Online tools read book consumers’ interests

By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Los Angeles Times

BOOKS have long been made into movies. Now, they’re heading straight to YouTube.
           
Michael Connelly adapted the first chapter of his new murder mystery, EchoPark, into a 10-minute film for YouTube and other online video sites in an attempt to attract new readers.
           
Book publishers face the same challenge bedeviling all media: how to compete for attention in an entertainment market that includes TV, cable, forms like online social networks, downloadable music and video, podcasts and videogames.
           
The average time Americans spend reading has declined from 117 hours a year in 1999 to about 105 in 2006. Meanwhile, some 172,000 books were published last year—more than 19 new titles published for every hour of every day of every week.
           
“The author and the publisher realizes there isn’t just clutter in the marketplace, there is massive clutter in terms of competing with other books,” said Albert N. Greco, senior researcher at the Institute for Publishing Research in New Jersey. “Then, you compete with newspapers and magazines and video games and cable and satellite and music and doing nothing.”
           
Connelly’s dark hero, Los Angeles Police Detective Harry Bosch, made his brooding debut online before EchoPark reached bookstores on October 9. The video, shot for about $10,000, ends with the tagline: “read what happens next in Echo Park.”
           
“I do believe this was a tool in getting people excited,” Connelly said. “It was on the Internet, it was on YouTube, before the book was out. It sharpened excitement. So when the book came out, they were ready to buy it. I do know statistically that the first week of sales for EchoPark was the best first week of sales I’ve had.”
           
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux was among the first to try YouTube as a way to bring literature to the masses. In August it released a video book trailer to coincide with the release of The Mystery Guest, a memoir from French writer Gregoire Bouillier. Others were soon to follow.
           
Broadway hired VidLit to create a book video of humorist Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, using an audio book reading and black-and-white family photos.
           
“If you never saw Bill Bryson before, you definitely get an idea of what it’s about,” VidLit founder Liz Dubelman said.
           
Little, Brown and Co. produced a movie-slick trailer for Echo Park as part of an extended promotional campaign that mixes traditional book readings and television appearances with less conventional approaches, such as podcasts and downloadable audio clips.
           
“The philosophy is just to create a movie release type of excitement for it,’’ said Anthony Goff, an associate at Little, Brown’s audio and digital media group.
           
Connelly wanted to do more.
           
He developed a script with Terrill Lee Lankford, a screenwriter whose credits include Storm Trooper and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. They selected a location with special significance—the apartment building where Robert Altman shot The Long Goodbye.
           
Lankford hired actors Tim Abell, who appeared most recently in Soldier of God, and Bill Bolender, whose television and movie credits include The Shawshank Redemption.
           
Lankford and Connelly hope the online video does more than spark book sales. They hope it persuades Hollywood studios to bring Bosch to the big screen.
           
“We’re not saying this is studio-level quality, but that piece is about mood, it’s about atmospherics. That’s what Harry Bosch is about,” Lankford said. “It was kind of a stepping stone to say Harry Bosch could exist. We could make a movie of this.”