On SF Signal Now—A New Mind Meld: The Pros and Cons of Book Trailers
I clicked through on to SF Signal last night—a regular blog stop for me these days and perhaps worth checking out if you haven’t already—and saw that they had a new ‘Mind Meld’ up—on the oh so fascinating topic of Book Trailers!
And there are some equally fascinating commentators, including my good friend and fellow author, Mary Victoria—carrying the banner for the Antipodes and the ladies!—as well as E.D. deBirmingham, Cooper Moo and Mark Teppo, all from The Mongoliad project, Scott Sigler, and Simon Spanton of Orion Publishing.
I think there are some very interesting points-of-view included and the only sector I feel is clearly missing is that of Paranormal Romance—because I know my writing colleagues, the very savvy ladies of the Supernatural Underground, have considerable experience of book trailers!
But still, this latest Mind Meld is well worth a read—if only to see the amusing trailer from Neal Stephenson and the team at The Mongoliad project!
You can check it out Right Here.
(And if you’re so minded, do leave a comment!)
Thank you for boosting the signal 🙂
JP is the more “silent” of the two of us who do Mind Melds. He’s not really on twitter or social media…
Always happy to boost the signal, sir!
Ah, now you have revealed that JP is a ‘he.’ (OK I already knew that from the SF SIgnal site, but still …)
I enjoyed that meld! (Though it must be said I feel like a bit of a joker next to all these intelligent and well-spoken folks.)
Loved Spanton’s post. He pretty much nails it – the pros and cons, and that lingering sense that in some cases, books may want to remain books instead of pretending to be films… Call me old fashioned, I agree. (Particularly when the book in question has a distinctive/poetic prose style. How can you possibly put that across with images?)
Agree with you re the general excellence of Simon Spanton’s comments — but Mary, why didn’t you link to your trailer in your post as the others did: hiding your digital animation street cred under a bushel! Plus I feel it goes a long way to capturing the “distinctive/poetic prose style” of your books!
LOL! I didn’t realise we were supposed to link to our own trailers, honestly. But mine is on my home page, anyone who clicks through to my website can’t miss it.
As for animation street cred… actually, that makes me very wary of book trailers. Books shouldn’t be expected to be movies – the fact that people want them to be is sad, imho. Can you imagine trying to do justice to ‘The Dervish House’ with a book trailer? The best I can think of would be to hear someone reading passages from the work, over images. But that’s not *sexy*, is it.
That is true, Mary, about clicking through, but your trailer is so wonderful and draws on your digital background too, so it *would* have been nice to see the trailer in there with all the others.:)
But I do share your reservations, to be honest, and without your animation and film background, so it’s interesting to me that coming from that background you see the same problems/limitations…
My trailer has two advantages: it is extremely simple (slight pans over fixed images) and uses some lovely, atmostpheric artwork and music. I knew I couldn’t pull off something complex with the time/software at my disposal, so I stuck to stark essentials…
I still get a little twinge in my heart, looking at that image of the burning ships when the ‘Tymon’s Flight’ caption comes up. It’s still my baby. 😉
Thanks for the link. It is a very interesting post and the topic warrants discussion.
My experience with book trailers is pretty limited. I suspect I’d only see a book trailer if I was already a visitor to an author’s site.
You do see them increasingly popping up on genre sites like SFX and yes, SF Signal, but I still don’t think they’re general fare. And I must admit that I do tend toward Simon Spanton’s view that promo-ing a book, which is such a different product and medium, via a ‘trailer’ that is effectively designed for film, does seem just a little counter-intuitive… So I think The Mongoliad trailer, which effectively goes someplace quite different, may be the way to go…