Timothy's Thoughts

I thought I'd given up on book videos, but then I came up with this one. The main reason I put this video together is because some of the examples in Extending Art of Illusion can't be fully appreciated without seeing them in action. I had a lot of fun developing the Tracker plugin. I spent more time than I care to admit just setting up trackers and moving a sphere around the scene with my mouse so that I could watch the pointers follow it through the scene. You can see some of that in this video.

R achelle Gardner’s post yesterday was about book videos. Do we need them? Do we not? Do they sell books? Do they not? The fact is that we don’t know how much we need them and how many books they sell, if any. That hasn’t stopped us from doing other things, such as handing out bookmarks, or book signings or blogging, but book videos are getting a lot of discussion. The real problem is that they are expensive. Even if we do it on a shoestring budget, book videos require an investment of time, but when we get the publisher involved, the cost of a book video starts at around $3,000 and a well produced one could run into tens of thousands of dollars. Is it worth it and what’s the point? Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture. Most readers don’t spend their days watching book videos, so even if we have one, that fact alone isn’t going to push our book sales up. It is a little like killer bees. One bee sting probably won’t kill you. Two bee stings probably won’t kill you. You ma...

E ditor’s Note: Today I'm giving you another video. At four minutes, thirty-eight seconds, it is lengthy for a book video. Most of the ones I have seen come in at less than half of that. But please watch the video and then we'll talk about it. This isn't the first time I've talked about book videos and it won't be the last. The current understanding of book videos seems to be that they probably help sell some books, some of the time, but we may have been able to sell those books anyway, using a cheaper method. In other words, we don't know how much book videos help with sales and we don't know if they are worth it, but they may be. They are certainly not a silver bullet. You can't just put a video out there and get thousands of people to read the book. For that matter, it is hard enough to get thousands of people to view the video, and it is free. If you are a bestselling author, your publisher might foot the bill for a book video. For the rest...