Some of you writers out there may not be familiar with the social media world. There are now things called “book videos.” A book video is like a short movie preview for an upcoming or newly released book. In this month’s The Writer magazine, journalist Beth Bakkum writes a short blurb about book videos. Here it is with my added links:

PROMOTIONAL BOOK VIDEOS CATCH ON

In the age of YouTube and MySpace, publishers are looking for new ways to connect with the Internet crowd. Promotional book videos are their latest endeavor to do just that. Simon & Schuster launched a video site that features 40 writers; Hyperion Books, HarperCollins and Penguin Group also use book films, as does Oregon bookseller Powell’s Books.

The videos aren’t intended to be Hollywood slick; rather, they’re short, informal clips to help the reader get to know the author and learn about the book.

“I don’t know if we’re reaching people we wouldn’t otherwise be reaching, but we are reaching people who are not necessarily reading book-review sections, or always watching a TV show,”Sue Fleming, Simon & Schuster’s vice president and executive director for online and consumer marketing, tells the Associated Press.

Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Worldwide, points out the success of the book video made for the bestseller The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Igguiden. “It was such a good piece that the Today show picked up on it and aired the whole thing.,” he said.

Author Marianne Wiggins recently made a video for her novel The Shadow Catcher. “I don’t know any writers these days who would say that it is beneath their dignity to make a video. Sales have been flat for publishers and I want to find readers. If my publisher suggests something like this to me, I’m certainly going to go hand in hand with that endeavor.” -Beth Bakkum

Most book videos now contain a short explanation of the story with an interview with the author. The majority of book videos concentrate on promoting the author more than the book. Robin Mizell of the blog Treated and Released has a great article about how we as authors and artists can take this one step up. Robin outlines how creative a book video can be, has links to some contests, and outlines in detail what an author should do to create and distribute a book video themselves. Check it out and learn up – this is where book selling is going.

I’d like to make an added suggestion for those of us who are working on their first project: Make the book video before the book is finished. Heck, perhaps even before you start writing. Why not use video and audio media to help you with your planning? As with writing a logline for your book, making an amateur book video in your own home can help you define your characters and hone in your plot. If you don’t have your logline written, a longer, more drawn out interview can help you get down to the bare bones of the storyline. If you can’t get anything out of it, show the video to a friend and have a discussion about your friend’s impressions. Watch a couple of book videos, do your own, act like a “real” author. This could go a long way in boosting your confidence, streamlining your project, and building enthusiasm to write. Two caveats: 1. Don’t show or publish the book video to anyone but your closest first readers/friends. You wouldn’t want interest to bubble up in a product that isn’t produced. 2. Think twice about sending your homemade book video to publishers along with your transcript. Whereas some may be intrigued by it, others may see it as a gimmick. Do some research first before submitting a book video. Those caveats aside, I think a book video can be a great way to start a project. I’m working on the script for my book’s video today.

Please tell me what you think of book videos and using social media as a creative spark generator.

As a fiction writer (a.k.a. story-teller), I want to take a moment to remind us all of that (hopefully) familiar feeling of immersion when reading a great book. I’m not being a luddite. Just take a second and think back to that experience. The writing was so good you lost track of time. The fictional characters were real people, perhaps just like you or your neighbor down the street. You could hardly wait to turn the page. Your foot was tapping. Your heart rate went up. You let yourself be whisked away, and that was the point. Remember? Good.

Now ask yourself, what could make that better? Perhaps being a part of the story yourself?

“Immersive Entertainment” is a term being thrown around by everyone from plasma screen TV manufacturers to mom-and-pop podcasters. Like the term “new media,” there is no solid, agreed-upon definition of the term, but the buzzword still peaks interest in the media-worn consumer.

Any sci-fi fan worth their salt can name a dozen hedonistic planets, solid holograms, or pleasure robots that portray our human fantasies of virtual reality. I call these ‘entertainment realities,’ and they seem to be our goal. We take small steps toward these entertainment edens. Today’s developers are concentrating on previously ignored senses in order to make the story experience seem “more real.”

Storytelling, the mother of all entertainment, first relied on sound. Printed media came, relying on sight. The vistas and the music became enveloping, whisking us away further into the story. Now there are high-definition flat screens that add special backlighting to supposedly increase depth perception, which the manufacturers boast will make you feel “like you’re there” more than ever before. Movement and touch are being added; Your chair or at the very least your game controller can vibrate when your avatar takes a hit or there is an explosion in a TV show. Smell-o-vision will probably soon emerge, and every show will have code that activates certain chemicals in the connected surround-smell modules in the room. Turn it up to superblast and you’ll be able to taste it too. Most of the top Googles on “Immersive Entertainment” are about these mock virtual reality video gaming or extra bells and whistles (lights, sounds, chair buzzing) added to your living room.

Entertainment has moved far beyond the lonely one-hour-a-week episode on TV or console game. Now, you can read blogs “written by” the fictional characters in that TV show, you can watch extra footage on websites, you can join in discussions and post video tributes on YouTube or Viddler, you can game on-line with strangers. Just recently I noticed that members of Twitter, a free on-line instant-message type of service, can now follow Chuck Bartowski, the main character of this season’s break-out hit “Chuck.” Chuck is a mild-mannered tech support guy who is forced into international spying.

I follow Chuck on Twitter.

I don’t know what I’m expecting out of it. Chuck doesn’t reply to any messages, he just puts them out, and infrequently at that. He doesn’t read anyone else’s messages. Basically, the writers of the show are using social networking media to promote the show. I know this. But I have to admit, when I was browsing the Twitter site and I found “Chuck Bartowski” listed as if he were a living, breathing person and not just a character with an actor’s face, I was excited. I love that show. Plus, Chuck is exactly my type of guy: geeky, yet handsome; masculine, but empathetic (he’s a bit of an underachiever, but I could work on that!) It excited me that I could be exposed to this quirkily dreamy anti-hero in an extra, seemingly more personal way than just watching him on my DVR or reading a fake blog post. I can pretend that Chuck is in my small social network, that Chuck is messaging me personally, that we used to work together but now live in separate states but we keep in touch. I know the instant messages, called “Tweets” on Twitter, are just as fake as a fictional character blog post, but somehow Twitter and tweets as social media are still so new and fresh that Chuck’s messages just seem more real. This makes my heart speed up.

I’m sure it will get old. My heart will slow down. Reading a thriller is a lot different the second time around. Chuck is the lucky character to be the first to send me all a-Twitter. My first fictional love was Phineas of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace; he stole my teenage soul. Phineas still holds a special place in my heart. But A Separate Peace was one of “those” books for me, an entertainment reality that I will never forget. Will instant messages and a silly TV show compare to that experience? Only time will tell. But I intend to keep my mind and eyes open to Chuck, to keep my preferences for the printed novel in check, and give the new social media world a chance to whisk me away.

Multimedia: The more the merrier

Collaborations of writers, artists, musicians and programmers yield lively work. Born Magazine is a source

This week, as I watched some animated poems and “played” a piece of interactive fiction, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the more sophisticated pieces took more than one person to build. Artistic collaboration is nothing new, of course, but within the emerging world of digital literature it seems to be more important than ever.

Is the new media changing the way artists work?

Chris Joseph might not go that far. But as a writer who works in a variety of digital media, he’s well aware that joining forces with other artists can yield some very interesting results.

Joseph is Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. His multimedia project Animalamina (www.animalamina.com) is an unusual and delightful piece of interactive poetry for children. He created it in collaboration with 12 visual artists.

“I think collaboration is very common, and almost essential, for a full multimedia project,” Joseph says. “Very few people have the full range of skills required – writing, music, art, programming.”

Taking his inspiration from the classic storybook teaching tool of ABCs, Joseph first composed poems featuring animals representing each letter of the alphabet. There are buzzing bumblebees, for instance, and “very very vultures being (very) rude.”

He envisioned the project as a traditional print piece, but worried he wouldn’t have much to add to the already well-trodden ground of ABC books. Digital art, by contrast, was hopping with possibilities, especially for his intended audience of kids 5 to 11 – people who understand interactions with computers much better than their parents do.

He described his idea to his visual artist friends and asked them for submissions. The artists, working in different media, contributed pictures that Joseph then animated in Flash. The resulting piece is a dynamic set of interactive, interconnected poetry animations set to sleek electronic music that Joseph composed.

One of the most striking aspects of the piece is the breadth of styles represented. The backdrop of one scene is a panoramic photograph of a view from a mountaintop; the user spins the image around using the cursor in order to see the view from all angles. The piece representing the letter C features animated cats that began life as charming paintings by Clare Drapper, bright, splashy creatures wearing loony expressions that put me in mind of the pets in George Booth’s New Yorker cartoons.

Simply put, Animalamina wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without multiple contributors.

“I think I’ve been pretty fortunate so far in my collaborating partners. All the Animalamina artists were friends, including a couple who I’ve only ever known online, which was more important to me than any kind of assessment of ‘quality,’ and I love the variety of styles that resulted. But I think it suggests a basic problem, which is finding and funding collaborators to work on multimedia projects,” Joseph said.

This is the very problem Born Magazine (www.bornmagazine.com) exists to solve.

Created in 1996 in Seattle as a print publication that facilitated linkups between artists and writers, Born went online the following year. Today it features collaborations between creators of traditional literature and artists who work in digital media.

The current issue includes an unnerving poem called “He Wants to Take Your Picture,” written by Susan Brown and brought to life by the art/design team Synthetic Infatuation. As retro-cute images slide around and tell their own story, the poem is recited by a robot voice that doesn’t get the inflection of American English even remotely right – you know it, it’s the terrifying “Agnes” voice from your Mac’s VoiceOver program. The piece is as much performance art or film as it is a print poem.

Scott Benish, the magazine’s online curator, explains that some of Born’s collaborations are set in motion by Born editors, who select a poem or short prose piece from the submissions they’ve received and pass it on to a visual artist, who then interprets it in “interactive media.” Other times a team works together throughout the process, blending words and visuals from their project’s inception.

“Design – visuals, interactivity and audio – has the potential to really enhance the understanding of the piece, or even completely change the interpretation of a piece, which can be interesting or unfortunate, depending on the point of view of the writer,” Benish said.

A potential pitfall? There had to be one; without risk there is no art. In other words, stay tuned. This literature is evolving every day.
Katie Haegele is a writer who lives in Montgomery County. Visit her at www.thelalatheory.com.
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