Tim Young's Blog

​Hope you enjoy this interview I did on fellow author Steve Moore's site.

We're all used to movie trailers. Those enticing video teasers that give us a preview of "upcoming attractions". In the case of movies, the format makes sense. After all, a short piece of video is being used to promote a long piece of video. But why would a publisher or author want to use video to promote a book?

This is the question I tackled recently, and it's one of the many publishing related decisions you have to contemplate if you run your own publishing business or if you self-publish. Of course, most authors and books do not use trailers to promote the book or provide insight into the story, so why did I? There were several reasons I created the trailer below.

People react differently to different media. Just as some are left brain dominant and some are
right brain dominant, some people react better to video than print.​ If you describe for them what a story is about it may not trigger an emotional response or attraction to the story. Conversely, if they can visualize the story, the attraction may be triggered.
​It's an additional way to introduce the story to potential readers. Just as books use a synopsis, log line and back cover description to entice readers, a book trailer does the same thing but uses a different media and​ targets those who like "watching" stories. So show them what your story is about.
Virality. ​If a trailer is unique (and lucky), it could go viral. When was the last time you saw a book synopsis go viral? Doesn't happen. But with a video, it's possible.
Discovery. Guess what? People who watch movies like stories. A novel is a story. If they stumble across your trailer on YouTube, Vimeo, etc., then a trailer creates a new way for readers to discover an author.

There are other reasons as well, but I'll stop there in case anyone wants to comment.​

Regarding creation of the trailer, it took me a Saturday using footage that I had or could easily grab from free sites. I used iMovie on my Mac and tweaked it until the story matched the book. If you're not comfortable with technology or don't have the software, there are businesses that charge $1,000-$2,000 for a 30-60 second book trailer. Amazon does that, for example, as part of its CreateSpace service, but you can do a better job on your own, in my opinion, and save the cash for something else. Like ice cream.​

​I'm not sure when I decided to write a novel. Nor am I really (what I perceive to be) the typical would-be novelist, which I perceive as those who love to read, love to write and, perhaps, have either education or employment in writing or language. Or those who just want to say "I'm a novelist."

I meet none of those criteria.​

Yet, ​I had an idea for an interesting book about a year ago and filed it away. During many longs days milking cows, making cheese, slopping hogs, preserving food (and praying for a child) I found myself thinking about the idea here and there. Daydreaming, really. Just kind of wondering what the book would be about, what the story would be and how it might end. That sort of thing. I told myself that I'd take a stab at writing it when we dried the cows off for the year, which for us is around Memorial Day. We keep them dry until just after Labor Day and begin milking and making cheese.

I'm not sure what I expected when I sat down to write a couple of months ago. I set up a private writing area. Actually I stuck a table in the rest room in the garage and labeled it the toilet bowl. And so, I climbed into the toilet bowl dutifully every day for at least 4 hours or so and began writing. No outline to speak of, no plotting whatsoever, no "character notes." Don't really know what much of that stuff is anyway. The only "training" I can claim was having read Stephen King's wonderful non-fiction book "On Writing". In it, he described how he has never plotted and only starts with a situation. Like, I wonder what would happen if a woman and a child were trapped in a car by a rabid dog (Cujo). Then he begins writing and the characters come alive and the story is unearthed by the author.

Honestly, that sounded crazy to me. I mean, you'd have to be pretty fearless to start writing and produce a few hundred pages, only then to find out the story was tangled and had no direction. Then again, that style appealed to me. So I began and I wrote, one word at a time.​

And it happened. Characters came to life, walked on stage and demanded a voice. Other characters that I thought would be prominent faded into obscurity with their weak voices and vanilla perspectives.​ Scenes appeared logically, dictated by the fossil I had unearthed (King's metaphor) about the story and, in the end, it became about something very different than I had visualized. Very different, with an outcome that surprised me.

I wrote 105,000 words in about six weeks which became about 34 chapters and just over 400 pages. The suspense novel is called Poisoned Soil and has gone through a couple of draft revisions since then to cut the word count back to 97,000 or so and is being professionally line edited now. After all, I gotta get this project finished before the cows scream to be milked next month. ​It is set in Georgia, primarily Rabun County and Athens.

I guess my question is, are there any readers out there who also want to write? Have you written? Are you intrigued by the process? I really fell in love with it and have ideas for another 6-7 novels, but that'll have to wait until milking time is over!.

And then, I'll climb back into the toilet bowl​

When I read the post on barfblog titled "Raw Diets are Bad News for Pets" aloud to my barn cat she released the mouse impaled by her claws and dropped her head in shame. I explained that she could still catch the mouse and that I would be happy to cook it to a crisp but she opted to nap instead.

Does this kind of talk make sense to you? Dogs and cats can't eat raw meat? It's not enough for us to worry about what we can and cannot eat that we have to pasteurize everything our pets eat? How exactly did they evolve? I have to admit I didn't pay much attention in school other than to golf, so I must have missed out on the evolutionary leap our furry friends made from killing and eating to being served pasteurized Alpo.​

Don't get me wrong; food safety is a concern and always has been. But is it the raw element of food that is the problem?​ Or could it be...I don't know, something else? Like how the plant or animal was fed and grown? Perhaps how the meat, dairy, fruit, fish or foul was handled after harvest until consumption?

Believe me, this stuff concerns me a lot. After all, we milk cows and drink raw milk. And, we have a newborn who will soon be doing the same (hopefully helping out with the milking!). We're assiduous with our cleaning, storage and handling procedures and testing for somatic cell counts (SCC), bacteria counts, listeria, e.coli, etc. But that's just testing from the bulk tank. We still have to make sure we consume the product as fresh as possible and be sure it's transported and stored properly.

I know, I know...we're not supposed to drink raw milk. Blah, blah, blah. Heck, we had to search for a bit to find a pediatrician who didn't spin her head when we confessed (hushing our voices in embarrassment) that we would likely feed a raw-milk formula to our baby. One pediatrician said that not only was raw milk crazy but there wasn't anything good in milk to begin with, so just go with formula instead. We most all agree that breastfeeding is best but that isn't always an option.

I dunno, there's a lot of talk out there and it can be hard to make sense of. But I find myself coming down on the side of nature and evolution, mimicking what it took to get us here. The point is...be careful what you feed Fido.​

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