what else is missing from the ATD marketing program?

[pynchonoid]

Book Videos: Where Did They Come From?
October 09, 2006
By Kimberly Maul

<http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/hollywood/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003222727>

As purveyors of book videos, The Book Standard has
seen it all, including many different theories to the
origins of this developing trend. As we prepare to
launch a book-video focused blog, it’s time to get the
dirt on book videos and prepare to learn even more.

In 2000, Derek Armstrong, author and publisher of
Kunati Book Publishers, developed the idea for a book
video while he was working at Persona Corp., which
worked on marketing plans including movie trailers.
Armstrong wanted to promote his book idea, Song of
Montségur, which he was pitching to agents and while
the book has yet to be published—it is coming out from
Kunati as The Last Troubadour in 2007—the idea of book
videos stuck with him.


“It was the first time it was done for a book,”
Armstrong told The Book Standard, about his video for
Song of Montségur, which was re-made in 2001, “but of
course the credit goes to the movie industry. I guess
it was our idea to borrow a good idea from them. What
we noticed was a massive a growing swell of internet
traffic to the right after the launch. It’s the
ultimate viral marketing vehicle.”

In 2002, Circle of Seven Productions coined the term
“book trailers” and started producing detailed videos
that allow consumers to get a feel for what the book
is about through a visual synopsis, rather than just
looking at the book cover, said Sheila Clover English,
CEO of COS Productions.

“I couldn’t find anyone else doing them,” English told
The Book Standard. “If there were, there wasn’t a lot
of fanfare. The initial reaction was very
conservative. There was no market for book videos, so
we tried what we could to create a market as we
continued to grow our business.”

Other companies have since come into the space,
including, VidLit, the company founded in 2004 by Liz
Dubelman, which sticks with flash animation and
voice-overs in order to keep the story more in the
readers’ imagination. VidLit, which is now run by
Dubelman and Paca Thomas, took off when the video for
Yiddish With Dick and Jane, by Ellis Weiner and
Barbara Davilman, garnered so much attention that it
caught the eye of the publisher of the original “Dick
and Jane” books, who filed a lawsuit.

“We try very hard to make VidLits different from movie
trailers or television promotions,” Dubelman said. “We
never show a character unless the author does, because
reading is a collaboration between the author’s
imagination and the reader’s imagination. We wouldn’t
want to take away from the magic of reading.”

ExpandedBooks, one of the more recently-founded book
video production companies, focuses on author
interviews, giving viewers a glimpse into the author’s
process and ideas for writing a book.

“To us, a book video is a catch-all term that can be
used to describe any one of numerous types of videos,”
Skye Van Raalte-Herzog, producer of ExpandedBooks,
told The Book Standard. “Specific book videos such as
book trailers and viral videos portray an original,
vivid and memorable introduction to the book, while
book video interviews are more in-depth and offer a
portrait of the book and the author. There are other
types of book videos as well that portray
dramatizations and others that closely resemble ads.”

ExpandedBooks, which was founded in 2005, started out
to promote the coffee table book for the hit
television show Friends. Todd Stevens, executive
producer, was a producer for the show and thought of
using video to promote the book. James Michael Tyler,
the actor who was Gunther on the show, is also
involved with ExpandedBooks as a producer and host for
the videos.

Other companies focusing on producing videos of author
interviews include BookWrap Central and Book-Byte.com.
Companies like Book Shorts produce “short films,
animations and interactive media that capture the
spirit of a book in moving images,” according to its
website. Authors also produce their own videos, like
Stephen Cannell, whose daughter interviews him with
questions readers submit on his website.

In early 2006, The Book Standard held the 2006 Book
Video Awards, in which film students from around the
country competed to create videos for three new books
from Bantam Dell, Richard Doetsch’s The Thieves of
Heaven, Cody McFadyen’s Shadow Man and Alex Master’s
Stuart: A Life Backwards. This event got mainstream
media interested in book videos, with articles in USA
Today, Newsweek, The Hollywood Reporter, Publishers
Weekly and Backstage all discussing the new marketing
technique. This fall, The Book Standard is going back
for rounds two and three, which will feature videos
for teen and picture books.

Book video contests, debating the pros and cons of
various types of book videos and learning more about
behind-the-scenes of book video production are some of
the topics we’ll be discussing on the new blog, Book
Trailerpark. Covering internet marketing plans, with a
focus on video content, even the smallest-budgeted
book videos can make a home in the Book Trailerpark. 

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