Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: No TV for You
So you’ve got a new book out, and despite all attempts at humility, you secretly believe it is the coolest thing invented since smart phones. The whole world would love to read it – if you could only get those jaded, cynical, world-weary, keepers-of-the-gate to give you a little television air time. Forget it.
I briefly worked as a newspaper reporter, and I married a television news producer. I made a side trip through the land of promotion, working as a publicist for a couple of authors, for a few years.
So, believe me when I tell you, forget what the perky little “You can do it!” how-to promotion articles tell you – unless you are Stephen King, Anne Rice or a celebrity already – you are NOT going to get television coverage for your magnum opus of fiction.
Let me explain why you aren’t going to get television coverage, and so, should not waste your valuable and probably-limited personal publicity funds on it.
Look at the word Tele-vision. The Vision part is key – there must be something to see. No matter how pretty your cover art; there’s no movement, no action to it. And there’s no way to change that fact. Therefore, your book is of no interest to the television reporter – or to the television station’s viewers. Even if those viewers read ten books a month, when they turn on the television, they expect to see something visually entertaining.
Concluding my discussion of films I saw courtesy of the Fantasia screening room, I’ll be writing today about three movies: a drama with elements of horror called They Look Like People, the horror-comedy called Nina Forever, and one of the purest horror movies I’ve ever seen, Nathan Ambrosioni’s Hostile. I’ll begin with They Look Like People, written and directed by Perry Blackshear. It’s about two men, one of whom, Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), appears to be falling into insanity; he believes aliens are giving him messages. He happens to cross paths with his old friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel). They’ve both recently had long-term relationships fall apart — Wyatt’s fiancée in fact cheated on him and then broke up with him. Christian offers Wyatt a place to stay, and Wyatt accepts.
By this point I’ve discussed all the movies I saw in theatres at the Fantasia film festival, but there remain a half-dozen more that I saw courtesy of the Fantasia screening room. I’m going to write about them over two posts, for ease of reading. And then I’ll have a coda wrapping up my Fantasia coverage with thoughts on what I saw, and the value of the festival. For now: reviews of the psychological romance comedy Poison Berry in My Brain, the metafictional satire Anima State, and the suspense movie The Interior. All of them, one way or another, directly to do with what happens inside the head.
