During the last week I have been able to participate in the most iconic of author events—the book signing tour. Arranged by my publisher, Cedar Fort, I have been fortunate enough to setup and sign books in the local Costco stores. Today will be my third signing in Arizona and 
arrangements are being made for a week of signings in
Utah next month. 
 
The experience is probably a little different for debut novelists than it is for more established authors simply because they have a chance that fans of  their previous books will stop by and visit. However, I suspect that the basics are the same. And I’m going to share a little bit of what I learned.  

Take someone with you. I don’t remember where I got this advice, but it was
right on the money. Having a friend along will not only help you to loosen up so you can greet the customers with greater ease, but they can act as your assistant. You need to focus on connecting with the people in the store. A helpful friend can let you do that while handling all of the other tasks that need to be done. 

Get a poster with your picture on it. It wasn’t until after my first signing that I understood the wisdom of this advice. I thought that pasting my image on a poster was an unnecessary bit of vanity. In reality, it informs the people walking by that there is an author on the premise ready and willing to sign their books. Very few people knew that I was an author. I have no doubt that more of them would have stopped and talked to me if they realized that I had written the book on the table in front of me. Even if that was for no other reason that to tell their friends that they had spoken with a real live person
of interest.  

Stand and smile. I have been to my share of trade shows and know from my experience on both sides of the table that those
people who stand and smile attract a lot more visitors than those who sit and wait for
people to stop and talk to them. It’s the difference between a joyous invitation to participate and solemn warning to be
left alone. At least, that is how it appears to your potential customers. 

Say hi. You’ll be surprised at the results. At each of my signings I sold books to people
who had barely looked in my direction. A friendly greeting, literally, turned them back around and after a fun discussion with them, they bought The Gathering. 

That’s enough author tips for the day. The important thing about my
book signings is that I had the chance to meet all sorts of
interesting people. This is the moment I had dreamed about as
a wannabe author. All of the slow moments and effort that goes into  
meeting new people is worth it when one of them stops and takes an 
interest in my book. 

If you get a chance, I hope you will stop by one of my signings and say hi. 
 

Last minute addition: I didn’t have time to post this 
before I left for today’s book signing and am glad that I had to wait. Because, it gives me the 
opportunity to talk about my 
new friend—Earl. 
 
Earl stopped by and told me that he had already read the book and liked it. Well, color me surprised. Not that he liked it, but that within the week that The Gathering has been out someone has already read it and had time to come down from Salt Lake City and tell
me about it. Alright, he didn’t make the trip to Arizona just to tell me he liked the
book. It just happened to be a happy coincidence that he was in Costco while I was doing the signing. The important thing is that I received my first, in-person feedback on the
novel. Earl said his favorite part of the book was the questions in the back. 
 
Thanks, Earl. It was a pleasure to meet  you. 

            
Once you have filmed the trailer, sent all the extras home, and cleaned  up the mess—you’re still not done. The post production crew needs to have a go  at the footage before you have a trailer that will wow the masses and convince them to buy your book. This includes video editing, special effects, sound  recording or re-recording, and sound editing.
             
At this point in the process, you should have a good amount of footage from which to make the trailer. Video editing will take the twelve shots of a table full of stately men in suits yelling at one another and put it together to form a scene of political chaos. Or at least that’s what I hope is going to happen. If you have video editing software and are moderately familiar with it, this is something you could do on your own. Fortunately, I have an expert on the process doing that for me. 
             
Special effects. Everyone loves them. I don’t know very much about the process. Video editing software carries a number of effects the average person can use. They include stop motion, time lapse, and attaching text to an object on the screen. For The Gathering I needed a burning building. Amber Nichols and Doug Monce filmed downtown
Phoenixand will be inserting a special effect that makes one of the buildings looks like it’s on fire. Cool,  huh?
             
There are some options as to how you put together the sound track. You could use the actual sound that is recorded at the time of the filming, but that will leave you with an amateurish quality of audio. You can re-record the dialogue and match it to the video. You can place the original audio in the
background and record a voice over track on top of it. And you can ignore any of the recorded sound all together and run a music track. We decided to do a bit of all of those. The original audio track will be used in the background, a soft music track will be placed on top of that, and then a voice over track will be
the primary sound that is heard. 
             
If you’re selling a book you probably need to ad text that will tell your audience where they can buy it. Or you might want to roll some credits. In either case, this really falls under the category of special effects, but requires a different focus. Put your marketing cap on and decide what information you want the viewers to have after having just seen the trailer. I’m going to flash a message at the end of the last scene and then go to an
advertisement that has the cover image and the Amazon.com information so they
can order it. 
             
A live action trailer is a lot of work and may include tasks that are  beyond you and your circle of friends. That’s okay, there are alternatives. 
              
Another method is to do a slideshow with text and background music. If you can find the right images it can result in a very effective trailer. For an example of this, check out the Wonder trailer. With the purchase of a reasonably priced video editing suite you could do this yourself. 
              
A second option is to hire someone to put a trailer together for you. In some cases, it may be cheaper to go this route than pay for the software and spend the time to do it yourself. My friend, Craig Mazur, does this this at his site Top Rank Solutions. He will be doing my next book trailer. You can contact him here. Feel free to mention my name. 
             
Whew, I think that covers it. I won’t be posting over the holidays, but watch for an interview the first week in January. I’ll be interviewing one of the characters out of my book. Until then . . . Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

            
Once you’ve written the script for your trailer and assembled a crew to make it, the next step is casting. In the case of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trailer I was brought on to the project as a helper/extra. That part is easy enough to describe. Amber put out a facebook message asking if anyone wanted to participate and I jumped on the chance to be part of the fun. Boom. That’s it.





Here is a picture of Amber, and Lucy watching Christopher Sheffield setup for the classroom scene. 
             





For The Gathering trailer I’m  much more involved in the process. There are six sets, nine actors, and about a dozen extras needed for what should be a one-day shoot. Scrounging up the on-screen talent is something that Amber normally does, but I wanted to be as big a part of the process as I could. I agreed to see what I could pull from my
network of family, friends, and neighbors. 
             
Because I have a good voice for it, I decided to take on the role of narrator. One of the guys in my neighborhood, Dan, does stand-up comedy and volunteered for any speaking parts. There’s only one and as it turns out he can easily pass as a television reporter. While those were the two key parts in the trailer they weren’t the hardest to cast. Almost half of the footage will be of a family watching the news in their television room. I don’t have any children near the age of the ones we need so I couldn’t use them or their friends. I ended up recruiting Luke Jackson, who looks pretty much the way I pictured one of the characters in my mind. He agreed to convince enough of his friends to
fill the rest of the teenager slots. 
             
But the trickiest job of recruiting extras was getting a room full of politicians. Where are you going to find a bunch of mature men in suits? I’m hoping the gentlemen at my church will be interested enough in experiencing the wonders of film to fill out my roster of angry politicos. 
              
That still left two scenes uncast. These were a little more difficult to arrange. I needed a food riot and the location of a terrorist attack. Amber suggested that we purchase those scenes from an online video archive. In this case, it was easier and cheaper to find footage that matched our needs than attempt a complicated shoot for them.
             
Now, comes the fun part. The shoot itself. Getting together and actually filming the scenes is what comes to mind when people think about shooting a video. Lights. Cameras. Action. And as an author this is probably as close to seeing your story turned into a movie that you’ll ever get. Enjoy it. 

Shooting for my trailer doesn’t start until the end of the month, so I’ll be drawing on my experiences as an extra with Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Mantecoza. What I took away from both of these shoots is to expect repetition. I can boil it down to just a few words of instruction: stand here, walk until we say stop, then go back and do it again. 





This is Amber giving us our "Stand Here" instructions.









Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast. Sometimes my “stand here” spot was the same and sometimes it wasn’t. Some of the time they wanted me up front with the primary actors and some of the time they wanted me in the back since they had already shown my face
in the last take. Most of the time it didn’t matter, because the take they decide to use might not even be one where you make an appearance. As an extra, you might walk around an office floor for three hours and not show up in that scene at all. 

The best part of being an extra is getting to know the rest of the cast. There’s a chance you’ll make new friends. You’ll definitely make useful contacts. And you share an inside view of the project. Like the time that they queued the scene, but forgot to take the lens cap off the camera. 
 
That’s it for today. Looks like I need to do a part three so that I can discuss the post production elements of creating a trailer and alternative methods of production. Until then, keep your stick on the ice or something like that.
 

There are some amazing moments on my journey as an author. Finishing my first
manuscript—okay, any manuscript. Signing the contract with a publisher. And seeing the cover for your novel. The amazing moment in my life right now is 
making the book trailer for The Gathering.

Geek moment—waaaahooooooo!

Even though the filming doesn’t start until the  end of the month, I’ve had the advantage of participating in the shoot for the  Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You can see that here.

Go ahead,  take a couple of minutes and check it out. Not surprisingly, I was lucky enough  to enlist most of the same crew to put together my trailer. 

Obviously, the first step in the process is to write a novel that’s going to be published. Then once you have that out of the way you’re going to need a script for the trailer. I felt comfortable doing that myself so I sat down with my good friend and Producer for the project, Amber Nichols, and together we worked out the storyboard. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted and Amber kicked back a lot of great ideas to improve it. I spent
the next day writing and revising the script and then sent it over to Wendell Brown. He has more experience with screenplay formats than I do and was able to make suggestions on how to punch it up.

This step was tremendously fun. Instead of daydreaming about how the movie version of my novel would look, I wrote it—in miniature form. Even better, I involved several of my friends and they shared in my vision of the story.

The next item on the list was to recruit the talent needed to film the trailer. This is where your networking efforts as an author really pays off. Amber was able to convince Douglas Monce to join The Gathering project as the Director, Brandon Gesimondo-Clark as Chief Camera, and Dee Astell as the Set Photographer. Having people who know how to properly set the lighting, manage the actors, and how to transform a location into exactly what the scene requires makes the difference between a professional quality video and an amateur attempt.  

Here’s a picture from the Manic Pixie Dream Girlshoot. If you watched the trailer you may remember a classroom scene where the two main characters of the story are talking together. Classmates are in the background. The funny thing about this scene is that we didn’t have enough extras on this particular day. Amber had to improvise. Keep in mind that these are supposed to be
teenagers. In the back row you will see my eleven-year-old (who is a small eleven) and Amber’s aunt posing as teens.

Did you notice that they were not teens when you originally watched the trailer? Probably not, because Amber did a masterful job of making eight people, in two rows of chairs, look like a classroom. And the cameraman was able to really help that illusion along with the correct shooting setup. 

One of the fun aspects of participating in a project like this is getting to see all the interesting behind-the-scenes bits. In the case of the classroom scene mentioned above that included having to scrounge enough textbooks for my daughter to sit on and Amber’s aunt putting her hair into a ponytail. Both actions were needed to make them look more like the teens they were meant to be portraying. And it worked, but I stood in the background and snickered at the thought of the two of them passing for teenagers.

Then there was the delightful banter between the two lead actors during the actual filming. Since their dialogue wasn’t going to be used in the trailer they had instructions to talk. No lines. No topics. Just talk. The lines that Sean Worsley delivered were hilarious. They would have made a phenomenal outtake.

In part two of this article I’ll discuss casting, filming, post production, and some alternate book trailer formats. See you then.