In three months — on February 28 – my first novel, Acts of Violence, hits shelves in Germany as Ein Akt der Gewalt. I’ve been sitting on the cover for a while now (at the request of my German editors), but, as the catalogue is out, it is public. So – here it is:
I dig it a lot. It’s both cool as a piece of artwork and appropriate for the novel, a rare combination. There will also be an audio book read by David Nathan released simultaneously.
And in March, I believe I will be visiting a few German cities – Berlin, Munich, others – to do readings and Q&As. I’ll announce dates probably in February. Anyway, it’s my first translation, and I’ve been kept in the loop throughout the process, and have found it to be a great experience.
I’m looking forward to working with everyone at Heyne on future books.
Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes by Bill Peschel came out earlier this month.
I haven’t finished it, but I’m going to go ahead and recommend it as a great holiday gift anyway, as it’s not a book you have to read straight through — one taste and you know whether you like it, I think. It’s a series of tales about writers acting out – sometimes with good reason, sometimes not.
Also, if you’re someone who shits, and who isn’t, it will make a great bathroom book, as none of the stories is more than a page or two long. There’s nothing worse than bringing a novel into the bathroom, getting lost in a thirty-page chapter, and finding, when you try to stand an hour later, that your legs have fallen asleep and are completely numb. They collapse under you, you fall to the bathroom floor with your pants still around your ankles, and the day is ruined.
Amiright?
Here is a typical, if rather short, sample (from page 38):
From her first book, Jacqueline Susann knew the value of self-promotion. She hustled booksellers, distributors, and journalists. She toured extensively. She was the first to visit the truck drivers who delivered her paperbacks at dawn, handing out pastries and signing books for them.
So, the week after her first book, Every Night, Josephine! was published, she went to her publisher for a meeting and found the entire staff around the television set. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Her response was characteristic. “Why the fuck does this have to happen to me? This is gonna ruin my tour.”
Just learned that Japanese rights to Acts of Violence have sold to Shinchosha, who publish Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Jeffrey Archer, Ken Follett, and John Grisham, among others. If that’s not a good way to start the day, I don’t know what is.
According to his rules, each novel must be started and completed within a 72-hour period. If he hasn’t completed a novel by the end of 72 hours, the manuscript is disqualified from being included in the final 24 novels.
I once wrote a 60,000-word novel in eight days. I was working almost constantly, so, to me, it didn’t really sound possible to bang out a full-length novel in three days. But these novels, according to the rules, have to be only about 100 pages. Which, you know, is 25,000 words — not a novel. But whatever. It’s still a feat. I just don’t get the point.
Unless it is simply publicity. In which case, good job. It worked.
EDIT (17 November): D.J. Britt stopped by to comment, and, since my post is little more than criticism, it only seems fair to highlight his response:
Thanks for all the comments. That anyone offers any thoughts on my project, pro or con, is appreciated. Just a couple of comments in response to what I’ve read here:
First, I’ve written old school. My last ‘normal’ novel came out at the leisurely rate of 1,250 words a day. This gave me a draft of a 116,000 word novel in 90 days. The problem to date is that no one has accepted what I’ve written in a ‘normal’ time frame.
As for why I’m doing this, I have two answers. Yes, this is a shameless publicity stunt. And already, it’s working. Today, the Telegraph in the UK dismissed the exercise as an example of quantity over quality. I was thrilled!
The other reason I’m doing this brings me to my most argumentative point. I believe this exercise will make me improve as a writer. In fact, I simply reject the arbitrary decrees I’ve read here and in other forums that say this can have no artistic merit. This is just a choice people are making, likely without considering the evidence. I’ve finished two stories so far, and I love the energy and spirit of them both. Are there typos and some awkward sentences? Sure. Do they have have artistic merit? I think they do.
I invite people to decide for themselves, by checking out either or both of the 3-Day Novels now in the library at 24novels.com. Critiques on the actual work, instead of the motivation behind it, would be greatly appreciated.
I doubt trailers sell many books, but they seem to be an ingrained part of book promotion these days. There are no real standards in terms of quality or cost. Some are well thought out, professionally produced, and obviously cost a pretty penny. For example:
Mostly, though, they tend to consist of text, a series of pans across still photographs (Ken Burns-documentary style), and generic music. The trailer for my novel Acts of Violence is an example of this:
I didn’t do it myself. I paid for it with money from the advance for my second novel. I didn’t think it generated enough views to be worth the cost; even if I sold a book for every view — and there’s no way that happened — it still didn’t generate its cost in new income. That said, it’s better than many of the trailers I’ve seen, so it was worth the cost in terms of production value. Some trailers, though, I really hope were made at home, because if somebody paid money for them — damn.
Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at book trailers, thinking about what I could do for my upcoming novel, The Dispatcher (upcoming in eight months, not next week). I’ve come up with a few guidelines for myself, things I think make a trailer at least watchable.
1. Keep it to ninety seconds. There are trailers that run longer and still work, but I think they’re the exception. The trailer for Stephen King’s Duma Key runs a mere thirty seconds, and is pretty effective.
Of course, most of us have to provide a bit more information to get a reader interested. With Stephen King, his name and just a hint is plenty. But still, you can pack a surprising amount of information into a ninety-second video.
2. Avoid voice over narration. It’s tempting to imitate film trailers completely, including the use of voice overs — “In a world torn apart by war!” — but I think it almost never works with book trailers. Voice overs are something that it seems anybody should be able to do, but mostly when amateurs do voice work it sounds like amateurs doing voice work. Besides, it’s a trailer for something that consists of text; using text to describe it is a natural fit. Also, the cover copy usually will work as a pretty good guide for the trailer.
3. Create as much movement as possible. The trailers that simply cut from picture to picture without layers and with very little movement in the frame (one slow pan after another with little variation, and that’s if you’re lucky) feel longer than they are.
4. Use images to give some idea of the genre and tone without simply reflecting the text. Often, in book trailers, the images match the text exactly. You read “A loyal dog,” and the text is floating over a picture of a golden retriever sitting on a green lawn with its tongue hanging out. I think the imagery should add to the text rather than simply reflect it, otherwise you have words and images doing the same job redundantly.
5. Keep the text to a minimum.
With those five things in mind, I tried to put together a trailer for The Dispatcher. Instead of still images, though, which is the standard, I went through the archives of the Prelinger collection and pulled public domain footage from various government and instructional videos. I cut the footage together so that the flap copy for the novel would work with it, then ran it through a few effects and filters to give the footage a noirish look. I then yanked music from Kevin MacLeod, who puts his own royalty-free music online for use with credit (and a requested, though non-mandatory, five-dollar donation).
Which is to say, the trailer I put together cost nothing but time.
Public domain footage, royalty-free music, and I cut it together on Windows Movie Maker, which I downloaded for free two days ago.
I don’t know that it compares to the trailers above (and I might have too much text), but then, with the exception of the one for Acts of Violence, they probably cost several thousand dollars.
My goal was to create an effective trailer at as little cost as possible. On the cost front I succeeded; its price was zero. Whether the guidelines I created for myself helped me put together a good trailer — well, I think it mostly works.
