Lights, Camera, Publishing?

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By NINA C. AYOUB

Are university presses ready for their close-up? In a nod to Hollywood, a growing number of trade publishers are producing book trailers to promote new titles. But do video teasers have a role in university-press publishing? What about longer formats? Based on an entirely unscientific poll of publicists at 25 university presses, the answer appears to be an emerging "yes" for those venturing into videos and a curious "maybe" for many who haven't. Others express doubt, citing time and resources.

When Mark Heineke was asked if the University of Chicago Press had tried trailers, his reply was a pithy "kinda." The press created two sites with multimedia in advance of two books. Heineke, the director of publicity, further elaborated, "I think the trailers are a magnificent idea if you have a book with the visuals or vivacity to make the most of the medium, and if you have the personnel and acumen to pull it off and get it out there." A trailer/slide show "out there" for Chicago was for Claire Nouvian's The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss (http://www.thedeepbook.org) In it, eerie sea creatures float, one by one, into view against a black background. Each is accompanied by text of its common and scientific names, its size, and its marine depth, as well as by sternum-throbbing music. The Deep's trailer, Heineke says, "truly went viral" for the press when one creature "became somewhat of a Web 2.0 celebrity." The Dumbo octopus (Grimpoteuthis) extended its arms' reach into blogs, poetry, T-shirts, and other realms.

The University of California Press is nearly 400 miles from Hollywood, but the movie- trailer example is embraced by Mark Anderson, an associate sales manager. It's "an existing form in our culture," he notes. "A lot of trial and error" has already occurred, so the task becomes how books can adapt to the medium. Anderson, who has produced several trailers for the press, stresses story and being "clear who you're talking to."

For Gayle Greene's Insomniac, for example, he created a trailer (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10466.php) intended to resonate with anyone plagued by sleeplessness. After a blurb is displayed in which Joyce Carol Oates praises an "impassioned work" that combines academic and personal elements, Greene starts to read from the book's beginning: "The first thing to go is your sense of humor. …" The literary scholar is unseen, but on a black background there are flashes, at irregular intervals, of the red numbers of a digital clock 11:52 … 1:50 … 2:50 … 3:04 … 3:26 … 3:59 … and so on. Anderson wanted viewers to sense from the first seconds that the "people behind this book know what an insomniac is going through." As Greene's book attests, he says, insomniacs "don't feel they're understood."

As much as Anderson champions book trailers, he argues they should not be considered stand-alone items but must be well integrated into a book's total promotion. He also has other concerns. The quantity of media being produced "is accelerating at an insane clip," he observes. "Is it just going to become this kind of murmuring din?" Along with the difficult job of evaluating impacts on sales or on a press's profile, publishers will have to work to differentiate their efforts. Still, Anderson is having fun. As he jokingly confesses, it's about "justifying a cinema major."

Many university-press Web sites are already linking to videos such as news-media interviews with authors. But for presses pondering whether to develop videos themselves, an issue is whether to produce them in-house or with an outside production company.

In an example of the latter, Columbia University Press recently produced trailers for three of its tradier titles in a package deal with a company called TurnHere, says Philip Leventhal, Columbia's Web marketing manager. The shortest, just over a minute, is the playful standout in a cinematic sense. It quite literally creates buzz for James E. McWilliams's American Pests: The Losing War on Insects From Colonial Times to DDT (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13942-7/american-pests/webFeatures). At the start of the teaser, which is set to fast, jazzy music, a variety of cut-out graphic-art insects swarm the brightly colored book cover and then briefly halo the scholar as he begins talking about farmers. It's "a basic phenomenon of two animals, humans and insects, fighting over plants," the historian says wryly as new images appear.

Also intrigued by teaser videos, Jeremy Wang-Iverson, publicity director at Rutgers University Press, took another tack. Working with a video-making friend, he produced a clip (http://www.vimeo.com/1085518) as a kind of experiment, before telling either press or author. The approach for Kevin Mattson's Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America is humorous, if cryptic. Who is that bearded, shades-wearing man? Who are those two children, so young, yet aware of Washington punditry? Along with political comments by three characters, some of which is drawn from the start of Mattson's book, the video flashes blurbs for the new title. The last, from Michael Kazin, shoots word by individual word onto the screen in monumental Hollywood fashion. Wang-Iverson says he showed the video first to Mattson, who has also done a podcast reading for the book. The publicist was relieved that the scholar, and press colleagues, were amused.

At Princeton University Press, the favored format for some years has been extended interviews, often between authors and press editors. Andrew DeSio, Princeton's director of publicity, says at first clips were filmed to send out with media pitches to show "how a person acts in front of a mike." Soon they were mounted on Princeton's and other Web sites. Almost all of Princeton's videos were filmed by Chuck Creesy, the press's director of publishing technologies. He has tracked the Web-server logs, and the numbers of views seem astonishing. They are due especially, Creesy says, to traffic on the free educational section of iTunes. To take an intriguing example, in May alone, he says, a three-year-old video interview (http://press.princeton.edu/video/frankfurt/) with Harry G. Frankfurt, a philosopher and the author of On Bullshit, "had 101,201 views, of which 9,793 came through our site."

Some months ago, with the completion of a presswide database, and with a job opening, the University Press of Kentucky decided to hire a dedicated electronic-marketing manager. Developing the job description, Leila Salisbury, the director of marketing, says she found that only around 10 university presses had that specified position, and all were much bigger than Kentucky. She hired Siobhan Byrns, who has a master of fine arts and had worked for Apple Inc. Byrns's experience was outside the publishing world, but that, says Salisbury, meant she was without preconceived notions of what publishers should do electronically. Kentucky has begun with extended video podcasts, or vodcasts, that feature authors speaking to the camera.

Recently debuting (http://www.kentucky press.com/podcasts.cfm), with a lively equine logo sequence designed by Byrns, are videos of two authors from Lexington. Going local has kept costs down. One is a video of a (noirishly lit?) film scholar, Thomas R. Lindlof, author of Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars. The other is a video of Thomas G. Barnes, an environmentalist-photographer-forestry professor, who is shot traipsing the forest for Rare Wildflowers of Kentucky. The beginnings of Kentucky vodcasts are a kind of farewell for Salisbury, who has also been an acquiring editor in film and popular culture. Later this month, she will become director of the University Press of Mississippi.