July 2024 – WordServe Water Cooler

One benefit of summer is that we have more light to read by.

Our highlights below include new releases, contracts signed, notable reviews and PR events, new authors to the agency and other news of note by clients and agents.

New Releases

Congratulations to Kelsey Scism and Bethany House Publishers for the July 31, 2024 release of One Year with Jesus: A Weekly Devotional Journal for Middle School Girls.

Every girl’s guide to discovering who you truly are in Jesus

Being a middle school girl is . . . a lot. It seems like every day presents a new challenge as you navigate friendship, crushes, girl drama, stress, school, and confusing emotions.

One Year with Jesus is your guide for dealing with the stuff that life is throwing at you right now. Think of this devotional journal as a safe space where you can get real with God–and where God can bring you the peace and comfort you need.

Inside this book you’ll find:

· 52 devotions to help you apply God’s Word when life gets messy–one for every week of the year
· Reflection questions to help you grow closer to Jesus
· Journaling space so you can be honest with God about how you feel

These early teen years can be really hard–but they can also be really beautiful. Because it’s here that God shapes the girl you once were into the woman he created you to be.

Congratulations to Christopher Izant and Diversion Books for the August 13, 2024 release of Final Engagement: A Marine’s Last Mission and the Surrender of Afghanistan.

Through a deadly last showdown beside Afghan forces fighting the Taliban, Marine Corps veteran Christopher Izant illustrates the impossible conditions and strategic blunders that disillusioned a generation of American warriors and all but guaranteed defeat.

They were stepping into a world of hidden minefields, cultural clashes, “green-on-blue” insider attacks, and a patient, relentless enemy. But Christopher Izant and the Marines on his team volunteered to train and fight alongside the Afghan National Security Forces despite the risks and a seemingly futile mission they would term “advise and abandon” made by policymakers a world away.

Final Engagement embeds readers with then-Lieutenant Izant and his team of combat advisors at Combat Outpost Taghaz during one of Operation Enduring Freedom’s most crucial and challenging campaigns. It was 2012, southern Helmand Province, and with fixed base-closure and withdrawal timelines, the Marines had only six months to sustain the hard-won victories of the infantry units and prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. But before Border Advisory Team 1 lay down arms, there would be one last deadly battle with a devastating aftermath.

Izant relives a fight in the Afghan borderlands that forebode the fall of Kabul nearly a decade later and confronts the violence and anguish that transformed a generation of American and Afghan warriors from idealist volunteers for a just war to disillusioned veterans of a lost cause.

Contracts

Angela Herrington signed with Broadleaf Books for the December 2025 release of Beware the Old Witch in the Woods.

Lisa Colón DeLay signed with Broadleaf Books for the February 2026 release of Enticed.

What We’re Cellebratiing

Congratulations to Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Their WWII novel, The Long March Home, won International Book Award.

Summer reading shouldn’t be only for kids but also for adults. Books go hand in hand with beachy weather and bright skies .

Our highlights below include new releases, contracts signed, notable reviews and PR events, new authors to the agency and other news of note by clients and agents.

New Releases

Congratulations to Jennifer Strickland and Regnery Faith Publishing for the June 11, 2024 release of I Am a Woman: Taking Back Our Name.

It’s time for women to reclaim what makes them uniquely female and affirm God’s breathtaking design for womanhood.

“Wake up!” cries Jennifer Strickland in this bracing call to women. With womanhood itself under a withering cultural attack, this is no time for Christians to stand teary-eyed on the sidelines.

Men are invading women’s sports and even bathrooms, while schools indoctrinate children in lies about gender fluidity. The assault of insanity on reality took normal women by surprise, but we can’t waste another minute in fighting back.

Our culture needs an answer to transgenderism, pornography, sexual violence, and the lies that are crippling our young women and robbing them of their dignity We cannot abdicate our responsibility to the next generation. It is up to women who fear God to restore the true meaning of our name.

Women have had enough. And now it’s time to rise up as emboldened warriors to declare the truth against the gender-bending culture’s lies.

Jennifer Strickland, a podcaster, author, and former model, is calling women to use their influence to expose the lies of gender ideology and point children and teens back to God’s beautiful design for male and female.

In I Am a Woman, Strickland calls Christians to uphold the dignity of womanhood with clarity and compassion. She urges readers to cherish the power imbedded in the name “Woman”—because women are not undefinable. The name “Woman” means guardian, rescuer, advocate, protector, and life-bearer. Women must reclaim their name and reject any agenda that diminishes the dignity of sex and gender for future generations—before it’s too late.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Felicetti and Samantha Vicent-Alexander and Eerdmans Publishing for the July 2, 2024 release of Irreverent Prayers: Talking to God When You’re Seriously Sick.

Two pastors share their experiences with serious illness—and their candid, darkly humorous prayers for making it through.

Samantha Vincent-Alexander almost died from a septic leg infection. Elizabeth Felicetti underwent aggressive treatment for both breast and lung cancer in the space of a few months—and then the cancer came back. As Episcopal priests, they know well the typical prayers offered in times like these. But when you’re seriously sick, you need more than psalms and sentimentality.

You need to tell God how you really feel.

With vulnerability and wry humor, Felicetti and Vincent-Alexander share the prayers they wish they had when they were ill: thanksgiving for one-size-fits-all hospital underwear, curses against Tylenol, frustrated appeals when well-wishers call you brave or inspiring. At once faithful and brutally honest, these prayers offer readers a more candid way of communicating with the God who understands human suffering with an incarnational intimacy.

Talking to God when you’re fighting serious illness can feel impossible. But God can bear our doubt, anger, anxiety, and grief. This unconventional prayerbook helps readers access a deeper relationship with God in raw times—and offers them a place of solidarity and spiritual rest.

Congratulations to John A Dailey and Knox Press for the August 13, 2024 release of Tough Rugged Bastards: A Memoir of a Life in Marine Special Operations.

Tough, Rugged Bastards is the memoir of an ordinary guy who seized an extraordinary opportunity to become one of the most elite warfighters in America during the most volatile times in the Global War on Terror.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed the Marine Corps to establish a unit that would answer to US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The eighty-six-man “Detachment One” was formed with a two-year charter to train and deploy as a “proof-of-concept” to assess the viability of a larger Marine Special Operations contribution in support of the Global War on Terror.

For such a departure from the norm, a special leader was needed. The Commanding Officer—Colonel Robert J. Coates, a Marine Force Recon legend—was given his pick of personnel. One of the four team leaders he selected was Gunnery Sergeant John A. Dailey. Coates gave Dailey and the others free rein to select their men from a crew of proven Force Recon Marines with the sole stipulation that they be: “Tough, rugged bastards with strong backs and hard feet.”

These men built a unit from nothing, trained for unknown missions in an unknown location, and deployed amid controversy and skepticism. Once in Iraq, they were dubbed “Task Unit Raider” and quickly won over the naysayers who doubted the Marine’s ability to operate successfully in the fluid and unconventional special operations environment.

This book tells Dailey’s story of the creation, training, and volatile 2004 Iraq deployment of Task Unit Raider that led to the creation of the Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC). Det-1 served as the bridge between the Raiders of WWII and the Marine Raiders of today.

Contracts

Shannon Evans with Eric Clayton signed with Paulist Press for the June 2025 release of Our Mother Too: The World Embraces Mary.

Courtney Ellis signed with InterVarsity Press for the February 2026 release of Weathering Change.

New Clients

Noelle Mering, Gretchen Hammond, Julie Belshe, and Dr. Angela Kaye Love recently signed with WordServe. Welcome!

What We’re Celebrating

Congratulations to Carolyn Leiloglou and Katie Powner. Their books – Beneath the Swirling Sky by Carolyn Leiloglou and The Wind Blows in the Sleeping Grass by Katie Powner won Selah Awards under the categories of “Middle Grade Novels” and “General Fiction”