Last call: Publishing 101 workshop and Tarot Salon. And more.

This week is about to jump into high gear for me. Thursday, I’m doing a radio show for Tarot by Misha. On Friday, we’re holding our bimonthly Tarot and Psychic Salon at the gallery here in Brooklyn. At the gallery on Saturday, I’ll be offering a Publishing 101 workshop. Finally on Sunday, we’re holding Thea’s fourth birthday party. (Yes, my little mermaid daughter turned four this week! Where did the time go?) On Monday, I’ll catch up on rest.

The Publishing 101 workshop is almost fully booked. But there are still a few spaces left, for anyone who’s procrastinated on registering. Right now, I’m coordinating and organizing all my materials for the workshop — I have so much information to share that it’s a matter of deciding what’s most pertinent. I think it’s going to be a fun afternoon!

Here’s the info for the gallery events:

Friday, March 20, 6 – 9:30 pm
TAROT AND PSYCHIC SALON
Free admission and refreshments.

In time for the Spring Equinox, the seer’s salon is back — and ready to answer any questions you might have for the new season. This time we’re adding a masseuse to the mix, who will offer chair massages. Reading prices vary by reader. No reservation required.

Saturday, March 21, 2 – 4:30 pm
PUBLISHING 101
$40. Includes materials fee.

• Filed under blogs we read, events, publishing, publishing 101, queens, reviews + press, studio and gallery, tarot and oracles | One Response

Publishing Monday: Book trailers – effective or just fun?

Those of you who read my post from Friday now know the full extent of my obsession with video making. (My thanks to all those who suffered through my “you gotta watch this” e-mails, and offered suggestions and critiques.) Fortunately, I’ve “wrapped” my latest Doomed Queens book video. Now I can move back to working on my new book proposal without further distractions — at least until the next inspiration/distraction hits.

Watch “Good Queen” here. Watch the other videos here.

To educate myself while I was working on the Doomed Queens videos, I checked out other book trailer videos. These days, it seems like book trailers are de rigeur for just about every book that gets published, from small print-on-demand operations to major publishers. The production values for these trailers ranged from extremely basic to cinematic pieces that must have cost mucho dinero to bring into being.

Most of the videos posted on Blazing Trailers presented a basic treatment for book trailers: A bunch of stock photos or video set to music, with the flap copy superimposed as text. Not the most effective or impressive book videos I’ve seen. Watch a sample video here.

In terms of satirical fun, it’s hard to beat the trailer created to promote Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. Watch “Necrobufrin: The Key to a Better Death” trailer here.

For cinematic scope and atmosphere, watch the Blood and Ice trailer here. One can already smell the popcorn.

Somewhere in between these high and low extremes, Carlyn Becchia created a simple but haunting animated trailer for her award-winning book, The Raucous Royals. Watch it here.

Fun as these book trailers may be, I wonder how effective they are in driving book sales, even when a video goes viral. I’m still out on that one — I’d love to see one of my videos get that popular, so I can find out first hand. But what do you think?

One example: Quirk Books released a video for their upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.* It quickly bombarded the internet. Compared to the trailers for Breathers and Blood and Ice, it has fairly simple production values — lots of Keira Knightly over Mozart with a surprise twist. (I’ve just searched for it to provide a link, but only found it on Facebook. Wonder if the video got pulled for copyright infringement, though I would assume Quirk had cleared the rights to use those movie stills.) It will be interesting to see what happens with sales once P & P & Z is officially released later this month.

I suspect much depends on how well the book is written  — if it’s a good read, people will buy. After all, remember what happened when Snakes on a Plane came to a theatre near you: Viral video became box office bust. Ultimately, a good catch phrase — and Youtube trailer — can only go so far.

Are there any other book videos out there that you think are especially effective? Or surprisingly bad? In either case, I hope you’ll post links to these examples in my comments.

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*Side note: What it says about our zeitgeist that we’re become so obsessed with zombies these days? That we feel hopelessly trapped in undeath/economic stagnation? Hmmmm…..

• Filed under be-mused, creativity, publishing | 4 Responses

Creativity Friday: But I really want to direct!

Okay, I’m officially obsessed with video-making, after creating my second Doomed Queens video for AsktheQueens.com. (Check it out here. I revised it, adding a surprise cameo at the end. I’ve also updated my first video here.) I’ve already moved onto making a new book video. This one is atmospheric, rather than humorous, and very short. I hope to finish it up soon, so I can jump back to writing my new book proposal, which has been patiently simmering away.

The process of making a video feels surprisingly intuitive to me, even after I factor in learning new software and technical requirements. In some ways, I guess it’s not that much of a jump from considering what goes onto a book spread to deciding what goes into a video scene. We book illustrators are used to thinking sequentially, right? (Does that make sense?)

To make my videos, I’m using iMovie, which came bundled in OS X on my iMac. The video clips I inserted were downloaded from iStockphoto.com. The music and much of the sound effects came bundled with GarageBand; again, thank you OS X! Most of my graphics and titles were created in Photoshop and imported into iMovie. This way I can place everything exactly as I’d like, instead of succumbing to software presets. (Yes, I’m already straining against iMovie limitations for what I want to make. I’m now fantasizing about learning Premiere and After Effects — in my copious free time, of course!)

How long will this obsession last? Even as I write this, I’m thinking about getting back to my video making. I suspect that though,  in the manner of most obsessions, it will soon pass and be replaced by a new one. We will see. But before I return to my latest cinematic minature, here are 38 tips to become more creative that don’t involve iMovie or Youtube. Some of them I agree with, others not-so-much. But they’re all worthy of thought.

This list comes courtesy of the Gaping Void. I hope they inspire you to a very creative weekend!

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.

14. Dying young is overrated.

15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

16. The world is changing.

17. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.

18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.

19. Sing in your own voice.

20. The choice of media is irrelevant.

21. Selling out is harder than it looks.

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

23. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.

24. Dont worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

25. You have to find your own schtick.

26. Write from the heart.

27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

28. Power is never given. Power is taken.

29. Whatever choice you make, the devil gets his due eventually.

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

31. Remain frugal.

32. Allow your work to age with you.

33. Being poor sucks.

34. Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.

35. Savor obscurity while it lasts.

36. Start blogging.

37. Meaning scales, people don’t.

38. When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams.”

• Filed under be-mused, creativity, queens | No Comments

Doomed Queens Bitter Wisdom: Advice from beyond the grave

During my January blogathon (remember that?), I began an occasional feature in which I offered up the bitter wisdom of ill-fated female power brokers adapted from Doomed Queens. First up was Cleopatra, who offered advice on how not to choose allies.

Since then, I’ve decided to take this concept a bit further. What if you could consult the queens themselves to take advantage of their bitter wisdom? What advice would they offer us from beyond the grave?

And so I’ve created a website at AsktheQueens.com where you can do this very thing: Type in your question and receive an answer from the queens themselves. Their replies are culled from the cautionary morals featured throughout Doomed Queens — fun and sometimes surprisingly accurate!

The art above is from a video I created to promote Ask the Queens, which is now posted on the site as well as on Youtube. Though the video is up, I plan to revise it in future days.

The voiceover was done by me, if you’re curious what I sound like. I did have a cold while recording it, so this will probably be redone when my sinuses are clear. There’s also an obvious error in the video itself — see if you can catch it! An imaginary gold star goes to the first person to post it in my comments.

Also, if you have any suggestions for how to improve the video, let me know. I’m new to all this video making stuff. But this new form of creativity has been very inspiring to me. I plan to write about this in my next Creativity Friday post.

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This is part of an occasional series on the bitter wisdom of unfortunate female regents. Ask the Queens was adapted from DOOMED QUEENS: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends, from Cleopatra to Princess Di (Broadway Books, $14.95).

Learn more or purchase DOOMED QUEENS here.

• Filed under be-mused, queens | One Response

Publishing Monday: Getting to Yes, part final

Read part one of Getting to Yes here. Read part two here.

Gah, it’s late here — it’s been that kind of day — but at least it’s still early on the west coast. Before Publishing Monday turns into Tuesday, here’s our last installment of Getting to Yes.

So, from my previous entries on how to get a book published, here’s what we can safely surmise:

1. It’s hard to get a publisher to look at unsolicited submissions.

2. It’s even harder to get a publisher to acquire (ie: buy) a manuscript.

Bearing these unalterable facts in mind, how do we work around these roadblocks? Here are a few time-proven suggestions for those of us without friends in the biz:

1. Make your manuscript as stellar as you can. Even if you think it’s perfect, even if you love it more than you can imagine, it can always be improved. Believe me, I’ve learned this one the hard way. I’ve revised some manuscripts so many times that they bear little resemblance to their original versions. Ultimately the final version was always improved, even if I couldn’t recognize it at the time. Time and distance go a long way toward sharpening critical facilities.

2. Once you get your book to that place where you don’t know what more you can do, run it past some readers. (I can write much more about the revision process, but for the sake of brevity…). Revise as needed. Only then is it time to research publishers.

3. Visit bookstores and see who’s publishing what. Go to independent book stores as well as the big chains, such as Barnes and Noble or Borders. Look in related books’ acknowledgments to see if the author has acknowledged their editor. Most do. Once you have a dozen or so publishers and editors on your list, then visit the publishers’ websites and see what else they’ve published. How would your book fit in? Have they published anything too similar recently? For additional information, I like to check out Publisher’s Weekly and other publishing sites, using their search function for an editor’s name. This is a great way to see what other books they’ve acquired, and where their interests lie.

4. Read the publishers’ submission policies. Follow them to the letter.

5. If your chosen publisher doesn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts — most don’t these days, though smaller publishers often do — you’ll need a literary agent. Follow step 3 again, this time looking to see if the author has acknowledged their literary agent in their book.

6. You can doublecheck your research with publisher and agent guides and websites. A caveat: Doublecheck on your doublecheck, since information may not be accurate or up-to-date. True example: When I worked at Dial Books, we frequently received submissions via Writer’s Market. How did we know? Writer’s Market misspelled the editor’s name — a sure giveaway. Again, I recommend the Literary Marketplace and Publisher’s Weekly for this.

7. The bottom line is that persistence is more often important than talent, though talent goes a long way. Alas, rejection is part of the game. Ultimately, it’s not personal. It’s information — information about your manuscript, information about what the publisher is acquiring these day. Use it.

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In closing, here are two more getting published stories from me, one which ends successfully, the other not-so-much.

Story one takes place early in my publishing career. I had put together a rather elaborate proposal for an illustrated anthology of opera stories. My publisher turned it down because they felt it had too limited a market, though they loved the idea. A fellow illustrator suggested I show it to an editor at a different house; this editor was known to love opera. Here came my second rejection: Reader, she hated my book. I was so discouraged that I filed the manuscript away until several years later. Now working with a new publisher, I mentioned my opera book idea. Nothing happened — that I was aware of, anyway. Two years later, I was perusing their catalog and noticed they had published a book on (yup!) opera stories. So that was that.*

Story two has a much happier ending. When I began to work on the proposal for Doomed Queens, I decided to design it with black and white illustrations. The reason: So the production costs wouldn’t be prohibitive. After so many years, I had learned from my past experiences selling The Lover’s Path and similar full color gift books. But I also thought that Doomed Queens‘ darker (heh) subject was better served by these production limitations. Could you imagine Charles Addams or Edward Gorey in full color?

Because Doomed Queens was a black and white book, my literary agent was able to submit it to a much wider market than she would usually — she didn’t have to limit herself to publishers who only specialized in full color printing. Within five days she had offers from five major houses, one of whom acquired it in a preemptive offer.

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* I don’t know if this was coincidence or not. Either way, intellectual property rights are notoriously slippery in these circumstances.

• Filed under publications, publishing, publishing 101, queens | 3 Responses