A Series of Interviews on How to be Successful Advertising on Social Media.
Mike can be reached on Facebook and Instagram. On Twitter, he’s @avalon_landing, which is a JD Salinger reference in Finding Forrester. His advice for social media in a nutshell is, “Share insights. Don’t just ask for a sale.”
Mike is a well-known screenwriter with some incredible credits to his name — Finding Forrester, The Rookie, Radio, Secretariat, and Cars 3. He also did a “Sesame Street not-like-the-others”: The Nativity Story, which he laughed about in good humor.
His first book, Skavenger’s Hunt was just released as an e-book and is now available in paper book form as of November 14th. It is a YA novel about a 12 year old who travels back to 1885 New York City and participates in the original scavenger hunt. The adventure helps him come to terms with the death of his father. This book can be found in bookstores and on social media, all of which ports back to Inkshares for purchase, as noted in above.
Mike reads daily, and it’s a 50/50 mix of nonfiction and fiction. He has an innate desire to learn, so that’s important in whatever he reads, but he has no favorite genre. In nonfiction, he is currently enjoying the history of the Nez Perce people. He grew up in Enterprise, Oregon, so he has a personal interest as well as an intellectual one. He reads a hybrid of e-books and paper books, and when he reads an e-book, he uses his Kindle exclusively, because there is no chance of distractions from emails, posts, etc. like on an iPad. His routine is to write in the morning and read in the evening. He used to read in bed, but these days he has a chair by the fire with a lamp, which sounds very cozy.
Growing up, influential books for Mike were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis, and The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Later, he enjoyed Hemingway’s Ghost by Layton Green, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, and Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Online, he follows a lot of news sources, like the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Bill Maher. He also enjoys sports news sources. He doesn’t mind getting an email from an author every ten days to two weeks, but it has to be good stuff and a variety of stuff. Other types of updates, such as on Twitter, need to be limited to every few days, as he finds daily to be fatiguing and he will start to ignore it.
Mike’s advice for a website was for me to include spotlight videos where he could learn more about the science and origins/inspiration for my novel in video form with me as a voiceover. He says that is a great way for me to show my passion and interests and will help readers connect. He’d suggest I focus on the science in general, as he’ll feel like he can learn something. Whatever your strength is, use that is your focus. People want to learn about you as a person, as it lets them connect with your book.
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