Single Sentence Animation

JA April 07

A while ago I blogged about the popularisation of book trailers as a form of marketing, and how I felt that this didn’t always work to suit the medium. Thinking back, I still believe the core problem was that many trailers started out by treating books the same way as film – dramatising certain key scenes, hiring actors to do the dialogue, incorporating voiceovers etc. Carrying off something like that would clearly involve a lot of time and effort, not to mention a significant budget, which is perhaps why so many early trailers fell off the mark.

Electric Literature, a quarterly anthology of short stories by Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, has chosen a slightly different tack, and I think it works. If you haven’t heard of the publication before, this in short is the lowdown:

To publish the paperback version of Electric Literature, we use print-on-demand; the eBook, Kindle, iPhone, and audio versions are digital. This eliminates our up-front printing bill. Rather than paying $5,000 to one printer, we pay $1,000 to five writers, ensuring that our writers are paid fairly. Our anthology is available anywhere in the world, overruns aren’t pulped, and our back issues are perpetually in print. We hope that this model can set a precedent: more access for readers, and fairness for writers.

More than that, the editors have taken to new media with gusto. Published stories are often accompanied by ‘Single Sentence Animation’ – where the author picks one sentence or paragraph from their work for an artist or illustrator to envision. The results are varied – from the tiny figurines in Donna K.’s short for Lydia Davis's The Cows to Jo Dery deceptively simple yet humorous sketches for T Cooper’s The Time Machine – by my favourites thus far have to be the three done by animator Jonathan Ashley. The first of these was created for Jim Shepard's Your Fate Hurtles Down at You, followed by an extract from Michael Cunningham’s novel-in-progress, Olympia, and lastly Stephen O'Connor’s ‘Love’. What works about these videos is that they realise their difference from say a blurb or movie trailer and work around this. There’s no voiceover, no plot summary – there’s a just a fragment of the story and the mood this creates. I think that the best publicity boffins recognise that the online community and file sharing is not about the hard sell – no one is going to forward a link for a trailer crying out 'buy this book!'. Instead, they’re far more likely to tune into something creative and interesting in its own right (a curiousity that may translate into website hits which may in turn translate into sales). As Michael Cunningham noted in the New York Times, Single Sentence Animation has the ability to ‘maintain the integrity of the written word and extend its range’.

Have a look at the rest of the videos on the Electric Literature website.

We call ourselves Die Harschblödeln: the Frozen Idiots. There are four of us who’ve volunteered to spend the coldest winter in recent memory in a little hut perched on a wind-blasted slope of the Weissfluhjoch 9,000 feet above Davos. We’re doing research. The hut, we like to say, is naturally refrigerated from the outside, and a good starting point for all sorts of adventures, nearly all of them lethal.

Peter tried to murder his brother only once

As she squinted, what had seemed a tall, weathered tree stump, suddenly morphed into a stocky gray-haired man.

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