Book Readers As Production Designers

Do you realize that every time you read a book without pictures you become a production designer, casting director, and costume designer? Hell, you can be a director if you want to. Whether you know it or not, when you read a book without pictures, your brain fills in the blank spots. You can see the people, how they are dressed, which way they are moving, and what it looks like around them. Neat, huh? - Peter Wooley, author of What! And Give Up Show Business?

I discovered the above great quote on a website I found via a wonderful video. So here is the progression of the discovery:

1. I was watching a video that will be included soon in one of my 20-Minute Book Marketing Podcasts.

2. That video led me to another video that was showcased on the original video's page. You can see the video right below, where production designer Peter Wooley describes the day he met actress Katherine Hepburn. It's a great story.



3. The above video led me to Peter Wooley's website at http://www.wooleypeterwooley.com where the top banner featured the following quote:



4. And that led me to checking out Peter Wooley's book, What! And Give Up Show Business?, which showcases many great stories about Hollywood movies and stars.

Note: Peter Wooley has been a production designer in the motion picture and television industries for over 30 years. His work includes Going Home, Sounder, Cleopatra Jones, Blazing Saddles, and High Anxiety.

Do you have any great Hollywood stories? Or stories about interesting encounters with famous book authors? If you do, please share them in the comments below. Thanks.

John Kremer, author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books

An Interesting Way to Create a Viral Video

Alama Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, got real creative when they received a phone call from an unhappy customer who was thrown out of the theater after violating their no-texting-during-a-movie policy. They created a viral video of it.



Here was their description under the video:

We do not tolerate people that talk or text in the theater. In fact, before every film, we have several warnings on screen to prevent such happenings. Occasionally, someone doesn't follow the rules, and we do, in fact, kick their asses out of our theater. This video is an actual voice mail from a woman that was kicked out of one of our Austin theaters. Thanks, anonymous woman, for being awesome.

Become a fan on Facebook -- www.facebook.com/alamodrafthouse

For more info on the Alamo Drafthouse, visit www.Drafthouse.com.

They lost a great opportunity here to drive more traffic to their Facebook page and website because they'd didn't add the http:// in front of their links. If they had, YouTube would have made those links clickable links.

In less than two months, this video (and an uncensored companion video) have received 4.7 million views! And all they did was take the recording of an angry customer rant, add text in a creative way, and post the video. - And became heroes in the process.

While some of us like to talk when we are in a movie theater (I'm certainly one of them), there are a ton of moviegoers who simply want to enjoy the movie without a lot of background chatter or light glare from texting maniacs. To them, Alamo Drafthouse is a clear winner.

An interesting sidelight. They uploaded the video on June 3rd. On June 7th, Yahoo News carried a story about the video. 1.6 million people went to see the video after reading about it on Yahoo News.

Hint: If you want your YouTube video to go viral, start by making sure Yahoo News (or other news aggregation sites) write about your video. Of course, Yahoo News isn't going to cover the humdrum book trailer, but if you have a video that is creative, interesting, funny, or controversial, make sure the major news sites hear about that video.

If you want to see what videos are currently going viral, check out http://www.videoinbox.com, which showcases the top 5 new viral videos every day.

Related articles

• The Week's Best Viral Videos & Video Marketing Lessons - (reelseo.com)
• 5 Recent Hugely Popular YouTube Videos (& What) Made Them Go Viral (pamil-visions.net)
• Viral Video Quiz: Love, Like, Play & Win (viralblog.com)
• VideoInbox, Another Google/Slide Production, Brings Viral Videos To Your Inbox (techcrunch.com)

Google Gadget Showcases Your YouTube Channel

Check out this neat Google gadget that allows you to showcase all the videos in your YouTube channel. Note: If you want to showcase only specific videos (rather than all the videos in your channel), you can create a new channel and create a specific gadget just for those videos.

Google Search Stories Video Creator via YouTube

Just tried out Google's new video-making service: Google Search Stories Video Creator at http://www.youtube.com/searchstories. This service allows you to quickly create a video featuring a series of Google searches and then easily upload the video to YouTube.

I created the video below in about two minutes. Simple. Easy. But Google has to make it more interesting to have it be something more than a trick.

The T-Mobile Dance: Another Fun Time

Here's another fun video with 11.5 million views in less than four months. Neat. Enjoy.



Thanks to @GarethHopkins for the recommendation.

Something to Brighten Your Day - Enjoy

Discovered this video via Tellman Knudsen . . .

I hope you enjoy it.



Sound of Music: Over 3 million views.

Incredible Stop-Action Movie

This 4-minute movie must have taken a hundred hours to make. Incredible work. Beautiful. And amazing.



Title: Stop Motion with Wolf and Pig

YouTube Videos: A Funny Series of Movie Take-Offs

I'm sad to say that many of these wonderful parodies are now no longer on YouTube due to the idiots at Constantin Film Produktion. These stupid, stupid, dumkopfs (they're German) consider these funny parodies as copyright infringement. Such stupid, stupid people.

Don't they know that these parodies are actually making more people aware of their Downfall movie, and that many people are watching or buying the movie because of the parodies. Dumb, dumb, dumb people.

Alas, this means that many of the YouTube links below will no longer work. Sad.

I'm not sure who did the first Hitler parody, but they are all funny. What a wonderful series of take-offs from a movie clip.

Twitter Frustrates Hitler As Followers Split (6,160 views):



And here's another using the same movie excerpt, but completely different content:

No Twitter for Hitler (38,249 views):



And a few more variations on the same movie excerpt:

Hitler is invaded by Mexicans (34,890 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dvio5W1gTU

Adolf Hitler - Vista Problems! (687,000 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExeyrNZwzwQ

KFC Nuggets get banned; Hitlers Downfall (11,296): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBdetQeZ3fQ

Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live (1,099,012 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkDxF2k

Real Estate Downfall (1,644,472 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNmcf4Y3lGM

Somebody Stole Hitlers Car (808,392 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dl4faCpJE

Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft (2,405,926 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JF03i7NfIU

Hitler Superbowl (592,207 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_9UTvESBIc

Hitler's got the wrong bike (628,137 views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukAhlxl4hmM

New York Times Tries YouTube: You Too?

On Tuesday, a full-page ad in the New York Times newspaper announced the debut of its YouTube series of Conversations featuring famous people talking about their favorite sections of the newspaper. Even with a full page ad in the NYT, however, the videos featuring famous people still have only a few hundred to a few thousand views.

For example, the following video with John Leguizamo has so far had 783 views (at least 3 are mine) in three days. In five years since this article was original posted, this video has received a little over 4,000 views. And that's with the power of the New York Times and the celebrity of John Leguizamo!



Why do I bring this up? Because many of you are putting videos up on YouTube and expecting an avalanche of views.

Well, consider this: If the New York Times can only get a few hundred views of some of their videos after a FULL PAGE ad, celebrity spokespeople, and a key feature in the Marketing Vox ezine, how do you expect your video to get views?

I've seen other major companies put videos up on YouTube and declare victory with a few thousand views, but personally (and professionally) I don't think a YouTube video is successful without half a million views.

And if you want that many views, you have to do more than simply put a video up. And do more than pay for a full-page ad in the New York Times. You have to learn how to use the viral power of the Internet.

Online Promotion Can Make a Difference

Using text messages, Facebook groups, and YouTube videos, student activists in Venezuela organized protest marches against the increasingly autocratic rule of president Hugo Chávez. One protest march featured more than 200,000 union laborers, students, housewives, and business executives. The marches helped to defeat a reform package that would have enabled Chávez to be president indefinitely. As the leader of the movement noted, “Youths in any nation, I believe, can do the same. They can make history.”

40 Million Views for One Poem-Related Video

The Dash Poem Movie written by Linda Ellis and produced by Mac Anderson, has been viewed 40 million times. Linda has received over one million emails thanking her for writing The Dash. Their Simple Truths website sells a ton of books and movies.



For more such success stories for online marketing and Internet marketing, see http://www.tenmillioneyeballs.com.

Viral Videos Lead to 3 Printings

After uploading three viral videos to YouTube, the publisher of Chad Kultgen's novel The Average American Male had to go back to press three times in the first month.


Here are links to the other two videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WSczMVN6ns

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMFoAvnzxl4

For more such success stories, see http://www.tenmillioneyeballs.com.

YouTube Vegetables

If I were an author of a diet book or cookbook featuring vegetables, I'd make a down and dirty funny video about vegetables and tie it to a commentary on the above video featuring the vegetable orchestra.

The above video has already been viewed 295,000 plus times. It will only get more popular. A fantastically fascinating video with viral possibilities. Someone who creates a great commentary piggybacking on the vegetable orchestra -- and the value of eating vegetables as well as playing with them -- could get hundreds of thousands of viewers for their companion video.

If you post such a video, be sure to add the following tags: vegetable orchestra, vegetables, orchestra, commentary.

To discover other video-sharing websites where you can share your videos, check out http://www.bookmarket.com/videosharing.htm.

How to Get 30,000 Subscribers to Your YouTube Videos

The fellow that does the What the Buck videos on YouTube describes in this video how he got 30,000 subscribers to his videos. That's subscribers!

He has had as many as 200,000 people view one of his videos.

Mashable.com: Social Networking News

If you are interested in new social networking sites and changes to existing sites such as MySpace, YouTube, etc., you should check out Mashable.com. It's probably the best blog about social networking and what's happening in Web 2.0. Great resource.



Today, in their MashTracker section, they featured Zaadz, a social network of people who want to change the world, which just received a major investment from John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.



If you are into social change, check out Zaadz as well. It could be a great resource if you publish new thought, self-help, or spiritual books. Note: It's a slow site to load. You will need a fast Internet connection.