Yesterday afternoon, Simon & Schuster‘s children’s publishing division announced the results of its new partnership with the New York Film Academy—the school Brett Ratner did the ad for—and their “Reel Reads Book Sizzle Contest,” in which roughly 400 student filmmakers were invited over the summer to make three-minute “sizzle video” trailers for three S&S YA titles, with three finalists whose films began running on the books’ Amazon.com catalog pages Monday. (The three books are Private: Inner Circle by Kate Brian, Glass by Ellen Hopkins, and Hacking Harvard by Robin Wasserman.)
Lest you think that S&S just managed to find a way to get free marketing materials, the company will in fact be shelling out $500 worth of books to each of the finalists, with the grand prize winner getting $1,000 in cash. Mary McAveney, vice-president of marketing at S&S Children’s, describes the contest in the press release as “a truly unique opportunity” for film students “to flex their creative muscles and motivate readers to share the expectation and excitement of a great new book.” Just as unique as when Bantam and The Book Standard ran their contest for film students last year? Not to mention all those student films with Coca-Cola bottles prominently placed in them I had to sit through in cinema multiplexes in the 1990s…