jenda loved her job with Your Journal, loved being part of such an important corporate institution. Everybody relied on Your Journal as a secure repository of their personal photos, stories, thoughts and feelings. People interacted with it every day, experiencing pangs of guilt if they failed to respond to the reminders on their digilets. You could also put photos and comments on LifeBook, but those were shared with everyone in your loop. YJ was personal and people often referred to their YJ files as their “exomemories”. 

Jenda was due for her next sabbatical in a couple of months and she had already booked into a resort in the Republic of California. The social order under Chulel had done away with retirement, moving instead to a system in which every worker received a one-year sabbatical every ten years. Technically, of course, a “sabbatical” should occur every seven years, but the term had a nice feel. Nobody questioned such verbal technicalities. 

Jenda pulled up some pictures of the resort, which suddenly struck her as mundane and boring and not somewhere she wanted to spend an entire year of her life. Maybe she should try something different. Maybe she should try painting again. Jenda vaguely recalled a place where her mother had gone a few times, a place that used to be considered something of an artists’ colony. Maybe in Mexico. Jenda searched through various mediazones and finally came up with a town in central Mexico called San Miguel de Allende. She wasn't sure that was it, but she decided that was where she would go. She did check to verify that there would be tennis courts. She always said tennis was her favorite activity. 

Within a few minutes Jenda had cancelled her reservations for California and made new ones for San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Then she drafted a memo to her supervisor, asking to begin her sabbatical early. She would lose a few weeks of leave, but she felt an odd exhilaration arising from these rash decisions. It felt good. 

2.

2125 marked the centenary of the entry of the miracle age prophylaxis Chulel into the marketplace. The occasion probably should have been marked by a celebration of some sort, but so few people remembered what life was like before Chulel that it would have seemed rather like commemorating the invention of water or air. So the year would come and go without fanfare. 

Two people who did remember life before Chulel were the inventors of the drug, Drs. Max and Emily Feldman, who had lost their only child to Hutchinson-Guilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) back in 1977. “Progeria” referred to a set of diseases that caused premature aging due to a genetic anomaly; HGPS had been its most common (though still extremely rare) form. 

The Feldmans had delayed “having a family” as people used to say, until after they both completed med school. Following their daughter’s death, they had devoted their careers to finding a cure for progeria. It had been a long haul. The first significant advance had come from another lab, which announced a promising new avenue of research in 2014. Pharmakon Corporation, and specifically the Drs. Feldman, built on this and in 2017 published preliminary results of a drug they named according to its active chemical components. Nobody now remembers that name. 
The drug was ready for human trials by early 2018, and a dozen or so families from around the world came forward, traveling to the Pharmakon headquarters in Atlanta to let the Feldmans try out the drug on their afflicted sons and daughters, who had been diagnosed with either HGPS or one of the other, even rarer, forms of progeria. 

What nobody knew was that Max Feldman was also testing the drug on himself. Even Emily didn’t know. Max Feldman was already 78 and although he checked out healthy enough, he had a family history of heart disease and atherosclerosis and there were certain aspects of the lab tests on the new drug as well as its effects on a small test group of bonobos that had irresistibly piqued his curiosity. 
By the time the tests on human progeria patients were declared unequivocally successful in 2021, the people closest to him were beginning to notice something about Max. One of those people was the Feldmans’ lab assistant, Winslow Morris.  

In the third month of the trials, Winslow noted that there seemed to be a couple of vials of the drug missing. He questioned Dr. Max about it, and was told it must be a mistake. When Winslow re-counted the next day against the numbers in the computer, he found no discrepancy. It happened again a couple of months later and this time Winslow kept his observation to himself. Again, the numbers mysteriously rectified themselves within a matter of hours. Then one day Winslow thought he saw Dr. Max slipping a vial of the medicine into the pocket of his lab coat. That’s when it clicked. Winslow started observing Dr. Max more closely. On the day before the results of the progeria field tests were formally announced, Winslow missed work. And then he disappeared altogether. 
Winslow hadn't needed to steal any of the medicine. He knew how to make it. His destination was China and within six months a new drug started showing up on the streets. It was called “Fontana” and it was touted as the “fountain of youth”. It was outrageously expensive and sold mainly to customer lists Winslow compiled by irrupting into databases of dermatologists specializing in cosmetic surgery. He was an instant millionaire. 

Winslow did not know that Dr. Feldman had altered the dosage for his own use. Fontana consumers were overdosing, and before the drug had been on the street for a full year, its reputation went into free fall. People who were self-medicating with this black market miracle potion started to develop strange skin disorders, unexplained neuropathies, and a vulnerability to infection, all of which ended up on the list of warnings regarding possible side effects when the first generation of the real drug went on the market in 2025 under the name “Chulel.” 
Winslow was sorry about all this. It cut his income stream down to nothing. But he took his multi millions and his remaining stocks of Fontana and fled. 

Book Promo | Gerald Weaver | Gospel Prism

Title:   Gospel Prism

Author:   Gerald Weaver

Genre:   literary fiction

Publisher & Date:  London Wall Publishing,  21 May 2015

Pages:   370-paperback, 338-harcover, 284-Kindle

Book Synopsis:

Alone in his jail cell, Christian receives a midnight visitation from a beautiful stranger. She is the messiah and tasks him with solving a series of spiritual mysteries in order to save his immortal soul...

Atmospheric, dreamlike, unpredictable and wise, Gospel Prism is the dazzling debut novel from Gerald Weaver which brings into focus the relationship between literature, language, truth and religious faith.

'Gospel Prism is a remarkable, charming but disturbing novel with an intriguing premise.' Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities,  Yale University

'Weaver's Gospel Prism is lit by a literary wit and the intricate knowledge that at the end, as in the beginning, there is the word.' Jonathan Levi, author and co-founder of GRANTA

 Purchase a copy on Amazon: US / UK / CA  

About the Author: 

Gerald Weaver received his bachelor's degree from Yale University and Juris Doctor degree from Catholic University. He has been a Capitol Hill chief of staff, a campaign manager, a lobbyist, a single father, a teacher of English and Latin, a collector and seller of Chinese antiquities and a contributor to the political magazine, George. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and travels regularly between the United Kingdom and the US. Gospel Prism is his first novel.

His experience of reading challenging literature in order to survive a dark place served as a provocation for this sensitive, atmospheric, dreamlike, compassionate, unpredictable and wise debut novel which brings into focus the relationship between literature, language, truth and religious faith.

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