Promoting Books with Video
If you watch the Super Bowl you know that part of the fun of doing that is watching the commercials. Ad agencies around the country work all year to come up with the most clever and ingenious commercials for their clients to debut on Super Sunday. Those commercials cost millions of dollars and reach millions of viewers. Small independent publishers don't stand a chance of ever affording one of those commercials but there is a way to get a "commercial" about your books where millions of people can see them --- promotional videos.
The World Wide Web has given anyone with a product or service to sell a huge forum in which to do it but, as most of us know, getting attention is the big issue. Most of us have web sites and a lot of us have blogs. We can join cyber communities through Amazon and Author's Den and many more such services but getting your product out there is an ongoing challenge. One interesting and effective tool is the growing number of video sites that literally millions of people access every day. So I decided to give it a try.
I knew I wanted to promote my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale and I wanted to get the video live before Valentine's Day in the hopes of taking advantage of the holiday named after me (or the reverse --- I've never been sure which). Since my business, Valentine-Design.com, specializes in web sites and promotional materials for small businesses I figured I should be my own customer. This is how I went about it:
1. Write a script. I knew I wanted to keep my video under a minute and I wanted to create a mood of romance and adventure. I figured each slide in my video would require about 3 seconds of time so I decided on 20 slides (I actually wound up with 24 when I added credits). I wrote a script that consisted of 17 lines of text --- one for each slide.
2. Create a storyboard. On a big yellow legal pad and in my favorite coffee shop with a huge mug of turbo-charged caffeine I drew out a series of squares and began filling them in. The first slide would be an intro, 17 slides for the script, 3 slides featuring the title of the book with a picture of the cover, a blurb, and where to get it. Another slide was added to promote my previous book of romantic love stories (remember this is for Valentine's Day), a slide for the credits, and a final slide with URLS for my press and my blog.
3. Assembling the images. I searched through my own photographs, art work, and collection of scanned art and then went on-line and took images from free photo sites including government sites like the Hubble Telescope. By Googling "free stock photography" I found a wealth of sites where people posted photos that are available for anyone to use.
4. Designing the slides. In Photoshop I created a frame that was the size I wanted all my slides to conform to. One by one I assembled the images using layers, lighting effects, and a variety of filters to give each slide the mood I wanted it to have. I knew that I wanted to keep to a particular color palate of mysterious, deep colors so the white text would really stand out when layered over them. Once the slides were ready I added the text.
5. Selecting the music. I knew I wanted music for the background. In the past I've purchased stock music from sites like MusicBakery.com but for this video I decided to use a snippet of music from a CD. I put the CD in my disc drive and copied it to the hard drive and used Windows Media Player to convert it to MP3 format. Then I downloaded a small freeware program called InAudio to edit the piece down to one minute.
6. Putting it all together. I used Flash MX to assemble the slides and add the music adjusting transitions and timing as I went along. There are many freeware or shareware programs that you can find on Tucows.com that do the same thing. When the video looked the way I wanted it to I clicked Publish and my computer created my video.
7. Here it is!
As soon as I was satisfied I uploaded my file to my various web sites. The next step is to convert the SWF (Flash) file to an MPEG or WMV file to post to Google Video, YouTube, etc. If your computer has Movie Maker on it (mine doesn't) you may be able to skip this step by assembling your movie in that instead of Flash.
And there you have it, a commercial that the entire cyber-world has access to. It might not be the Super Bowl but it's pretty super for us little guys.
- Visit Parlez-Moi Blog for more information on book promotion and marketing.
The World Wide Web has given anyone with a product or service to sell a huge forum in which to do it but, as most of us know, getting attention is the big issue. Most of us have web sites and a lot of us have blogs. We can join cyber communities through Amazon and Author's Den and many more such services but getting your product out there is an ongoing challenge. One interesting and effective tool is the growing number of video sites that literally millions of people access every day. So I decided to give it a try.
I knew I wanted to promote my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale and I wanted to get the video live before Valentine's Day in the hopes of taking advantage of the holiday named after me (or the reverse --- I've never been sure which). Since my business, Valentine-Design.com, specializes in web sites and promotional materials for small businesses I figured I should be my own customer. This is how I went about it:
1. Write a script. I knew I wanted to keep my video under a minute and I wanted to create a mood of romance and adventure. I figured each slide in my video would require about 3 seconds of time so I decided on 20 slides (I actually wound up with 24 when I added credits). I wrote a script that consisted of 17 lines of text --- one for each slide.2. Create a storyboard. On a big yellow legal pad and in my favorite coffee shop with a huge mug of turbo-charged caffeine I drew out a series of squares and began filling them in. The first slide would be an intro, 17 slides for the script, 3 slides featuring the title of the book with a picture of the cover, a blurb, and where to get it. Another slide was added to promote my previous book of romantic love stories (remember this is for Valentine's Day), a slide for the credits, and a final slide with URLS for my press and my blog.
3. Assembling the images. I searched through my own photographs, art work, and collection of scanned art and then went on-line and took images from free photo sites including government sites like the Hubble Telescope. By Googling "free stock photography" I found a wealth of sites where people posted photos that are available for anyone to use.
4. Designing the slides. In Photoshop I created a frame that was the size I wanted all my slides to conform to. One by one I assembled the images using layers, lighting effects, and a variety of filters to give each slide the mood I wanted it to have. I knew that I wanted to keep to a particular color palate of mysterious, deep colors so the white text would really stand out when layered over them. Once the slides were ready I added the text.
5. Selecting the music. I knew I wanted music for the background. In the past I've purchased stock music from sites like MusicBakery.com but for this video I decided to use a snippet of music from a CD. I put the CD in my disc drive and copied it to the hard drive and used Windows Media Player to convert it to MP3 format. Then I downloaded a small freeware program called InAudio to edit the piece down to one minute.
6. Putting it all together. I used Flash MX to assemble the slides and add the music adjusting transitions and timing as I went along. There are many freeware or shareware programs that you can find on Tucows.com that do the same thing. When the video looked the way I wanted it to I clicked Publish and my computer created my video.
7. Here it is!
As soon as I was satisfied I uploaded my file to my various web sites. The next step is to convert the SWF (Flash) file to an MPEG or WMV file to post to Google Video, YouTube, etc. If your computer has Movie Maker on it (mine doesn't) you may be able to skip this step by assembling your movie in that instead of Flash.
And there you have it, a commercial that the entire cyber-world has access to. It might not be the Super Bowl but it's pretty super for us little guys.
- Visit Parlez-Moi Blog for more information on book promotion and marketing.
posted by Kathleen Valentine at 6:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home