Book Trailers: How important are they

The Importance Of Book Trailers For Self-Published Authors 

Writer’s Relief, Inc.

Ronnie L. Smith, President

“The success of your self-published book will ultimately be determined by your ability to rise above the competition and grab the attention of your potential buyers. And let’s face it—with all the books currently on the market, there are a lot of titles competing for your readers’ attention. To stand out from the crowd, media-savvy authors are using book trailers to entice book buyers and build sales.

Some writers may wonder if using video to sell the written word makes sense. Think of it this way: You’ve most likely experienced the effectiveness of movie trailers. A well-crafted movie preview creates buzz and convinces you to buy a ticket. In the same way, a professional book trailer will help you engage your audience and generate more interest in your book.”

Okay, so some of my writer friends think my trailers are out dated in this modern video world of flashing images, bright lights, and “talking movies” rather than photographs with voiceovers. But here they are examples of what can be done with Movie Maker on a PC.

The trailer for Child Of My Heart is responsible for selling more books than all my others, probably because it comes up in search engines of popular themes (children, child abuse, child neglect, NICU, PICU, pediatric nursing, motherhood, etc.). 

So here they are--all with their original covers. Enjoy! And let me know if any make you want to purchase one of my books.

ALL THE VOICES IN MY HEAD

https://youtu.be/GqC1RW-r_Mg

CHILD OF MY HEART

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NvAu6XIM-g&feature=related

BAGGAGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBVmlsLltU&feature=youtu.be

TRANSMUTARE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpcfCqGgE-o&feature=youtu.be

AUSPICIOUS DREAMS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIR6kWm2b8I

If you’ve made a trailer for your book(s) feel free to post me the link and I’ll be happy to share it on next week’s blog.

If you haven’t thought about making book trailers the article below may inspire you.

Writer’s Relief, Inc.

http://selfpublishingrelief.com/importance-of-book-trailers/

How HarperCollins Cheated Wiley Cash

The first story Wiley Cash remembers telling was told to his neighbor when they were six years old. His family had just returned from Myrtle Beach. Cash told the boy that his dad had buried him neck-deep in the sand, so deep that a crab latched on to his big toe. His sister overheard the story and asked, “Why’d you lie? That didn’t happen.” Cash didn’t have an answer for her. The truth was they’d played in the sand, and swam in the ocean, which seemed boring. But to have your big toe almost torn off by a crab? Now that’s a good story.

Later in life Cash thought about his lie but knows that as a six-year-old, you’re called a liar when you tell a story that you know isn’t true. But if you can keep telling stories and writing them down, people will eventually call you a writer.

Tiffany B. Davis


Cash, Wiley (2012-04-17). A Land More Kind Than Home . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

This Dark Road to Mercy is a novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.

After their mother's unexpected death, twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night.

Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armored car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn't the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due.

Narrated by a trio of alternating voices, This Dark Road to Mercy is a story about the indelible power of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.

(FYI: I cut and pasted this HarperCollins synopsis from Amazon. I’m glad that I didn’t read it before I read the novel. For me, it tells too much of the story and leaves little, except the ending, to be discovered.)

Now for the difficult part—a review:

The premise of “This Dark Road” is pretty solid but the conflicts were so coincidental and serendipitous that it read more like a Nancy Drew mystery than the Southern Gothic novel some tout it to be.

I enjoyed that the story is set in the summer that both Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire were trying to break Roger Maris's home run record. I’m not a fan of baseball but Cash added just enough information about the rivalry to knit the story together and not bore me with a sport I don’t appreciate.

The Southern (North Carolina) dialect didn’t seem quite authentic and the three voices—Easter, Weller, and Pruitt all sound the same—the same as Cash’s.

It seems that Cash wrote this book with the notion that someone would turn it into a screenplay and then a movie. With a little help I believe it could be. It certainly has sufficient plot and charm but I’m afraid, if the movie is done right, people will never say, I liked the book better.

The book has flaws…flaws that a good editor could have easily corrected, like what Tay Hohoff did for Harper Lee. Hohoff realized that Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was a rough draft. She encouraged Lee to turn that rough draft into the beloved masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird.

An astute editor at HarperCollins could and should have recognized that Cash’s manuscript was not ready for publication. HarperCollins cheated Wally Cash and HarperCollins cheated me as a reader. This Dark Road To Mercy stopped being literary fiction with the title. HarperCollins could and should have encouraged and assisted Wally Cash to turn this rough draft of a novel into a triumphant Southern Gothic novel, maybe to become one of the best books of the century.

Had this book been self-published I’d give it 5 stars because of its charm and the last line that lingers. But because the publisher is prestigious, respected, and a royalty publishing company This Dark Road To Mercy will have to settle for 2 stars.

LET'S ARGUE!

Rather than make a New Year's resolution I'd like to request an argument!

                                                                 (c) Shelia Bolt Rudesill

It seems to me that reasoned argument or banter is necessary for a blog to be of any value. Many people write blogs to establish a platform for their work or their ideas. Bloggers not only “show off” their work and share ideas; they make friends, and hope that, somehow, their blog will attract an audience (contacts/customers) large enough to go viral. 

A certain amount of “conflict” on blogs seems to be necessary for the blog to go viral. When people read blogs and only compliment the author, the author gets nothing but kudos—especially if the readers send a private email response rather than comment publically (on the blog) for others to read. When there is conflict (controversy), readers will hopefully comment and share the blog with their friends who will then read the blog and comment and share again and again until the blog has hundreds, thousands, or even millions of “followers”.

So, my friends, this is my wish for 2016: Let’s Argue! Not fight or squabble, or put one another down, but kindly discuss or debate our opinions. Believe me, I will not attack you personally if your opinions differ from mine. I will welcome opposing positions, but I will also defend my arguments and expect you to do the same. Otherwise, nothing constructive results from the debate. There doesn’t have to be a definitive consensus of opinion or agreement in a good argument.

In a blog I posted several weeks ago, I mentioned that I hadn’t read the book I was blogging about. I did that on purpose, to get a discussion going, but no one took the bait. If someone had protested, perhaps someone else would have either agreed with the protestor or stood up for me and then, just maybe a huge discussion would have ensued. Ah, my dream!

On Tuesday, January 5, 2016, I will post what I hope will be a controversial blog about how one big NYC publishing house not only let me down, but let down a noteworthy author. Please let me hear what you think about my opinions. LETS ARGUE intellectually and have a Happy New Year!

Don't Forget To Read During The Holidays

A Sudden Gust Of Gravity

Christina Davenport, waitressing to pay the bills, has given up on becoming a magician—until she meets the mesmerizing Reynaldo the Magnificent. He offers her a job as his assistant in his magic and juggling show. She takes it, hoping she can revive her dream without cutting his giant ego in half.

I chose to feature this book because I've always wanted to be the first to review a new book on the Amazon website. "Gravity" caught my attention as a potentially entertaining book, something I needed to read on a rainy and gloomy day.

In A Sudden Gust of Gravity the lives of Christina Davenport, Dev (Doctor Dae Soon), and Ralph (Reynaldo the Magnificent) intertwine while each becomes aware of and casts out individual demons. This is a multifaceted story with interesting and well-rounded main characters and even more interesting backstory characters. Laurie Boris has written a novel with a healthy balance of intrigue, conflict, relationships, and romance. Highly recommended. 

"When you play from your heart, all of a sudden there's no gravity. You don't feel the weight of the world, of bills, of anything. That's why people love it. Your so-called insurmountable problems disappear, and instead of problems you get possibility." - Carlos Santana

Laurie Boris is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of five novels: The Joke's on Me, Drawing Breath, Don't Tell Anyone, Sliding Past Vertical, and Playing Charlie Cool. When not hanging out with the universe of imaginary people in her head, she enjoys baseball, cooking, reading, and helping aspiring novelists as a contributing writer and editor for IndiesUnlimited.com. She lives in New York's lovely Hudson Valley.

* Follow Laurie on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/laurie.boris.author

* Keep up with Laurie's blog at http://laurieboris.com/blog/

* Follow Laurie on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/LaurieBoris

* Check out Laurie and other award-winning authors at http://enovelauthorsatwork.com and see her page there at http://enovelauthorsatwork.com/laurie-boris/

Want To Publish a Short Story, Memoir, Essay? Here's some links!

This is an FYI for writer’s searching for publishing and contest opportunities for short stories, flash fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and chapters of books. These links are literally the results of MONTHS of blood, sweat, and tears. Enjoy and Happy Submitting!

Empty Sink Publishing:

 http://emptysinkpublishing.com/

Under the Gum Tree:

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/under_the_gum_tree

Bewildering Stories:

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/index.html

Writer’s Relief (Don’t be fooled by this company. They want to find places for your work for a fee but there is plenty info here to submit on your own: http://writersrelief.com/review_board/review-board-short-stories-essays/

Catapult:

https://catapult.co/

Beyond Your Blog:

http://www.beyondyourblog.com/new-to-submitting-your-work-start-here/

Body Verses:

file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Call%20For%20Submissions.pdf

Joyland Magazine:

http://www.joylandmagazine.com/submissions

Behind Closed Doors : https://behindcloseddoorslitmag.wordpress.com/submissions/

Anthology Market: http://www.angiebenedetti.com/blog/category/anthology-market-listings/

Talking Writing:

http://talkingwriting.com/

Beyond Your Blog: (I saved the best for last! This site is overflowing with markets!)

http://www.beyondyourblog.com/new-to-submitting-your-work-start-here/

A HUGE thanks to Suzanne Fox, my Facebook friend, for suggesting a few of these.

Ersula K. Leguin: A Beautiful Reward

Ersula K. Leguin's Acceptance Speech

The 2014 Medalist For Distinguished Contribution To American Letters 

“To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for 50 years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. 

                                                               Photograph: Robin Marchant/Getty Images

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. 

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. 

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. 

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. 

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom." 

Ersula K. Leguin Books