When you write a new book, one of the problems is always getting people to buy it. The most difficult part of this is letting potential buyers know that the book exists. Small publishing companies don't have budgets that allow them to buy network television time for the author to ponder killing off his most popular character, thus giving the readers an incentive to buy the book to discover if he did. Thirty seconds of James Patterson on CBS costs more than my publisher spends on their entire operation during a year.
So the only way I'm getting on CBS is if I do something newsworthy. Writing another book isn't, so I don't think I'm likely to need to skip work some morning to talk to Charlie Rose.
One thing I can do is get on YouTube. I did some acting when I was younger. I also worked in radio for quite a few years. The combination provides sufficient confidence for me to figure I can sit in a comfortable chair reading a story from my new book, This and That, without making a complete fool of myself. So I took my camera, which has a video setting, put in on the tripod, and gave it a shot.
Pretty awful. The image, that is. The reading wasn't bad, but there wasn't enough light on my face and there was a blue reflective bar running vertically through the scene.
Now I needed to make two purchases instead of one. The first was MoviePlus X3, which Serif has on sale at a steep discount now that a newer version has been released. My editing needs are extremely simple. I need to be able to create title cards at the beginning and end of the video, and I need to be able to cut the shots together. The hope was that I'd be able to read an entire story or essay right through without any fluffs. If I couldn't, I needed to be able to pause for a few seconds, then start over with the paragraph where I'd screwed up. Then, during the editing, I'd be able to cut out the fluff and pick up where I'd started over.
The second thing I needed was a better camera. So instead of shooting the reading on my old Kodak Z1015IS, I went over to BestBuy and picked up a Sony HDR-CX160. Instant jump in quality, with a 1080 x 1440 image area (full HD, in other words). Converting the finished image for YouTube results in a reduction in quality, but it's still reasonably good. An additional advantage of the Handycam is that you can turn the display around 180 degrees, so you can see it as it films you. Makes for a lot more confidence that you haven't accidentally moved out of frame.
So last night I set up the camera, turned on some extra lights, picked up my Kindle Fire, and started reading A Patient Man, one of the stories in This and That. As expected, there were a couple of fluffs, which were cut out with only a minimum of fuss. I picked that particular story for various reasons. It's fairly short. It's written in first person form, with only a few lines of dialogue. And it's suitably creepy. I grew up reading Poe, so I like creepy.
I also do it well. My favorite part as an actor was probably Jonathan Brewster, and the resemblance to Boris Karloff was likely brought across most strongly by the voice, rather than the makeup. I didn't quite go full Karloff for this story, but I think I managed the proper genially sinister effect.
Don't take my word for it, though. The upload went smoothly, so please feel free to pop over to YouTube and take a look. J.T. McDaniel reading A Patient Man
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