VidLit.

Okay.

So, I've already read The Amazing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl.  There were things I liked about it, but overall, I wasn't a huge fan. 

Just for kicks, I watched the excerpt at VidLit -- and cripes, it made me want to read it again.  If that's not good marketing, I don't know what is.

[Later:  My god.  I just spent way too much time at this site -- there's a hilarious excerpt of the first Clique book and A Day in the Life of Meg Cabot.  There's lots of other stuff, too, but I stopped when I realized that I was voluntarily watching commercials and got a bit disgusted with myself.]

Comments

[steve]

I was really excited about the whole vidlit thing for a while. I really liked "Arithmetic of nurses" and "Craziest" But the site doesn't have enough original content for me. I liked it better wheen it was a venue for some interesting video/sound/word art. But it moved into what seem essentially to be ads for books.

[Leila]

It's too bad.

Remember that awesome show that was on PBS where the guy would do the charcoal drawings while a narrator read an excerpt from a book? Whenever I watched it, I wanted to read the book after.

If the did it right, VidLit COULD be like that -- a way of letting the book promote itself.

[Paul Slansky]

It seems silly to complain in 2006 that a lot of the content is essentially advertising. Advertising and entertainment have blended -- face it, that train's long since left the station. The question is, is the advertising entertaining? With VidLit the answer is "yes" far more often than "no." And I'd be saying this even if I didn't there wasn't a VidLit of my book "My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them" on the site. Besides, what are music videos but ads for songs, and they give out big awards for those.

[Leila]

Oh, for sure -- not only are there music video awards, there are awards for COMMERCIALS. But just because advertising and entertainment have mixed doesn't mean I have to like it.

But some advertising irritates me and some doesn't -- for instance, I think the product placement segment in Wayne's World is brilliant because they mock the whole idea of product placement while still getting paid by the companies who are advertising. But most commercials and all infomercials are lame. And I'm sorry, but most of the VidLits I watched were the kind of commercial that would make me A) change the channel or B) walk out of the room.

Obviously, people's personal response varies greatly on this. I know that adults tend to be horrified at the amount of product placement in the Gossip Girl genre, but the kids who read them are pretty blase about it. Because I don't have television at home, I may not be as thick-skinned as most when it comes to commercials.

PS. Speaking of advertising, did you just plug your book in that comment?