DB16 revealed…

The launch means I can come clean about ‘Who is db16?’ – the teaser campaign I’ve been running for the last few weeks, with masses of help from friends in the television world. I knew that publicising an ebook without a publisher’s backing would be tough, and making a short ‘book promo’ seemed an obvious way to put my experience as a TV producer director to good use.

I considered making a fast-cut, high on action, movie-style trailer, but quickly decided that the casting, filming and editing would be a huge task, and anyway, as a reader I loathe having what my characters look like decided for me. I settled instead on a simple, single scene from the book: the body of a young woman washed up on the Thames foreshore – an image captured as though by chance on a CCTV camera.  The film’s final strapline would pose the question ‘Who is db16?’ (Since the girl in my story is unidentified, the police call her db16, the sixteenth dead body retrieved from the river that year.)

Inevitably, my simple scene turned out to be a bit of a mare. Having found a promising young actress called Hannah Duffy who was up for lying around half-naked on a cold muddy river shore, I was put off shooting it on location by the numerous permissions I’d need – from the river police, Canning Town police, and the Port of London Authority – and also by the elaborate health and safety precautions needed to protect Hannah from sharp-edged flotsam and possible toxins in the Thames mud.

After discussions with smart editors and visual FX chaps I concluded that the ‘dead girl on foreshore’ image might be more easily achieved by CGI.  All I needed to do was shoot the ‘backplate’ – a shot of the foreshore at the Thames Barrier – on a locked-off, ie completely static, video camera; and film Hannah separately, against a special chromakey drape.  Once the two images were combined using digital wizardry, I’d have my shot.

Both shoots went well. Having borrowed an HD-DV camera from my supportive occasional employer Darlow Smithson, I struck lucky with a breezy yet bright morning to film the mudflats beside the Barrier, which glittered beautifully in the sunshine. Then it was the turn of Hannah to play dead in my back garden. (If my next-door neighbour did look out of her bedroom window and wonder why I was painting mud onto a half-naked girl lying face-down on my lawn, she’s far too English ever to have brought it up…) But when my CGI whizz came to ‘composite’ Hannah onto the background, he hit a problem: in order to create a believable final image, both shots needed to be completely still – and the section of footage that I wanted, with a boat cruising through the Barrier, had a slight but discernible wobble on it from the buffeting of the wind.

It took a good deal more tweaking to iron out the shake, but the final results were as good as any composite shot I’ve seen: techie types were impressed that the guy even got a seagull to fly ‘over’ Hannah’s head. There were further sessions with an editor friend to add the CCTV effect, audio and text, and for the final version of the film I sourced a haunting female vocal from a talented composer I know. And all for a film lasting less than 60 seconds…

The teaser was uploaded to YouTube and to its own dedicated website with a countdown to launch date when the mystery would be revealed.

The scene was set for a bit of pot-stirring. While a small band of guerrilla marketers spread the link via Facebook, I carried out a more targeted approach, sending an envelope carrying nothing but the DVD of the film with its ‘Who is db16?’ end card to some movers and shakers in the book world. The first tweet to emerge was from Sam Missingham of the Bookseller – queen of all things digital in publishing and one of my favourite tweeters.

Next to respond was Damian Barr, journalist, writer and the brains behind the legendary Shoreditch House Salon, who happened to be staying in a remote Scottish hotel when he received his DVD – a coincidence that, together with the coincidence of the ‘DB’ initials, must have made the delivery seem more spooky than I intended. A string of tweets accompanied by shots of the package and film followed, and for an uncomfortable moment it seemed like the tease was working too well as Damian wondered aloud if he might be the target of a crazed axe man. He later tweeted that it was ‘more likely to be marketing than murder’, which came as a relief, and when he was let in on the secret, he took it in extremely good humour, as I had guessed he would.

All of which gave me a short story idea: a crime writer so desperate to publicise a book that he commits a murder.

Look I’ve got an alibi, okay?

You can read the first installment of Anya Lipska’s digitial publishing journey in her first post.

You can read the second installment of Anya Lipska’s digitial publishing journey in her second post.