Dean Koontz Book Trailer Contest

It's a little-known fact that I'm a big Dean Koontz fan. I subscribe to his entertaining email newsletter, which you can do via his website if you like.

That's how I heard about his brand new competition with a $5,000 top prize. To win you have to create a 30-second book trailer based on reading two pre-publication chapters of Dean's forthcoming novel, The Good Guy. As his publishers say on the competition page, the trailer that best brings the book alive for potential readers will win the grand prize.

You can download the first two chapters of The Good Guy from the competition page, along with the "Essentials Packet" that provides everything else you need to enter the contest. All you have to do then is write and shoot your trailer and upload it to the video-sharing site YouTube. The deadline is May 1 2007.

I appreciate that to enter this contest you will need video-making as well as writing skills, but there are still lots of things I like about it. One of them is that everybody who enters wins a prize - a free "I Shot The Good Guy" tee-shirt. Also, as well as the $5,000 grand prize, there are two runner-up prizes of sets of signed, limited edition Dean Koontz novels, with a value of approximately $1,000.

Anyway, I'm not much of a videographer, but this contest has definitely grabbed my interest. Jayne (my partner) is a Dean fan as well, so we're considering entering a video together, and tossing a coin to see who gets the tee-shirt. If you decide to enter too, maybe we'll see you on YouTube?