Hot on the heals of his self-produced, four-minute book trailer, Jeff Carlson‘s Plague Year and Plague War are spreading even farther. He reports that Spanish publisher Minotauro (see this article) is also distributing the book in Columbia and Peru, and plans release in more South American countries.
The trailer, “4 Minutes Above 10,000 Feet”, has had 20,000 hits on YouTube in two months. One of those hits resulted in a senior editor at Romania’s Millennium Press contacting Carlson’s agent, and now the first two books are scheduled to be translated into Romanian.
Carlson says the trailer cost him about $400, “nearly all of which went to my web guy to convert the original file and build a Flash player for it on my site, which, in retrospect, was unnecessary. The YouTube version looks surprisingly sharp, especially if you click on the ‘Watch In High Quality’ tab.” Other expenses included a tank of gas for the San Francisco area native “to drive to the Sierras and back, and Adad and Chuck were paid in sandwiches, Pepsi, and chips, plus we had to license two songs for the soundtrack. That was it. Of course, I’m fortunate that the real mastermind, Adad Warda, is a childhood friend of my wife’s, a film student turned pro who was delighted just to tackle the challenge of it.”