Book Trailer: STYXX by Sherrilyn Kenyon (Update)

Sherrilyn Kenyon is one of the few authors I can honestly say I found through her book trailers. She has a lot of them, and they are always fun.

I read here that it was no coincidence I found Kenyon through her trailer. There was a huge campaign associated with her first book trailer.

With a summer release for the paranormal romance, St. Martin’s had a huge investment in a 350,000-copy first printing. They hired professionals to create a 33-second book trailer, Dark-Hunter Acheron, then hired Zeitghost Media to manage the campaign. The publishing house sent an e‑mail with a link to the video on YouTube.com to 90,000 people, which was preceded by teasers several days before announcing that something big was coming. Zeitghost Media distributed the video across the Web, and dozens of blogs and Web sites picked it up and continue to feature it. It’s had more than 429,000 views. On the Dark Hunter website and offline, they also used these marketing tools:

Ebook giveaways Wallpaper, screen savers, cursors, banners Dark Hunter quiz Publicity through media channels such as Publisher’s Weekly Twitter feed, Facebook Fan page, MySpace page, Free short story to download

The video was important as a destination for potential readers, but email announcements were used to jumpstart the video. Once on the site, there were other ways to find information about the book. There were downloads, giveaways. In addition, St. Martin’s used traditional press and many social media. Was it the book trailer that made the difference in people choosing to buy the book? Or was it the combination of efforts?

This is mindboggling and, for an author, a little intimidating. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a list of 90,000 friends to whom I might email my latest trailer.

There’s an ongoing debate among authors and publishers about whether book trailers do any good at all promoting books. (This is a slice of the ongoing debate among authors and publishers about whether ANYTHING AT ALL does any good at all promoting books.) I think it’s one of those things that doesn’t help much if it’s done cheaply, which, alas, is all that most of us can afford, but as part of a huge, well-funded campaign can do wonders.

Helpful, I know.  😉

I’d be curious to know what experiences other authors have had with book trailers. Does a trailer have to be a big-budget production to help, or can a simple, home-made video also attract readers?

Sharknado in Two Minutes

My son is having a birthday party this month. He’s turning seven. Water slide, kiddie pool, water guns and inflatable sharks. The theme: Sharknado!

If you still haven’t seen this glorious masterpiece, here’s the movie in a nutshell:

Kindred by Nicola Claire

“You may not be aware, ma douce, but not all vampyre have a kindred, some will live out their existence without such beauty in their lives. I have waited five hundred years for you.” 

Vampires, shape shifters, ghouls and magic users abound in a world where the Norms, (those humans without paranormal abilities) are ignorant of the creatures of the night and the supernatural species that live alongside them.

Lucinda Monk is a bank teller by day and a vampire hunter by night, but she wasn’t always a part of this world. Thrown into a heady mix of powerful people and sensual beings, she’s had to find her way practically blindfolded in amongst the creatures of the night. But she’s a capable and realistic kind of girl. Her motto: never show fear. But, there’s something different about Lucinda, something those creatures she hunts, want. In order to stay one step ahead of the enemy she has to let the enemy in. In all his compelling, seductive and delicious ways. Sleeping with the enemy has never meant so much before. But, can she trust him?

From the urban streets of the city, to the dark alleys and sinful bars that promise a wickedness a girl from the farm has never before been exposed to, Lucinda gets drawn irreversibly into the dark side of life. And if the Master of the City had his way, she would always be his. For eternity.

Should All Literature Be Licensed?

Flavorwire raised an interesting point in the article Why You Should Worry About Amazon Buying the Right to Publish Kurt Vonnegut Fan-Fiction by Michelle Dean. Should all literature be licensed?

The Kindle Worlds program, which struck the deal, has in the past limited its acquisition of rights to series like The Vampire Diaries. Vonnegut is a bit of a square peg in that company. Never mind that it seems to vastly overestimate the American public’s engagement with literary fiction. Are any Vonnegut characters household names? Am I missing something?

So it goes.

The weirdness only acquires worrisomeness in a larger legal context.

Just a few years ago, a writer named Frederick Colting produced a sequel to Catcher in the Rye that J.D. Salinger successfully challenged as unauthorized. A federal court in New York ruled that any attempt to characterize the new book as commentary on the classic was, “post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original, rather than reasonably perceivable parody.” Which is to say that she didn’t buy that just writing something that incorporated a character from the original book could constitute “commentary” or “parody” and therefore fair use. …Do we want “serious writing” to be a place where people must license characters from each other? Does that do a disservice to the way in which literature is, for a lot of writers, an ongoing conversation with their predecessors? How would postmodernist novelists, for example, be curtailed by such rules, since they often incorporate commentary on the characters of others? Forcing everyone to get a license would send chills down the spine of any novelist thinking of writing, say, a feminist novel from the perspective of, say, Holden’s girlfriend Sally Hayes, not just anyone who wants to engineer a meeting between Holden Caulfield and Serena van der Woodsen.

Licensing may be fine for fan fiction of pop shows, and really, really great for slash (no comment), but is this the direction we want for the rest of literature?

Dean is afraid that the strangulation of new licensing laws would smother literary creativity, swallow it whole, and slowly digest it with enzymes. Or maybe I should blog while watching Discovery shows about snakes. I understand that fear. I’m deeply skeptical about letting lawyers dictate to writers the content and characters allowed in their books. Once you give lawyers that power where does it end? Then again, what if you want to mock or challenge a book? That’s unlikely to be allowed by the original author.

Just to drag in the devil’s advocate argument, however, what if it has the opposite impact? After all, as the Salinger case shows, writers can already be dragged through court for violating copyright. And slash fan fic, I’d like to point out, is still not legal if you try to sell it. Amazon Kindle Worlds specifically bans smut. (Hugh Howey encourages you to write characters of any sexual identity for Wool fan fic, however.) I think that Kindle Worlds is good for fan fic, in that it brings into the open market (rather than black or gray market) the lively world of fan fic. There are still limitations yes, but I think both the creators of the original world and the creators of the spin-off stories benefit. (Amazon, if you are interested, I am happy to license the Unfinished Song for Kindle Worlds….)

Why would this not be true for fancy-schmancy literature as well? Maybe instead of closing off creativity, it would open up new vistas of collaboration.