Five gold stars

Yesterday I finished an excellent read. Truth to Tell by Mavis Cheek. Nina Porter is living the good life, says the blurb on the back cover. "Happily married, well off, a loving mother and daughter. So how come she finds herself alone in Venice with a handsome Italian? It starts with a marital row about honesty. Nina claims she always  tells the truth; her husband says it can't be done. And so the challenge is on. As Nina tries to live without the little white lies that support us all, she finds her life spiralling in directions she never expected."

Not only is the book good, I thought the back cover blurb was excellent, too.

The first line was even better: Tipping points are peculiar things. One minute the thought or desire is not on your radar, the next it is not only on your radar, it is looming so large it blots out almost everything else. And a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell says in his book, helpfully entitled The Tipping Point, is irresistible.

I was hooked. There are so many good things in her writing that I may well read it again just for the sheer pleasure of enjoying her particular prose style. Five gold stars to Ms Cheek.

The book trailer is nothing to do with Mavis Cheek. I decided to showcase (that awful word from America which I shouldn't allow my self to use!) my book trailers, and this is the third. Worry not, there is only one more to go. Unless I finish the one I'm working on for Reluctance, in which case there will be two more to come!

BOOK TRAILERS

http://www.youtube.com/user/JENB211?feature=guide

Apart from the fact that I like making them now I've got Windows Moviemaker, are book trailers any good as a promotional tool? Now that I have my new book out, I'm wondering if I should make one for Reluctance.

 If you follow the link above, you'll see I have four trailers up for viewing, but I'm constantly surprised by the number of views they get. Not that they get a huge number, but that the book that sells the least has the most views.
Isn't that odd?  and to make it odder still, the title that has sold the most copies has the least number of views. This suggests that there is a direct and inverse principle operating here!

I'd love to hear your views, and how you promote your trailers, so feel free to leave comments here!

Book trailers

You can probably tell that the weather here is not as good as it should be by the amount of time I'm spending writing for my blog! We've got wind and rain showers and it is definitely c-o-o-o-l.

I checked my You Tube trailers last night to see how they're doing. If you're interested here are the links -

one
two
three

The two later ones are definitely better than the one I did for Dark Pool - whatever possessed me to use pink font over a scene of Viking raiders? Sigh. One lives and learns...

A minute and a half seems to be a good length of time to get across a simple message. There's a difference in amateur trailers and those produced by professionals, but we do what we can with the limited resources we have. It is something I enjoy. Maybe if I was twenty and looking for a career, it might have appealed. The young people of today have so many opportunities for fascinating careers ~ things that were only to be found in science fiction sixty years ago!

The pics are from the batch taken in Perigeueux yesterday.

Promotion is vital these days

I've discovered software on my computer that allows me to make trailers fairly easily. In the last fortnight I've made two, one for SHADOWS, and here's the one that went up last night: Banners Let me know what you think of it! (I think I'd better re-make the original Dark Pool trailer, which now looks crass beside the other two!)

As for writing, I haven't done any for some time. There's no great angst about it; I'm just having a rest from writing every day by dealing with visuals and matching sound to them. It's a pleasurable thing to do and therapeutic, too. It started as promotion for my new release SHADOWS, which isn't three weeks old yet - still a baby! Because I didn't have a publication date, I was fairly laid back about preparing the sort of promotional tours that authors do these days. When I received a date at the beginning of May, it was a bit late to get on blog tour lists, and even then there was a fortnight's delay. I was lucky to have friends who gave me a mention on their blogs!

So I thought trailers might help, and hopefully they will.