Rebellion

9. Catastrophizing

He was able to surmise from the ensuing silence that there wasn’t any further contingency.

“Good, then let’s go for it please. Please, the head of the Creative department should meet with the digital scouts of WP. It won’t be as easy as scouting for writers, but I know they’d be up for the job. Shortlist the best, no matter country, age or any other attribute. Then, bring the list to me and we’d see where we can go from there. Any questions, before we proceed?”

A man clad in a black, leather biker jacket – occupying the third seat on his right raised his hand up. “Sir, I have an enquiry to make. It’s about book ads on TV.”

Book ads on TV?

“Book ads on TV?” His brows dilated in incongruity, and his voice held elements of shock. “What about that?”

“Well, these days some publishing companies have adopted the idea of airing an advert for their big releases on TV.” The male executive continued. “You know, like a brief trailer or something. They would contact some well-known actors and hire a director to shoot random scenes taken from the novel to make the public aware of the book. You know there are a lot of people who don’t listen to Radio, or read magazines and newspaper that are usually the major means of injecting such intel into circulation.”

Dayo sat up and cleared his throat. “Okay, I know you’re not talking about the good-old fashioned book ad which is usually void of humans, and are mostly close cut-off shots of action taken from varying sources and are assembled together to depict some sort of picture from the novel. You’re talking about an actual book trailer, big-scale like the one in place for movies?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think such is a good idea.” Dayo disagreed. “If we begin to adopt such visual means, then aren’t we really deviating from the true essence and boundaries of Literature? What’s literature anyway? It’s the body of all written books. That’s why we adopt written methods to project its publicity. Movie goers don’t write books for upcoming films just for marketing purposes? Nope, if a book is related to the film – then it’s written for a real story not for publicity purposes, so it baffles me when people in the literature society begin to go outside their boundaries just to gain more readers and recognition. I don’t agree with such method and I won’t allow such here.

This is the literary world, we won’t be borrowing aspects of other dimensions. If a person isn’t simply inclined or moved to read a book, then we won’t place a video simulation into his head just to stir interest. In that way his interest isn’t stirred by literature, instead it is ignited by the cinema world. I hope you get my point clearly. For our books, we’d stick to the good old book ads that includes camera close-ups and all that, and brief lapses into pages of the book. But full-blown trailers? Asides from the great cost that would stem from that – it is simply not in accordance to our principles. So, no we wouldn’t be doing such thing. Thank you for bringing up BTW, now we all know such thing isn’t encouraged here at Leaf.”

A comprehensive silence descended over the atmosphere, and it signified that every single room occupant had grasped the meaning behind his words quite well.

“Okay, so now that’s done with – let’s proceed to the real agenda itself. We all know that this coming Saturday is the celebratory event for the success of our new imprint’s launch and the writing academy which is currently ongoing at the moment. Asides from the fact that we’re inviting all our workers and their entire family to celebrate our success so far, it is also a bid to solicit for more investments from potential partners.

You see this sort of events brings different sorts of principalities from far and wide, and I’ve invited quite the number of these so called principalities myself. You might be wondering what the fuss is about, I mean money is something we have in abundance here at Leaf but believe me, there are some certain things that are simply unachievable without influence, and some certain power also that can’t be bought with money.