Sales Echo Short Film

The LA Times reports today about novelist/screenwriter Terrill Lee Lankford’s short film based on the first chapter of his buddy Michael Connelly’s new novel ECHO PARK. The film has been posted on YouTube and Connelly credits it with giving him his best first-week sales numbers yet.

"I do believe this was a tool in getting people excited," said
Connelly, a former reporter at The Times. "It was on the Internet, it
was on YouTube, before the book was out. It sharpened excitement. So
when the book came out, they were ready to buy it. "

The short film features my friend novelist Gar Anthony Haywood in his first acting role… he proves to be a natural at it, easily out-shining the professionals in the cast with his quiet, self-assured performance. Note to Gar: get a theatrical agent pronto. 

I’ve got to go now. I’m rushing over to deepdiscountdvd.com to get myself a copy of Lee’s HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS.  I wonder why, in all the years I’ve known him, Lee has never mentioned that film before…

5 thoughts on “Sales Echo Short Film”

  1. It’s interesting to see a literal (I assume) adaptation of prose into film, blessed by the author. It points out the differences between prose storytelling (where the reader is to a great degree in control of how the story unfolds, and word choice drives the story) and film storytelling (where the director and editor control the pace, and the word choice for describing scenery or actions is far less relevant than the directors’ and crews’ decisions).

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  2. I think it’s great that he did that (and I agree about Gar’s performance), but I’m curious about the comment about its effectiveness. When you first posted this, I went and looked at the YouTube page, and there had only been around 800 viewings. (It’s now up to 1,360–so obviously the article is generating interest.)
    Do you happen to know whether there was an effort to get more than just the general public to look at it, or whether there’s some other variable at work? 800 general-public viewings doesn’t seem enough to make much difference to initial book sales.

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  3. Keith,
    The link Lee provided is actually for a version of the clip that Mike’s British publisher requested using their cover. The version with the U.S. cover can be found here:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ndCN3uHinE
    It’s had almost 10,000 hits.
    There was also an earlier cut of the clip that was accidently linked to Mike’s website and that had more than 1,500 hits in the first two days it was up. I finally took it down.
    So the short has been seen about 12,000 times. Most of the hits happened right after we linked the clips to our various websites (prior to the book’s release).
    I think Mike was very generous in his statement, but I would still hope that the clip was of some small benefit to the initial sales of the book. (Not that Connelly needs much help in that department.)
    TL

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