Author: Dalan Decker

What if you had to save the world by solving a series of puzzles?  That’s the challenge – and responsibility – Peter and his friends face in this exciting children’s novel, written by PJ Nichols.  After being recruited by a mysterious old man with an unbelievable story, the children are launched into an adventure beyond their wildest dreams.  The challenge: Perfectly solve a series of dangerous puzzles or watch as the entire world falls into chaos.  Each puzzle is harder than the last, and there’s no starting over!  Puzzled is the first book in the Puzzled Series.  The second book, Really Puzzled has already been released.  The audiobook of Puzzled is planned for a November release, and will be made available on Audible and other retail sites.

From the book blurb:

Peter, an exceptionally clever junior high school kid, is pulled into an adventure where he and a few friends have to solve a series of very challenging riddles and puzzles. Peter’s mind, which has an amazing talent for problem-solving, is needed to save the world.

This adventure sure is a big change from what Peter typically deals with in life: He gets called geek and nerd by everyone in the cool group. He tries to hide his love for learning, in a hope to stick out a little less. He fantasizes about a girl who is out of his league.

Peter and his friends must solve every confusing riddle and challenging puzzle they face. If they can’t, a powerful supernatural being will cause immense destruction and devastation…

Shelve under:

• mystery books for teens
• mystery books for kids 9-12
• adventure books for teens
• adventure books for girls
• adventure books for boys
• chapter books for kids age 9-12
• chapter books for kids age 8-10
• intermediate readers
• solving mysteries
• solving riddles
• kids suspense books

This book is ideal for fans of:

• A to Z Mysteries
• Ballpark Mysteries
• Boxcar Children
• Captain Underpants
• Crime Travelers
• Dog Man
• Encyclopedia Brown
• Epic Zero
• Hardy Boys
• Harry Potter
• The Last Kids on Earth
• Trapped in a Video Game

“Hospitality is a challenging industry, but I love it,” writes F.H. Benzakour in his book, 12 Golden Keys to Hospitality Excellence.  Manager and CEO of some of the toniest golf courses in the United States, Benzakour’s book is aimed to help new leaders in the hospitality industry grow their teams, their resorts, and their profitability – with heart.  “One of the most important traits of winning leaders is their dedication to helping others evolve and advance by inspiring, enabling, mentoring, and training them,” he writes.  And he has done just that, in over half a dozen golf resorts.  Benzakour has won numerous awards and distinctions, including being named Top Private Club President/Manager of the Year by BoardRoom Magazine in both 2010 and 2011, and being named as one of the 20 Most Admired Golf Operators in the World by Golf, Inc., in 2009.

SoundFridge was proud to produce the audiobook edition of this important business book.  It is slated for release on Audible.com and iTunes for later this month.

An immigrant story, driven to success

Benzakour’s story is one that inspires as it teaches.  An immigrant from Morocco, he moved to the USA as an adult with a dream to work in the hospitality industry.  As a busy father and husband, he finished his post-graduate studies at the prestigious school of hospitality at Cornell University – widely regarded to be the best in the world.  He has spent 25 years taking some of the most well-known golf resorts on the East Coast of the USA from the red to profitability.

Benzakour believes that golf resorts, like all businesses, have a duty to be more than money makers.  “Holding a golf outing to raise money for research for a cure for a killing disease, or raising money for the families who lost a loved one on September 11, or to raise funds for a family who just lost a child to suicide, so they can pay the funeral expenses. Those are the best times in the hospitality industry—when we can come together to help one another. I really enjoy doing what I do because of special days like that,” he writes.  He recalls a heartwarming story after Hurricane Sandy in New York.  He opened his golf resort to the community so they could “come in and take hot showers, recharge their phones, and eat hot meals—since the food we had in the refrigerators wasn’t spoiled, due to the big generator we had at the time.”

Benzakour’s twelve strategic, eye-opening approaches, include these and more:

• Over-Invest In People
• Celebrate Diversity
• Be A Student of the Obvious
• Be A Master of Game Theory
• Swim In Blue Oceans
• The Pareto Principle
• Innovate or Die

By employing these twelve dynamic game plans within the 12 Golden Keys to Hospitality Excellence, managers will advance to being winners in the hospitality industry.

İngilizce Konu Anlatımı, or English Lecture Hall, is a widely popular YouTube channel that shares humorous English instruction.  It is one of the most popular English-language teaching tools in Turkey.  SoundFridge is pleased to announce a deal with İngilizce Konu Anlatımı to produce the narration for their next series of 38 educational videos.  The web program is produced and hosted by Özer Kiraz, an English teacher who is well known in his country and among the Turkish diaspora for his lighthearted English-instruction books.

Kiraz’ latest video series will focus on practicing the use of phrasal verbs, also known as separable prefix verbs.  These verbs are common in English and many European languages such as German and Dutch, but can be confusing for people who speak other languages.  An example of a sentence using a phrasal verb would be “You have to do this homework over.”  Mastering this rather non-intuitive verb presentation is key to sounding natural when one is speaking informal English.

A sample:

From Maid to Duchess by up-and-coming independent author Regina James is a sweet retelling of the classic Cinderella tale.  Following Evelyn, a kind-hearted orphan who lives in 19th-century London with her overly-ambitious stepmother, the story is a moving romance about the power of love to heal broken hearts – and homes.  Will she capture the heart of the Duke of Langley, a tragic widower and doting father of twins who has vowed never to love again?

From Maid to Duchess is a clean romance in the second-chance romance category.  It is SoundFridge’s second novel (after The Ghost Factory)  and the first romance title that I have produced.  A private collaboration, audiobook distribution is to be announced.

Originally published in the Republic of Korea, See, Hear, and Feel! is a charming children’s picture book that gives a quick tour of the human body by comparing it to familiar animals.  Children learn that we smell with our nose, but a dog smells 1000 times better, or that we touch our mothers’ faces with our skin, and the skin is the largest organ in the body!

Lerner Press, an educational publisher in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is publishing the book by arrangement with big and SMALL Publishing.  They produced the original book in collaboration with the department of education of Chungcheongnam-do Province in South Korea for use in public schools.  The book was written by by Min-ji Jeong with illustrations by Joo-yun Lee.  Editing of the English edition was provided by Joy Cowley.

Sample audio from book

(© 2018, Lerner Press and big and SMALL, used by permission)

SoundFridge is honored to partner with Lerner Press in this new audiobook.  This is SoundFridge’s third collaboration with this client.  The two previous titles were We Are Brothers by Da-yun Oh and Nicknames by Cecil Kim, both also published in the US market by big and SMALL.

This week, SoundFridge delivered its 200th project to China.  Puerto Rico business daily News Is My Business picked up the story, celebrating the milestone and giving background on the company.  This is a tremendous milestone and is the first time SoundFridge has received media attention.  To see the news story, click here.

News Is My Business is a locally-produced English-language business news magazine.  It is a member of the Dow Jones News Wire.  Published daily, it keeps tabs on all the important developments in the economy of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean regionally.  It also recently launched a podcast, Dollar$ and Cent$.

Thanks to Michelle Kantrow-Vázquez, Editor of News Is My Business, for helping SoundFridge celebrate an important growth point in this business!

SoundFridge continues to grow as I was invited to join the team of professional audio book producers at Archieboy.  This company works with publishers and rights holders to create audio books that will be sold on Audible.com.  This is a significant step forward for SoundFridge and will open up whole new kinds of possibilities.

Archieboy produces about 50 audio books per month.  They identify projects with good sales potential, then hire audio book actors directly to produce them.  This approach is a little different than the revenue-share model that is used on ACX.  It helps rights holders avoid the frustration of getting low-quality auditions for revenue share projects (as we’ve talked about here), while allowing audio book actors to eliminate their risk exposure for accepting them.

Thanks to Bo Benent, PhD and the team at Archieboy Audiobook Production!  Here’s looking forward to a fruitful partnership.

Big projects often take months to come together, and Exceptional Wealth by Mark Tepper, CFP^® was one of those projects.  I’m pleased to announce that the audio book of Exceptional Wealth is now available on Audible.com.

The project started back in November of 2017, not long after Hurricane María hit us here in Puerto Rico.  Mark’s team approached me about producing the “funnel audio” for his previous book, Walk Away Wealthy.  Based on his long career in the wealth management community, Mark penned that book to help owners of businesses with the arduous and complicated task of preparing their businesses for sale.  

With the lights off that day, I cranked up our little generator “Bruce” and produced the first two sections of Walk Away Wealthy.  Then we drove to San Patricio Mall in Guaynabo, where I used the WiFi to send it in.  I could not sleep that night.  This was such a huge potential project!

We were watching a Frasier re-run a few weeks later when I heard back from Mark’s audio book guy, Nathan García of Mavrik.  They informed me that they had another project in the pipeline.  Would I be interested in producing an entire book?  Would I!??

And again, time passed.

Then in December, they sent me the audition script for Exceptional Wealth.  For the entire book!  I was so excited my voice actually shook when I sat down to record.  Mark Tepper is a well-known voice in the wealth management and investment community.  He manages one of the biggest wealth management firms in the United States, Strategic Wealth Partners.  You see him on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and Fox Business segments all the time.  To land this gig would be a huge coup for SoundFridge, not to mention a shot of confidence.  I didn’t know how long it would take to hear back, but I recorded the audition and sent it back.

As I’ve come to understand since then, big important projects take a long time to work through the process.  (At the moment, I’m experiencing the same with the previously-announced The Heart of Things.)  There are a lot of stakeholders and people looking at the project.  Each step of the way, professionals examine the work.  They request tweaks and re-takes.  I finished the initial recording sometime in mid-February of 2018.  Since then, there have been a few back and forths.  I’m used to the work flow of working with independent authors.   A quick e-mail, maybe an audition, the purchase, and then the delivery.  Tweaks are taken care of on the fly.  Both ways are great, but my type-A personality wants to do things now, now, now, yesterday!

And now, it’s live on Audible!  There’s a sweet satisfaction in knowing that I was able to produce a project that is in the “big leagues.”  My thanks to Mark Tepper and his production staff including Nathan García for choosing me and my modest talent.  Good luck as you get Exceptional Wealth out there.  If CNBC wants to do a segment Mark, I’m available!

I’m pleased to announce our biggest deal yet.  After a round of auditions and some nail biting, today we closed the deal to produce The Heart of Things by John Hildebrand for Audible.com.   The Heart of Things is a series of essays about his experiences traveling the Midwest, written with gentle humor reminiscent of EB White.  The book is published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

John Hildebrand is a well-known author and former editor of Wisconsin Trails Magazine and a radio host on Wisconsin Public Radio.  He has written for Harper’s, Audubon, Sports Illustrated, and has two previous nonfiction books to his credit.  His book Mapping the Farm received high praise in The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Times.  He has also been awarded a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, the BANTA Award from the Wisconsin Literary Association, and a Friends of American Writers Literary Award.

SoundFridge is honored to partner with Wisconsin Historical Society Press to bring this latest book to Audible.

FROM THE BOOK JACKET:

“I’ve never believed that living in one place means being one thing all the time, condemned like Minnie Pearl to wear the same hat for every performance. Life is more complicated than that.”

In this remarkable book of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings—home, town, countryside—of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life: church suppers, Friday night football, outdoor weddings, garden compost, family reunions, roadside memorials, camouflage clothing. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn’t The Land Time Forgot but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means. From his home range in northwestern Wisconsin, Hildebrand attempts to do just that by boiling down a calendar year to its rich marrow of weather, animals, family, home—in other words, all the things that matter