amateur trailer for THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak

The means of advertising books and movies are many: posters in trendy locales, website ads, reviews in papers or blogs, displays at stores, entertainment segments or interviews on popular news and talk shows, and word-of-mouth that becomes increasingly easy to pass along through digital means. There are avenues, no doubt, and lots of them.

But the most ubiquitous is the movie trailer. It is the a popular and effective method of reaching people because we are an extremely visual culture. We want to see. And trailers indulge us in this craving. We are tantalized by the thirty-second or one- or two-minute glimpse a trailer offers us of the movie to come. They can be clever, dark, funny, mysterious, odd. They plant in our minds an excitement, an anticipation of something that might not be available to watch for over a year. And yet we love the trailers and their shorter brethren, the aptly-named teasers.

In recent years the publishing industry has capitalized on this success by producing their own counterpart: the book trailer. The challenges for the book trailer are unique. Those producing book trailers must start from scratch, gathering relevant words and phrases and key ideas and then translating them into images. The trailers come in multiple forms: still images with words, words by themselves, clever image-collages, flash movies, the rare animation, and on rarer-still occasions, live-action actors on sets.

It is the latter ones that I find the most intriguing. continue reading

It’s funny because it’s true . . .

Are you a Tweet? Or a Tweeter, Twitterer, Twit, Birdie, etc? Regardless of what charming epithet you may think to dub it, the word is out: Twitter is the newest fad in digital neuroticism. (We mentioned it way back in ‘07, but its recent rise has been so meteoric, and so important in cementing the book community, that it’s definitely worth revisiting.) Twitter is a “micro-blog,” one that limits your total characters to 140 per post. This means a certain level of succinctness that I, regrettably, find difficult to attain (this post, for example, is 3370 characters). continue reading

If you’re new to blogging, a great site to subscribe to is Daily Blog Tips. It has valuable information no matter how long you’ve been blogging.

Many individuals—myself included—have aspirations of writing a witty, fun, insightful personal blog and it becoming a wildly successful digital memoir. It’s a romantic idea, really: baring your soul to the world and the world eating it up with a spoon the way an enthusiastic child devours an ice cream sundae. One can only hope said metaphorical dessert of a blog has the success of, for instance, Neil Gaiman’s Journal, which recently won the 2008 Weblog Award for Best Literature Blog. Gaiman is a prolific author whose comic book series The Sandman and New York Times bestselling novels American Gods and Anansi Boys, among others, have created an obsessive cult following—and Hollywood has taken notice too. An avid reader of all things Gaiman, I was thrilled (though not surprised) to learn of yet another award in his impressive résumé. Gaiman’s success in creating and maintaining a fan base has allowed him to grow and thrive creatively, about which he could only say: “[L]et’s put it this way: it’s a very, very good thing for me that I am a bestselling author.”

I’d say it’s also a very, very good thing that you’re a blogger, Neil. continue reading

Ah, the digital age. Gone are the days of pesky human interaction, reading body language, interpreting facial expressions, and actually putting clothes on in the morning. More and more authors are embracing the advantages and savings that online promotion can bring them. And the hottest way to make yourself known on the web? Blog tours. continue reading

In this day and age of hyperinteractive media and communication, it is essential to maintain routine contact with your readers and clients. There is nothing like personal contact, but let’s face it, communicating via e-mail is often a preferable way to correspond. E-mail allows us to be clear and concise, saving us lots of time. It also lets us edit what we say before sending and customize our message so that it is attractive and attention grabbing. An eNewsletter is just what the doctor ordered!

It’s great to know that your newsletter subscribers actually want to read what you send out. They have chosen to receive your daily, weekly, or monthly updates. So treat them nice and offer them something of value.

Here are some basic things to keep in mind when sending an eNewsletter. continue reading

Oprah has been kind to books, and books have been kind to Oprah. The godlike talk show host granted a windfall to bookselling with her famous club (and performed something of a miracle, prompting legions of soccer moms and their ilk to rush to bookstores and ask for the works of William Faulkner). Now, her upcoming weight-loss book, according to UsMagazine.com, has commanded the highest advance ever, besting even Bill Clinton’s My Life. Whether or not you find Oprah a worthy arbiter of culture, there’s no arguing that she resuscitated reading for many a jaded TV watcher.

But as Oprah’s club rose to prominence in the late nineties, the Brits watched and saw room for improvement. In 2004, husband-and-wife talk show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan launched a book club of their own—but they didn’t want to directly emulate Oprah. continue reading