Welcome to YA Scavenger Hunt! This bi-annual event was first organized by author Colleen Houck as a way to give readers a chance to gain access to exclusive bonus material from their favorite authors…and a chance to win some awesome prizes! At this hunt, you not only get access to exclusive content from each author, you also get a clue for the hunt. Add up the clues, and you can enter for our prize–one lucky winner will receive one book from each author on the hunt in my team! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online for 72 hours!
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Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. There are FOUR contests going on simultaneously, and you can enter one or all! I am a part of the PURPLE TEAM (which happens to be my favorite color!)–but there is also a gold team, a red team, and a blue team for a chance to win a whole different set of books!

If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page.

SCAVENGER HUNT PUZZLE
 
Directions: Below, you’ll notice that I’ve listed my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on the blue team, and then add them up.

Entry Form: Once you’ve added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.

Rules: Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian’s permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by April 7th, at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.

SCAVENGER HUNT POST

Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Sarah Jude, author of THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS!

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Sarah Jude is the author of the YA Ozarks horror novel THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS (HMH). When she’s not writing, she is working in her art studio. She lives in Missouri with her family and her dogs.

 

Find out more on Sarah’s website: http://www.sarahjude.com

You can follow her on social media at these links:

twitter.com/sarahejude

https://www.facebook.com/sarahejude

https://www.instagram.com/sarah.jude

And just LOOK at this beautiful cover!!

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Two girls: one with a secret, one with a promise that she’d uncover it.

Welcome to Rowan’s Glen—a place full of old fashioned superstition and secrets. Twenty-five years back, a teenage girl was murdered after being crowned queen at the Glen’s May Day celebration, and outsiders have regarded the isolated farming community with suspicion ever since.

But that was before Ivy Templeton was even born. She’s lived in Rowan’s Glen for all of her sixteen years, and feels safe there with the company of her free-spirited cousin Heather, and their friend, Rook, son of the sheriff.

When Heather is elected queen of the May Day celebration then goes missing, Ivy must come to terms with the fact that she never knew her beloved cousin—or Rowan’s Glen—as well as she thought she did.

If you want to snap up your own copy of THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS, click here!

For Sarah Jude’s exclusive content, she’s sharing a behind the scenes look at how the cover was made:

“For this year’s YA Scavenger Hunt, here’s some behind-the-scenes information about how the cover of THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS came to be! Authors don’t often get much say in their books covers, so I feel incredibly lucky that my publisher allowed me quite a bit of input.

I’m an extremely visual person and am an artist in addition to my writing, so I love creating mood boards for the projects I’m working on. Over a year before THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS was published, my editor asked about my ideas for the book’s cover art. I sent her a link to a Pinterest mood board I’d created, and little did I know, she passed the link over to the publisher’s art department! Of all the images on the Pinterest board, one caught their eye enough that they contacted the artist who created it, a young Polish photographer named Marcin Ngraba (his work is stunning!). To go from being an, “Oh, that’s a cool inspiration piece” while I was drafting the manuscript to it actually becoming the finished book’s cover is wild.

Once the rights to the image were secured, my publisher’s art department added text, tweaking the colors and handlettering the font for the title. Book covers are so critical because they are the first impression readers have of a book, but with even the earliest cover concept for THE MAY QUEEN MURDERS, everyone involved knew it perfectly evoked the eerie, backwoods atmosphere of the story!”

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Don’t forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of books by me, Sarah Jude, and more! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 45. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the blue team and you’ll have all the secret code to enter for the grand prize!

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CONTINUE THE HUNT
To keep going on your quest for the hunt, you need to check out the next author, A. G. Howard! (*fangirling*)

For my personal giveaway, I’m gifting an ebook of DREAM KEEPER and an eARC of the sequel, DARK CONSORT. The Dark Dreamer trilogy is a YA Dark Fantasy published with The Parliament House about a girl and the Sandman. To enter, visit my Rafflecopter.