I’d been meaning to find some way to write about Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, a new book from Atlas and Co. that juxtaposes the archival mug shots of the Freedom Riders with contemporary portraits and interviews, but had never quite found the right way to talk about it. And then I spotted this seven-minute-plus video clip of author Eric Etheridge interviewing Joan Pleune and Hezekiah Watkins about their experiences forty-seven years ago. (Etheridge also has some powerful “print” interviews with other Freedom Riders on his blog for the book).
Apart from a slightly-too-long opening segment of silent title cards fleshing out the context (what takes roughly forty seconds to read could probably have been said in ten), I really like this as an example of promoting a book without really ever talking much about the book at all, and it hardly even feels like seven minutes. Now, granted, it helps that Pleune and Watkins have an amazing story to tell, an intimately personal story that resonates with historical significance. So it sounds a bit facile for me to say “find the story in your book that’s that powerful”—let’s put it another way: “Find the story in your book that inspires that kind of passion within you.” If you can find and share that, you’re well on your way to finding an audience.
(Although, as always, there’s still the question of where a video like this is supposed to end up. It’s all well and good to catch readers one at a time through Google searches, or being lucky enough to have your video embedded by admiring bloggers here and there, but what if there were a substantial destination site—a lens, in Seth Godin‘s parlance—where readers could pick and choose from a variety of book trailers? A site that wasn’t tied to any one publisher or video production company? For that matter, is there already a site like that I’ve been blind to?)