Book Trailer

Literary trendsetter Oprah Winfrey opened her book club discussion of "An Ex-Mas Feast" by Uwem Akpan with web video, a brief, intimate chat about the opening story in Akpan's short story collection.

As senior editor Ron Hogan correctly predicted, Winfrey picked "Say You're One of Them" for her club earlier this month. The short story collection allows the unique chance to break the content into bite-sized discussion pieces. Readers are invited to upload their own video responses as well.

Here's an excerpt from the video: "By the time I finished this story, every time I see a prostitute on the street--no matter where it is, whether it's Vegas or Africa-- I will never feel the same the same. I will always look at the prostitute from now on, and wonder, 'What's her backstory?'"

In an inspiring do-it-yourself promotion, novelist Kelly Corrigan crafted that book trailer out of a simple video from a public reading. The author added music, photos from a support group, and crowd shots, her simple video was viewed 4.5 million times.

In a Washington Post profile, Corrigan explained her long journey to support her memoir, "The Middle Place," during a publishing recession. She confessed to hand-selling 2,000-3,000 copies of her book, going cross-country in a DIY campaign. The article reports that the book has sold an estimated 80,000 paperback copies in hardcover and 260,000 paperback copies.

Here's more from the article: "She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site. Her agent helped get her on one network television morning show. About 20 friends hosted book parties, which she hit on a self-funded three-week blitz, selling books out of the trunk of her car. A guy shot video of her reading an essay at one of these parties, and she posted it on YouTube when the paperback came out."

(GalleyCat readers were first introduced to Corrigan's video back in January, when we raised the possibility that the publishing industry had finally found proof that the right video really can inspire readers to buy a book.)

We've talked a lot in the past about what makes for an effective book trailer, and with that in mind I wanted to show you this new one-minute ad for Dan Solin's The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read, which has all the slickness of a television commercial. (Although we're told there are no plans to buy time on any networks, we could easily see it on CNBC or Fox Business... or, for that matter, during weekend programming at the Hallmark Channel.)

This commercial particularly stands out when you compare it to the other videos Solin has released online this summer...

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Readers have noticed that we haven't run our usual "dog days of August" posts this year, nor the harvest of cat photos that traditionally appears around the same time. To answer your questions, the feature is, as we say in the trade, being reevaluated—in the meantime, though, those of you who are eager to share pictures of your dog with the rest of the Internet might want to check out a contest being run by Billy Rafferty and Jill Cahr, the co-authors of Happy Dog: Caring For Your Dog's Body, Mind and Spirit. Every Friday in September (plus the first Friday of October), they'll pick one photo of a happy dog to feature on their website, with additional prizes including a signed copy of the book and various canine accessories.

For a rough idea of the sorts of pictures they're looking for, you might want to take a look at the short video Dean Koontz put together for A Big Little Life, his new memoir (and first nonfiction book ever) about the time he spent with a golden retriever after injuries forced it to retire from being a service dog.

And, what the heck, we've got time for one more animal video—stay with this post for a short film starring Stacey O'Brien as she talks about Wesley the Owl, a memoir that's become a bit of a sensation among readers who shop at independent bookstores (especially in Southern California).

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"We can do better than poorly produced B- and C-level movie-esque trailers," ad-man-turned-novelist James P. Othmer argued during a discussion last night on Twitter. Because of budget limitations, he continued, the "conventional" plot summary book trailer "looks cheap" when compared to movie trailers; a provocation, on the other hand, "sheds light on a truth [or] issue." What Othmer calls a 'provocation,' we might also call an 'engagement,' and it's that slight shift in vocabulary that helped us recognize how Othmer's theory held up for trailers promoting fiction as well as nonfiction.

We've seen a lot of book trailers over the years, and our favorites, from Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency to Seth Greenland's Shining City, from Steven Pressfield's Killing Rommel to Kathe Koja's Under the Poppy, do more than just tell you what the book is about—they engage the viewer while telling a story, and not necessarily the one that's recounted between the covers of the book. Production values are nice, but if you have enough creativity and imagination, you can hook a potential reader by telling a story with nothing more than stick figure drawings.

Back to nonfiction, though: David Pogue's The World According to Twitter doesn't really tell a story, because it's just a compilation of tweets from Pogue's fans in response to his daily questions, and telling that backstory isn't terribly fascinating, no matter how likable Pogue's personality may be. (Just watch the first minute of the film and see if you don't agree.) Where the trailer picks up is the moment Pogue creates a new story about the lengths he and his publisher, Black Dog and Leventhal, are willing to go to in order to promote the book. After that, we might have quibbled about the execution of this scene or that, but we were willing to stick around to see where the premise was headed.

That's our take, anyway. Watch the film and tell us: What did you think?

A few years back, we met Annabelle Gurwitch to talk about Fired!, the book (and subsequent documentary) which began by detailing her own experiences being dismissed from jobs and then expanded to incorporate the experiences of other people, including Michigan auto plant workers and Best Week Ever host Paul F. Tompkins. Since then, Gurwitch has helped launch the Planet Green cable network with the recycling-reality show Wa$ted, and, for her next foray into book publishing, she's teaming up with her husband, Jeff Kahn for a relationship memoir called You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up!

Here's a ten-minute video of Gurwitch and Kahn workshopping material from the book in front of an audience last month. (The language is totally safe for work, although there's a stretch in the middle where some of the subject matter may not be appreciated by your officemates.) We've become increasingly convinced that the "traditional" book reading is in desperate need of an overhaul, and this performance piece—while not something every author can emulate—is a great example of an alternative approach to engaging readers by revealing your authoritative passions through storytelling.

(Don't have ten minutes? A six-minute clip from another performance highlights the story about the Facebook fight.)

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up! is coming in February 2010 from Crown.

Regular GalleyCat readers may recognize Julie Schoerke's name from her occasional field reports from book festivals in different parts of the United States, but her connections to the publishing world run deeper than that—she's a respected independent book publicist based out of Nashville who's worked with authors like Susan Gregg Gilmore and Michael Lee West. She's recently announced a new partnerships with UcasTV, a developer of "out-of-home television content" for broadcast, internal network, and web outlets, to create professional-grade book trailers at bargain rates. A 90-second trailer like that created for Gilmore's Finding Salvation at the Dairy Queen, for example, can be had for $600.

"I got sick of book trailer companies wanting to charge ridiculous amounts of money to do trailers for authors—or to do crappy trailers for little money," Schoerke told us. "Book trailers are very useful tools for various promotional opportunities beyond just posting on YouTube or other websites. My clients, authors and books, have benefited from high quality book trailers. But the challenge has always been the cost." And for those of you who aren't impressed by the "music and still photos and captions" approach of the basic book trailer format, Schoerke and Donnie Vick, the CEO of UcasTV, that "author book talk" videos will also be available. "Julie and I and our teams bring the key components to the table to make this a win for authors—expertise in the literary sector and the film sector," Vick explained.

Amberville is a hard-boiled noir with a difference: Its world is entirely populated by stuffed animals. HarperCollins editor Jeanette Perez inherited the novel after the acquiring editor moved to another publishing company, and she's already signed up three sequels, each of which is planned to be written in a different style. The next book, for example, is "a bit more literary," and if Amberville is about what it means to be evil, the next book will probe the nature of goodness. "The stuffed animals don't make it any less weighty," she told us; she's particularly delighted with the English translation of Amberville, which was commissioned by the author, Tim Davys, who felt the story would have a decent shot with American and British audiences if it was told just right.

Beyond that, Davys is shrouded in mystery. "None of us knows who he is," Perez insisted, "only that he's Swedish." Ahhh, but Davys is a man, we prodded, because the author bio on the novel's cover is deliberately ambiguous on even that front. "I probably shouldn't have said it, but he is," she admitted. "I've talked to him on the phone a few times."

We're doing our best to enjoy the federal holiday, but we didn't want to leave anybody who came to visit the site today completely emptyhanded—here's some videos related to stories you might've read about recently on GalleyCat.

Late last year, we told you about Nick Antosca's novel, Midnight Picnic, which was the first book affected by the shuttering of Impetus Press, and how it found a new home at Word Riot Press shortly thereafter. It's coming out this week, and Antosca has commissioned a short trailer from filmmaker Fred Guerrier.

Antosca tells us this trailer will appear on several cable networks, including BBC America, Bravo, and, perhaps most suitably, Chiller.

More videos await you...

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Naysayers have long maintained that nobody really knows if "book trailers" actually motivate readers to go out and buy books, but we're wondering if it might be time to give that argument a rest. After all, that snippet of film about the two guys who reunited with their lion made A Lion Called Christian one of the most sought-after out-of-print books of 2008. And there's a five-minute video of Kelly Corrigan reading an essay about women and their lifelong supportive friendships that's been viewed more than 3 million times in the last month—and maybe, just maybe, has something to do with the paperback edition of Corrigan's The Middle Place debut on the NY Times bestseller list at #18 last week.

We hear from Hyperion Voice that, as more and more women watched the video and told their friends about it, they saw a major surge in preorders for the paperback, and still more reorders after the official pub date—altogether, they've gone back to the presses four times already. And here's the kicker: That essay wasn't even in the hardcover edition of The Middle Place.