Kay and I have just finished our latest project. It is part of the “Conversati0n Series” we started a number of years ago. This time we had the opportunity to interview the author Helen Frost. Helen won the Printz award for “Keesha’s House”. She is a wonderful writer and I am so grateful for the time she spent creating this video. If you would like to learn more about Helen and her work you can find it at www.helenfrost.net
I was once a fan of a company called “Nocast”. They provided cable, Internet and phone services and I loved them for about 20 years. I was a fan. Now I have moved to a new house and another company, let’s call it “Zontier”, offered me a great no-contract deal so I thought I would give this new company a try and I knew that if I didn’t like their service I could always go back to my friend “Nocast”. I called “Nocast” to switch my service and was transferred to their customer retention service. Expecting the same friendly and helpful service that I had received in the past I was confronted with monotone indifference and a mountain of rudeness that I am sure must have broken some record somewhere. Thinking this was a one off deal, I called back the next day and got the same treatment. OK, maybe there is something going on in the local office. I tried the web and had the strangest chat session imaginable, very similar to the “Hello I am Peggy” ad on TV. If you don’t know what I am talking about, check out http://twitter.com/usprimecredit
Customer service is the business of helping one customer at a time. Valuing their loyalty and respecting them. A customer service and retention department should not cause you to angrily stomp around your new house cursing their stupidity and ineptitude. It should not cause you to bend on one knee and point your finger to the sky and make a solemn vow never, ever, ever to do business with this company again. It should not cause you to write a blog post warning my friends and family about doing business with them.
Libraries are all about service to our patrons and the community and making positive connections one patron at a time.
P.S.
How did I find out about the deal “Zontier” was offering? They were twittering about it and actually my wife found it.
Just as movies advertise and promote the latest and greatest upcoming releases, you too can create and promote books by creating a book trailer. These are similar to a movie trailer and are designed to catch the viewers’ attention and spark an interest. “Coming to a nightstand near you!” book trailers are great because you can showcase something that has just been published or you can be retrospective and create a book trailer on a personal favorite.
These are really fun to make and are a chance for you to take all the skills you have learned from this book or from your other video projects and apply them.
Here are some tips and tricks:
1. The book trailer should be between 1 – 3 minutes.
2. Introduce the title, author and suitable age range of readers.
3. If possible, include a graphic of the cover page.
4. Give a brief overview of the book, but don’t give too much away as the whole point is for the person to pick up the book and read it. I just hate it when a movie trailer gives away the entire plot line.
5. Use your own voice and possibly a head shot when talking about the book.
6. It may seem obvious, but pick a book you have read and would love to do as your first book trailer. Your enthusiasm will naturally come through.
Write a script
Thinks about what you want to say and language you want to use. Remember that you are making a mini-movie so your script needs to have a beginning, middle and an end.
Storyboard
As always, create a storyboard. It is the perfect tool for laying out your ideas and getting your thoughts in order. I have covered this in the book. One thing I didn’t cover was thinking about music. Once you have your storyboard drawn out, start thinking about what kind of mood you want to create.
Music
Here are a couple of sites where you can get royalty-free music pretty cheaply.
and choose the Usage Right either labeled for reuse or labeled for reuse with modification and your search results will return images that you can legally use.
Lights, camera and action
So you have your script, you’ve storyboarded all your shots and you have picked out some images and music. You are ready to start filming.
Here is an example of a book trailer I created for “Keesha’s House”:
Here I have used stopped motion, inserted images and added my talking head
Here is another example I created for the Dan Brown book “Lost Symbols”:
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
-Ray Kroc
I love this quote. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how change occurs within organizations and personally. I had the chance to listen to two guitarists talk at Sweetwater Sound over the last year. Veron Reid and John 5 both talked about absolutely loving what they were doing and persistence. These two qualities for me at least are the two things that are needed to convert an idea into an action. If you love what you are doing and are persistent you are unstoppable.
We probably all feel that we spent too much time in meetings, especially the death march meeting that trundles onward to its inevitable demise. Meetings for me are an abattoir for the mind. They are where good ideas make their final stand before they are euthanized by collective groupthink.
I think that any group of people can fall under the spell of groupthink. It could be the fixed gear bicycle crowd or the hipster artists. It’s easy to be snared; the nice thing about groupthink is that you don’t have to think as hard. There is the security that if you think like the group then you are one of us. There isn’t a hidden manifesto of rules or secret handshake, what erodes independent thinking is simply peer pressure.
So this is the dilemma within the library profession as I see it. Most of us did not fit in and eventually found ourselves working in libraries. Where (surprise) we did fit. We found a group of like-minded professionals that we could relate to and had similar values and maybe similar ideals. So we have all the ingredients for groupthink. The ALA bill of rights is a pretty good example of shared values and perhaps groupthink.
Not all collective thinking is bad. It gives us our laws and a structure in which to operate. I do think that groupthink is toxic when you are in the idea and innovation game. It is far easier to kill another person’s idea than it is to create your own. Especially if that idea is counter to the group’s belief system.
We need these independent thinkers within the library profession. These are the ones that tell us the world is not flat. They tell us that vinyl records as a format is dead and by the way, so is paper. So rather than burning these voices at the virtual stake or lashing them with sarcastic comments, think about preserving them.
These are quiet voices hidden in alleyways of the Internet. Voices you have to seek out, voices that are hidden and are really going to challenge you. Can you meet that challenge? Do you have the courage to step outside the belief system of your peers?
I am really interested in the future of e-books and what publishers and authors are thinking. I found this wonderful series of videos by Tim O’Reilly. He talks about where he thinks the publishing industry is going. Tim is the guy the created the term Web 2.0.
