by Martha Reed
Since I’m in charge of promoting my fiction in addition to writing it, I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to new promotional ideas. At Malice Domestic last May, I cruised the tables picking up samples of what I thought were the best in bookmarks and postcards, looking for eye-catching graphic design and then taking the samples back to my room to puzzle out what exactly about the design had caught my eye. I quizzed my sister, too, showing her the samples and asking: would you buy this book because of what you see here?
And I know that cover design is important, too, that’s why we see series books that all feature the same foil-stamped typeface or the same shocking set of colors. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series or anything by James Patterson immediately springs to mind. It’s market branding, like any other product, the way we see a Starbucks logo and know we’ll find a great cup of coffee.
Something new turned up over the weekend: video trailers. Well, new to me, anyhow, even though I spent a few formative years watching Billy Idol on MTV. Louise Ure has a new book, The Fault Tree, and she invited readers to go to YouTube.com to preview a video trailer, so I went. The trailer was short and sweet, one minute fifteen seconds long, and I thought it piqued my interest, but the more I thought about the idea of video trailers for books, for written material, the more questions the idea raised.
I know that humans are visual animals. I know that when training an associate, the quickest path to mastery is to show them how to do it and not just send them to a certain page in a training manual. If the act of reading, of translating text into images through the use of the imagination, involves a higher mental process, and your audience prefers a visual medium – which I tend to believe since YouTube is all about visuals – then is creating a video trailer for a text product an exercise in futility?
I also know that the Baby Boomer generation is probably the last generation to be raised on text. Yes, we had a TV when I was a kid, I’m not that old, dammit, but we only had three channels and cartoons exclusively on Saturday morning. Nowadays, the airwaves are awash in junk programming and any kid with an imagination has migrated to computers to play interactive video games. The visuals on modern games are amazing, I admit; quite a contrast from the Ms. PacMan and Frogger I knew in college.
But if we’re moving into VideoLand to preview and support text, I foresee a problem: casting.
As an author, it’s always a delicate balance in my work to give readers just enough descriptive information but not too much. I don’t want to describe each one of my characters down to the number of fillings in their teeth. My writing is a partnership with my readers, and I want them to share in the process. I want them to activate their imaginations to decide what a character looks like to them. I’ll make suggestions, of course, but the final decision is in their head, not mine. That’s why I love reading books before I see the movie – I want to see if the writer, the casting director and I were in the same ballpark. The best example I can mention is the casting for Silence of the Lambs – Thomas Harris has been a dark horse favorite of mine since Red Dragon, and after I read Silence I held my breath waiting for the casting announcement. Clarisse Starling = Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins = Hannibel Lector? Flawless.
Which leaves one last question: if we create a video trailer to stimulate interest in our book before the text version comes out, are we stunting the creative partnership by planting visual preconceptions in the minds of our readers?
Since I’m in charge of promoting my fiction in addition to writing it, I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to new promotional ideas. At Malice Domestic last May, I cruised the tables picking up samples of what I thought were the best in bookmarks and postcards, looking for eye-catching graphic design and then taking the samples back to my room to puzzle out what exactly about the design had caught my eye. I quizzed my sister, too, showing her the samples and asking: would you buy this book because of what you see here?
And I know that cover design is important, too, that’s why we see series books that all feature the same foil-stamped typeface or the same shocking set of colors. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series or anything by James Patterson immediately springs to mind. It’s market branding, like any other product, the way we see a Starbucks logo and know we’ll find a great cup of coffee.
Something new turned up over the weekend: video trailers. Well, new to me, anyhow, even though I spent a few formative years watching Billy Idol on MTV. Louise Ure has a new book, The Fault Tree, and she invited readers to go to YouTube.com to preview a video trailer, so I went. The trailer was short and sweet, one minute fifteen seconds long, and I thought it piqued my interest, but the more I thought about the idea of video trailers for books, for written material, the more questions the idea raised.
I know that humans are visual animals. I know that when training an associate, the quickest path to mastery is to show them how to do it and not just send them to a certain page in a training manual. If the act of reading, of translating text into images through the use of the imagination, involves a higher mental process, and your audience prefers a visual medium – which I tend to believe since YouTube is all about visuals – then is creating a video trailer for a text product an exercise in futility?
I also know that the Baby Boomer generation is probably the last generation to be raised on text. Yes, we had a TV when I was a kid, I’m not that old, dammit, but we only had three channels and cartoons exclusively on Saturday morning. Nowadays, the airwaves are awash in junk programming and any kid with an imagination has migrated to computers to play interactive video games. The visuals on modern games are amazing, I admit; quite a contrast from the Ms. PacMan and Frogger I knew in college.
But if we’re moving into VideoLand to preview and support text, I foresee a problem: casting.
As an author, it’s always a delicate balance in my work to give readers just enough descriptive information but not too much. I don’t want to describe each one of my characters down to the number of fillings in their teeth. My writing is a partnership with my readers, and I want them to share in the process. I want them to activate their imaginations to decide what a character looks like to them. I’ll make suggestions, of course, but the final decision is in their head, not mine. That’s why I love reading books before I see the movie – I want to see if the writer, the casting director and I were in the same ballpark. The best example I can mention is the casting for Silence of the Lambs – Thomas Harris has been a dark horse favorite of mine since Red Dragon, and after I read Silence I held my breath waiting for the casting announcement. Clarisse Starling = Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins = Hannibel Lector? Flawless.
Which leaves one last question: if we create a video trailer to stimulate interest in our book before the text version comes out, are we stunting the creative partnership by planting visual preconceptions in the minds of our readers?
