Bestselling novelist Anne Rice launches her inaugural vook today, a multimedia version of her 1984 vampire story, “The Master of Rampling Gate.”
To find out more, we caught up with Vook CEO Brad Inman–who said the company has more than 500 titles planned for 2010. According to Inman, the company shot between six and eight hours of footage for the Rice vook, including a New Orleans tour with her son, Rice interviews, and expert commentary.
The company recently secured $2.5 million in seed funding, and he shared some upcoming projects: “We will be releasing a vook for Seth Godin’s “Unleashing the Ideavirus” next week, which we’re thrilled about. We have also just released “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which includes beautiful videos about Lewis Carroll and the Oxford community that inspired him to write this classic tale. We think that people are really going to enjoy it, especially as enthusiasm grows around this story with the Tim Burton movie coming out on Friday.”
Inman added some advice about video length: “While I think that video content and length will always depend first and foremost on the text, it seems that, generally speaking, shorter videos are better suited for our vooks. 1 to 2 minute videos are long enough to provide context or illustration to the text while still being short enough to keep the reader’s attention and interest. I also think that much of our audience is used to browsing YouTube or watching quick clips on the internet, so a short form video is something we know they are willing to embrace. However, Vook as a concept and a company is still very new, and we’ll continue to experiment with length and content.”
“One thing I’m very excited about is the new possibilities that the iPad will introduce for Vook. The larger screen will only continue to enhance our authors’ words and filmmakers’ videos, and we’re still exploring how to best display those stories,” he concluded.