Just in Time for Back to School: New Tool Restores Love of Books for Reluctant Teen Readers

West Palm Beach, FL. — It’s been 27 years since Steve Alten’s first release, MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror, made its hardback debut, surfacing on every bestseller list, including the NY Times. But it was not until the mass-market paperback came out in the spring of 1998 that Alten’s page-turner found its true audience.                              

“I became inundated with hundreds of emails from high school students, who were all basically telling me the same thing … ‘Mr. Alten, I HATE reading, but I LOVE MEG,’” Alten recalled. “Teachers were next, emailing me about catching students sneak-reading my novel in the library … ‘I didn’t think they knew we even had a library.’” 

When the Young Adult Library Services Association named MEG as their top selection for reluctant teen readers, Alten knew he had to get involved. In 1999, he launched Adopt-An-Author, a nonprofit teen reading program that provided teachers with curriculum materials and projects and arranged classroom visits via Skype. By 2015, over 8,000 teachers had registered — and yet no one could figure out why non-readers were captivated by Steve Alten thrillers. Then six years ago, a group of science teachers hired experts to analyze Alten’s work. Their findings: “Steve Alten is a very visual writer. Something about his prose enables non-readers to better comprehend the story. Many stated they could see the images in their heads while they read.”

“I remember calling my curriculum director (Barb Becker) and issuing us both a challenge — to find a way to add visuals directly to the source material,” Alten said.

Three years later, on February 22, 2024, Alten and Becker were seated at his kitchen table with their laptops open, carefully going over which images to use on their co-creation, the “Visually Enhanced Smart Thriller,” or VEST. Available only at www.SeaMonsterCoveHS.com, a VEST is a novel reformatted as a PDF to accommodate dozens of color images. Each chapter has vocabulary words highlighted within the text. When the student sees the vocabulary word, they are instructed to say it, read the written definition and find the image that best fits its meaning.

“Our goal was to create an ‘association’ which would cause the brain to store the information directly into the reader’s long-term memory, where it could be easily accessed for years to come … only nothing was working,” Alten recalled. “Barb had located new color images that better defined the vocabulary words when it occurred to me that we were still testing the student’s knowledge. Why test them? Let’s just give them the answer. A dozen layouts later we found the sweet spot into long-term memory.”

But Alten and Becker saved the best for last — the reward students earn for doing their daily pleasure reading: access to Sea Monster Cove — a virtual world Alten created to pitch an original episodic TV show he wrote called, Where Sea Monsters Roam. It is in this virtual world that students can interact with the most dangerous prehistoric marine predators in the planet’s history. The special effects are major motion picture worthy, bringing to life wild activities, like cage-diving in the critter’s habitat at midnight — a little late-night stimulus to get the heart and adrenal glands pumping.

“Everything is ready. There’s never been anything as effective or as entertaining as Sea Monster Cove High School. Now we’re inviting high school students and teachers to use everything we offer for FREE all summer through Labor Day. All we need is for a school administrator or principal to contact us through the website and tell us how many memberships they need for students and teachers, and we’ll send the codes — no charge. By Labor Day, your teens will be so into reading our visually enhanced thrillers you’ll barely recognize them. And if your school is ready to join? Our school packages run from .99 cents to $1.99 a student.”

About the Author

Steve Alten is the bestselling author of 18 thrillers, including the MEG series. His first novel, MEG, published in 1997, launched the free teen reading program, Adopt-an-Author. In August of 2018, The MEG made its long-awaited debut in theaters, hitting No. 1 at the box office in both the U.S. and worldwide, grossing over $563 million.

For more information, visit www.stevealten.com, or follow the author on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SteveAlten) or Twitter (@meg82159).