My wife is launching her first book this week, “Les Naufragés de Chélon“. It’s an adventure book (in French) targeted to 9-12 year-olds. She has an editor that’s progressive enough to allow us to experiment with the launch strategy and we’ve decided we would try using some of the Web’s social tools to promote it.
The first thing we built was a machinima (see definition) trailer using Second Life. We hired a US firm, Riel Life Productions, to shoot it for us. It’s now available on YouTube or on the book’s web site. That was a fascinating process involving set building (most notably the huge volcano), hiring SecondLife actors and shooting the trailer.
Even though book trailers are used more and more, I believe using a Second Life machinima movie to promote a book is a world premiere. The book also has a Facebook group.
What it means: this will be an interesting social web experiment to try to measure the impact of social tools on an offline product. Like I blogged about a month ago, I suspect the intrinsic value of Second Life today is more offline than online.
Seb Provencher's Blog 
What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers
This is a great way to promote reading to young, technically savvy adults and teens. This is a great opportunity for authors and the book publishing industry to reach out and show that books are fun!
What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers
This is a great way to promote reading to young, technically savvy adults and teens. This is a great opportunity for authors and the book publishing industry to reach out and show that books are fun!