Do I need a book trailer?

Book videos have been the in thing for the last couple of years, and I’m rather keen to make one. I am, however, in two minds about it. As a Z-list author, I can’t justify spending thousands of pounds hiring a professional company, and yet if I cobble together a trailer myself will it be so tacky it’ll actively put people off buying the book?

I’ve already made a few lame attempts at a video, just to get to know Windows Movie Maker, but as publication draws nearer, it’s time to start taking the idea more seriously.

I’ve made a list of pros and cons that I hope will be helpful to other authors thinking of jumping on the trailer bandwagon.

 

Reasons to have a book trailer:

• If it’s a good video and distributed properly, lots of people will know about the book and some of them might even buy it out of their own money. (This point is brought to you courtesy of Captain Obvious.)

• If it’s really original and exciting, it might go viral.

• Making a trailer is fun. (If it’s not fun, and video editing feels difficult or boring, then the advantages are possibly not worth the amount of time involved.)

• When people watch a book video, they are spending a minute with your name and book title inhabiting their brain. A minute is a long time on the internet. A good video can make a lasting impression. (Unfortunately, so can a bad video.)

• Videos can (and should) be posted on a variety of sites – not just YouTube – and are a legitimate way of promoting a book widely online without spamming forums and making yourself look an idiot.

• The video can crop up in Google searches for terms other than just the book title, so you can reach potential readers who are interested in your general subject.

 

Reasons NOT to have a book trailer:

• Who the heck actually watches them other than a.) the author’s mum, b.) other authors wondering if they ought to have one too?

• If the video sucks then it could deter people who would really enjoy the book.

• It takes many hours to get the thing looking remotely good.

• There are also lots of research hours involved – viewing other trailers, reading tips on the web, sourcing good-quality images, and planning where to display it when it’s finished. All this time could be spent writing.

• Even though you’re not forking out thousands for a professional trailer, you could still have to spend some money for permission to use the right image or piece of music. (N.B. the composer or photographer is just as skint as you, so pay up.)

• It doesn’t matter how slick your video is – some people will hate it. Same as the book. But if they’ve bought the book and hate it, at least you get your royalty. If they watch the vid and hate it, you get NOTHING! You LOSE!

• Many of the sites where you can submit your trailer are US-based, e.g. Preview the Book, Watch the Book and Book Screening, so if your book isn’t out in the US, viewers could be disappointed.

• Your target market might not actually be very web-savvy. A lot of avid readers are people like your mum, who buy books from proper shops but only log on to the interweb once a week to see if they have an email. For some reason, they don’t think it’s normal to spend 20 hours a day surfing random crap. How will they ever know about your trailer?

• As for book buyers who do use the web a lot – they’ve already seen enough stock photo slideshows with flashy transitions and agonisingly slow text. It has to be something special to impress them.

• Book trailers might be fashionable at the moment, but there could come a point when they get old-hat and embarrassing, like when your local parish council decides to do a nude calendar.

So far, the cons are outweighing the pros. A book trailer is certainly something that needs a lot of thought if it’s not going to backfire. Should I go for it?

 

Consult the writing oracle

Thanks to Rod on WriteWords, I’ve discovered a new form of procrastination in BT’s Ask Emma feature. This is a great idea – BT punters can ask the creepy swivelly-eyed virtual assistant why their phone line isn’t working, and be reassured that it’s probably their own fault and it’ll cost them. And because this service is aimed at the fine, upstanding British public, BT can be confident that no one will ever type in rude words just to be stupid.

 

I started the conversation with a few gentle questions:

 

Me: How long is a piece of string?

BT Emma: Sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please reword your question.

Me: Should John Sergeant have continued with Strictly?

BT Emma: I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understood your last question. Please try rephrasing it and ask me again.

 

Fair enough, this is supposed to be for questions about BT after all:

 

Me: Why is BT so crap?

BTE: I’m not programmed to understand insults. Please ask me a question about BT.

Me: So, if I say ‘arse,’ is that even worse?

BTE: Would you say that again please?

Me: Oh, okay. ARSE!

BTE: Please ask me a question about BT.

Me: All right – when was BT established?

BTE: Please let me know what your enquiry is about so I can give you the correct telephone number.

Me: Who invented the telephone?

BTE: Please let me know what your enquiry is about so I can give you the correct telephone number.

Me: What do you think of the view that Antonio Meucci was the real inventor of the telephone, and Alexander Graham Bell just copied off him?

BTE: Please visit our moving home page for more information.

 

Hmm, I don’t think either Meucci or Bell is up to going to any housewarming parties these days, unless it’s as part of the finger-buffet for the Worm family, so let’s try a different tack. This blog is supposed to be about writing, so I’ll think up some writing questions and pit Emma against Carol Bolt’s The Book of Answers.

 

Q: How many copies of my book will sell?

BT Emma: User guides for all our new and many of our older products are available online.

Book of Answers: The answer may come to you in another language.

 

Q: Should I get a real job?

BT Emma: If you’re interested in working for BT please visit our careers site.

Book of Answers: NO

 

Q: Do you agree that one should avoid the verb “to be” at all times?

BT Emma: I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understood your last question. Please try rephrasing it and ask me again.

Book of Answers: Ask your mother.

 

Q: Should I only write what I know?

BT Emma: If you want to write to us for any reason, please use the following address: BT plc, Correspondence Centre, Durham DH98 1BT

Book of Answers: A year from now it won’t matter.

 

Q: What shall I call my next book?

BT Emma: Please run that by me again – I didn’t understand your question.

Book of Answers: A year from now it won’t matter.

 

Q: Is my prose too purple?

BT Emma: Please reword that last question. I didn’t recognise the words.

Book of Answers: A year from now it won’t matter.

 

So… does this mean…

 

Q: Will my writing career be over by this time next year?

BT Emma: If you’re interested in working for BT please visit our careers site.

Book of Answers: Gentle persistence will pay off.

 

With that, I’d better stop messing around and go and get on with gently persisting, before it’s too late.

New website

 

I have re-designed my main website, so click here if you’d like to take a look:

www.carolinerance.co.uk

I was previously using some free software, which was OK for getting a basic site up, but the design quickly got old. The trouble was, the software was supposed to be foolproof, which actually made it very limited and quite difficult to use. It would have a fit and tell you the world was going to end if you wanted to do something as dangerous as pasting in a bit of HTML code. It also had some annoying bugs, which kind of defeated the whole point of it being aimed at beginners, because I wouldn’t have had a clue how to get round them if I hadn’t done websites before.

I’m now trying out Serif WebPlus 10, which seems pretty good, so I’ll be able to do some more interesting stuff with the site from now on. (Money-saving tip: If you’re thinking of buying WebPlus 10, try the free version WebPlus SE first, then if you need the full version you can upgrade for only £9.99.)

Hope you like the site, and let me know if you spot any broken links or typos.

 

Speaking of design, it’s cool to see Kill-Grief’s cover shown as one of the designer’s favourites at Soapbox Communications. Thank you once again to John Schwartz for doing such a great job – I still haven’t tired of looking at it yet!

How’s Your Book?

One* or two people keep asking me this every time I see them and I’m not quite sure what to say. I mean, no one has told me my book has ‘flu, or has broken its leg, or is waiting to hear its exam results, so I don’t know what to report.

 

For a start – which book? The one I’m in the middle of writing? The one due to come out next year? The haunting Booker-winning epic I’m going to write some day? The futuristic dystopian YA fantasy I’d forgotten about until the baby pulled it out from under the bed and I sat there thinking i.) blimey, my handwriting was neat in those days and ii.) this is not that bad, so why did I abandon it and contemplate slitting my wrists over how awful it was?

 

So here are the answers to how my book is, and anyone who asks will henceforth be referred to this blog.

 

1. The one I’m in the middle of: I did a 100,000 word first draft, which was OK writing-wise but useless plot/characterisation/theme/everything else-wise, so I’ve started again. Now I’m doing 500 words per day, in my own lightweight version of NaNoWriMo. Usually I start these 500 words at about 11.35pm, when I’m almost blind with knackeredness and I just type any old crap until the word count hits 500, then I go to sleep. I never read it over, so I could be repeating the same 500 words every night for all I know.

2. The one due out in March: I am completely over this book. I should get some proof copies in the next week or two, and then I’ll think “ooh, it’s like a proper book,” and maybe this will re-ignite my excitement, but otherwise I would rather eat a maggot than read a single wretched word of it.

3. The haunting Booker-winning epic: I want to start researching this but I have to finish No. 1 (above) first. It will be set in the Edwardian era. Great. I know nothing about the Edwardian era.

4. The futuristic dystopian one: I wish I hadn’t thought it was crap and I wish I’d carried on with it, because it was a million times more carefully written than any first-draft I’ve done since. I never submitted it anywhere – I didn’t dare because I thought it wasn’t good enough. I was right, but I’m glad I wrote it.

 

From a distance of about 15 years, I’m pleased with No. 4. It’s not wonderful. It’s not publishable. But it’s OK. It’s really OK, and this gives me a small amount of confidence to keep plugging away at numbers 1-3.

 

 

*If you’ve arrived here because you’ve asked how my book is and I’ve written this web address down for you, and you’ve carefully managed to type it in rather than try out that complicated Google thingy that all the youngsters are talking about – welcome! As to when you get your signed copy of Kill-Grief – when you go and buy one and bring it to me to sign.

Death of Michael Crichton

 I’m really shocked and sorry to hear of Michael Crichton’s death from cancer on Tuesday at the age of 66. He was quite an influence on me in my youth – far more than you’d think from the historical, un-blockbuster-y love story I ended up writing.

 

The first I ever heard of Michael Crichton was while I was studying for my GCSEs in 1991. We were still looking for something to fill the gap after the 1990 World Cup, and my best friend (who has since gone on to do loads of really clever stuff to do with environmental science) told me she was reading this brilliant book about dinosaurs being brought back to life. To me, newly obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Emily Brontë, this sounded rather low-brow, but she leant it to me when she’d finished – it was a hardback with a stark image of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton on the front.

 

Little did I know it then, but I had in my hands a UK first edition of Jurassic Park, and I stayed up all night frantically turning the pages when I should have been writing an essay. Goodness knows how many hours my friend and I subsequently spent talking about this book!

 

A couple of years later we rushed to the cinema the moment the film came out (friend was an usherette and got us preview tickets) – we loved the exciting special effects and had the satisfaction of feeling we’d discovered the story before anyone else. On a biology field trip in Devon, our bus went back and forth along a hilltop road and we imagined the cattle in the distant, bleak valley to be brontosaurs peacefully grazing.

 

She wanted to be a palaeontologist; I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a doctor, a vet or a writer. (In my innocence I thought these were all on a par, money-wise.) Our ambitions converged in Jurassic Park. Since then, those ambitions have changed and developed along the way, but I hope it’s not too cheesy to say that Crichton’s work influenced the directions we eventually took.

 

I even once dumped a boyfriend because he thought it was weird to have read Jurassic Park before seeing the film!

 

But no matter how many millions of books Crichton sold and how many random Joes like me enjoyed them, the important people now are his grieving family and friends, and my sympathy goes out to them. In the end, it’s the person who really matters, not the fame. May he rest in peace.

The Greek god of spontaneous combustion

 

Chances are you’ve had a really bad cold recently, or you’ve got one at the moment. If not, bad luck, because you’re about to come down with one in the next few days. There’s a lot of it about, don’t you know, and the moment you say “but I never get colds” is the moment you’d better start packing for an all-expenses-paid trip to Snot City.

 

Here is some small consolation, though – if you’re capable of sitting up long enough to read this YOU HAVE NOT GOT THE FLU, ALL RIGHT? (UPDATE July 09: OK, maybe you have swine flu, I’ll give you that)

 

Of less consolation is the fact that if you’d been around in the early 20^th century, your horrible cold could have been prevented, or failing that, completely cured! Recently a relative was clearing out her medicine cupboard and found this box of Thermogene.

 

 

I have mentioned quack remedies before, but as this is fondly remembered by many people still alive then perhaps it would be better to call it an “over-the-counter” remedy.

Thermogene seems to have been around since the turn of the 20^th century, when it was called Thermogène. Within a few years, the exotic accent had disappeared, making the name reassuringly British and clinical, but I can’t help wanting to pronounce it Therm-ODG-en-ee, like some Greek god of spontaneous combustion or something.

Trouble brewing

 

It was a box of wadding, a bit like cotton wool or upholstery stuffing, impregnated with capsicum oleoresin and methyl salicylate, which gave it the slogan “the warmth that heals.” I suppose it was a forerunner of deep-heat creams. It was also highly flammable (I can say this with authority as I have just set light to some.)

 

Thermogene cured… well, what didn’t it cure? Adverts list sore throats, colds, neuralgia, toothache, bronchitis, lumbago, inflammation, neuritis, sciatica, pneumonia, quinsy, laryngitis, sprains, asthma, pleurisy… etc.

 

Thankfully, in the case of pneumonia, the adverts recommend that you should see a doctor.

 

For less acute chest complaints, as far as I can gather, one put a layer of Thermogene against one’s skin and then kept it in place by the use of a liberty bodice. This was a wise winter precaution even if there was nothing wrong with you. The Thermogene by all accounts stayed in place from October to May, but this could well be an exaggeration on the part of elderly relatives.

 

I didn’t have a liberty bodice handy, but in the interests of hands-on medical history (or rather, boredom) I put some Thermogene down my sock, half expecting my entire body to disintegrate to a charred skellington. When nothing immediately happened, I put some normal cotton wool down my other sock as a control experiment – never let it be said that I’m not thoroughly scientific in my approach.

 

The Thermogene felt a tiny bit warmer than the cotton wool, but I soon forgot it was there and about two hours later, I realised nothing had happened. Maybe this was because the Thermogene had been left open in a cupboard for 60 years and had lost its ‘oomph’ or maybe it was because I didn’t follow the suggestion that “its action… may be intensified by sprinkling the wadding lightly with whisky.”

 

The next ancient item in my relative’s medicine cupboard was a liquid called “Gut Reviver.” Intrepid though I am, I drew the line at drinking some. This was the right decision, because closer inspection proved it to be for perking up old tennis racket strings.