After months of thinking, working, and playing around with video and animation clips, I finally got the book trailer finished the way I wanted it. Now all that’s left is buying the stock photos and footage, and swapping everything out…and then you’ll get to see it.

It got me thinking, though, about my last post, and how much I learned about the Victorian era to work on the first book. Research is king, right? Then I have a thought, and realize how much I still don’t know about that period in time.

Book promotion, for example. These days, it’s a combination of word-of-mouth, appearances, signings, advertisements, blog posts, Facebook announcements, book trailers on YouTube, you name it. But what about the Victorian days? How did Dickens, for example, promote his work? [Author scratches his head.]

Did he advertise? I know he serialized some of his novels, so they first appeared in the newspaper before being compiled into book form. Did he do signings? Appearances? I know he read some of his stories (and even performed A Christmas Carol) before audiences in theaters. Did he have good relationships with local booksellers? Did he bribe the kids on the street to tell all their buddies about his books?

Did he print bookmarks and postcards and business cards? Did he attend conferences, meet with other authors, agents and editors? Did he hang out at the bar and entertain wanna-be authors with tales of horror from the desk of a real writer? Did he agonize over whether he spent too much time promoting (blogging, Facebooking, making trailers) and not enough time working on the next book?

There is so much I don’t know about the Victorians, or even the next time period, the Restoration. I shudder to think what your average writer in the 1600′s went through. There must have been quite a line at Gutenberg’s Press. (That’s a joke–I’m not that dumb. I know Gutenberg made more than one.)

I must be thinking about Solomon a lot, because this came to mind: “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” Ecc 2:11.