Featured Author: Gerri Hilger

Our Duty

Author Gerri Hilger is a life-long resident of Kansas where she was raised on a farm with lots of chores. She loved to sneak away to the barn loft to write terrible poetry and awful stories while dreaming about traveling the world. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English from Pittsburg State University at the end of the raucous ‘60s. This was followed by years of teaching, raising four children with her farmer husband, and helping on their land. While pursuing her Master’s degree in Education, she began to follow her dream of writing. After more than 35 years teaching thousands of high school students, Gerri now enjoys retirement, writing and traveling with her husband to visit their children and 15 grandchildren in four different states and to enjoy sites of the world.

Our Duty is a story of love, friendship, the dangers of war, and the bonds of true friendship, based on true events and real characters.

Our Duty follows the shenanigans of Polly and Aggie, student nurses when World War II began. Eager to be a part of the action, Aggie joins the Army Air Corps upon graduating nursing school, and qualifies as flight nurse. She is shipped off to the Pacific, while Polly stays home. Aggie soon faces many difficulties common to this under-recognized group of brave women, including their initial lack of respect by the military brass. Aggie finally earned the respect of all around her when she kept 30 wounded men safe when their plane went down in the Pacific. Her letters home detail the challenges for nurses and the accounts of the personal lives of the airmen she came to know who faced unimaginable dangers in the skies over Europe, many ending in death. While Polly stayed behind to help on the home front, she does her part to keep Aggie entertained. Her letters boost the morale of any who are privy to them, describing romantic adventures and changes in life in the States.

Our Duty is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Follow Gerri on Facebook. Visit her website, http://www.gerriwettahilger.com

Awards Update!

Congratulations to Our Book Award Winners!

Kat Biggie Press would like to congratulate Kat Biggie Press authors who have recently received awards or mentions:

Linsday Gibson is a finalist in the 2018 Book Excellence Awards in the Inspirational category, for her book, Just Be: How My Stillborn Son Taught Me to Surrender. Learn more about Lindsay.

Suzanne Brown received Silver in the Readers’ Favorite Awards, for her book, Mompowerment: Insights from Professional Part-Time Working Moms Who Balance Career and Family. Learn more about Suzanne.

Heather LeRoss is a 2018 Non-Fiction winner of the IAN Book of the Year in the Parenting/Family/Relationships category for her book, Just Tell Me I’m Pretty: Musings on a Messy Life. Learn more about Heather.

In addition, Kat Biggie Press founder, Alexa Bigwarfe, won the 2018 Book Excellence Award in the Writing and Publishing Category for her book, Ditch the Fear and Just Write It!

These, and other Kat Biggie Press titles, can be purchased on Amazon.

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Featured Author: Lindsay Gibson

Just Be: How My Stillborn Son Taught Me to Surrender

Trauma can shake you and break but it will also wake you and make you. Lindsay’s memoir, Just Be, is not only her story of what happened – but how she evolved to embrace forgiveness and letting go. Evolving through trauma means acknowledging your feelings, not burying them – so that they can teach us and reach on higher that brings peace, joy and reminds us who we really were before the trauma.

My story is about embracing and allowing grief to just BE so that grief could help me find strength and joy through the power and oneness of higher love. Beyond that, Just Be, brings the readers to another level of forgiveness: Which is how to heal trauma that was stuck in my body, thereby releasing the energy cords from the past and future generations within my family. How trauma can get passed down over and over and how to break that cord.

This book is for women who have experienced trauma, particularly mothers. However, this book is for all women, no matter what stage of motherhood they are in or even if they are planning for children or not. It will speak to women in grief from a loss of any kind or previous trauma/crisis who are looking for inspiration on how to forgive, particularly after trauma, and what that means for their spiritual growth, and for the health of their children. This book highlights the bond mothers have with their children from preconception to after birth, and our intuition.

Just Be: How My Stillborn Son Taught Me To Surrender was a 2018 Finalist in the Book Excellence Awards.

Follow Lindsay on Facebook. Visit her website, http://www.lindsaymariegibson.com

Support a KBP Author!

For authors who choose to go the self-publishing route and partner with a hybrid publisher like Kat Biggie Press, their passion project is an investment of not only time and energy but money. Some authors are able to finance the publishing process with their own funds or with the help of family. When that is not an option, authors may turn to crowdfunding. Today, we are sharing one such campaign, created by Kat Biggie Press author, Sharissa Bradley, whose book is slated for a December 2018 release.

Sharissa’s forthcoming book strives to teach readers how to gain total body wellness all the way from our psychology to our genetic make-up and includes her personal tips for how to live the healthiest life possible. The book also includes several expert interviews and success stories. Perhaps most importantly, however, the book follows an actionable path with a custom workbook that will help readers create their own plan.

After personally being diagnosed with 4-autoimmune diseases, Sharissa leaned very heavily on her research background to learn as much as she could about the origin of autoimmunity, and options for healing outside of standard medical advice. After 6 months of research and using myself as a guinea pig, she was able to reverse her antibody response until it was untraceable. When she finally felt well enough to share her story with the world, she began coaching people to their own success stories.

Sharissa Bradley is an experimental psychologist turned nutritionist who has spent the last 10 years studying psychology, the human brain, health, nutrition, myths around food as well as the idea that we know what to do and yet we still, seemingly, chose not to do it.

To learn more about Sharissa and support the Healthy Lifestyle Revolution, visit her IndieGoGo campaign.

To learn more about how much it REALLY costs to publish a book, check out my blog post HERE.

Featured Author: Heather LeRoss

Just Tell Me I’m Pretty: Musings on a Messy Life

Heather writes to connect women who feel alone, who are missing a village of support. She writes for the mother of a special needs child who’s not sure how she is going to manage one more melt-down, one more parent-teacher conference, or one more day.

I wrote the book so other women could read my stories and feel like they’re not alone in the insanity that comes with raising a family, divorce, blending families, getting older, and watching their parents age. I wrote it to help women who parent a child who requires a little “more” from the world and who sometimes feel overwhelmed by this need. I wrote it for the women who sometimes feel like they want to run, who cry at odd times, and who might like to simply hear, “You look pretty today.”

Order the book HERE.

Heather started her writing journey on her blog, Tipsy Tiaras. Tipsy Tiaras was born when Heather wanted to promote her children’s book, about a near-sighted, clumsy monster with a lisp named Sampson, who is afraid of kids and gets uncontrollable gas when he tries to be scary. She wrote stories about her life and interviewed women with amazing stories to tell and wrote about them. Her blog struck a chord, so much so that readers sought Heather out to tell her how much her writing helped them or made them laugh. Heather decided she wanted to reach a wider audience and give more people the “feel-goods.” Just Tell I’m Pretty: Musings on a Messy Life is a compilation of blog posts and never-published content.

Heather’s an imperfect human trying to raise perfect humans. She’s mom to 2 boys of her own and a stepson. She lives in the gross world of boys who argue about using soap in the shower and ensure the dog always has fun stuff to lick in the bathroom.

Follow Heather on Facebook and Twitter.

Featured Author: Amie Lands

Amie’s writing journey began when her daughter died in 2011. Her newborn daughter Ruthie Lou received a life-limiting diagnosis soon after birth and knowing that she would eventually die, Amie needed support, or an experienced friend, to walk her through this loss. After leaving the hospital with limited resources to guide her, she searched high and low for a book to help her on this journey. She never quite found what she was looking for. After five years of grief work, tending to her broken heart and eventually becoming a person of support for other bereaved moms, Amie found that she was often answering the same questions that she had in her early grief. Through helping others Amie realized there was a need in this community for a book, an experienced friend, to walk families through this unknown journey. This was the book that she was looking for, and came to write. Navigating the Unknown was released in January of 2017 by Kat Biggie Press.

Our Only Time, Amie’s follow up to Navigating the Unknown, was created to motivate, inspire and show appreciation for medical professionals through experiences told from a patient’s perspective. Through heartfelt stories, families share the sacred time spent with their baby — whether in utero or after birth — and offer insights into how medical professionals positively impacted their experience. Also included are recommendations on how best to be supportive of patients and what types of actions to avoid during this devastating experience.

Through these incredibly intimate stories of loss, medical professionals can better understand a grieving family’s experience and become equipped to support bereaved parents when they leave the hospital without their baby. Medical professionals will come away with new insights on how to guide parents, empowering them to have the least amount of regret during this loss, and allowing for the greatest chance of healing in their grief as they re-enter the world.

Amie Lands is a teacher, wife, and mama to three beautiful children. She is the author of Navigating the Unknown:An Immediate Guide When Experiencing the Loss of Your Baby, a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist®, founder of The Ruthie Lou Foundation, and an ongoing contributor at Still Standing Magazine. Since her daughter’s brief life, Amie’s passion is offering hope and providing support to bereaved families during their grief journey. Amie lives in northern California with her husband and their two sons.

Visit Amie on Facebook, Twitter and her website.