Remember when YouTube was born? Anyone? Anyone?
OK, let me refresh your memory; back in 2006, it was pretty
much wall-to-wall grainy home videos and bad Gnarls Barkley covers. Thankfully,
we’ve come a long way since then; with over a billion unique users, YouTube has
evolved into a monster, with something for pretty much everyone. It’s also home
to an awful lot of book trailers – publishers
often have their own channels and post everything from reviews to author
interviews. Some of us have put up clips of themselves reading extracts from
their latest book. But if YouTube is the daddy of all content vehicles, then
Vine (Twitter’s mobile video-sharing app) is its illegitimate baby. And it’s
growing up fast.
At first glance, Vine looks a lot like YouTube only shorter;
it’s a six second video clip in a never-ending loop designed to melt your
brain. But get past those twerking tutorials (note for those unfamiliar with
this term: imagine a jerky Haka being done by people in teeny-tiny hotpants to Crazy in Love by Beyoncé and you’ve got
the picture) and there’s some inspired creative content. Vine has over thirteen
million users and they’re a hungry bunch – like tech-savvy locusts, they
consume fast and move onto the next thing. If you’re creative and clever, that
next thing could be you.
Alright, so one six-second video isn’t going to make your
book a bestseller, but it does offer you something new and different to offer
your readers, especially when you take into account that a whopping 55% of today’s
web traffic is video. At the very least it might generate some elusive
word-of-mouth buzz. Although it helps if you are a fabulous illustrator – see
this lovely vine by Benji Davies
for his picture book, The Storm Whale
– all you actually need is a camera phone, the Vine app and a bit of
imagination. I plan to create a series of Vines to promote my Cassidy Bond
series next year and I’m using what’s already out there as inspiration. Check
out Meaghan Cignoli, a NYC photographer who is now a full-time professional
Vine-ographer, for ideas.
Thankfully, it appears the twerking is entirely optional.
2 comments:
Hm - that certainly is very short! Thanks for this - so much to keep up with!
Thanks, that's helpfully informative. I wish there was something so straightforward as one Literature multimedia and multiuse channel that was held in such esteem that everyone wanted to put everything to do with books on it, only, then my browsing time might be better focused and spent. Until then I lurch around a couple of social networking sites and am unaware of or have never viewed the half of them! Good luck with your Vine time.
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