Maybe.
There was a story on National Public Radio about vidlit.com. Here's how it begins:
KAI RYSSDAL [So that's how you spell his name!]: Pity the first time author. Or any author for that matter. Months and years spent slaving over prose. And it all comes down to getting good publicity. Anything. A decent review or two Maybe a book tour. Maybe an ad for the book in a national newspaper. But those ads can run tens of thousands of dollars. So some publishers are turning to the web. It's a kind of ad we're more used to seeing on the big screen. Ashley Milne Tyte reports.
ASHLEY MILNE-TYTE: Liz Dubelman worked in the entertainment industry for years. As a keen reader, she often wished publishers would bring the same marketing gusto to their product that the movie business did to theirs. So a couple of years ago she approached a publishing house . . .
LIZ DUBLEMAN: . . . And I said to them, "I go to a lot of author readings, and oftentimes there are seven people in the audience."
She suggested another way to boost readership: bring animated book trailers to the Internet. Since then, her company, VidLit, has made about 40 trailers for major publishers. At a few thousand dollars each, they're a fraction of the cost of a print ad. The trailers are a playful marriage of words, images and sound effects.
Each one is e-mailed to a large mailing list, and posted on video sites like YouTube. Here's one for the book Trump Nation:
BOOK TRAILER: To add to your fortune once you've hit the big time as a billionaire you should, one, convince opponents of your sprawling riverside development that two key benefits of your project are richer neighbors and better TV reception . . .
Dubelman says, "The idea is to be able to cut through the clutter and find a book by sampling it just as you would finding a piece of music."
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My random musings:
It's not completely analogous. A vidlit is not like reading a book.
Hearing various readers say, "he said," even sotto voice made you remember that they are trying to translate a reading experience into a video.
This might be a good way to capture teen readers.
Do I hope that someone will make a vidlit of one of my upcoming teen thrillers? You bet!
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Here's an explanation of the idea from vidlit.
