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Saturday, June 30, 2012

More on the Book Trailer


This has been quite a week in my writing life. For reasons I'll save for later, this is a week that I may look back forever and say it marked a turning point.

I had an opportunity to show the book trailer to my local chamber of Commerce. My daughter and I had collaborated on a video mash up promoting Baltimore as a place to retire (Inner Harbor). We took two dogs of a video, and combined the best scenes, substituted some of our own original photography, and video swapped out the pathetic sound track with an appropriate killer track, and boom, we had a great video. We showed our local chamber that this is the kind of video we could create for our town.

As an example of the video editing prowess of my daughter, Liz, I showed them the two minute book trailer for The Fastnacht League, my book. Now I need to remind you that there are a number of flaws in that video. But those flaws are known only to Liz and me because we have seen the video countless number of times.

For instance, we know that in one instance the words do not match the image. We also know that one of the clips we used is too short to convey what we want. But these things are known only to Liz and me. When we showed the video to the group, they were absolutely blown away.

I am starting to understand another problem with book trailers. The first problem, and the one made known to me by my writing mentor, was that book trailers attempt to mimic movie trailers and give away too much information. We were very, very careful with this video NOT to do that. In fact, we were too subtle in the first versions; nobody could understand what we were talking about. That all changed when we put the 1873 baseball game shots into the video story.  The second problem seems to be that the video was too effective, if that is at all possible.

The "star" of the video

They wanted to know when the movie was coming out. A little voice inside of me was laughing his head off. Another little guy in my head was wishing I had this full-length movie all completed. I immediately came right back to earth when the next question was asked:  How much will it cost to do this for us?




You can view the trailer at   www.amishandbaseball.com on the trailer tab.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Making the book trailer


I am far from being an expert on the subject but, having just gone through the excruciating process of creating my first book trailer, I am sure any advice I pass along could be valuable.

There are a number of reasons why making a book trailer can be beneficial to your writing, even if you never post it on the net. One benefit is that it forces you to focus on the key elements of your writing. My trailer is for a fiction novel.

When I finished my novel and then had to write a query letter, I ran into all sorts of problems. I had to condense the plot of an 88,000-word novel into a single page of less than 250 words. It took me eight weeks and about that many emails to my mentor to get it to the point where I considered it acceptable. I was lucky to have a great mentor and he kept rejecting it until I was forced to get it right. In fact, after the first month and four tries I was so angry and frustrated that I gave it a rest for about six weeks. Then my mentor and I started the arguments again. The second round I was finally on the right track and the last three revisions were just fine tuning.

I thought this post was about constructing the book trailer? It is. I found out that the book trailer is pretty much like the query letter but even more condensed. In fact, it gives even less away. In a query letter, you don’t give away the whole plot, just enough essentials to make the agent or publisher curious enough to ask for some or all of the manuscript.

It’s the same thing with the book trailer. How many times have you sat in the theatre and watched movie previews that gave away everything? So many times I’ve sat there and thought to myself that I didn’t need to see the movie now that I had seen the trailer.

I’d also venture to say that a picture is worth a thousand implied words. A quick count of the words in the trailer reveals that I used only 58 words, 66 if you include the title and my by line. So from 88,000 to 275 to 58. Quite a distillation.

Here is how I made it. From the query letter I picked out what images I would need to highlight the main points of the plot. In my case, it involved farm scenes of plowed fields, corn and hay. So I drove the three hours to the farm area where I grew up and filmed lots of field images. By luck, some people and objects (I don’t want to spoil the trailer, unless you want to view it first and then come back to this discussion) wandered into view and I was able to capture them on film. I drove to the actual setting of the book and got some real specific images.

After a review of what was usable, I located some background music. This beta version of the trailer on my website will not be used in the final or in the YouTube version. I will use a very simple piano part that I own the rights to. Find a friend and get them to tinkle on the keyboards, hook Audacity up to your recorder, iPhone, and video camera, whatever and download it so it’s digitized. I then moved the images around to match the music.

I wrote all the word slides which are basically parts of the query letter that I wanted to feature. I moved them around with the pictures until they made sense and used fades and overlays.
After my family watched the trailer several times I used their feedback to rearrange some of the images and change some of the timing and punctuation of the word slides. Something was missing and we figured out that there were no people in the movie. Because of another spoiler alert, I can’t tell you exactly what it was but we found out a particular event would be taking place in our town in three days, and that event would supply all the people images we would need. I immediately sent emails to the two organizations asking permission to film them. I told them exactly what we were doing and how the images were going to be used. That’s real important – to be open and honest with them. They gave me much more access than I dreamed possible.

Then I added those images to the third try of the trailer and that is what I put up on the book website. Three tries and about eight weeks of fiddling and the beta was good enough to put on the website. I still need a little bit of music tweaking and maybe a small change or two (depending on what my writer friends tell me will improve it) and I’ll put it on YouTube and Facebook and put links on Twitter.

Making the trailer was not easy but it’s not impossible. I am amazed, looking back, how much making it forced me to focus on the essence of the story. I now think that if you can’t think of actual real life images that match your novel, than you cannot expect readers to imagine your plot. This could be the ultimate “show, don’t tell.”

I am doing research for a novel that I plan to start writing sometime in September. I decided to take some advice that I heard over and over but didn’t heed because I didn’t understand it: write the query letter first, and then write the novel. I did write the query and now I have a clear direction where I need to do my research and what to focus on.

You don’t need to be a slave to the plot in the query letter. Why not revise the query as you go along?  Then make a movie. Nobody ever said you had to show it to anyone. It might be too hard to make the trailer first but what a focusing tool that would be!

The trailer for my novel, The Fastnacht League, can be easily found on my book website  www.AmishandBaseball.com . Any constructive feedback is very welcome and feel free to ask any questions. By the way, until you make one, you have no idea how much fun making a movie can be!

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Fun at the (2012 BEA Book) Expo

The 2012 Book Expo America was wonderful this year. Not because I was handed two wonderful books and not because I got up-close to watch a fascinating interview with Dan Rather. BEA had such a warm vibe. The people were all so nice, attendees and exhibitors. This was the first time the general public was allowed in (on the last day- and by invitation only) and the regulars feared the rabble. As it turned out, or at least as it was reported, there were only a few bad experiences.

I had forgotten to check the morning agenda and was doing a quick survey of the huge Javits Center landscape when I spied Dan Rather being interviewed on a small stage. I immediately settled in the second row of seats in the center and watched. I had forgotten that he’s out of news broadcasting for six years. Already?


The best part was the interviewer’s request for an elevator speech evaluating each president Rather covered over the span of his career. He started with Dwight Eisenhower and went through them all, ending with George W. Bush. The interviewer also pressed him for his impressions of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
Naturally, he was promoting his book, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News, released this past May, but that didn’t make him any less forthcoming in his opinions. At one point, discussing the cruelty of the police in Mississippi using fire hoses on the protestors, he had to stop speaking. He sobbed and apologized for losing his composure.
That incredible interview was the start of my BEA experience.
I’ll mention it again: The Javits Center is massive and at times it can become the Bataan Death March, but the result is worth your effort. I was walking past the booth of Fox Chapel Publishing Company, a publisher of craft books and spied a magnificent book on Steampunk. I knew nothing about Steampunk except that it is Victorian Science Fiction, not my cup of tea. But I had to admire the craftsmanship, not only of this fabulous book but the whole Steampunk idea. If you are into polished wood, brass fittings, antique glass and gears, this is your world.


I was so fascinated that the sales rep gave me the book, “The Art of Steampunk,” which showcases the major craft artists working in the Steampunk genre.  Being a computer geek, I especially liked the Steampunked laptops and desktops. I also know if you have an old manual typewriter (I own two) that you can buy an electronic device to capture the keystrokes into a word processing program. It is a strip that is positioned just under the key area. If you like the feel of the old keyboards and can stand the noise you’ve just entered writing heaven.
The Kindle people were great and spent at least a half hour explaining the fine points of uploading an e-book into their system. Just the information on the photos I am using in my book was worth the entire trip to the BEA. It is so much better to discuss questions face-to-face with the experts. I had a technical question about hyperlinks in e-readers. Who better to ask than the founder of Smashwords, Mark Coker? I just walked right up to him and ten minutes later, all my questions were answered. That beats a chat session with an A.I. bot, doesn’t it?