w. brand publishing
our flagship imprint is home to the memoir + biography genre
Please support local indie bookstores by requesting our books or order your copy through them.
Sex, Trucks, and Rock 'n Roll
Sex, Trucks, and Rock 'n Roll: A Spiritual Journey takes readers on a wild and captivating ride through the life of Ben Mason, an arrogant and decadent rocker who eventually finds redemption and peace amid chaos. Drawing on his experiences in the music industry and his love for Eastern and Western faiths, Ben embarks on a transformative journey that leads him to self-discovery and enlightenment.
In his raw memoir, Ben shares the secrets of his evolution from being a self-centered rockstar to a successful entrepreneur and loving father. Through his deep connection to sacred Native American rituals and the mystical energy of the land he calls home, Ben learns to embrace his true self and let go of the trappings of fame and fortune.
Navigating the ups and downs of his personal and professional life, his story is both a vehicle and a soundtrack for his spiritual awakening. Through his music and art, he channels his inner struggles and ultimately finds solace and acceptance in his own skin.
With transparency and vulnerability, Ben invites readers to embark on their own journey of self-transformation. By sharing intimate thoughts and feelings, he offers clues and inspiration encouraging readers to overcome their own struggles and find inner peace, kindness, and prosperity.
Release date: Jan. 30, 2024
Memoir, Music Business, Entrepreneur, Spirituality
Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
2023 IBPA Ben Franklin Award Winner
2023 Finalist - Foreword INDIES Award
DRAFTED!
Drafted! tells the story of Henry Morgan Miller’s year in Vietnam at the invitation of Lyndon B. Johnson. It is the story of a meat-cutter—wannabe commercial airline pilot—whose life was rudely interrupted by being inducted into a war that he considered someone else’s battle for a lost cause. It’s a story that could describe many of the almost 300,000 men drafted in 1968 along with Morgan, or, for that matter, the 1.85 million drafted between 1964-73. It is the story of your brother, your son, your friend—some who came home safe and sound, and others who perished, or were no longer whole.
In his book, Morgan also exposes a major mechanical issue with Vietnam-era Cobra helicopters; so serious that had they been Ford cars they would have been subject to a major recall. He suggests that Cobra helicopter pilots were guinea-pigs for aircraft plagued with serious, not to mention deadly, hydraulic problems.
Drafted! is for readers who want to experience what it was like, on a day-to-day basis, to go through basic training, learn to fly gunships, and then be shipped out to the Vietnam war zone. What it’s like to be shot at and shot down. To serve your country honorably, while fighting a war you don’t believe in, only to return and be ostracized by a misguided faction of the general public.
Release date: Dec. 19, 2023
Memoir, Military, Vietnam
Large Print, Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
2023 Finalist - Foreword INDIES Award
Milspouse Matters
You knew what you signed up for. These words are often directed at military spouses, yet the true depth of what it will mean to be married to a service member is seldom fully grasped. In Milspouse Matters: Sharing Strength Through Our Stories, readers are immersed in the captivating world of military spouse life, unearthing the challenges and triumphs faced by those who leave behind the familiar to embrace a life of constant change.
Authored by Jen McDonald, this compelling narrative weaves together the experiences of military spouses across generations, illuminating the unbreakable bonds that unite them. With a keen focus on the impact of frequent relocations, deployments, and the nomadic nature of military life, McDonald also celebrates these spouses’ resolute tenacity. Drawing from her personal three-decade journey as a military spouse, alongside stories from contemporary spouses and those from the Korean War and Vietnam conflict eras, Milspouse Matters reveals the remarkable strength within this community.
Whether you’re seeking courage, confidence, or a deeper understanding of the military family experience, these shared stories invite you to discover the unyielding resilience that lies within us all.
Release date: Oct 10, 2023
Memoir, Military Families, Milspouse stories
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
HOAX
Hoax is the story of a woman born and raised in the Jehovah’s Witness cult. Her journey from self-realization of the indoctrination she was born into to self-acceptance as she struggles to belong in a world where things are not as they seem. Finding the courage to leave, she loses her entire family and children in the process.
A story of battling Alcohol Addiction, Mental Health Diagnoses, and the journey to becoming her true self in the wake of the loss she struggles with. A powerful story of strength, vulnerability, and redemption leaves readers with hope and conviction to embrace their truth as well.
When you’re raised in a cult it is hard to escape indoctrination but even harder to find yourself. Follow Pony Jean’s journey of self-realization through loss, addiction, and mental health diagnoses as she allows herself to become vulnerable and worthy of becoming her true self.
Release date: Jan. 24, 2023
Memoir, Cults, Mental Health, Addiction
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
Dispatches from the Cowgirl
Leaving her career and everything she knew behind to follow her husband, Julie was rapidly approaching forty and wondering, “What is my place in the world?” Enter Africa, the continent she had dreamed of since childhood, a chance to reinvigorate her life. A supposed two-year assignment for her family in Sub-Saharan Africa soon turns into an eight-year adventure in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Djibouti and sees Julie become an unofficial diplomat as wife to a military attaché. In a world where diplomacy is key, Julie becomes the person she was meant to be.
Julie’s memoir is a real-life Alice in Wonderland tale. A cowgirl falls into Africa like Alice fell into Wonderland, taking you on a voyage of discovery and into the little-known world of an American military spouse serving amongst the world’s diplomatic corps. One moment, you’ll laugh out loud as Julie takes her first step onto the African continent and begins setting up their home in Cameroon. The next, you’ll gasp in shock as a terrorist bomb shakes their house in Nigeria.
Part travelogue, and part midlife coming-of-age story, Dispatches From the Cowgirl takes you to the Africa that Julie experienced. Complete with all its beauty and flaws, it’s the Africa that continues to capture the attention of the world’s military powers and the Africa she struggled to say goodbye to.
Release date: Sept. 13, 2022
Memoir, Military, Travel Memoir
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
The 16th Second
Words matter . . . they live in our hearts and in our minds until we give them the strength to speak for us. Give them the power they were created to have. They deserve to be heard, and so do you. –Ted A Richard
The 16th Second is the autobiography of a small-town gay boy from Deep South Louisiana who survived homophobia, alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse, rape, and HIV/AIDS to become somebody that no one, not even he, expected.
The story winds through his childhood, where Ted had become accustomed to coming in second. Weaving a tale of drama, heartache, and failure, the path leads him to figure out what it takes to come in first; and why it mattered.
The childhood recollection of “never being good enough” morphs into a world of delusions of grandeur as his search for fame seemed to never materialize; causing him to make fame mean something else entirely.
It is a story of redemption and success after years of searching helped him realize that he had to let go of the fame of the past (which never existed), and begin living in the present, in order to secure his future.
Release date: June 14, 2022
LGBTQ+ Memoir, Autobiography
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Kindle, and AudioBook
In the mid-twentieth century, The Bluebell Girls—dancers known particularly for their height and glamorous appearance—were recognized and admired throughout much of the world. At any one time, troupes appeared on several continents in a multitude of venues: theaters, clubs, on TV, at the Lido in Paris, and the Stardust in Las Vegas.
In Have Chignon—Will Travel: Touring Italy with the Bluebell Girls 1960-61, Elizabeth Dale Phillips takes you with her on an incredible odyssey, starting out as a shorthand-typist in London who had never danced professionally, and metamorphosing into an elegant Bluebell Girl. She begins in Milan as a rookie dancer on a bare stage with seventeen other dancers, a pianist, a drummer, and a choreographer. Over the next five exhausting weeks of rehearsals, she witnesses the creation of a polished show—a show in which over the next seven months, as a member of the company, she would tour every inch of Italy and Sicily.
Elizabeth, now in her eighties, tells her story with both candor and humor. It’s a tale of camaraderie and occasional strife, lots of glamour, even more hard work, and sometimes boredom, all while taking an excursion that most twenty-year-old women in 1960 could have only dreamed of.
Release date: September 28, 2021
Memoir, Biography, Dance/The Arts
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
The Lifetimes of a Journey
“My experience with unconditional love has included finding it, losing it, grieving over it, searching again for it, and ultimately discovering that I’ve had it within me all the time. I believe that each of us has it in us all the time … although it just may be out of sight.”
Through a series of personal reflections and short stories, author John Davis will lead you on an expedition toward an intentionally bold pursuit of presence, deeper compassion, and the ultimate acceptance and awareness of unconditional love, both for yourself and for others.
This book will meet you where you are in your own journey of dealing with loss, grief, or self-acceptance. The author knows what it’s like to have loved, to have lost, and how it can seem there is no way forward. Join him on a journey to turn ordinary life into a life in which unconditional love takes the lead. And discover that, although a fully conscious and present life may seem to be out of sight, it is within reach.
Release date: October 12, 2021
Memoir, Biography
Hardcover Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
Eric Hoffer Awards Grand Prize Short-List, First Horizon, and Montaigne Medal, Finalist
every grain of sand
From the time he was a little boy, David Wichman dreamed of traveling the world, all the while incarcerated in his own bedroom. After years of beatings and neglect, he escapes to the safety of foster care at age fourteen. Though he finds respite and a sense of belonging with his foster families, he ends up aging out of foster care and homeless on the streets of San Francisco.
A blackout alcoholic and drug addict, David takes to sex work to survive, finding support in transgender street workers, gay hustlers, drug dealers, hookers, and misfits of all kinds. He seeks refuge in homeless shelters and stands in food lines at local churches, occasionally finding temporary office jobs, only to return to his squalid hotel room on San Francisco’s Skid Row. He tries repeatedly to escape the snares of crystal meth addiction, only to end up relapsing again and again, finally resorting to white-collar crime to pay for his habit. After a stint in jail, his life pivots sharply in September of 2004, and he finds his way to freedom from addiction. His spiritual journey gifts him with inner peace and an abiding gratitude for the wonder of his own existence.
David’s story is not merely about recovery from addiction—it’s for anyone trapped in loneliness and limiting beliefs about their worthiness. His story illuminates the shame and self-loathing that plagues communities across all demographics and socioeconomic lines and seeks to liberate our minds and hearts to give and receive love. Everyone needs freedom from shame—especially the self-destructive and often deadly shame of complex sexual experiences, traumas, and desires. The essence of every individual is whole, pure, and beloved. When we wake up from the illusion that we’re broken and begin to live from this incorruptible place of being, we heal, we find peace, and we begin to live out our purpose.
Release date: March 10, 2020
Memoir, Biography
Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook, and eBook
From Mad Man to Happy Farmer
An Asset-Based Thinker’s look back at the lessons learned from a lifetime in marketing to help guide, motivate and inspire the industry’s next generation of responsible leaders. A communications industry veteran, Hank Wasiak’s professional journey took him to and through the corporate boardrooms of the ad world’s biggest names. He learned from the best in the business to become the best in the business.
From the beginning Hank also made time for his second career, teaching marketing communications. He’s taught at six universities and been in the classroom with successive next generations of marketers for almost fifty years. For the past ten years, Hank has been an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
In 2003, Hank was Vice Chairman of the world’s largest marketing communications company, McCann-Erickson. He was unexpectedly pushed into early retirement. Hank went on to partner with his son at Concept Farm, Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year Winner. The move heralded his exit from a “had-to” career and his entree into the “want-to” work he had always longed for. At the Farm, Hank has been blessed with more meaningful work, productivity, personal fulfillment, determination, confidence, and humility than he could ever have imagined. This is his inspiring story of how he moved from the boardroom to the “barnyard,” what he learned about life and marketing along the way, and what he wants future marketers to know about the power and purpose of what they do.
Release date: January 5, 2021
Biography / Business / Marketing
Paperback, Kindle, and eBook
Detached: a memoir
“Many times in dysfunctional families, children and their children often take the easy way out and follow the examples set by their parents. I chose the hard path; the painful one; the one that broke the cycle of insanity and abuse. It ended with me.”
–Bridgette Pearce
In a world where the nuclear family is considered to be a husband, wife, and two kids in a house with a white picket fence, Bridgette Pearce’s childhood was anything but that Norman Rockwellian image. She was the only child of a woman who bore her as a single, unwed, 17-year-old child herself. The boy in the equation was nonexistent in Jeannie Allan’s life and in her daughter Bridgette’s, and Jeannie coped in the only way she knew how: By falling prey to substance and alcohol abuse while falling for men who took advantage of her kind heart and also abused her because of it. In Detached: A Memoir, Bridgette recounts her childhood as the parent figure in a mother-daughter relationship and how she grew up too quickly for her age and missed out on the experiences that most children enjoy. From her unique perspective of having to fend for herself, resulting in full emancipation from her mother when Bridgette was only thirteen years old, Bridgette details her young adulthood and achievements. Not only did she graduate from high school two years earlier than her peers, Bridgette graduated from the University of Maryland and went on to become a successful executive at The United Way of Central Maryland while raising a happy, healthy family of her own.
Conceived to help others by assuring them that they’re not alone and helping them navigate through difficult relationships, Detached: A Memoir is a mesmerizing book that will attract a wide audience.
Release date: June 16, 2020
Memoir, Biography
Paperback, Kindle, and eBook
A Daughter to Many
Andrea June was given up by her family for adoption before she was two years old. Andrea was introduced to a family that already had two boys, one of them being severely disabled. Despite Andrea’s poor health, this young family adopted her, and changed her name to Kari Ellen.
Growing up was very difficult for Kari. She wasn’t exactly the daughter her new mom hoped to have. Her father sexually abused her. By the time she was thirteen, her parents sent her away.
Peniel Christian School, a non-profit ministry, accepted troubled children from across the country and from every walk of life, ranging from criminal gang members to others simply with ADHD. This was Kari’s home for the next five years.
Living on a seventy-seven acre farm in rural Wisconsin with forty other children promised many adventures. It was at Peniel that Kari accepted Jesus as her Savior, and saw her need to forgive her dad.
Years later, Kari met her husband Drew in Nashville, Tennessee. Since they wanted to have children, researching her family history became a priority. The startling information they uncovered changed her life forever.
God’s hand was surely at work . . . He had plans for her future.
1st Edition Release date: April 30, 2019
2nd Edition Released Sept. 2022
Memoir
Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle and eBook
Unbound Feet
There is no way that thirteen-year-old wallflower me could conceive of a day when I would dance—voluntarily—in the halftime show of the Chinese University Basketball Association championship that was broadcast to millions of people. But I did.
My memoir Unbound Feet: Finding Freedom in Communist China chronicles this miraculous transformation.
Teaching at an international university in Henan Province comes with perks and drawbacks. The college was a major draw for foreigners from around the world expanding my worldview with each new cultural interaction. One of my favorite things was that no one there knew me from the U.S., so I was able to work out being the person I wanted to be without any preconceived notions.
I took the time to re-examine all aspects of my life: relationships, faith, and expectations. The journey wasn't always smooth and sometimes I felt as if I was moving backward, but I was better and stronger for the experience.
When I left China in 2011, I was ready to restart my life in the United States. However, I wasn't ready to give up the lessons I'd learned or the freedom I'd attained while living there.
While I haven't danced as much since returning stateside, every now and then the spirit moves me and this former wallflower can bust a move.
Release date: February 2, 2021
Memoir / Christian Faith
Paperback, Kindle, and eBook
FACING THE ELEPHANTS
Facing the Elephants, the personal memoir by Rebecca Black, explores her past trauma, on-going health issues including dying three times, and ending with her elective double mastectomy after finding out she had the BRCA1 gene. Through it all, she finds peace and spiritual connection with an elephant family while volunteering at the zoo.
This is Rebecca’s first book and we anxiously await her sophomore release.
Release date: February 12, 2019
Memoir
Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
the Unbelievable Life of a Country Boy
A slice of life from the Depression Era through WWII to present day–Peter Jack Newton’s story in his own words.
A massive time of change was the consistent theme of the Twentieth Century. Those born early in the period either suffered through its financial crashes, major wars around the globe, and advances in science, travel, and knowledge or they embraced it with all its trauma, tragedy, and anxieties to rise above the fray and finish life at the end of the century with gusto and humble appreciation for the journey. Peter Jack was not only born in such a time but also FOR such a time!
From the beginning, he found joy in a childhood fraught with the struggles of survival on a poor Southern farm, the youngest of eleven surviving children led by his widowed mother through the dark depression. Despite his poverty and brandishing his newfound entrepreneurial spirit, he entered college in search of his lofty goals, but WWII proved to be another potential obstacle.
However, his indomitable spirit and his strong desire to achieve no matter the adversity carried him into and through the toughest of life’s challenges. His life so simple, his accomplishments so great, and his faith so strong brought him, at age eighty-nine to pen his story for his posterity in written words that, to those who knew him, sound just as he spoke. And now, the greatest joy of all belongs not to just his offspring, but to all readers as well!
Release date: June 09, 2020
Memoir, Biography
Paperback, eBook, and Kindle
Here’s Your Pill, Kitten!
A biting, bittersweet, uproarious recovery adventure reveals truths about nursing homes and the opioid crisis.
When S.M. Kelly suffers a freak accident near Central Park and shatters her femur, at first, she figures “It’s early…we can still make dinner and Kinky Boots tonight,” as an ambulance hurtles her toward the hospital. The complex, 4-hour surgery results in a 9-inch titanium plate and seven pins embedded in Kelly’s leg, and her humorless surgeon, Dr. Swarthy Unibrow, orders three months’ recovery in a nursing home. Here’s Your Pill, Kitten! is a true story of recovery, discovery, and survival. Kelly’s vibrant, cheeky storytelling is reminiscent of the biting prose of Postcards from the Edge, Orange is the New Black and American Horror Story rolled into one. She has frightening, bittersweet, yet often hilarious interactions as the youngest patient amongst her eccentric neighbors that include the Capo, Sly Norman and Vito-One-Eye. The youthful staff that includes Nurse Margo from Fargo and Jill the Pill inadvertently fling aside the privacy curtain to expose nursing home conditions from both patients’ and nurses’ perspectives. It’s generally not pretty. Kelly masterfully describes the mental and physical challenges of maintaining a full-time executive job while learning to walk again and live as a mobility-challenged person; all within the madhouse of staff in-fighting, rampant opioid availability, and unpredictable, potentially dangerous patient outbursts.
Release date: October 06, 2020
Humor / Memoir
Paperback, Kindle, and eBook
The Ruining of Lemus Daniel
The early 1960s in Springdale, Arkansas, were colorful to young Larry Daniel in spite of the all-white upbringing the town had provided him. He’d thought he was rich growing up. His dad flew him around in his personal airplane to resort locations. A ski boat, tickets on the fifty-yard line at Razorback Stadium, and a membership at the country club were some of the other benefits of his childhood.
His father, Lemus Daniel, was a successful businessman, and famous musicians among others were a part of his inner circle. He was fun-loving, popular, and generous, but deeply lacking in impulse control and far too trusting for his own good. Turning 11 for the son brought an introduction to women that weren’t his mother and alcohol, a coming-of-age ritual. The fast lane had his father blinded to what was important, which helped get him set up for a big fall from someone that he’d considered a friend.
When everything went down it was without a soft landing. After word had been passed down from the top, Lemus had suddenly drawn the ire of a rogue cop with a grudge. He was effectively smeared and eventually run out of town. Set adrift, the boy was doomed to fail.
At 15, Larry was kicked out of school, roughed up by his dad who’d returned to set him straight, and ran away from home. Walking the streets of a neighboring town among other runaways and returning war veterans, he experimented with substances and panhandled for spare change. Many months later, he was retrieved by his notorious father and brought home after he’d returned from his own exile. After father and son reunite, a perilous walk on the dark edges of society, follow. It would be another decade before Larry Daniel took an honest breath and began the road to redemption.
Ugly truths reveal a young man who struggles mightily, but survives and contributes to society in a big way. Meanwhile, the father writes a tell-all about his downfall and the Feds get involved. Parts of his manuscript are included in the story of this wild ride.
Release date: March 3, 2020
Memoir, Biography
Paperback, Kindle, and eBook