Presents straightforward instructions for a number of specific manly activities related to automobiles, sports, the outdoors, home maintenance, socializing, and cooking.

Like a movie trailer, a book trailer is a teaser designed to get and keep viewers' interest long enough that they make that important click: to your website, to your promo site, to wherever more information about your book can be gained. With the mass move to the Internet for audiences to seek information and entertainment, a book trailer sets your book apart. It helps you overcome the tough marketing challenges that face both self-published and traditionally published writers. Book Trailer 101 looks at the creation of book trailers as a series of steps. During the process, you will go back and rework previous steps as you learn. Finding a special photo could result in a change of script. Reading a phrase out loud might cause a rewrite to smooth out the delivery. Creating a trailer is an iterative loop of events. Learning to create book trailers has a logical flow. In What is a book trailer? we examine the external characteristics of a trailer by comparing them to the more familiar movie trailer. Then, we look at when to start trailer development, whether trailers work and finally, book trailer levels. In Step 1. Identify Audience, we identify your target reader and buyer, as well as reader expectation and genre, and we look at what makes a trailer go viral. All of this defines who your trailer is aimed at. Now that the target is defined, we begin Step 2. Create Building Blocks by describing the book with elements you can use to create your log-lines, tag line, high/low concept and praise. With the phrases and building blocks complete, in Step 3. Select Approach, we look at various trailer approaches, along with their strengths and weaknesses, so you can select the appropriate one for your book. We also touch on viral videos. Step 4. Write Script is where the rubber meets the road. The work to this point is all about developing some of the raw materials to write the script for your trailer. First, we dive into the inner workings of a book trailer, examining LEAD timing, components and trailer arc, then move to various script formatting options: timeline, storyboard and screenplay. We also offer script-writing tips from a variety of industry professionals. With your script in hand, it is time to start Step 5. Acquire Media and get the media you need. It is important that you not only have the best images, music, voice-over and video for your purposes, but also permission to use them. You will also find a list of website addresses where you can get free or low-cost media. Once you have your script and media, it's time to Step 6. Assemble the Video. There are many alternatives for the creation of your trailer, depending on the complexity of the script/media, as well as which computer platform you are working on. Do you do it yourself or pay someone else? We examine DIY vs. vending the assembly of the video. Now that your trailer is complete, how do you Step 7. Upload and Promote your video? This is the time to plan how to maximize the impact of your trailer. That's it in a nutshell. The process of thinking about, writing and creating your book trailer will give you renewed enthusiasm for your book. It's interesting, engaging and fun!

From YouTube's Head of Culture and Trends, a rousing and illuminating behind-the-scenes exploration of internet video's massive impact on our world. Whether your favorite YouTube video is a cat on a Roomba, “Gangnam Style,” the “Bed Intruder” song, an ASAPscience explainer, Rebecca Black's “Friday,” or the “Evolution of Dance,” Kevin Allocca's Videocracy reveals how these beloved videos and famous trends--and many more--came to be and why they mean more than you might think. YouTube is the biggest pool of cultural data since the beginning of recorded communication, with four hundred hours of video uploaded every minute. (It would take you more than sixty-five years just to watch the vlogs, music videos, tutorials, and other content posted in a single day!) This activity reflects who we are, in all our glory and ignominy. As Allocca says, if aliens wanted to understand our planet, he'd give them Google. If they wanted to understand us, he'd give them YouTube. In Videocracy, Allocca lays bare what YouTube videos say about our society and how our actions online--watching, sharing, commenting on, and remixing the people and clips that captivate us--are changing the face of entertainment, advertising, politics, and more. Via YouTube, we are fueling social movements, enforcing human rights, and redefining art--a lot more than you'd expect from a bunch of viral clips.

Can a hardcore gamer survive a real-world crisis? Seventeen-year-old Alex Brooks is obsessed with becoming an e-athlete. What teen wouldn’t want to make a million dollars playing video games professionally? Especially if you’ve got a real shot at it like Alex. His mom, a television producer in Hollywood, casts her son in a reality show about young gaming hopefuls seeking fame and fortune. This gives him great exposure in the industry. On top of that, His dad owns an up-and-coming tech business that is about to launch a revolutionary product. Life couldn’t be better--or could it? Truth be told, Alex doesn’t need to go pro as bad as he needs to grow up, and what teen really wants to do that? He’s popular with other gamers but his over-inflated ego makes him obnoxious to almost everyone else. He hides a deep secret--the cavernous void in his life that nothing seems to fill. He thrives on a false sense of accomplishment but is haunted by an inescapable sense of loneliness. He has lived in the shadow of his dad’s relentless pursuit of building a tech empire while watching him fail to keep his family from falling apart. What will it take for Alex to gain a new perspective on what it means to become a man and what it takes to be a hero? Everything changes when Alex goes missing. He must face a life or death struggle in a foreign culture that doesn’t have a power grid. Man or computer mouse? His digital world didn’t prepare him for the challenges that are about to confront him. Alex is not ready to rescue anyone, he needs to be rescued. For those who really know Alexander, why would anyone want to save him? This coming-of-age story follows Alex as he is forced to grow up the hard way through extraordinary circumstances, which cause him to re-evaluate what’s important in life, his need for God, and the positive influence of older mentors. Adventure, danger, romance, survival, despair and Providence are the ingredients that help remake his life.

Discover how—and why—Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America experience societal, economic, and infrastructural inequality throughout history covering everything from Columbus’s arrival in 1492 to the War on Drugs to the Black Lives Matter movement. From reparations to the prison industrial complex and redlining, there are a lot of high-level concepts to systemic racism that are hard to digest. At a time where everyone is inundated with information on structural racism, it can be hard to know where to start or how to visualize the disenfranchisement of BIPOC Americans. In Systemic Racism 101, you will find infographic spreads alongside explanatory text to help you visualize and truly understand societal, economic, and structural racism—along with what we can do to change it. Starting from the discovery of America in 1492, through the Civil Rights movement, all the way to the criminal justice reform today, this book has everything you need to know about the continued fight for equality.

The gorgeous story of two friends separated by everything in the world—except love. Readers and animal lovers of every age will want to relive this journey over and over again. Katya and her Meema are spending another normal summer at their cottage in Alaska, when a chance accident leaves Katya face-to-face with the biggest creature she’s ever seen… an enormous kodiak bear, soon to become her closest friend. But when Katya suddenly returns home to Seattle, the two are torn apart, leaving Kodi to do whatever it takes to reunite with his fragile human friend. It’s a wild adventure packed with breathtaking views, new companions, and danger around every turn.

In this New York Times bestselling “imperative how-to for creativity” (Nick Offerman), Adam Savage—star of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters—shares his golden rules of creativity, from finding inspiration to following through and successfully making your idea a reality. Every Tool’s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you. Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop’s worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like: In Every Tool There Is a Hammer—don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don’t have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever’s handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance—making is messy and filled with screwups, but that’s okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid—it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it’s a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue—mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects. This toolbox also includes lessons from many other incredible makers and creators, including: Jamie Hyneman, Nick Offerman, Pixar director Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, artist Tom Sachs, and chef Traci Des Jardins. And if everything goes well, we will hopefully save you a few mistakes (and maybe fingers) as well as help you turn your curiosities into creations. I hope this book serves as “creative rocket fuel” (Ed Helms) to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.