Book Trailers: Awkward Authors or Works of Art?

Book trailers have been around for almost ten years now, but they don't seem to create the amount of 'buzz' they are supposed to. This isn't stopping the publishers, though, as we see more and more book trailers popping up on the internet.

If you compare these book trailers to the ones we see in the cinema, you start to wonder why authors and publishers still even try. Creating a trailer for a film seems easy enough. You try to pique the interest of the viewer by showing them the most interesting parts of the story, by using the most visually attractive images you can have in your movie. You can't do this with a book, because there are no images. You will need to start from scratch and create a visual world for a textual medium, and as we all know from various movie adaptations, this doesn't always get it right. Before I wrote this article it seemed wise to research the subject and watch as many book trailers I could find. I learned that book trailers are no exception to the adaptation rule. A good example of this is the book trailer for Joseph Finder's Power Play, which makes the book look like a corporate version of Die Hard without the great one liners by Bruce Willis.

Instead of making me interested in reading this book it actually turned me off of it. Mind you, this was not a book trailer for a vanity writer who thought it would be 'fun' to also produce a trailer with his friends. Finder has written eleven novels, won several International Thriller Awards and is frequently reviewed in the New York Times. I'll admit that the New York Times isn't the penultimate authority when it comes the quality of books and their review of this particular one wasn't exactly raving, but it does mean that Joseph Finder is a serious writer, with serious writing credit.

Luckily there are also a lot of fun, interesting and above all good book trailers. An example I personally like is Packing for Mars: SpaceHygiene, a book by Mary Roach that tries to answer strange questions about going into space.

This trailer is quirky, funny and gives you a sense of the content of the book without giving away the entire story. Because Packing for Mars is a non-fiction work, not giving away the story doesn't seem particularly hard. When you create a trailer for a novel, however, this gets more difficult. A trailer shouldn't give you the feeling that you already know how the story is going to unfold. If that is the case, why would you need to read the book? An example of a trailer for a work of fiction that doesn't do this, is the trailer for A Super Sad True Love Story.

Instead of focusing on the story, it focuses on the author. They briefly explain what the book is about, but nothing is given away. Instead of conveying a story, it conveys an overall feeling that you can expect to find in the book. It conveys the style of the author, stating that if you enjoyed this trailer, you will enjoy this writer. Besides the funny tone of the trailer, it also uses so-called 'star power' by inserting famous actors and authors like James Franco and Jeffrey Eugenides, proving that even the literary world isn't impervious to using celebrities for advertisement. These author-oriented trailers don't always work as well as this one though and sometimes you end up with the author awkwardly talking about his book and the act of reading (yes, I'm talking about you Jonathan Franzen)

There are many more examples of good and bad trailers, but the ultimate question from a marketing point of view is in the end, do they work? Is it worth it for a publisher to spent his valuable time and money on a book trailer? This question doesn't have an easy answer. With every marketing tool it is difficult to point out if it actually influences sales or not if your customers don't specifically tell you. The only way to find out if they actually work is to ask every single person who buys a book if they saw the trailer and if this was the reason they bought it.

In 2008 The Wall Street Journal has tried to assess the effect of creating trailers on book sales. They came to the conclusion that 'there is scant evidence […] that the average book trailer has much impact on sales'. There haven't been more recent studies on this, which is a shame, because it would be interesting to see if this changed in the growing world of e-books.

Many publishers keep returning to the keywords 'creating a buzz'. The objective is to make people talk about the book and recognize it when they're browsing their bookshop. I said at the start though, that this 'buzz' doesn't really seem to exist. Many people haven't even heard of book-trailers and if they have, they don't seem to notice them.

An interesting take on book trailers comes from filmmakers Scott Thrift and Ari Kuschnir. Rather than seeing the trailer as a way to market a book, they approach it as a work of art on its own. Something to be a companion to the book, rather than a mere representation of it. Their own attempt at making a trailer for the supernatural thriller Blood and Ice is actually very impressive. 

It gives a small hint of what the story is about, but it mostly creates an eerie atmosphere. The clip is intriguing even if you even you don't know it's about a book. After watching many trailers I have to admit that I agree with them. My favourite trailers are the ones that don't give away the story, but create an extra dimension. They give an impression of the author and of the general atmosphere of the book. A trailer that is an artwork of its own, something remarkable and interesting, will definitely create that 'buzz' everybody keeps talking about.

Street art

It can make a whole day a little bit better when streets are decorated with funny stuff, that makes you snigger while walking by. I found some really cool pictures of street art, which are probably not very new art pieces, but in my opinion still worth sharing.

First of all, as a lace fan I wished all fenches looked like this.

Lacefence found at blog.freepeople.com

I have been working at a store in Delft since a month now and in that month I learned that the city is known for its wrecked bikes that get trown in the water by drunken students. Every now and then a big truck with a special reacher is coming by to get them out. Not just a few bikes but a whole truckload full of them is covered from the water. It is very interesting to observe, but probably not as special as this:

New York bike, pictured by a facebookfriend

And then there is the work of artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera which brightens up the streets of Paris, by filling crackes up with wool.

Wool in streets found at blog.freepeople.com

Kidnapping ideas 3: The Oh Comely Art Edition

First of all I feel like I need to apologize for the lack of updates lately. We’ve all been pretty busy and blogging sort of drew the shortest straw. We’ll off course try to update every week, but we might not always make it. That said, I was waiting to make a new kidnapping ideas post, because I had bought many new magazines. But again, due to too little hours in a day, I still haven’t read all of them. What I’ll do is make a bunch of shorter posts about 1 magazine in particular every time. This time it will be issue five of Oh Comely. It had so many great things again, but there were two art things that I thought were really cool!

Birds in Hats

Alice Tam was interviewed by Oh Comely about her website Birds in Hats, which is exactly what it sounds like: she draws birds in hats and they are awesome! She doesn’t go for the obvious combinations and really gives the birds a personality. One of my personal favorites is the Flamingo in a Fascinator, but she drew so many that you can pick a favorite for yourself!

Flamingo in a Fascinator

Robin in a Christmas Top Hat

England Revisited

This article/interview was about an art project by Simon English called England Revisited. In 1971 he visited 75 points across England picked carefully by writing the word ENGLAND on a map of the country. He met interesting people, found relatively unknown country spots and left notes on every mark. But 40 years later, he found himself wanting to revisited the places he had been. He took pictures, trying the find the original places he went to the first time around, which really makes you think about change. It’s interesting to see how much or how little some things change in such a big amount of time. All the pictures and video’s from his trip can be found on his website and you won’t regret taking a look. If I ever make an art work I want it to be something big and impressive like this. 

Point 16 in 1971

Point 16 in 2010

Point 33 in 1971

Point 33 in 2010

Travelling Notebooks

Besides the above art, Oh Comely also tried to make a work of their own by handing out 35 notebooks to strangers and asking them to write in them, pass them on to others and sending them back when they are full. Only two notebooks came back, which was really disappointing. I thought the idea was so great and if they want to try it again, we’ll participate and make sure the notebook will be sent on.

Comiques

In non-oh Comely related artwork: I also found a cool comic that I want to share! It’s a comic made by Anne Emond, who is a writer, illustrator and drawer of comics from Brooklyn. Her comics are mostly about herself and other people looking ridiculous, but to me they are mostly very recognizable, funny and awesome!

Home is were the heart...

At the moment I live in Rotterdam together with my boyfriend in a house at the most notorious street of the city. Maybe even the most notorious street of the country, due to some current events.. My house is pretty big, super cheap and I do feel at home in it, but when I am grown up and rich I would like to own something like this:

House with Slide, .fubiz.net

The slide-house above is build in Tokyo, like the one below is too. I hope with all my heart that everyone in Tokyo will persevere and can stay in their marvelous houses. I think these houses are able to make you forget the horrors of the past last days a tiny little bit.

Another great house far away from the disasters is this tree-house in the forests around Portland.

Or this mountainhome in the Swiss Alps, which is placed 1250 m height on the mountain. You can rent it and stay there for €1800 a week (in the off-season..In the high season it is twice as expensive.) If you are interested and are willing to spend that money, book it here: http://www.villavals.ch/.

Young Masters @ Auction

This weekend I went to the Young Masters @ auction at Roodkapje organized by Ongekend. The art auction was organized for relatively unknown artists that were given a place to show off what they can do. It was my very first auction and I was pretty excited! It’s a fast paced, highly competitive business, but only when people are willing to spent some real money off course. The bids on the first couple of artworks went pretty slowly and it sort of seemed like there wasn’t a lot of interest. But soon the bids went up to 600 and 700 euros and money started rolling. The artworks were projected on a screen one by one, when all of a sudden there was a really creepy sound welling up from another room, a low, dark, drone like sound. No one seemed to notice or pay attention to it and I sort of started to freak out a bit. I looked around for impending doom or people suddenly freezing, but nothing of the sort seemed to happen. The noise stopped and I decided I was probably crazy. It's always better to just ignore these things.

There were 45 artists showing their work, and it was kind of a shame not all of them got to sell their work, but as the auctioneer said, people were being very ‘Dutch’ in their bids, which meant most were looking for cheap buys. I was a tiny bit disappointed by this ‘dream small’ mentality of the country I live in, but it was still a really cool concept and lots of people got to show their work. Besides watching the auction, I took some pictures and even found out where the creepy, doomy noise came from!

The Auctioneers

Thijs van Gasteren had brought three installations which all looked very intricate and also reminded me a bit of scary alien sentinels. They were really cool to just stare at and try to figure out what they did and how he made them work.

Nano Microscoop

Personal Computer

I also liked Nurzehra Ulukaya ceramic work, especially the Deer and an artwork called Abeyance, which hung from the ceiling right above the audience.

Untitled (Deer)

Abeyance

Erik Overmeire en Dennis de Bel made two artworks which have their basis in one art discipline that gets translated to another. The one called One Frame is an image which they used as the ‘source’ for a soundfragment, which got printed onto only 4 cd’s. Very arty indeed! Their other work worked the other way around. They used sound to generate the image and made it into a lightobject. The work was put in a half-lit room, which really showed how pretty it was.

One Second

One Frame

Sigrún Gudmundsdóttir, an Icelandic artist who now lives in Rotterdam had brought an installation called Two a Day, which really catered to my organized mind. She also brought a ‘statue’ called By the Dozen, which was a woman covered in empty medicine strips. She looked like a futuristic shiny woman, which is off course a good thing!

Two a Day

By the Dozen (in the back)

Rotganzen, an art collective from Rotterdam, brought a huge fluorescent lollypop with the word hexamethylphosphoramide on it (it’s a mildly toxic liquid). It comes from a series called Gangredine Consumptus.

Hexamethylphosphoramide

What war once was (Pocket edition)

The scary noise I heard apparently came from this big black box made by Daniel Maalman. It’s a soundproof, one-person, completely dark box which gives you a sound experience. The low bassy sounds already frightened me enough, so getting the full experience didn’t seem like a great plan to me, but others told me it was pretty cool and intense.

The Blackbox

When I left to get my coat I was in for one more art-experience. The girls hanging everyone’s coat were from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie concocting a artwork of their own. It was called Coat Check and involved them putting on everyone’s coat and taking a picture of it next to a sign with the person’s name on it. The images were projected and repeated on a screen, but in case you missed them wearing your jacket, they also printed the picture and pinned it to your coat. It was sort of an invasion of privacy, but I thought it was a really fun idea to take something ‘intimate’ and turn it into something public. And it was great that you get a picture of it!

Coat check wearing my coat

As said, I liked the auction and it was a great opportunity for a lot of new artists, but I would love to visit a real auction with really known artists and see how that works. If you know any I could go to, please let me know!

Dali Photography

Dali Atomicus, 1948

Salvador Dali!
Like everyone else I love his surrealistic paintings, but his lesser known photos are definitely quite as cool.
In the 1940's Dali teamed up with Philippe Halsman. They became partners on many projects, including a series of playful tableaux that had all the disturbing irrationality of dreams or a painting by Dali. Some became iconic, like the first two pictures in this blog. I think it is nice that everything you see on these photographs was also happening in real life, adjustments after taking the picture were not possible and not needed. At a time in which the most high-tech photo-camera's and photoshop are used, it is hard to imagine how much effort this would have taken.

Dali Skull, 1951

"Midsummer Night's Mare" 1950

The photograph above was discribed in a Fall 1950 issue of Photography Workshop:

"Still bent on suspending objects, Halsman and his willing accomplice, Dali, produced the explosion picture on page 39. The photograph was built around the fantasy of Dali's shoe exploding with the image of a beautiful woman appearing amid a holocaust of popcorn and French bread."

Dali also worked together with other famous photographers of that period, among them Man Ray and Brassaï. Man Ray is actually known as "The Dali of photography'. His photographs have been more influential than Dali's, although not as famous and well know among the mainstream public.

Salvador Dali and Man Ray Photograhped by Carl van Vechten

Le Violon d’Ingres by Man Ray

Swanmarket

Everybody who’s been in London knows and probably likes the Camden Market.
Rotterdam, in an attempt to show off its creativity, now has their own version called Swanmarket, which includes shops that sell vintage, art, clothing & accessories and tasty treats. This weekend was a Christmas version of the lifestyle market, but the Christmas aspect was limited to Glühwein and the massive amounts of snow outside (my feet are still frozen!) To give an impression, we have some pictures and some links of cool sellers we saw today and luckily for you most of them have Etsy stores!

There was so much snow, people had built an iglo!

Empty houses were turned into a marketplace where several people could sell their creations. I really liked the leather bowtie necklace and chrochet jewelery from Van Rox. I have been trying to make a leather bowtie all night, but all I'm really doing is breaking my sewing machine (damn my hubris!). Another cool artist was Remona Poortman who makes twodimensional as well as threedimensional art. I love the drawings, but also the felt and leather teardrop necklaces

My favourite thing and what might be our new meeting place, was Rotabs. This is a stylecenter where  creative people can sell all kinds of things. You'll find big pieces of art like a stripped down slotmachine, but they'll also sell clothing, magazines and vintage! I was happy to find Mint Vintage, because Rotterdam really needs more vintage clothing stores. We'll probably write some more about Rotabs later, but just to give you an impression of the amazing things that are happening there we give you visual inspiration!

The most tasty scone ever at Lof der Zoetheid

They let you fill your own teabags!