Going West

Produced for the New Zealand Book Council, isn't this one of the best adverts for the joy of books ever?

The excerpt being read is from Maurice Gee's Going West. Gee is recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest novelists and you can find out much more about him and his books here.

An Outrageous Burst of DIY Creativity

Amir Muhammad's latest project New Malaysian Essays is being launched at Central Market Annexe tomorrow night (16th). I can personally vouch for the book (which contains essays by Brian Yap, Aminuddin Mahmud, Burhan Baki, Saharil Hasrin Sanin, Amir Muhammad and Sonia Randhawa) being mighty good brain food. Amir has tempting glimpses of each of the essays on his blog, and Brian Yap's piece The Trouble With Malaysia can also be read (footnotes and all) in this months issue of Off the Edge. The Sun is also publishing extracts.

A whole lot of other good indie stuff will be launched and sold including Chuah Guat Eng's new collection of short stories The Old House (which I will be writing about later), Bernice Chauly's The Book of Sins, Sufian Abas' collection of disposable (?) pop fiction in Malay Kasut Biru Rubina, and new albums by Jerome Kugan (at last!), Hardesh Singh and the amazing Mia Palancia.

I think Amir (who is proving himself quite remarkably adept at marketing his products) is the very first Malaysian publisher to create a video trailer for a book, and I do hope this is the start of a new trend :



Earlier in the day, Kata-Suara is holding readings at featuring Aisyah Baharudin, Azman Ismail, Azmyl Yunor, Bernice Chauly, Pyan Habib, Razali Endun and Usratika. The event starts at 5 p.m. and the venue is RA Fine Arts, 6 Jalan Aman, off Jalan Tun Razak. (Map here.)

Those with sufficient energy and commitment and a ticket for the LRT should be able to make both events, but do make sure you have deep pockets to buy books and CD's at Amir's bash.

His Inestimable Self

There's a very nice interview with Peter Carey in the Scotsman. I've just bought his new novel His Illegal Self which is yelling, nay shrieking, at me louder than all the other books on my TBR shelf. ReadmereadmereadmenownownownowNOWNOWNOWNOW!

Carey is my darling* and I'm so scared of even the teensiest spoiler in Jackie McGlone's piece that my eyes skip over (for the moment at least) all mention of the novel, but fasten onto all the little snippets about Carey the man and Carey the writer.

Some insights into his creative process:

... What really fascinates me ... is the power of the imagination. I believe that writers should write about what they don't know, not about what they do know. Some of my students become trapped in their own lives, churning over the crimes of parents and siblings, which stops them discovering the incredible joys of invention.

... Perhaps it was writing The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang that really freed me up – maybe it was being brave enough to abandon all punctuation in that book that did it. Getting rid of punctuation means you have to get rid of all sorts of sloppiness in your writing, you have to be really, really exact. And it allowed me to be playful with language, which is what I'd admired in serious literature when I first started to read it when I was about 18.

... Writing's a mysterious process. It doesn't do to analyse it too much. This will sound romantic coming from me, but I do feel it's often like I've been through a fit of madness. When I'm a little anxious or insecure, I'll take down one of my earlier books to try and cheer myself up. It never works. I either think, 'God, this is crap!' or 'This is good, I couldn't do that again!' Sometimes, though, it's like someone else wrote a particular book."

McGlone adds some previously quoted Carey nuggets:

On creating characters:

I do not speak to them outside working hours, although the pleasures of creating proper characters is enormous, especially since novelists are prone to magical thinking anyway. You write something; then you meet someone who's exactly like the person you invented. My novel Illywhacker has some of that argument about it – the storyteller, Badgery, tells lies which later become truths."

On writing novels:

It's a privileged way to spend your mornings. When you have made some nice sentences, how thrilling is that? And then you get to go to lunch – I'm enthusiastic about lunch.

On the unexamined life:

For a writer it's the only one worth living. As a human I'm better off knowing why I do things, but as a writer I don't want to know. Everything that happens to me goes down like sediment to the bottom of the river. I do draw on that swampy stuff, but it's better not to know where it came from; also it's a good excuse not to improve my character.

Here's the trailer for the new novel:



*Reminder to self, try to be more cool and detached as a literary blogger ...

Postscript:

The Guardian podcasts an interview with Carey about the novel.

There ... But Not There

If you want to sell your book, you have to promote it. But, it seems, the author's tour may be a thing of the past.

Ian McEwan is doing a tour of the US to promote his latest book On Chesil Beach. Only ... he's not going to be there himself.

Bob Thompson in the Washington Post reports that independent booksellers Powell's Books has come up with the idea of making a high-grade film (part of which is viewable with the article) of the author reading from and talking about his book, and of building events around that. McEwan's film will be shown at 54 other screenings around the country, mainly, but not exclusively in bookstores, with discussion being lead in some cases by other local novelists.

Wouldn't it be great if McEwan's film, and other author films when they are made, could be shown in bookshops here? We are so starved for author visits, and Malaysia is an awful long way to fly someone to read to us.

Another way for an author to appear without actually appearing is, of course, by video link. We enjoyed a run of those at the British Council a couple of years back when a tiny group of hardened bibliophiles were able to interact with Toby Litt, Beryl Bainbridge and David Lodge.

And nowadays an author can even sign books from half a world away by using the LongPen - (something I thought was a hilarious joke when Margaret Atwood came up with the idea!)

Which is how Norman Mailer (incapacitated by "age, asthma and athritis") will be appearing ... but not appearing ... at the Edinburgh Festival this year and signing books for his fans. And Atwood will be interviewing (again by video link) legendary Canadian short story writer Joyce Carol Oates who will also sign books.

In fact a whole list of famous authors have used the LongPen saving (as the promotional website for the device reminds us) over 30 million tons of carbon emissions!

Vidlit Replayed

A miracle of blogging is that when you write about someone, they frequently show up as if invoked from across the world.

I wrote some time back about "book trailers" (like film trailers, but for books) and mentioned the pioneers in the field, Circle of Seven Productions. You had some mixed feelings about this as a way to promote books. Now here's the CEO of the company, Sheila Clover English giving her take, and over turning some of my own preconceptions about their use:

Book Trailers are used by small press and aren't as expensive as you might think.

They are tools, like anything else in your promotional or marketing arsenal. If you use them correctly they can and do work. Since we've been making them since 2002 we have some stats and data on sales.

There are really two types of book trailers, if you're going that route.
1. Is a commercial. It is an ad, a little sexier than a print ad. It can be put on TV and spread around the internet. It is given to book clubs and booksellers.

2. Viral. These are the ones that are more exciting. They don't look like ads. They're kind of like music videos, which are ads to sell CDs. These are put online and people pass them around and take them to put on their own sites.

If you can have a book video that is both, you can utilize it in so many more places.

Print ads and traditional marketing tools reach out to established readers. A group that, sadly, is shrinking. The videos are really to expand a demographic. People have evolved into visual creaters and the book industry now has a way to gain their attention through that medium.

When I first came up with the concept of book trailers is wasn't just a marketing idea. My company joined the American Library Association and we now work with schools and libraries on a "Back to Books" program that is geared toward teaching young people that books are entertainment not limited to the size of a screen. We're trying to "hook" them early into realizing that books are as exciting as tv, movies, video games or music videos.

Unfortunately, our more philanthropic side was overlooked for an opportunity to make a big "splash" in the media and get some free online advertising through video. Of the dozens of publishing houses we worked with on this concept no one would give us the time of day until our clients started hitting NY Times and USA Today on a consistant basis.

Not only does this concept work, when done correctly, but it could be a wonderful opportunity to make books exciting to a group of younger people, or perhaps remind others who don't read anymore, that books are fun, sexy and exciting.

I hope one day that the industry will see the big picture. The one where we don't try to outsell the other publishing house or the other authors, but one where the industry can bring in new readers and compete against video games and tv instead of each other.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Sheila Clover English
CEO, Circle of Seven Productions

VidLit?

Need an attention grabbing way to publicise your book? It seems that just as film trailers create interest in the latest movies, book trailers on the internet are the latest ploy in fiction marketing. According toElise Soukup in Newsweek :

Publishers and authors are increasingly commissioning trailers for books—some with dramatizations by actors that could easily be mistaken for movie trailers—that can be viewed on their Web sites and even aired on TV and in movie theaters.

The concept was initially pioneered in 2002 by Circle of Seven Productions (which cleverly trademarked the name "book trailers" so everyone else has to refer to them as "book videos").

The first mainstream publisher to have jumped on the bandwagon appears to be HarperCollins Canada. (Check out the video for Gautam Malkani's novel Londonstani and see if it tempts you to rush out and buy the book!)

The Book Standard recently announced the winners of a contest in which film students created videos for three new Bantam Dell titles. (I found the trailer for Stuart: A Life Backwards horrendously Pythonesque, though.)

Anyway, think the idea will catch on??