#14 Bringing a book to life
#14 Bringing a book to life
Everyone loves a good story don’t they? Our own craft somewhat relies on our ability to condense any subject, service or product into a meaningful narrative through photos, videos & marketing. Whilst the content is inevitably not always something we’re passionate about, understanding how best to market & produce a high quality end products & the process to get there is!
So it was a real pleasure when we recently had the chance to put our creative skills to the test with a local author, Dale Parnell, who was looking for an effective way to stand out from the crowd to market his second fiction book release, a collection of short stories.
Promoting a new book isn’t something we’d done before and we’re certainly aware of the difficulties in authors getting people to buy their books in this digital age! So we sat down with Dale to talk about the specifics involved & work through our tried & tested process for any media & marketing project. We worked through a process with Dale, identifying the typical target audience, understanding how other authors tend to release books & what Dale was hoping to get out of the project. After a number of conversations we hit upon the idea of creating a short film using one of the stories, ‘The Garden’.
Once the initial idea was approved, Dale gave us free reign on the creative side. We soon evolved our original idea of a short film into something more akin to a music video – bringing Dale’s words to life through his own voice – “the vocals”, which we set to an instrumental piece -“the music” that Nick created specifically to go with the emotion of the story.
We effectively had our song, so now we were ready for the video, which we decided should be stylistically cinematic and visually complementary to the words within the narrative, with the aim of taking the original text and bringing it to life.
We then worked with Dale to build a small campaign to market the video and by default the book, including behind the scenes footage and teasing the video release. As a side note, we still aren’t sure if this kind of collaboration has been done before, but we’d love to do it again!
We’ll be releasing the video this coming week, but in the meantime, enjoy this behind the scenes!