Want to get in the mood for Laurie King's new Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes novel, The Pirate King? Here's the new trailer for the book recently posted on Laurie's site, full of atmosphere, wry wit, and of course, pirates!
Btw, how hysterical is it that movie-style trailers are now made to sell books? It's totally appropriate in this case; Laurie's book is about the silent movie industry, and this trailer incorporates plenty of vintage B&W pirate movie footage to provide the necessary action. (Even in trailer form, the point of a moving picture is to move.)
So long as you have a plot dripping with intrigue, an irresistible character or setting, or some other hook that can be effectively exploited, visualized, and sold in a 2-minute trailer, you're good to go in the brave new world of book promotion.
Meanwhile, not only authors and other creative artists, but their characters and/or subjects are now required to have a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. It's one thing to discover a FB presence for historical figures like William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, or the Plantagenet Edward II (who has an active Wall full of pics and comments, even though he's been dead since 1327). But fictional characters are swarming all over social media like bees on Holmes's hives.
I discovered this with a vengeance when I posted a blog about the Disney cartoon feature Tangled last December—in which I riffed on how Disney princesses and their heroes (in this case, Rapunzel and her rascally thief-turned-hero Flynn Rider) have evolved over the decades. Within a couple of months it had more hits on this site than anything else I'd ever posted. I couldn't figure out why until I followed a couple of links backward to their sources and discovered that Flynn Rider, has his own thriving Facebook page, complete with cocky updates from the virtual man himself, and swooning pre-teens (one assumes) writing mash notes on his Wall. Who knew? These days, real-life reality is just another option (and not a very popular one) on the massive virtual smorgasboard.
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