Where the Buffalo is Marfa? About the Trailer

So, who are all these wacky people in my "Where the Buffalo is Marfa?" trailer for the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project: Exploring Marfa, Texas & Environs in 24 Podcasts? I have no idea. The clips and photos are all "gigs" from www.fiverr.com-- check out their profiles and many other gigs, all @ USD $5 each. All of these fiverr.com sellers were prompt and professional, and I can recommend them warmly. You can check out their gigs, their ratings-- and if you like one (maybe for a holiday greeting --or your own wacky trailer?), just hit the PayPal button.

Herewith, with my thanks, the cast:

Accordion player: squeezeboxhero

(Australian?) dude reading message and then smacking to wall: coreworkouts

American guy yelling "Marfa!" in a rant-like way: mel864

Plastic bag man: robertocarlos

Redneck character in blue sunglasses: johnwright238

Zombie: kristylynn

Psycho Welshman: facebook_poster

British banana: bethan

Peapod dancer: haleylujah

Funky dancer in brown shorts: coreworkouts (again)

Accordion guy (again): squeezeboxhero

Girl in elephant mask and Marfa sign: reticent

Guy in fur hat with Marfa sign: newsfromstreet

Swimmer with Marfa sign: rubikart

OK, what is truly mind-warping is that I don't know their real names and I don't know where they live nor where they filmed any of these. And these previously impossible, even unthinkable, digital juxtapositions interest me as something to explore in the book I'm about to start writing. When I did my last travel book, Miraculous Air, about Mexico's Baja California peninsula, in the late 1990s, almost no one (outside of a very few people in Tijuana, Ensenada and Los Cabos) was on-line and it was quite the novelty that a telephone or two had arrived in some villages. Now, looking at Marfa, Texas and environs (Alpine, Fort Davis, Valentine, Marathon, and the Big Bend), I find restaurants tweeting their breakfast menus and the local lamp shop on Youtube. I've yet to do a podcast-- the project starts in January-- but I'm already following a small community of West Texas tweeters, and you can follow me @marfamondays.

---> Read about the Marfa Mondays Project

Trailer for My Translation of "Bhima's" Manual Espírita

A new trailer (about 1 and a half minutes):



Forthcoming this fall as an e-book from Dancing Chiva Literary Arts. Want to be alerted when it's available?
>>Join the Dancing Chiva mailing list
>>Join the C.M. Mayo mailing list

UPDATE October 15, 2011: The book now has its own website, with extensive Q & A, resources for researchers (bibliographies, lists of archives, films, podcasts,and more).

Book Promotion, Book Trailers, and (shazam!!) Carolyn Parkhurst's Trailer for The Nobodies Album

I've begun work, at last, seriously, on a couple of new books, but the question of book promotion continues to amuse, fascinate, and consternate me. In part this is because I have come to realize, both from my own experience having published several books, and from seeing that of friends and students, that book promotion is a Mt Everest of a hurdle, emotionally, psychologically, and even artistically (see my blog post, "The Arc of Writerly Action"). For each writer the size and particulars of the challenge is unique, but it seems that almost everyone, except the certifiable narcissist, feels well, wierd, about promoting their own work.

One of the new and very powerful tools of promotion is the so-called book trailer, a brief (or maybe not so brief) video. (You can view my most recent trailer here.) It's difficult to make generalizations about book trailers, though I've tried-- see my blog post, "Book Trailers: Some Categories (or, Draft of a Taxonomy)".

All that said, the #1 best book trailer I have ever seen, by five hundred miles, is my amiga (and I am not saying this because she's my amiga) Carolyn Parkhurt's latest, for her novel The Nobodies Album. And it co-stars my amigas, novelists Amy Stolls, in the T-shirt, and Paula Whyman, reading the reviews. Seriously, I have never seen a better book trailer. And for you writers squirming about (gasp) self-promotion, just take a deep breath, a swig of whatever you're drinking, and watch the anecdote now:



Good luck, Carolyn!

Book Trailer for Sky Over El Nido

I am endlessly astonished by the changes in the book business. As a writer, it feels like riding the Matterhorn: I'm never sure what's around the next bend (a dip or the Yeti?). Back in 1995, when the University of Georgia Press published Sky Over El Nido, my first collection of stories, a book typically came out in hardcover, received a passle of reviews from magazines and newspapers, and then (if luck had it) there would be paperback edition. Maybe movie options. Maybe foreign rights. Maybe (very rarely) audio. But that was pretty much the whole show. And in less than a slew of weeks, the book would be gone from the bookstore shelves-- adios! Out of sight, out of mind, out of print. (And whoever bothered to read back issues of newspapers for old reviews?) Now, of course, we have websites (mine, www.cmmayo.com, went live in 1999). We have e-books outselling print books, and who knows, maybe "vooks" (video books) will soon take off. Newspaper and magazine reviews are ever scarcer, while blogs, legions of them, have filled in the vaccuum. And because of on-line booksellers such as amazon.com, buyers can find a universe of books, from ye olde best-sellers to the most obscurely self-published, from 1895 or 2005, 2010 or 1973--- and at 4 am, should they happen to be surfing at such an hour.

So: herewith, some 15 years after the book's original publication, is the trailer, a 2 minute video, for Sky Over El Nido. Yes, Sky Over El Nido is still in print in a paperback edition. E-book coming soon.

Book Trailer for Miraculous Air

The book trailer for my travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, is now online here. I find book trailers fascinating, in part because they are so new and wildly heterogeneous. Read about my "draft of a taxonomy" here. (And do click on the Martin Atkinson + amigos trailer.)

Electric Sheep

Read about 'em here. (Featured in Anat Baniel's excellent book trailer.)

More on Book Trailers - Article in Today's New York Times

Today's New York Times has an interesting article on book trailers. Just the other day I posted a blog on these things, a first attempt to provide a rough taxonomy (read that here). And today I had lunch with a writer friend who has a book coming out this fall: trailers, trailers, trailers, that took up about 50% of the conversation.

For shy authors, may I suggest a "TPA" (see category #2). Most authors opt for "Author Stars" (category #4); and in many cases, this is not, alas, an optimal strategy.

More anon.

Book Trailers: Some Categories

Now that I have a couple of book trailers (view here and here), I am fascinated by the genre. What's a book trailer? It's a brief video or linked webpages that, ideally, tells you three things:

1. The title, author's name and what it's about;
3. Why you would want to read it;
3. When and where you can buy it.

Beyond that, it seems, whatever floats your boat. A few rough categories:

U Click

Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

TPA (Text, Photos, Audio, plus some move and transition effects)

Eric Barnes, Shimmer

C.M. Mayo, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

Masha Hamilton, 31 Hours

Chuck Palahniuk, Tell-All

Tim Wendel, High Heat

TPA Plus Film

Erica Perl, Vintage Veronica

M.J. Rose, The Reincarnationist

(It's Not a Movie Already?)

Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters, Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters

James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand

Patti Lacy, An Irishwoman's Tale

Author Stars

Anat Baniel, Move Into Life

Sandra Gulland, Josephine B. trilogy and Mistress of the Sun

Penny Peirce, Frequency

David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable

Mary Sharratt, Daughters of the Witching Hill

Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

David Wiesner, Art and Max

Writer Reads

Sandra Beasely, I Was the Jukebox

Sergio Tronocoso, The Last Tortilla

Author and Amigo(s)

Martin Atkinson, Tour Smart

Gail Sheehy, Passages in Caregiving

More anon.

What Connects You to the 1860s? Guest-Blogging Today at Beatrice.com:

Cinco de Mayo (May 5th) is almost here-- that's the official pub date for the paperback edition of my novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, apropos of which, I'm guest-blogging today over at Ron Hogan's fabulous book blog, beatrice.com, on some of the more fascinating stories I've learned from readers in the past year. More -- and more of those stories--- anon.

Book Trailer of the Day at Shelf-Awareness.com: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

The new trailer (video) for the May 5th paperback edition of my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (Unbridled Books), is book video of the day today over at Shelf-awareness.com (book biz news).

P.S. Very light blogging this week as I'm past deadline to turn in revisions on the translation. But check back tomorrow for a very fun guest-blog post...

Shimmer and Shimmer

Talking about book trailers with an editor this very morning... (re: my previous blog post, a selection of book trailers).

Here's a particularly good one, for Eric Barnes's novel Shimmer (Unbridled Books, 2009).

Curiously, I was just thinking of posting the link when I happened upon my amiga poet Christine Boyka Kluge's latest blog post, "Shimmer".

More anon.

VidLit Monday

It's both a new art form and a new PR tool: the book trailer, a subspecies of "vid-lit," so called after VidLit, a company that makes videos for books. Here's an example of a book trailer (not by that company, as far as I can tell), for James Howard Kunstler's novel, World Made By Hand, which certainly encourages the idea of a "movie based on." And here are several more examples of book trailers. Less-slick are Steven Hart's Thrill-a-Minute Skyway Cam video, apropos of his book, The Last Three Miles: Poltics, Murder and the Construction of America's First Superhighway and Gayle Brandeis's video for her new novel, Self-Storage. As I have a novel coming out next year, I'm interested in the form, but I'm also enchanted by the possibilities of incorporating sound and image (both still and moving) to fiction itself--- especially flash fiction. It's a very different concept than dramatizing the work, as in a movie-like trailer. Neither is it anything like an almost purely visual feast (e.g., Tufte's video about his sculpture, "ZZ Smile"), or even, as Internet film-maker Nick Askew does, a series of mini-documentaries on www.soulbiographies.com.
P.S. Here's some ancient history: the 2005 National Public Radio piece on vid-lit.