A book trailer, despite the name, is something essentially different to a movie trailer. Most producers of book trailers don't seem to be aware of this, and it's the reason why book trailers usually don't do what they are supposed to do: entice people to read a book which they wouldn't have otherwise read.

Here are three key differences:

1. Movie trailers are effective because they are shown before another movie which has been deemed to appeal to the same demographic. Book trailers aren't shown in books deemed to appeal to the same demographic.  They are usually on YouTube, an author's website, a book page, a publisher's page etc. They, therefore, have limited effect if you don't already know and like the author. You need to be directed to them in some way. They aren't put in front of you just as you're about to read another novel, the way movie trailers are put in front of you just as you're about to see another movie.

2. Movie trailers can take all the images they need from the movie itself. Making one involves selecting, assembling and contextualising existing images. Book trailers, however, need to create these images from scratch, and the danger is that this process can lead to the opposite effect you are trying to achieve. Reading (unlike watching movies) is about getting people to create their own images in their heads. Providing them with images can destroy the magic.

3. Movie trailers are the end result of the work of vast teams of movie-making professionals and feature experienced actors of the highest calibre.  Book trailers don't have these advantages. Although some obviously have quality actors and high production values, they simply don't have the resources behind them that movie trailer producers have.

To try to bring the differences into sharper focus, let's compare the movie trailer for the recently released 20th Century Fox film, The Book Thief, starring Geoffrey Rush, with two book trailers for the Markus Zuzak novel on which the movie is based.

Movie trailer for The Book Thief

The movie trailer for The Book Thief benefits from having an Emmy Award-winning director, an Academy-award winning actor, and the studio behind The Life of Pi. There are a number evocative images and it gives you a real feel for the movie. It does what good movie trailers do through skillful scene and dialogue selection, vividly drawing you into the story. It currently has nearly nearly 2 million views on YouTube.

Book trailer for the YA edition of The Book Thief

This award-winning book trailer for The Book Thief with nearly 110,000 views on YouTube, justifies a close look. It's focused at the Young Adult market, where book trailers seem to work best. The productions values are strong, although nowhere near in the same class as the movie trailer. Interestingly it doesn't actually enact the story, so it is doing something quite different to the movie trailer. It concentrates on the words themselves, the story-telling. The girl is reading from a book, giving the listener tantalising hints, and finishing with the words "If you let me, I shall begin." Successful book trailers are often the ones that provide the flavour of a novel, using its words, but without enactment, leading you to a point where the story is about to begin.

Book trailer for the adult edition of The Book Thief

This trailer for The Book Thief, which has just over 6000 views, has clearly been produced the way many book trailers have been produced: with copyright free archival footage, images and music, and non-professional narration. It seems to me to be reasonably effective until the narration starts and then it falls apart. Up until that point it functions in a similar way to the previous book trailer (without the higher production values). It's much too long. Well before it was over, I was waiting for it to end. Clearly, the summarising of the story plot in a book trailer doesn't work, whether it's through action or words.

So, how do you judge the success of a book trailer? The obvious answer of the number of views isn't the whole story. I'll have a closer look at this in part 2.

Wouldn't it be great if we could time travel?  To witness the great moments in history, to see what the future holds, to have another chance to do some things better in our own lives.  There may be some people in the world who have zero interest in time travel, but surely they just haven't thought about the possibilities enough.

Time travel is exciting, enticing, enthralling.  We would like it to be possible.  Which, of course, is precisely the danger when presented with "evidence" for time travel like this 1938 film clip of people coming out of a factory in Massachusetts.  You want to believe it.  You're inclined to ignore logic and other evidence presented to you because the idea is so appealing.

I've got to be honest, I would love time travel to be achievable, and for this film clip and others that appear across the internet to be evidence for it.

But let's look at some of the questions we should be asking here:

Could this be some sort of hoax use of visual effects software like Adobe
After Effects?  I wouldn't dismiss this possibility too quickly.  It's obviously technically possible to achieve this, and without analysing the original celluloid film, you couldn't prove that it was authentic and untampered.

However, there may be evidence of some trickery in the video clip itself.  If you go to full screen and look closely around the 47 second mark, the left arm of the woman in the dark skirt seems to pass through the dress of the woman with the phone, while the right shoulder of the woman on the phone sort of disappears into the shoulder of the woman in the dark skirt.

Inconclusive?  Yep.  They could have just bumped into each other and it just looks like they're merging.  If that's the case, though, wouldn't there have been some reaction by one or both of them if the two women had actually bumped?  Instead, there's no flinching, nothing at all to indicate that they had come in contact.

Still not convinced?  Here are some other questions to think about:

How does a mobile phone work in 1938 without any transmission systems?  Ah, okay so there could be some future flux capacitor at work that enables transmission through the caller's original time. Okay, I suppose it's plausible that if you can come up with the technology for time travel, you could come up with the technology to communicate wirelessly while you are travelling through time.

Why aren't the people around the woman on the phone looking at her as if she was a nutter?  Or why aren't they at least showing curiosity?  She's talking to herself while holding a box to her ear!  That's worth at least a couple of strange looks, but no one even bats an eyelid.  Now, you've got to admit that's weird.

Even if the the clip is authentic, could she be holding a small radio to her ear?  Or a hearing aid if some kind?

Or is it, in fact, a piece of mobile communications technology developed in the 1930s?  Motorola pioneered wireless mobile communications in the 1930s through two-way radio.  Maybe it was a prototype?

Anyway, as you can see, we can't get an iron-clad explanation for the clip and whether it provides evidence for time travel.  After looking at many of the possible explanations and counter arguments, I've come up with what I like to refer to as my scientifically-based mathematically rigorous "Strasser Likelihood Table for SF-type Phenomena in the Real World" (or "Strasser Table" for short) which provides my estimated percentage likelihoods for each of the possible explanations I've outlined.  If you don't like my percentages, or have other possible explanations to add, you can always post your own version of the Strasser Table.

Here are some rules for Strasser Likelihood Tables for SF-type Phenomena in the Real World:

The Possible Explanations need to be mutually exclusive, that is, you can't have two or more explanations being correct simultaneously.

The percentages need to add to 100%, that is, one of them must be correct – even if to achieve this, one of the options has to be "Other currently unknown explanation".

You can't have 0% or 100% for any explanation because this suggests absolute certainties and the table is for phenomena which we are not certain about.

The Possible Explanations need to be listed in order from the most likely to the least likely.

Good luck with your own time travel likelihood!

Tangent, the premiere magazine for fantasy and science fiction short story reviews, has listed ten Aurealis stories in its 2013 Recommended Reading List, including two with 2 stars and one with 3 stars.  With very few exceptions, the other stories on the list are from professionally paying markets as defined by SFWA. There's a 50-50 split between fantasy and science fiction in the 10 Aurealis stories, and issues #57, #63 and #65 each have two stories on the list.  Here are the ten Aurealis stories:

“Monday-Child” by C.S. McMullen (Aurealis #57, 2/13)) F

“Where Colossi Sleep” by Daniel Baker (Aurealis #57, 2/13) SF*

“Catspaw” by James Bradley (Aurealis #60 5/13) F**

“Kernel” by Sean Monaghan (Aurealis #61, 6/13) SF

“Remnants” by Dan Rabarts (Aurealis #62, 7/13) F*

“The Pillar of the Small God” by Gerry Huntman (Aurealis #63, 8/13) SF*

“Prophet” by Liam Pieper (Aurealis #63, 8/13) SF*

“Intelligent Design” by Marta Salek (Aurealis #64, 9/13) SF***

“Poppies” by S G Larner (Aurealis #65, 10/13) F*

“Butcher’s Hook” by Jason Franks (Aurealis #65, 10/13) F**

Here’s the list of the stories that will appear in the upcoming Tor anthology, Carbide Tipped Pens, edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi. Ben Bova is a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of Analog, and a former editorial director of Omni; and Eric Choi is an aerospace engineer, writer and editor from Toronto, Ontario, who was the first recipient of the Isaac Asimov Award for his novelette “Dedication”.

Carbide Tipped Pens is an anthology of new hard SF stories that follow the classic definition of the genre, in which some element of science or technology is so central to the plot that there would be no story if that element were removed.  The aim of the editors was to collect stories which emphasise plot, character, science, originality and believability in equal measure, not only to entertain readers but also to educate and to return the sense of wonder of the Golden Age to a new generation of 21st Century readers.

The list below is in alphabetical by author surname (which usually means I'm near the end) and doesn’t reflect final order of the stories.

“Thunderwell” by Doug Beason
“Lady With Fox” by Gregory Benford 
“Old Timer’s Game” by Ben Bova
“She Just Looks That Way” by Eric Choi
“A Slow Unfurling of Truth” by Aliette de Bodard 
"SIREN of Titan” by David DeGraff
“Ambiguous Nature” by Carl Frederick
“Recollection” by Nancy Fulda
“Habilis” by Howard Hendrix
“The Circle” by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)
“The Play’s the Thing” by Jack McDevitt
“Skin Deep” by Leah Sloane Petersen & Gabrielle Harbowy
“Every Hill Ends With Sky” by Robert Reed
“The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars” by Kate Story
“The Mandelbrot Bet” by Dirk Strasser
“The Snows of Yesteryear” by Jean-Louis Trudel
“The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever” by Daniel H. Wilson