More Cover Design AND Video Marketing Ideas for Your Book

Today I found the blog of “Ink Slinger in Inner Space” Karen Gadient. She is both author and  graphic designer. A single post on her blog stimulated this entry.  Karen designed the cover jacket for a recently released science fiction book.

Stimulating Thought Number One: Here’s another source for an illustrator for either cover design or for the innards of a picture book. Mark this post for future reference. Karen has a portfolio tab on her blog. I loved the quality and detail of her art. The art on the book cover shows another dimension to her style–her diversity–since the cover is completely different from the illustrations in her portfolio.

Link: http://karengadient.com/2012/11/02/debris-dreams-the-kickstarter-book-trailer/

Stimulating Thought Number Two: Karen provides a link to the young author’s promotional video trailer for his book. What?! Promotional video??? I thought video trailers were solely for hyping movies or rock albums. What do I know? Not much, evidently. Now young authors are using YouTube and such to distribute promotional videos touting their books. Brilliant. Free Advertising. And if you are clever or creative enough, you sell books!

Stimulating Thought Number Three: An author can ask for money for marketing from the public. Karen introduced me to Kickstarter, a web site devoted to connecting artists of all sorts with persons interested in funding the arts. Indie authors needn’t starve to promote a quality project. But I’ll write more about Kickstarter in a future post.

Wow, Karen! All those great ideas from a single post! Thank you!

Vividness and Density–The Key Qualities of a Book

Our lesson today comes from author Philip Roth, whose work is read around the world. Several of Roth’s books have inspired movies. Roth speaks to us with candor about qualities that make a book successful and pleasing to the reader.

Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Writers and Artists

Author Vernon Vinge: On Writing, Fiction and the Singularity

Excellent interview with science fiction author Vernon Vinge

This video explores the platform of science fiction as a vehicle to advance ideas. The interview offers advice for writers, as well as thoughts about the future.

Elements of Building Suspense

YouTube channel EmpoweringWriters has several videos instructing children in the basic elements of writing. Below is an example of the videos. The one below is less than ten minutes long. It’s about building suspense. (If you home school, this YouTube channel may give you ideas for lesson plans on writing.)

Summary: Use language to cue the reader that something is going to happen. The teacher calls the device “red flag words.”

Helpful Hints Re: Videography

Love this guy’s stuff.  I was blog hopping and found the site of still photographer Phil Kneen. He tells about using two sick days productively: he taught himself to use filmmaking software and produced the embeded video below.

By Phil Kneen

People/1:01 from Phil Kneen on Vimeo.

Here’s his words about the process:

(Source: http://philkneen.wordpress.com/2012/03/ )

I’ve never really had the patience for filmmaking, it’s something I’ve always been interested in, I’ve dipped my toe into it over the years, but stills photography always wins my attention. I’ve constantly been unable to focus my creative interest into two things at once, I suppose it’s a good and a bad thing?

Over the past two or three weeks I’ve been a bit ‘static’ due to back problems, this has had the hidden bonus of allowing me the time to sit and play with Apple’s fantastic bit of software, Final Cut X. With the help of Youtube tutorials, Google and a bit of intuition I’ve managed to teach myself the basics of this professional video editing package in less than two days. The fundamentals of video are actually easier, for me personally, to get to grips with as there are only 3 colours, red, green and blue, to deal with, as opposed to 6 in digital stills. All the other nuts and bolts, such as contrast, saturation, hue , etc, are essentially the same.

The video below is just a short 2 minute thing that I put together using existing footage and some bits I’ve made over the last week or so. Final cut is amazingly easy to use – I edited this film together in just a couple of hours. I haven’t seen many friends over the last two weeks, but those I have seen are probably in this short…

Creating the Blockbuster

Sometimes the wisdom from an expert supercedes anything I have to say on the subject of writing. Today I want to allow novelist Gene Del Vecchio to inform us about critical principles for developing broad-based readership for a story.

From YouTube, here is a video with 11 principles needed to create a blockbuster. The author speaks from 30 years of experience in the entertainment field. The principles are useful guides as an author works on his novel, play or movie script:

Creating Blockbusters

If the link above doesn’t work, go here to view the video: (P.S. In the video, he pitches his book on the subject. Study his techniques — you may have a book to pitch someday, too.)

http://youtu.be/RfCq1OG1ryk