Marketing Mrs Darcy

I’m beginning to realise that in order to succeed as a writer these days it is necessary (but sadly not sufficient) to lose one’s sense of shame. I’m not sure at which point I lost mine, but looking at what I’ve just done, I can be pretty sure that it’s gone. Let me explain.

I had an idea a couple of weeks ago that it would be really cool to put together a YouTube promo video for “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens”. I’d never done anything remotely like it before, but surely it couldn’t be that hard, could it? I had a look around for the best cheap video editing tools, before realising that I already had iMovie on my Mac, so I didn’t have to spend any money at all. (Thanks, Steve Jobs!)

The next decision was what kind of promo to do. My first thought was one of those mash-ups based on the bunker scene in “Downfall” – in this case, Hitler would be a closet Jane Austen fan, railing about these dreadful mash-ups. I worked out a vague script, found an un-subtitled video on YouTube and downloaded it using KickYouTube. I got as far as adding the first couple of subtitles (and it really is amazingly simple), before it occurred to me that this really was a bit of a tired old meme.

The next plan was to find a version of Pride and Prejudice that had been dubbed into a foreign language, so that I could add my own subtitles to that, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. At this point I realised what I had to do. I would have to dub it myself, doing all the voices. So that’s what I did, and I’m really pleased that I had to, because it led off into all sorts of weird areas that would never have happened before. Here’s the result. Do take a look before the BBC ask me to take it down …

In other news, Mrs Darcy had her first ever proper review today in the web fiction journal ERGOfiction, and I am really pleased with it, for reasons which may become obvious if you take a look at what they said.