Michael J. Bowler

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2016 Fall YA Scavenger Hunt

September 24, 2016 By Michael J. Bowler 4 Comments

ya_scavengerhunt_webbannerhalloween team-purple

purple-team-yash-fall-20168

NOTE: This is NOT the official Hunt Post – the Official post about Jennifer Jenkins is dated October 4th.

Michael J. Bowler and SPINNER are part of Team Purple. I’m so excited to be part of my first scavenger hunt. Yay for purple! Hunt runs from October 4-9. Keep reading so you can play the game. Have fun and good hunting!

(Content that follows borrowed from YA Scavenger Hunt website.)

If you have never participated in a YA Scavenger Hunt before than this post is for you.

We are so glad that you have joined us! Hunting is so much fun and I always discover new authors and their books. It’s also fun to get to know each author and have access to exclusive content that each author offers. Oh, and I can’t neglect to mention all the amazing chances at prizes!

HOW DO I PARTICIPATE? WHAT DO I DO? I’M A NEWBIE! HELP!!!

The YA Scavenger Hunt is run twice a year. Once in April and once in October. It runs from Thursday to Sunday. So you have just three full days to participate.

We open author registration 6-8 weeks before each hunt. If you have a favorite YA author, this is the best time to reach out to them through twitter or Facebook or email and encourage them to sign up.

Author registration closes and teams are announced 1-2 weeks before the hunt begins. This gives everyone enough time to get their posts together and we can hopefully work out any kinks beforehand.

On Thursday at noon (pacific time) all authors posts go live and the hunt can begin. Then this is the part where you come in.

  1. Pick a team or a specific author. Start there. Go to their site (we link to each author’s sites here at YA Scavenger Hunt).
  2. Find their YA Scavenger Hunt post. It should be super easy to tell which one it is because it will have our graphic on it.
  3. Read their post which will include an author bio, book info, exclusive content, (not always but in most cases) a giveaway, and a link to another author’s webpage.
  4. Look for a number on the post. This could be big and colored. It could be “you need to know…” It should be pretty easy to figure out which number you need to know. Write this number down.
  5. Click the link at the bottom of the post so you can continue the hunt within that same team.
  6. Repeat steps 2-5 until you have visited all the authors for one team.
  7. Add up the numbers that you collected from all the authors of one team. Visit our ENTER HERE page, find the appropriate Rafflecopter, and submit your entry.
  8. Repeat for every team that you want.
  9. Optionally, watch your TO BE READ list grow and grow.

Need just a bit more help? Here’s a sample scenario. Do not use these numbers for the actual hunt as they are just a sample.

Let’s say Colleen Houck, Tera Lynn Childs, and Beth Revis are all on Team Yellow. I choose to start with Colleen Houck and go to her page. Colleen Houck is hosting Tera Lynn Childs so on Colleen’s page I will find information about Tera Lynn Childs, her book, and her exclusive content. The number I find is 7. The giveaway I will find is hosted by Colleen Houck though so if I enter the giveaway here, I’m entering to win a book from Colleen Houck.

Colleen Houck links to Tera Lynn Childs so I head there next. Tera Lynn Childs is hosting Beth Revis so I get to read about Beth Revis, her book, and her exclusive content. The number I see is 23. If I see a giveaway, this is for something from Tera Lynn Childs.

Tera Lynn Childs links to Beth Revis who is hosting Colleen Houck. I’ll read about Colleen Houck, her book, and her exclusive content with a giveaway by Beth Revis. The number here is 3. The link at the end of the post will go back to Colleen Houck at which point I know I am done with Team Yellow.

I take the three numbers I have collected (7, 23, and 3) and add them together (33). I head to the ENTER HERE page on YA Scavenger Hunt, find the Rafflecopter for Team Yellow and enter the number 33 to be entered to win a book from all three authors on that team.

Last tips and hints!
Not all authors are going to host personal giveaways.
If you can’t find where you should be going, you can always visit our STUCK page for help.
If you need help, you can leave a comment on this site, post on the YA Scavenger Hunt Facebook page, or tweet @YAScavengerHunt on twitter.

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Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: scavenger hunt, Spinner, Team Purple, Teen Lit, YA, YASH

My Series Is Complete

November 12, 2014 By Michael J. Bowler Leave a Comment

Once full cover

My final book is available as of today. Once Upon A Time In America brings The Knight Cycle to a close and will be the last book I have in print for a long time. Children of the Knight was never a stand-alone book, but merely the first of five long chapters spanning four eventful years in the lives of my characters and the country as a whole. Once is the chapter that brings the story of Arthur and Lance and the modern-day Knights of the Round Table to a close, and I hope I ended their journey in a way that satisfies readers and engenders within them the feeling that the series was a worthwhile investment of their time.

It has been a long, often bittersweet journey for me in the writing and publishing of these books, but in the aggregate I am proud of my accomplishment. I feel I have greatly improved as a writer and the books get better as they go along. I’m proud that this series addresses issues that most writers tend to shy away from. I’m proud of the themes and messages that youth can take away from this story. I’m proud that the series is not another knockout of “insert title of popular YA book here,” but stands on its own as an original, unique “world.” It’s our world of today, but rather than make it worse and dystopian as so many writers do, my story offers hope that the world and America can get better, and that young people are the ones who will make it better. To do so, youth need to ignore much of what they’ve been taught by the media and their elders. They must join together and be the change they want to see. They must accept and embrace their superficial differences and work together as human beings first, everything else second. In banding together in this way, the youth in my series bring about profound and positive changes for the entire country, and are outstanding role models for any teens who read about them.

My next blog post will be aimed at those out there who want to be successful authors, especially those who have their first book ready (they think) for publication. I made a lot of mistakes in my attempted journey from writer to author, mistakes I have yet to overcome. Perhaps if I share them with the world at large, other writers will not commit the same errors and will achieve real success.

Writing is difficult and lonely, but also very exciting as the world you envision comes to life on the computer screen before your very eyes. However, going from a writer who has written a story to an author with sufficient readers to make all the time and effort worthwhile is an entirely different story, but it’s really the “big picture,” and in my view what separates a writer from an author.

Because of my mistakes and the fact that self-promotion is an area in which I have zero ability (sadly, no joke there), I have garnered a mere handful of loyal readers. But they are super-loyal and love my series and I love my readers. And I’m grateful to have them. For those readers, and because I always finish what I start, I completed the series and made it available. It is my hope, of course, that word of mouth might eventually bring more people to the story and then those people will bring even more. Writers write so that readers will read, and hopefully enjoy, their work. I am thrilled that those people who have read all five books greatly enjoyed them and loved journeying with the characters, and I thank everyone who has stuck with me along the way.

At present, I have written another novel – a YA horror thriller – that I will shop around. I strongly doubt that it will see the light of day as a published book, but as one of the main themes of my Knight Cycle asserts, hope endures. The writing business is tough. I don’t make claims to being a great writer, but I think I’m a good storyteller. However, my opinion doesn’t count. LOL The marketplace determines the success or failure of any piece of art (I’m greatly stretching the meaning of that word to include my books – Ha!), so time will tell if The Knight Cycle will ever catch on with the reading public, especially the youth for whom it is intended.

My book writing journey ends for the time being alongside the journey of Arthur and Lance. However, I will now, hopefully, write more posts for this blog since Sir Lance tells me he’s lonely all the time. HaHa! The next post will be centered around the mistakes I made on my road to becoming an author and then, who knows? I will, of course, work hard to interest an agent or publisher in my new book and if, by some miracle it gets picked up for publication, I’ll be thrilled and grateful. But I won’t expect that to happen. False expectations in any avenue of life can be deadly. I’ve learned a valuable lesson from the many incarcerated kids I’ve worked with over the decades: hope for the best, but expect the worst. Sadly, that’s how our juvenile justice system works – the worst usually prevails. Success in the highly competitive world of book publishing is so not different.

However, hope endures…

Amazon link to Once Upon A Time In America is below.

http://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-In-America/dp/099087110X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1415807221&sr=1-3

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Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: African American, book series, children's rights, Constitutional amendments, diversity, hope endures, inner city, Latino, LGBT, Native American, politics, Teen Lit, youth empowerment, youth leadership

Does Word Count or Storytelling Matter More To Readers?

October 20, 2014 By Michael J. Bowler 13 Comments

check-word-count-one-word-less-than-word-limit

How long is too long for a novel? According to everything I read from “experts” online, a novel is defined as between 50,000 and 110,000 words, with 100,000 often the upper limit of word count that an agent or publisher will even consider for publication.

For Young Adult novels, the upper end of the word count is defined as 80,000, with 70,000 or less preferred. Anything over 80,000 words is considered “too long” to engage teen or young adult readers.

Here’s my question to you, the reading community – do you consider word count before you embark on a new book, or do you select books because the story sounds interesting and/or you like the cover art?

For myself as a reader, I love long books if the story and characters are engaging. I do not like extraneous detail that adds to the word count and detracts from the story. By “extraneous” I mean describing in extreme detail what each character is wearing each and every time he or she appears on the page, or describing what paintings are hanging on the walls or other unnecessary setting details. If such information is intrinsic to the plot or essential to understanding a character, it’s fine as long as it’s not overdone. Most of the time, however, authors simply “indulge” themselves.

As an example, I know people love the Song of Ice and Fire series, but I cannot get through them. I read two and a half books, very slowly and sporadically, I might add, while simultaneously reading other books that I found more appealing, and then finally gave up. Besides the constant brutality, especially towards children and teens, the author spends far too much time describing things I don’t care about. What Circe chooses to wear in every single scene is not important – a general description in a few words suffices to create an image in my mind. I do not need paragraph upon paragraph of descriptive detail when that detail does nothing to move the story forward.

Digital printing of paperback books is not very expensive. I know this because I have self-published books and my novels have better covers and formatting than many works from large publishing houses. That’s my opinion, of course, but I find the finished products to be stunning and completely professional.

It seems to me that the word count numbers used nowadays by agents and publishers reflect the overall “dumbing down” philosophy of media in general. I feel insulted that these people equate me with someone who only watches television or other “short-attention span” media. Readers, by definition, have longer attention spans and like being engaged with the printed page (or even the digital one.) I know people are busy these days and life is more complicated, but as a reader I love to be involved with characters I care about no matter how long the journey is, or how many words the author needs to finish the story. Some books have a lot of characters and plot – I’m very guilty of this – and thus require a higher word count to give both the story and the characters justice.

So here are my questions, and I welcome your comments and opinions – do you as readers only want short books, or does the quality of the writing and the complexity of the plot matter more? Do teens and young adult readers only want short books with simplistic plots and only a few characters to keep track of? Are readers incapable of following long stories with involved plotlines? Does word count matter more than storytelling?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Michael+J.+Bowler&search-alias=books&text=Michael+J.+Bowler&sort=relevancerank

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Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: book length, cohesive plots, storytelling, strong characters, Teen Lit, word count for novels

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