Book links round-up: an impostor, laughable book trailers, Hugo Weaving pulls a Peter Sellers, and more

• Novelist Graham Smith says there’s no such thing as a contemporary novel
• A real-life talented Mr. Ripley fancies himself a Rockefeller
• New book traces the lineage of American punk
• The 2011 Moby Awards present the best and worst book trailers
• Marc Carney’s unnerving investigation into the “Red Market“
• Hugo Weaving to play multiple roles in film adaption of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Etcetera and Otherwise wins book trailer award

The novel Etcetera and Otherwise, written by Sean Stanley and published by Tightrope Books, won Best Foreign Book Trailer at last week’s Moby Awards for book trailers, held in New York and hosted by Melville House and MobyLives blog owner Dennis Loy Johnson.

The novel tells the story of bookstore owner Otherwise, who embarks  on an erotic road trip with love interest Etcetera.  The New York Time’s books blog Paper Cuts describes it as:

A violently comic assault on Canadian literary lions done in a style that brings Margaret Atwood into a kind of north-of-the-border “South Park.” (Blame Canada indeed!)

That trailer also includes a line that itself deserves an award for Best Blurb: “This book decapitated Michael Ondaatje!”

Other book trailer award categories included Trailer Least Likely to Sell the Book, won by Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell; Most Annoying Performance by an Author, won by Jonathan Safran Foer for Eating Animals; and Most Annoying Music, won by children’s book, New Year’s At the Pier by April Halprin Waylan.

Daily book biz round-up: Lansens on 24; iPad bolsters piracy; and more

• Lori Lansens proves it certainly doesn’t hurt sales to have a Hollywood husband
• Amazon’s Kindle division gathers the troops to compete with Apple
• Does the iPad encourage e-book piracy? Wired says, “Kinda”
• MobyLives picks the five best indie book trailers
• Digitalbookworld analyzes how much money can be made from book-related iPhone apps
• Katherine Govier on how to keep in touch while writing

Daily book biz round-up, March 16

Another day, another news round-up:

• British Airways doesn’t care about book people
• A sneak preview of the new titles publishers are taking to the London Book Fair
• Colin Thatcher ordered to hand over book profits
• Pride and Prejudice and Overkill: the new book trailer
• British publisher Arden manages to wring one more play out of William Shakespeare
• Your daily Martin Amis WTF: “I wish my sister had converted to Islam”
• John Grisham joins the e-book revolution
• Demand for iPad tapers off after boffo first-day sales

Bookmarks: Britain’s phone booth library, Herta Müller’s “psychosis,” and the Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner

Some sundry links from across the Web:

• Resourceful idea of the week: British village transforms traditional red phone booth into local library
• Coming soon to a theatre near you: the book trailer for Quirk Classics’ Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
• Nobel Prize-winning Herta Müller “has a psychosis,” says Romanian spy
• Neil Gaiman discusses audiobooks with David Sedaris and Martin Jarvis on NPR. Similarly, Douglas Hunter praises the e-book at The Globe and Mail and Mark Medley reviews the Kindle at the National Post
• Nabokov’s posthumously published The Original of Laura is not a novel, says Nathaniel Rich
• And the Bad Sex in Fiction Award goes to … Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

Stephen King, book trailer judge

Dorchester Publishing and Circle of Seven productions are joining forces to create a contest for book-loving amateur filmmakers. Participants will create a “book trailer” for their favorite novel in Dorchester’s imprint, SHOMI, a genre-blending, speculative romance line. The winning trailer will be chosen by veteran novel-cum-film dude Stephen King and shown in New York City and the winner’s hometown. The contest closes on December 30, 2008.

In the spirit of this post, check out this blog dedicated to book trailers – some of them are quite good.

Book to film

In this image-obsessed age, promoting books with moving pictures is a tricky but intriguing idea, and as the CBC Arts website reminds us, a couple of Canadian players are leading the way. CBC writer Andre Mayer looks at the film-style trailers that HarperCollins Canada has been creating for new titles over the past few months — close to a dozen in all, including Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. (Harper has the trailers up on its own website and has also been sending them on to litblogs.) And Mayer is impressed with what he’s seen: “Never before have I felt such a visceral urge to read a book,” he writes after viewing the Londonstani short.

Mayer’s piece also looks at Judith Keenan’s BookShorts initiative, which creates three-minute short films based on novels or non-fiction books, and at an American company, VidLit, which has been producing book trailers of its own for a couple of years. Mayer points in particular to a VidLit-created trailer for David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable: “While Rakoff’s narrative is inherently droll, the video also features animations of what the author would look like with the doctor’s proposed changes.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story on book trailers
Click here to view HarperCollins Canada’s trailers
Click here for the BookShorts website
Click here for the VidLit website