Olive Editions

nobody@vox.com(Emily) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:28:46 +0000

Jonathan Safran Foer

Harper Collins is releasing new "Olive Editions" of three popular novels. They are super cute editions, and the best part is they are priced very affordably too. The list price is $10, and Amazon is selling them for $8. The first three Olive Edition titles are Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

I was able to check out all three of them in person at Barnes and Noble today. They are a cute little size - a little bit bigger than mass market paperback size. I don't normally buy a lot of mass market size, but these are very cute and feel sturdy, more like trade paperback size. Perfect travel size too, you could tuck them into your purse or bag very easily. You can't tell from these cover images, but the sides are striped and also exceedingly cute.

I own, and have read and enjoyed, both Everything is Illuminated and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I like Michael Chabon, and have not read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’m definitely going to get that one, and am seriously tempted to get myself new copies of the other two as well. :) They would look so cute together.

Here are the other two covers:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

Milan Kundera

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel

Michael Chabon

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Interview with Timothy Quinn author of Octopus Intelligence

nobody@vox.com(The Book Trailer Blog) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:01:34 +0000

Octopus Intelligence by Timothy Quinn

I see on your website (http://octopusintelligence.com) that you're using many different ways to promote your book from excerpts to web banners to downloadable interview clips. And you've created not one but three trailers for you novel. What impact do you think book trailers have or could have on word of mouth and/or your book sales?

My intention with octopusintelligence.com was to develop a hub for collateral material relating to the book, so trailers were a natural segue as I started developing background for the real and fictional events surrounding the story—I threw a bit of everything into the site, since I didn't know whether people would be coming to the material from a traditional book review, or a blog posting, or an online retailer, or a YouTube video.

Although larger publishing houses generally have the budget and resources to handle this sort of promotion, smaller presses don't and so odds are it's up to the author to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get the information they need. If it works, then the website address becomes as meaningful an identifier for the book as the ISBN, and I think that's ultimately a democratizing force for consumers who might otherwise feel beholden to the special order department of their local bookseller.

Rob Stewart's website for his film Sharkwater (http://sharkwater.com) does this really well; for lack of significant funding or studio distribution, he's built a site which evangelizes for the project by making all the tools available for others to spread the word—he's not dependent anymore on a thirty second spot in front of Batman.

Truth be told, I also had an ulterior motive with octopusintelligence.com. The question I think every writer dreads upon finishing a book or a film or a play or whatever is, "so what's it about?" Innocuous question, but just about impossible to answer in twenty-five words or less, especially after you've spent several years working the whole damn thing out on paper. Now, if you've memorized your publisher's blurb, you can go with that, which is going to be weird because it's probably filled with words like "dazzling" and "wunderkind"... or you can do what I usually do, which is sputter something about loss and desire and then make a quick feint for the bar.

The website gives me a third option. It's a much broader canvas to work with -- there's text, there's video, there's audio clips—so it saves me having to extemporize a capsule summary every time the subject comes up.

You are the author of Octopus Intelligence as well as the creator of its trailers. Do you have any film/design/web/animation background? If so, what is it? If not, what was it like to learn Flash and animation to make them?

I'm a Canadian novelist, which is a nicer way of saying I'm hanging onto my day job. I'm the Director of Production with a Toronto-based web agency, and I've got a background in Internet design and development, so I'd had some basic experience with Flash when I started tinkering with book trailers.

Flash is a good technology for this sort of thing because it's as complex as you need it to be; you can do some extremely sophisticated vector-based animation using the programmatic capabilities of ActionScript, or you can do simple pans and fades and floating text, which is pretty much all I did.

The big challenge in building a trailer for a book is trying to create the illusion of motion without actually having any video footage. I spent a fair bit of time looking at how various directors have handled static content—Ken Burns' documentary work is great because he uses music and narration to make you forget you're basically looking at archival photographs, but honestly, even the opening credits of Law & Order do a decent job of conveying dramatic narrative through still images.

How did you come up with your concept for your trailer with the numerology?

One of the themes of the book is the search for meaning, and specifically the relevance of a message discovered by one of the characters under unusual circumstances. I wanted to play around with the idea of hidden meaning by burying that message in various formats within the trailer: a street address, a telephone number, a column of figures. The "Messages" trailer was built specifically to reflect the viewpoint of one of the two main characters. "Rewrite History" was designed through the eyes of my other main character.

Your choices for music are refreshing and unique. How did you choose the music for your trailers?

The music for "Messages" was relatively easy; I liked the way Chopin's Nocturne No. 7 in C Sharp Minor builds from quiet melody to a sense of impending crisis. The music for "Rewrite History" was more difficult; I wanted something operatic but modern, so it took me awhile to find David Byrne's Au Fond du Temple Saint—once I did, though, that became in my mind the de facto theme song for the book. For the final trailer, "The Hunt," I wanted a tone more than a melody, and I ended up sampling from a few different sources, including Peter Gabriel's venerable Birdy soundtrack.

I should mention there's a bit of a legal gray zone here around copyright. On the one hand, sampling any recognizable piece of music is risking legal action by the performers and their labels; on the other hand, YouTube and other video distribution channels recognize some degree of liberty around "fair use." To further complicate matters, some book trailers clearly serve a commercial purpose, while others (like those designed by individual authors or small presses) are meant more to build a sense of community around the work than to hustle people through checkout at Amazon. So it really becomes a judgment call on the part of the author or publisher whether or not to incur legal risk. Clearly, if you know a composer or otherwise have access to license-free music, that's a big advantage.

What advice do you have for creators of book trailers?

I think it's possible both to underestimate and to overestimate to limitations of the medium. Frankly, if you're aiming for Michael Bay on an Errol Morris budget, it's just going to look camp. That said, it's a mistake to think you can throw one of these together in a few hours and save the cost of hiring a decent designer or animator. The science fiction author Greg Bear released a slide show trailer a few weeks ago for his latest book, and some of the comments on Boing Boing were eviscerating. Greg Bear trailer

If at all possible, get someone else to write your trailer. Although I wrote my own copy, I had the benefit of working with a great editor on the manuscript and some of the promotional text, so I could leverage that vocabulary when I scripted my trailers. The advantage to having someone else write your trailers is that you're going to get a lot closer to your audience's perspective instead of being blinded by what you happen to like about the book.

And finally, are there any other book trailers out there that you love?

There's a lot of this sort of thing on YouTube that's really unwatchable, and much of it seems to be promoting vampire erotica. Who knew?

I saw you posted a link to Michael Chabon's trailer for The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and I think that's really well done—it plays to the strengths of the medium by limiting itself to narrative and simple design. I also liked the trailer Boom Studios released for their North Wind series; again, they took the material they had and did something interesting with it. North Wind trailer

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When to break the rules

nobody@vox.com(The Book Trailer Blog) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:57:09 +0000

I wrote in a previous post that authors are not voice talent and therefore should not be used for voiceovers in book trailers. But, of course, there are exceptions to every rule. In the case of Michael Chabon's trailer for The Yiddish Policeman's Union, the author reads an excerpt from his novel and the result is a beautiful trailer.

I could not find the original trailer on YouTube, so click below to see the English version:

Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union

And embedded below is a Spanish-language version from YouTube.

EL SINDICATO DE POLICÍA YIDDISH de Michael Chabon

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Vox’s posts tagged michael chabon

Olive Editions

Interview with Timothy Quinn author of Octopus Intelligence

When to break the rules