The Trickiness of Trailers: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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book trailer, film review, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, trailer art

I’ve had book trailers on my mind of late. Given that, I’ve been thinking of how emblematic (or not) they can be, of the work being promoted.

I was recently drawn in by the fantastically slick film trailer for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”:

I seriously love this piece at so many levels. The editing, the saturation–and most particularly the way in which the music and the images/text pulse together, such that the music is closely integrated with the visuals and adds the sense of an implacable, sinister escalation of tension and danger. Wonderfully done (so good that it will no doubt be cliche within a year or two).

It actually got us out of our comfortable, on-demand film-viewing chairs and into the movie theatre–a not inconsiderable feat (esp. considering that you can’t pause films in the theatre, the popcorn is absurdly pricey, and we always seem to get stuck in front of a pair of Whispering Demons who are under some mysterious obligation to provide a running commentary during the film).

But out we went–and discovered that the actual film is rather different to what the trailer implied.

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The original “Man on a Ledge”?

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"My Winnipeg", LedgeMan, Man on a Ledge

We saw the trailer for “Man on a Ledge” a few days ago, and my husband reminded me of its possible precursor: “LedgeMan”, the show within a show, from Guy Maddin’s bizarre, surreal, funny, and poignant film “My Winnipeg”.

“My Winnipeg” is one of those movies that makes you feel an elusive, underlying sense of sadness and poignancy, even as you laugh at the humour and absurdity of the imagery. It’s not a particularly coherent narrative, but is also quite wonderful in the imagined history and fantastical mythologies it builds around Winnipeg. If you’re an art film type, it’s definitely worth checking out.

“Numb3rs”: Mathematics as Magic?

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magic, Numb3rs, Prison Break, pseudo-science, science, Sherlock, Talk to Me

My husband and I watched the pilot of the television show “Numb3rs” last night. It’s about two brothers: the older one works for the FBI, while the younger one is a math whiz and a youthful prof at an eminent university. The younger one sees the entire world as numbers, and ends up helping out the older brother in solving a serial killer case by analyzing the data according to the application of mathematical principles.

My kind of show. I love geeky premises that involve the application some specialized skills that others don’t have and require the characters to think through the problem before acting upon it. I also love it when a show sets itself the challenge of being bound by certain concepts or principles that have to be obeyed as part of the crime solving process.

Except it rarely works that way. Numb3rs is a case in point. To disclaim: I’m not a math person. Nonetheless, even I had a bit of a problem with the solution to the pilot (warning: spoilers in the next two paragraphs. Skip them if you don’t want to know specifics about the pilot).

Guest Post: How to Make a Book Trailer

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book trailer how to, create a book trailer, emily casey, fairy tale trap

The fabulous Emily Casey has stopped by with an extremely helpful post on creating a book trailer, as part of her author blog tour!

Emily is the author of The Fairy Tale Trap, a young adult novel about Ivy Thorn, a smart and resourceful teen who must extricate herself from the fractured fairy tale in which she finds herself trapped.

Emily has also graciously offered to give away a ebook edition of her novel, downloadable via Smashwords. Check out her fabulous book trailer and the first couple of sample chapters on her website, then come back and enter the draw! All you have to do is leave a comment on this blog before February 3rd (limit of one general comment per day). Additional entries can be added by subscribing to Emily’s or my twitter feeds, liking our FB pages, and posting or tweeting about the giveaway. Be sure to leave a separate comment for each of the above. I’ll run it through a random number generator to select a winner.

Also: do check out Smashwords, Amazon, or Goodreads for more information or to purchase your own copy!

*   *   *

Hey, Kat! Thanks for letting me come on your blog. Today’s post is about how to make a book trailer for $0. Because if I can do it, so can anyone.

Being an independent self-publisher is hard work. It’s even harder to do it for cheap. A lot of authors try to cut costs where they can, and a lot don’t even consider making a book trailer. I think this is a mistake. A book trailer lets you show readers how great your book is in 90 seconds. Plus, it’s fun to make.

Now, I have zero experience making videos. There are a million ways to make a book trailer (Macs have similar, if not better, movie-making software), but here’s how I did mine.

Free Will v. Predetermination in The Golden Compass

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determinism, free will, predetermination, prophecy, The Golden Compass

I just watched The Golden Compass last night. I haven’t read the books–though if the movie is any indication, they do seem intriguing, and the glimpses provided of the world made me curious to check them out and see more of Pullman’s worldbuilding and his ideas.

One of the themes of the film, however, seems to be the tension between free will and coercions. I gather that the Magisterium, a coercive organization that looks rather a lot like the medieval Catholic Church interpolated into modernity, is an oppressive ruling force that seeks to shape fact and science through ordinance. They also appear to want to create docile, cooperative humans who will be perfected in very specific ways.

The main character, Lyra, is a young girl who evokes the fairy tale of the boy who knew no fear–she seems ready to march into any situation and fortunately for her, she is also resourceful and clever enough to get herself out of most of them–at least in the film.

At one point in the film, a mysterious and witchy character, Serafina Pekkala, explains that the stakes in the war to come will be “free will itself”–having just pointed out that Lyra is the subject of prophecies and will be a key figure in the conflict. This kind of conjunction between issues of free will and prophecy seems common enough in sf/f–e.g. it often deals with some emergent and long-prophesied figure, who will fight for the freedom of the people, or will battle metaphysical forces in order to protect the people from some kind of coercive evil that will rob them of their free will.

This kind of bothers me–though it obviously depends on the formulation. The reason is that if there’s the assumption that the people have free will at present, and are fighting to retain it, then how does a prophecy–something that strongly implies predetermination–fit in with that?

KDP Select: an Update on the Big Bucks for Exclusivity Proposition

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kdp select

Some of you have already read my previous post, expressing the KDP Select formulation in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma–as well as the update on that post, which was the result of Catana, one of my writer friends, pointing out that the Kindle Library only allows for one book download per month. The basic recap, for those who have not read them, is that with the one book per month limit for Amazon Premium members, it seems pretty clear that for an author like me: 1) whose price point is below a certain threshold, and 2) who isn’t particularly high profile as a writer, opting into KDP Select–and thereby having to go exclusive with my listings and remove them from Smashwords and all its distribution outlets–probably isn’t worthwhile (conceptually it’s upsetting to have to do anyway, but my hypothesis was that even at the level of revenue, it wasn’t worth it). Most Amazon Premium members, in order to make their membership worth it, would more likely use their “free” signout on someone far higher profile, whose books are significantly more expensive. I know I would.

I also decided to test this, by enrolling several of my contemporary romance novels, published under a different pseudonym, which I hadn’t gotten around to listing on Smashwords. I was just curious to see how they did, and since they were already exclusive by default, I wasn’t losing much. I also figure that for those of you who are wondering how well this might have worked for you, I can at least provide some kind of baseline.

So, the basics: I enrolled four books. Three of them were 50K word contemporary romances at $1.99 each. The fourth book is a 3 in 1 bundle of the individual books for $2.99.

ASIDE: Those of you familiar with the royalty scheme at Amazon (books priced at $2.98 and lower, as well as books priced above $9.99, only provide the author with a 35% royalty off the cover prices, while books in the sweet spot range between $2.99 and $9.99 provide the author with a 70% royalty) will note that I’m getting exactly the same royalty by selling all three books for $2.99 as I am for selling each book at $1.99–even though the reader is paying double. I wanted to see to what extent people would go for the half price value bundle versus the individual books (fyi, they mostly go for the value bundle, which sells about as well as An Immodest Proposal, my top seller as Kathryn Anthony, but I still do get the occasional single sale).

I enrolled them on the date of my previous post or thereabouts–namely, around the 10th of December.

So–what kind of big buck$$$ did I rake in as a result of enrolling these books into the KDP Select, exclusivity deal that prevents me from listing them elsewhere? How many eager readers downloaded my indie-priced books for free, thereby making me eligible for some as-yet unknown portion of the KDP Select Fund pie? 

On New Year’s Resolutions (and why I don’t believe in them)

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fresh start, lifestyle changes, old habits, small changes, time of change

I understand the reasoning behind New Year’s resolutions, of course. Fresh start to the year, fresh start to one’s life and all that yumminess. And yet it seems fundamentally flawed to me. Deciding to make a pile of changes of a single day, after weeks of excess and partying, strikes me as a recipe for failure and for feeling crappy about yourself when you end up flagging and falling into old habits because the changes were too wide-ranging and ambitious to be sustainable.

We all know the truth of it: long term lifestyle changes are ideally small, incremental, and undertaken gradually, in the context that will support the changes, and thereby allow each new habit to settle in and stick. Otherwise, they’re not going to last. And though it feels like very little is being done when transformations are undertaken in this manner, they add up. Look back after a year of small changes, and you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.