Mark Forstater's Blog

Unique Book Launch for The 7th Python

January 18, 2016 at 9:19 am Leave a comment

I don’t know if anyone has ever created an animated cover for a book before, but we may be doing something original and unique in our launch for the hardback version of my book The 7th Python.

We – editor David Cohen, publicist Nigel Passingham , webmaster Richard Cobelli , social media maven Patrice Stephens, and writer/publisher yours truly  – have been preparing a campaign to launch The 7th Python on an unsuspecting world. The centrepieces of the campaign are two animated videos of the book’s (cartoon) cover, which we plan to send to influencers and web sites in the English-speaking world with the aim of making our cover (via the animations) go viral.

The cover itself (soon to be revealed) was created by cartoonist Owen Williams. We asked Patrice Stephens how best to saturate the web with our attractive, colourful and funny cover, and she suggested putting it on all the social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on. She thought that the striking image would attract attention. Nigel Passingham then suggested that if the image caught peoples’ attention for a couple of seconds, wouldn’t an animated version keep them viewing for longer. Patrice agreed and said that we would need two versions- a 15 second version for twitter and Instagram, and a longer version for other media.

We were lucky to find a young and talented animator in Ruth Barrett, who created the two animations for us – one 15 seconds and the other 54.  Composer Helene Muddiman (Ice Age 4) arranged Sousa’s Liberty Bell March (Monty Python’s theme tune) into a jokey music score (inspired by comic Les Dawson’s piano routines), and we were ready to roll.

The challenge – not quite the 12 travails of Hercules – is to see how many people the video can reach who would then blog, busk and bitch about the book.

Oh and buying it, too.

There’s no denying it
We want you buying it.

So we hope to entice as many as poss to our Facebook page – The 7th Python – and to our website http://www.the7thpython.com.

There you’ll find info on the book and be initiated into the mysteries of buying it.

P.S. Fans of Cleese may be distressed he’s now repeating his brilliant ‘thrash the car with a branch’ routine from Fawlty Towers as an ad for Specsavers!

Entry filed under: The 7th Python, Uncategorized. Tags: animation, David Cohen, Facebook, Helene Muddiman, Instagram, JP Sousa, Les Dawson, Nigel Passingham, Owen Williams, Richard Cobelli, Ruth Barratt, Twitter.