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Saturday, 11 August 2007
Penny Sansevieri: Hello and welcome to another addition of powerful book promotion made easy.  This is Penny Sansevieri with Author Marketing Expert and Jennifer Thompson of Monkey C Media.  Hey Jennifer good to talk to you again.

Jennifer Thompson:  Thanks so much it’s nice to be here.

Penny Sansevieri:Listen I just got done doing a class in Colorado and we were talking about video and people had so many questions about Book Video.  Book Video is becoming so insanely popular.  Do you see that too?

Image  Jennifer Thompson:  Oh absolutely and the neat thing about it is right now there is very few people doing it so it’s a really good time to jump in and have a book video to help your promotion.

Penny Sansevieri: Yeah exactly, exactly.  You know the Book Video and you and I talked about this too one of the misnomers I think of Book Video is people want to actually turn their book into a mini movie which is really wrong.  I mean how long – now you guys do Book Videos?

Jennifer Thompson: Yeah we’ve been calling them Book Teaser Videos because really you should be teasing your book.  You should be giving people a taste of what you have to offer but you don’t really want to tell the whole story.  I’ve seem Book Teasers that are five minutes long and I think people lose their audience.  We recommend that authors keep their teasers to 30 seconds to a minute long no longer than a minute.  People just don’t have the attention span and if people don’t make it to the end of the teaser where you offer the URL where people can buy your book then of course you’ve missed the whole point.

Penny Sansevieri:Yeah exactly, exactly.  You know the other point of a teaser is to draw someone in so one of the things – I was reading this article the other day and it talked about how there is a company out there letting authors read their books and I don’t know about you but I don’t really think that that’s a good thing.  I mean you have to be – you have to be very careful with that because you have to be a very engaging speaker in my view.  Wouldn’t you say so?

Jennifer Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely.  I recommend having a professional voice over talent if you’re going to have voice at all on your video.

Penny Sansevieri:Yeah, because we you know when we did Camelwood Lake which is all – you can go to redhotinternetpublicity.com and see some of the videos that we are going to talk about today.  When we did Camelwood Lake we had no – we had no voiceover it was all music and that one – that one I know I did intentionally long because as you know experimenting with this time to see how quickly we could engage people in the message and you’re right we found that people would click off of it and click to the Camelwood website usually after 30 seconds.  You know they got the message, they got sort of the idea – the jest of the book and now they wanted to know more you know it got them sort of engaged with it.  But we’ve also done one because you guys did one for a book that we were working on where there was voiceover and it was just darling.

Jennifer Thompson: Yeah Accidentally Engaged.

Penny Sansevieri:Yeah Accidentally Engaged it was really, really cute.  You know videos that are just like wildfire gone across the globe and one of the reasons that I think that a Book Video would do with you well is that really pulls in the emotional trigger of the audience.

Jennifer Thompson: I have a question for you Penny.

Penny Sansevieri:Yeah?

Jennifer Thompson: A lot of people want to use video.  What do you think of using video on a trailer to grab your audience?

Penny Sansevieri:Well I mean I think it’s good.  I mean I think it’s good as long as it’s appropriate to the subject.  I have no problem using actual video I mean it’s got to be appropriate to the topic.  It’s really not and I got to tell you I mean I don’t know how you feel about this but it’s really not about what you do it’s about the emotional triggers that you are trying to get to with your audience.  You know, use video when video is appropriate.  Now we used video for Camelwood Lake – you guys didn’t use it for Accidentally Engaged but both were very suited to the market.  You know Accidentally Engaged was a cute quirky romance novel.  But you know this long winding elaborate video wouldn’t really work with it.  With the audience.

Jennifer Thompson:  I think the reason that the video worked so well for Camelwood Lake is because it was an excerpt and it did it created that emotional trigger you know the little girl that was being pushed on the swing and it was in the park and they were having a good time and you got this feeling the essence of what the book had to offer about the family.  But it didn’t tell a story and I think that is where authors make a mistake because they try and tell the story of their characters through an entire acting segment and that’s when people run into trouble.  Because if it’s not great acting and if it’s not directed or produced you know in a manner that we’re used to seeing coming out of Hollywood then I think we lose our audience because it becomes hokey and kind of cheesy.

Penny Sansevieri: Well you know you’re absolutely right.  I think that and I think that a lot of authors approach this far more complicated than they really need to.  You know you put together a teaser just like you put together an elevator pitch you know I mean we talk about elevator pitches so what’s that one to two second thing that you’re going to say to engage someone.  Your Book Video is the same sort of thing.  It’s what you’re really doing is you are saying is you’re hooking them into your message and by trying to tell the entire story and in particular try and tell the entire story in 30 seconds I mean this is not going to work.

Jennifer Thompson:Yeah.

Penny Sansevieri:  You know you want to tell enough of it to really engage them.  So how complicated is it?  I mean how complicated is it really for an author to have you guys let’s say for example put together a video?  I mean let’s talk time wise.  How long would it take?  Is it terribly expensive?

Jennifer Thompson:  Well a Book Teaser ranges in price and our base line is $2,000.00 and what that gives people is obviously the programming time.  We create the video in flash so it can be as little as 214k as opposed to a 9 megabyte file so it loads very quickly and it will also load on our platform which is very important.  So with the base price gets people is the music and we score all our music.  It’s all rights free.  We actually create it right here.  We ask our authors what genre of music would you like to have on your video?  What kind of style would you like and then we create that.  

Penny Sansevieri:  In fact when we did Accidentally Engaged we threw in kind of a Peter and the Wolf feeling.  As the tension started to grow with the trailer we added in extra musical instruments just like they did with Peter and the Wolf.  You know people didn’t realize it was happening but it was creating this feeling.  So the music is very important and of course it has to be rights free.  You can’t use your favorite song that is playing on the radio every week or you will get sued.  People want to be careful of that and people don’t realize that that is something they have to think about.  Now the other thing is we throw in the still images.  We did some animation.  The cover of Accidentally Engaged has a dog carrying a ring in it’s mouth.  So we have the dog walk across the screen, drop the ring and then walk off the screen.  

Jennifer Thompson:  So that was included the animation.  We also added voiceover to that particular video and we wrote the script.  So what I usually ask an author to do is write a script for us and then I help them massage it and really make it shine.  But once I have something to work with that’s a base line then we can really you know draw the characters and decide what we’re going to do with the video.  The voiceover is extra money because we have to pay for the talent of course and we record it here in our office professionally.  We have recording equipment so it sounds topnotch.  So when it’s all said and done that video was about $3,000.00.

Penny Sansevieri:  Yeah.

Jennifer Thompson:  We also have to find images so I encourage authors to bring me rights free images or royalty free images.

Penny Sansevieri:  Yeah exactly.  Well and I think to some extent having them help you on the script is really good because I got to tell you even from my own book trailer – book video you know you’re just too close to it.  You’re too close to it to be objective.

Jennifer Thompson:  Yeah true.

Penny Sansevieri: I will tell you in one of the things that I want to mention is that next week we’re going to talk about promoting video.  Video is – we find is just some of the hottest – it is so hot right now to use video to promote your book.  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  When you think about all of the ways and all of the things that you can do to promote your book and those fiction authors out there who say oh I have no way to market my book and I’ve heard this for years and especially being a fiction author.  I’ll tell you something look into doing a book video.  I mean it’s really, really powerful.

Jennifer Thompson:  Yeah and like we said there’s not really very many people doing it right now so now is a great time to get into a market that isn’t so dense with so much competition.

Penny Sansevieri: Yeah, absolutely.  You know and I say this to authors and we talked about this when I was at the Colorado conference too not everybody is going to want to hire somebody to do a video and that’s okay.  But here’s the thing you know it’s sort of like your website.  It’s sort of like your business card.  Make it professional you know don’t use Powerpoint which Powerpoint I’m sorry but Powerpoint can do a lot these days.  It’s amazing what you can do now with Powerpoint you can make things fly in and out but you know what?  These types of things they all become your resumes so take the time to do something that you really are proud of because you never know who is going to see it especially when you start to circulate it online and we’ll talk about some of that stuff next week.

Jennifer Thompson:  Absolutely.

Penny Sansevieri: Jennifer, it was great chatting with you again today.  Thank you so much for your time.

Jennifer Thompson:  My pleasure.

Penny Sansevieri:    Jennifer is with Monkey C Media – that’s the letter “c” --monkeycmedia.com and Penny Sansevieri from Author Marketing Experts – amarketingexperts.com and if you want to take a look at those videos that we were talking about today head on over to redhotinternetpublicity.com.  Click on your book should be on video and you’ll get to take a look at some of the trailers and we’d love your feedback on that.  Till next time, Jennifer thanks again.

Jennifer Thompson:  Thank you so much.

Penny Sansevieri: Bye, bye.

Jennifer Thompson:Bye, bye.
Last Updated ( Saturday, 11 August 2007 )
 
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