Cross-eyed Dragon Troubles Book Trailer

In the last few years authors have had to take up more and more of the marketing duties which were once handled by publishers. One of the ways to do this are by the use of Book Trailers.

Book Trailers are meant to be no longer than a couple of minutes and pack enough punch to get you guys interested enough to bite and take a closer look at the book. (A lot like the hook I talked about a month or more ago.)

I've procrastinated making mine but am slowly catching up. (Trolling for appropriate pictures make my eyes hurt! Looking for fodder is harder than making the darn thing!) For this latest video I started using a piece of software called Anime Studio. I think it really pumped up the quality of what I can make by a lot!

Watch the video and then I'll go through the steps I took to get it to the finished product. (Hopefully it won't be too lame and you won't cry to get your 1 minute and 13 seconds back.) :P



It's always best if you have some kind of plan before you ever start. Basically what you hope to say/show and the order.

There are several picture sites where for a fee you can download royalty free pictures (a few even have video clips) to use in the book trailer. There is one I know of that allows you to use them for free, but you have to make sure to give the photographer credit. Always need to make sure you're not infringing on someone's copyright. This includes the music and photos.

Here's a few of the ones I've been to or used:
www.dreamstime.com
www.bigstockphoto.com
us.fotolia.com
www.istockphoto.com
www.freedigitalphotos.net

Another option too is Deviant Art. If you find something nice there, you can email the artist and see if they'd allow you to use it in the video, giving them credit at the end. Some will and some won't.

For all these though, be prepared for your eyes to want to fall out of your head after hours and hours of scrolling through stuff! But if you end up with the perfect picture/drawing, it is well worth it. (Just give yourself time to recuperate! lol.)

Of course using photos you took does make things even better! Those are yours to use as you see fit. :P You never know what you may have hiding in an album somewhere. And with camera phone, nowadays, taking pictures is even easier. Just make sure the photo quality is high enough for what you have in mind.

I use two pieces of free software to put the video together. 1) Movie Maker, which comes standard with all computers using windows. 2) Audacity, which is a free down loadable audio recording and editing software (you will need a microphone or headset to use this to best effect).

The great thing about Audacity is that once you find your background music, you can open it up in the software then record your voice to add to the track. Even better, (make sure to save as the project) it keeps the soundtrack and the voice track separate so you can add silences in your voice parts to manipulate when they occur. This becomes very important when you're putting all pieces together in Movie Maker.

Like I said before, this year I also bought Anime Studio. The great thing about this piece of software is that you can add 'bones' to pictures to make them move. Even the Text can be manipulated. So you can make the book trailer less static. And it's even kind of fun! (You will export your project as an .avi to add to Movie Maker)

So, you have pictures, video bits, the music. Now all you need to do is put them together. Movie Maker will help you do that. Movie Maker allows you to import all the bits and then you can arrange them in any order you like, adding transition effects, scrolling text, and end titles.

The beauty here is that as you add each thing, you can preview it, and also see what time it falls on the video. This allows you to go back to Audacity and tweak your spoken parts so the timing is perfect.

Hopefully at the end you will have something to be proud of that you can share. And while it may have taken a lot of time to create, it won't be going anywhere and you can use it for years to come at your website, promo CDs, and whatever else you can think of. Make sure to upload it to Youtube. You can get code there to embed it at your webpage, or blog. Even better join Blazing Trailers where you can join a ton of authors and display your trailer with theirs.

Dreams and Writing

“…Her view of enchanters had changed a lot in the past few days. …She sighed and, gently putting down the sleeping gryphon, returned to her room.

Just as she drifted toward sleep she thought if Harone got what he wished, in time he would be like them. He too would have that presence she felt more than saw, which Kataro had named the Semblance. It would surround him like a mantle, an aura that could disconcert, even terrify. She felt an inexplicable sense of loss.

Reflected light from the column of flame gleamed like copper on the polished-stone walls about her. Golden flashes sparkled on the pebbled floor like trapped seeds of lightning. Tongues of flame licked across the ceiling, searching for cracks in the hewn stone and obscuring it from view. She drew a step nearer and the column seemed to turn, as though aware of her approach. Threads of golden fire forked from the center of the shimmering inferno and approached her in turn. She lifted her hands, holding them out as if to clasp the exploring tendrils…

Cara awoke with a gasp, and sat up. She stared frantically at her hands, and was amazed to find they were not ash and scorched bone, but her own flesh. A presence within her seemed to flee, as though shy of her conscious thoughts. She felt its retreat and then its absence with regret and a piercing longing.

It was cool in the room, peacefully quiet. Empty. Drawing the coverlet about her, Cara lay back down.”

---- extract from SEABIRD: “Many Meetings”(chapter title, about 2/3 of the way through the book)

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Have you ever inserted dreams, visions, fragmented words from newspaper clippings or tattered billboard signs, sacred messages, half-forgotten memories, the words of seers, etc when writing stories?

Dreams and vague memories in particular can deepen the richness of character portrayal, by introducing us to aspects of the character with which she may have only a tenuous connection during most of each day. However, dreams (etc) can serve other functions—for example, setting the mood of a scene, delicately inserting back story and even furthering the plot in some cases.

In SEABIRD, teenager Cara Marshall (the protagonist) dreams so frequently that the people of Narenta come to the conclusion that she is a seer. Cara has a little trouble coming to terms with this pronouncement since she has never encountered a true seer on Earth and the Narentans themselves admit that seers are uncommon in their world. Their conflicting views on the importance of dreams add to the story’s tension, while the content of her dreams help us to learn more about Cara and about her role in the book’s plot. Cara reacts to some of her dreams with delight, others with horror or mystification, which helps strengthen the mood of various scenes and was a great tool for introducing foreshadowing.

But why so many dreams in SEABIRD? I just told you—Cara is a seer. Okay, you got me. Which came first: the idea of Cara being a seer or the compulsive insertion of dreams higgly-piggly into the first few chapters of Seabird? Yes, the latter.

SEABIRD and Cara are gifted with dreams because I think dreams are cool. In real life—whatever that is—I’ve always felt that dreams are kind of a bonus to our existence. A little bit of story that we get free of charge just by dint of sleeping. Oh, and making a tiny effort to remember the details when we wake up. Many people, of course, believe that they rarely dream but the fact is that we all do.

HOW TO REMEMBER YOUR DREAMS: The trick is taking a few minutes on awakening to try to recall what we dreamed. If you have never done this and decide to make the effort, I suggest attempting to be as non-verbal as you can be while you passively wait for impressions, visual images and sounds to return to you now that you’re awake.

What not to do? Thinking something like, “I think I dreamed about the pool guy. Now what happened after I dived into the water? Was there really a school of miniature dolphins?’ etc will only serve to obliterate the actual dream. Keep your mind blank. This part is actually fairly easy before coffee if you think of about it.

If the dream contents seem to be worth it, be sure to write them down at once! Otherwise they will fade on you, very possibly before you’ve finished measuring the coffee grounds.

What do I mean by a dream being “worth it”? Why go to all this trouble? Well, you never know where the next idea for a story may come from. Alternatively, a fragment of a dream may tell you something about a character that you hadn’t realized, or get you out of that plot hole in chapter five. If appropriate—sometimes even if not appropriate—you can try plugging part of a dream whole cloth right into one of your scenes. You always planned for that character to have hallucinations, right?

For one of the weirdest dreams I’ve ever experienced, may I suggest the following link:

http://tree-lady.livejournal.com/76811.html

Sherry Thompson, author of SEABIRD: The Narentan Tumults #1 and EARTHBOW: The Narentan Tumults #2.