Book Trailer Awards: Does Anyone Else Think Thomas Pynchon Sounds Like The Dude?
More proof, in case you needed it, that this is truly a multichannel world: Tonight publishing company
Melville House will sponsor an awards event for the best book trailers.
Book trailers are short video clips promoting books. You can find them on Amazon.com and YouTube, among other Websites. Publishing companies have long availed themselves of the mass media to try to sell books (I remember seeing Jacqueline Susann on The Merv Griffin Show when I was a kid), but even then the authors were using words to sell words. Now the video images, and concept, are as important as the words in persuading people to buy something to read.
It would be easy to be a Luddite about this and rail against the insidious influence of crass commercialism on the literary arts. But even artists want to sell their goods and earn a buck. And the trailers that are finalists for the Moby Awards, which are being presented tonight at a swank club in Manhattan, are by and large pretty entertaining.
But will they sell books?
A few months back I wrote about a trailer for one of my favorite books of the past few years. The video, in which comic Zach Galifianakis is interviewed in the guise of Lowboy author John Wray, is pretty funny (
