One more book trailer, then we’re done for awhile.

This one is for The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

Another book trailer

Leviathan by Scott Westerfield.
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Continuing well-produced book videos

From Bad to Cursed by Katie Alexander

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PG decided to check out some book trailers that were well-produced.

Lily Alone by Jacqueline Wilson

From BookBub:

Whether you’re looking to write to market or are scouring manuscript submissions for your next acquisition, knowing what tropes appeal to readers can help inform your decision. We see different trends in different categories. And studying these trends, especially those that have been selling well recently, will help you learn what content can best engage your audience.

To help you get a sense of what’s currently engaging BookBub members, we’re showcasing two trending tropes across each of 15 different categories, along with examples of books that performed well for each trope.

. . . .

Historical Romance Trends

Marriages of convenience

In historical romances, readers love when heroines must wed the hero for reasons beyond their control, or marry for anything but love — only to find themselves falling head over heels!

. . . .

Heroes with titles

Dukes might have been few and far between in actual 19th century England, but in historical romance they’re thick on the ground, and our readers have been loving them as heroes lately — along with earls and marquesses.

. . . .

Action & Adventure Trends

Military fiction

In military fiction, protagonists will likely have a degree of experience in the combat and survival departments, so the book’s action sequences will reflect that expertise.

. . . .

Ancient secrets, codes, and hidden treasure

Given the gargantuan popularity of stories like National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code, it’s no surprise that our action and adventure readers are big fans of books featuring historical clues, hidden treasures, and puzzle elements.

Link to the rest at BookBub

Duke PG is fighting to survive by consuming Diet Coke until he can find the lost file on his computer.

One of the topics for indie author marketing that was discussed in the recent WMG Publishing Business Master Class created by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (to which gathering PG was invited) was Street Teams.

What is a Street Team?

Wikipedia says:

A street team is a term used in marketing to describe a group of people who ‘hit the streets’ promoting an event or a product. ‘Street Teams’ are promotional tools that have been adopted industry-wide as a standard line item in marketing budgets by entertainment companies, record labels, the tech industry, corporate brand marketers, new media companies and direct marketers worldwide. The music industry is now seeing a boom in the use of large street teams to reach out to fans and improve sales in the smaller hard to reach fans internationally.

. . . .

The concept for organized promotion teams in the music business can also be traced back to mid-1970s, when Starkey and Evans, two teenage KISS fans from Terre Haute, Indiana created the KISS ARMY as a group of fans determined to promote the KISS name. Although this could be more attributed to fan clubs, fans worked together outside of their homes, to promote KISS to other kids at school or while hanging out. This KISS army was quickly taken over by the band KISS itself and army recruits were offered limited edition merchandise and seating.

Usually unpaid, street teams for bands and artists are still often composed of teenagers who are rewarded with free band merchandise or show access in exchange for a variety of actions:

• placing stickers and posters in their communities
• bringing friends to the shows
• convincing friends to buy band merchandise
• phoning the local radio stations to request their songs for airplays & voting in the charts
• bringing vinyl and CDs to local DJs in the clubs where they work
• posting to band forums and bulletin boards online

PG is interested in how visitors to TPV use street teams in connection with their books, how street teams are managed (or not) and organized. He is also interested in any negative experiences, reasons street teams don’t/haven’t worked.

Links to useful resources relating to indie authors and street teams would also be great.

From The Atlantic:

Tom spent his days as a clerk, two floors below ground level in the cellars of Lloyds Bank. He worked in the foreign-transactions department from 9:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day, and in his free moments between filing and tabulating balance sheets, he wrote.

Tom was better known to the world as T. S. Eliot. By the time he started as a clerk in 1917, his most popular poem—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—had been published to great acclaim. But even then, despite his bank salary, the man who has often been called the greatest poet of the 20th century struggled to make ends meet. He accepted money from relatives to buy underwear and pajamas, and anxiety over his finances drove him to breakdowns.

.  .  .  .

Poetry has always been an art form, but it has rarely been a career even for the most legendary poets. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Charles Bukowski held a bevy of odd jobs, including work as a dishwasher, a truck driver, a gas-station attendant, and a postal clerk. The poet’s story has long been one of a double life, split between two urgent duties: making a living and making art.

Rupi Kaur is a case study in how dramatically the world of poetry has changed since then. The 25-year-old Canadian poet outsold Homer two years ago: Her first collection, milk & honey, has been translated into 40 languages and has sold 3.5 million copies stealing the position of best-selling poetry book from The Odyssey.

Rupi Kaur is a case study in how dramatically the world of poetry has changed since then. The 25-year-old Canadian poet outsold Homer two years ago: Her first collection, milk & honey, has been translated into 40 languages and has sold 3.5 million copies, stealing the position of best-selling poetry book from The Odyssey.

Since the publication of milk & honey, the poetry genre has become one of the fastest-growing categories in book publishing. According to one market-research group, 12 of the top 20 best-selling poets last year were Insta-poets, who combined their written work with shareable posts for social media; nearly half of poetry books sold in the United States last year were written by these poets. This year, according to a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Census Bureau, 28 million Americans are reading poetry—the highest percentage of poetry readership in almost two decades. Kaur’s publisher, Kirsty Melville, has seen it happen firsthand: “It used to be that poetry was down in the back of the store next to the bathrooms, and now it’s out front,” she told us. “And that naturally helps sales of all poets. The classics and other contemporary poets are selling.”

The rise of the Insta-poet didn’t start with Rupi Kaur. In 2013, Melville noticed that a Cambodian-Australian poet named Lang Leav was becoming popular on the internet, her work passed around on social media. Melville took a leap of faith and signed her to a book deal with Andrews McMeel, her publishing company. That book, Love & Misadventures, sold more than 150,000 copies. “We thought, Huh, there’s something going on here … For a poetry book—a love poetry book—to sell 150,000 copies was notable.”

. . . .

In 2010, the editor of n+1 magazine, Chad Harbach, famously wrote that there were two distinct and rival literary cultures in America: the institutional, university-driven M.F.A. track and the New York–centered publishing world. But now there is a third option: the fast-paced, democratizing, hyper-connected culture of the internet. The poets of this third category often have little formal training, and their publishers are strewn across the country. Andrews McMeel, for instance, is an indie publisher in Missouri. Social media seem to have cracked the walls around a field that has long been seen as highbrow, exclusive, esoteric, and ruled by tradition, opening it up for young poets with broad appeal, many of whom are women and people of color.

Social-media poets, using Instagram as a marketing tool, are not just artists—they’re entrepreneurs. They still primarily earn money through publication and live events, but sharing their work on Instagram is now what opens up the possibility for both. Kaur, the ultimate poet-entrepreneur, said she approaches poetry like “running a business.” A day in the life can consist of all-day writing, touring, or, perhaps unprecedented for a poet, time in the office with her team to oversee operations and manage projects.

Building their own mini brands, poets can harness e-commerce to supplement their income.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

From The New York Times:

The artist Marina Abramovic is no stranger to controversial performances, but she found herself involved in an unscripted spectacle on Sunday when an aspiring artist hit her with a painting.

Ms. Abramovic was leaving a book signing at the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, which is hosting Italy’s first major retrospective of her art, when a man slammed a paper portrait he had made of Ms. Abramovic over her head.

The sudden act drew horrified gasps from several people in the crowd that had been following Ms. Abramovic through the palazzo. “She was attacked,” one woman is heard saying in a video of the incident published by the Rome daily La Repubblica.

Ms. Abramovic said in a statement issued by the museum that she had been stunned by the aggression, but was unhurt.

She said a man approached her holding a “rather distorted” portrait of her, according to the statement. “He came forward, staring me straight in the eyes and I smiled thinking that it was a present for me,” Ms. Abramovic said. “In a fraction of a second I saw his expression change and become violent. You know, danger always comes very quickly, like death.” That’s when he smashed the portrait — with a frame, but no glass — over her head. “Boom,” he appears to be saying in the video.

. . . .

Ms. Abramovic said in her statement that once she recovered from her shock, she asked to meet her aggressor. “I wanted to know why he did this, why this hatred against me,” she said.

She said that he responded: “I had to do it for my art.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times