Posted January 27, 2010 to Digital, Media Appearances
Salon Magazine’s Laura Miller wrote a critical article on book trailers, and included quotes from me about whether they work. Never coming to a screen near you looks at the idea that trailers, or movies about books, don’t sell books to consumers.
She and I had a lengthy email conversation about book trailers – I’m convinced that unless there’s a unique hook or angle to the trailer itself, book trailers that are only about the book itself are only interesting to other authors (who are told they Must Have One). (Note: you do not have to have a book trailer.)
From that conversation, Miller quoted me talking about live action trailers featuring actors who were singularly unattractive to me:
Mind-blowing science fiction about nanotechnology or interplanetary travel is pretty hard to reproduce on your Flip HD, and affordable actors seldom measure up to the gorgeous heroines and heroes of romance. As Sarah Wendell, a co-founder of the Web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and coauthor of “Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels,” told me in an e-mail, “as a reader and shopper for genre fiction, I’ve never been swayed to make a book purchase based on a trailer … A few have featured actors so unattractive to me I was totally turned off.”
There have been some great book trailers in romance – many of which created by the authors themselves on a minuscule budget. But most of them leave me uninterested, and I have never purchased a book because the trailer was amazing. They may lead me to look up an author whose trailer is creative and witty, but they’ve never made me think, ‘I MUST have that book.’
Tags: awesomesauce, book trailers, pop culture, salon
Posted January 26, 2010 to Digital
Hot diggity! Beyond Heaving Bosoms is required reading at Yale University, and both the local and campus newspapers are talking about the course to be taught this spring by Lauren Willig and Andrea Darif.
First, from the New Haven Register:
Willig is not surprised by either the popularity of the course (80 applied for 18 spots) nor the willingness of the university to endorse it. The genre has been embraced by academia for years, early on by Eric Selinger at DePaul and Sarah Frantz at Fayetteville.
“The two of them have been instrumental in the movement to treat romance novels as text in their own right, rather than a sociological construct,” says Willig. “The trend was to treat romance novels only as interesting as to what they told us about the readership. They weren’t being looked at in terms of structure, theme and the usual critical literary apparatus.”
Then, at the Yale Herald:
It was, however, very surprising to see my suitemate come home from the Yale bookstore with books with titles such as Regency Buck, The Accidental Duchess, and to top it all off: Beyond Heaving Bosoms; The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. It wasn’t so surprising to see her with all those books, especially after the time she dragged me along to an erotica writing workshop (side note: erotica and romance novels are two different genres, but romance novels often contain erotic imagery), but the fact that the books came from the Yale bookstore and were to be read for course credit made me confused, jealous, and hot.
Tags: awesomesauce, bosoms, yale
Posted December 29, 2009 to Digital, Media Appearances
Linda Holmes, mastermind of the NPR blog Monkey See, has named me among her Top 10 Favorite Pop-Culture Humans of 2009. I don’t think there is a better compliment than “pop culture human.” Even better? I’m #8 between Drew Barrymore and Ben Folds. Sweet Holy Crap.
8. SB Sarah. One of the founders, and seemingly the current primary blogger, at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell is fearless and opinionated and puts her chin out every day to do one of the toughest jobs a lady can assign herself, which is to challenge people’s preconceptions and prejudices about culture. In Sarah’s case, she writes thoughtfully and hilariously about romance novels, dumping on the worst cliches and celebrating the writers who find ways to make a difficult genre interesting.
She’s also become very knowledgeable about e-books (which are perfect for romance readers), and wrote wisely and well about the new FTC guidelines for bloggers. Nothing warms my heart like a stereotype-buster, and nobody busts the stereotype that women who read romances are dumb, unthinking, or anti-feminist quite like Sarah.
I have fainted with the power of the compliment above. Gracefully, of course, and my skirt didn’t fly up and reveal my shapely ankles or anything. HOLY CRAP. Thank you, ma’am.
Tags: awesomesauce, blog, npr, pop culture
