The Making Of A Trailer

Writing a book is a whole lot of work. It takes hundreds of hours of writing followed by more hundreds of hours revising. Then, on the chance that you get published, it's a whole lot more work of promotion, platform building, selling, etc.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love every step and every stage of it. I am blessed to be where I am - no doubt about that.

But at the same time, one of the funnest parts of the publishing/promotion process, for me at least, is putting together a book trailer. For this book, two of the guys, Nick and Bill, who helped with the last trailer, agreed to get the band back together and do another. They are good friends who make the process a lot of fun.

It started with Nick putting together a skeleton music track. As you'll hear in the video, it's dramatically different than the one for Dirty Shirt. We were shooting for a 70's vibe to match the book, and I think the electric organ does that well - a sort of Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog sort of sound.

A week ago today, the three of us convened for the voiceover recording. Nick has a studio and lots of sound gadgetry to make a professional level recording. It was clear from the start that I was just there to coach and encourage, while the two guys worked through the script.

I discovered that doing a vocal recording using a script is pretty close to trying to record a song. There are nuances and inflections that I wanted to impose on the transcription of the text to make it interesting and dramatic. I am not sure, but would guess that it took close to 30 takes to get the whole script sounding how we wanted it. It's funny how many different ways you can inflect and or, in some cases, murder a word. At times this led to giggling and the resulting outtake. But these guys are patient and professional, like none other. So we pushed on.

So the whole evening was just cool watching all the talent in the room work together. I hate my voice, so that is why I asked Bill to fill in again. He has a radio voice that I do not. And I can't say enough about Nick and his multitude of acoustic and technical talents. When I thanked Bill for a fun night, we both agreed that we are not the strength of the group.

Like Bill said, "You have to be sure to stay friends with Nick forever if you want to keep doing these." Well, it's my goal not to piss him off anytime soon. Book number 3 is in the works.

I hope you enjoy the trailer. It sure was fun putting it together!

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