“How to Pitch - Mediabistro.com” plus 2 more

It's a cross between the All My Children, The Daily Show and Shaun of the Dead and targeted to promote books. Book Trailer producer Circle of Seven Productions and author Heather Graham teamed up this summer to create an entire season of The Zombie Today Show a comedy that also promotes books.

Sheila Clover English, CEO of Circle of Seven Productions and Executive Producer at Reader's Entertainment TV where the show airs each Friday, won a Davey Award for her last web show The Lonesome Losers which had a couple of young men using romance novels to give out online love advice. "People want the most entertainment value for their time and effort," says English who in 2003 trademarked the term Book Trailer and went on to pioneer that market. English goes on to say, "This show is a great platform for engaging people, giving them the entertainment they desire and introducing them to some great 'Zombie Approved' books!"

The first episode received over 10,000 views within the first few days it was released. The Reader's Entertainment TV website traffic has doubled since the show first aired on October 2^nd. Part of the advertising strategy includes having the 30 second commercial of the show play in a rotation prior to Evil Dead The Musical which plays all month in Louisville, KY. Other advertising will include online ads, social media and a Twitter campaign. The show has been picked up by local and regional television stations that highlight web material and is being played in several states in the US.

The Reader's Entertainment site has offered book trailers, author interviews and original programming since it went live in 2006. It is a reader destination site and part of the Publisher's Weekly Book Life program. The Zombie Today Show has its own channel on the site where you can find the shows, zombie commercials, blogs and other entertainment. The Zombie Guide gives a synopsis of each show which boasts celebrity guests such as Elvis, Heather Graham and Michael Jackson among others.

New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham helped produce the show and has several books and guest appearances. Authors who have books reviewed include Lori Foster, F. Paul Wilson, Douglas Clegg, Alexandra Sokoloff and others.

There will be twelve episodes in total and accompanying blogs that help tell the back story of how zombies came to live in modern society. The first episode explains, "If they can be taxed, they can be citizens!" The shows include humorous commercial parodies including Crust Toothpaste, Diagra, DatingDead.com and AberZombie.

"We hope people will have fun with it! That's what it's all about," says Sheila Clover English the show creator.

For additional information about The Zombie Today Show, Reader's Entertainment TV or Circle of Seven Productions contact:

info@cosproductions.com

info@cosproductions.com
www.readersentertainment.tv

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Book Reviews: The Khyber Pass and The Great Game - Salon

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 04:59 PM PDT

I owe this idea to Bob Lee and Jerry Hansen, the former of whom is a great person who has always asked me for fifteen years what was happening to India in 1000 A.D. to test my knowledge of history, and the latter of whom is also a great person who told me fifteen years ago to read The Great Game: better late than never. :)

These two books are part of some final research I am doing about Afghanistan.

As to the former question, India was not my original area of study, but over the years, Mr. Lee has inspired me to fill in the lacunae in my historical knowledge, which in this means as follows.

What was happening in India around 1000 A.D.?

Well, the very informative, only 225 pages long, and very readable book The Khyber Pass tells us Bob, if you didn't know, whcih you probably do, that in 1000 A.D. New Delhi India was getting ready to be sacked, again, this time by Turkish Ghaznavid warriors crossing over the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan.

Later, the Muslim went to a Hindu temple, where the Hindu warriors bowed before the phallus they worshipped, and went out to die before the Turks, who then smashed the hated idols and sold the women and children into slavery, and supposedly broke open the phallus to steal the family jewels, so to speak; more on how that relates to Afghanistan now in a minute.

As to the overall structure of the Khyber Pass, in 225 pages, we are taken from the first recorded crossing of the Pass by an invader of India, save the Pathans/Pashtuns, by Cryus the Great, to the creation of Pakistan.

Thus, as to the first thing to remember, which is obvious from a map if you are a geo-political type, Afghanistan has been an area of Persian, which is to say Iranian, influence, for a long, long time, a data trend if you will of 2500 years.

As to the general wonderful feature of the Khyber Pass, you get a very, very well-done sense of the ebbs and slows of 2500 years of civilization in an incredibly compact format; that Paddy boy can write (It is his first name, and he has a cool hat on the jacket in the spirit of crazy Scots, Irish and Brits everywhere).

As to Persian influence, even today, the Afghan city of Herat is coveted by the Persians, who remember trying to take it with the assistance of Russian officers as late as the 1830's, which leads to the second book, The Great Game.

As to The Great Game, like Mr. Hansen told me fifteen years ago a great read, I am slow but persistent, the book opens with two men digging their own grave for the Turkic sultan in modern Uzbekistan to the north of modern Afghanistan.

How can you not like a book with Timur going home to his harem in Samarkand after building a pillar of skulls in Delhi?

Anyway, per The Great Game, usually, the Sultan just liked to throw people off minnarets, but this time, he decided to just behead two British intelligence officers after digging their own grave while the Brit who converted whined about his civil rights being violated, albeit after the Sultan kept them in a rat infested pit for two years, bringing them out to ask them periodically,

"Would you like to convert to Islam now?"

Torture got one for two in this case, and the idea of democracy anywhere in that region is a joke and the first one that should go from U.S. policy, pronto.

In any event, although The Great Game comes in a lot longer, it is also very much worth a read for anyone trying to acquire a sense of Afghanistan now.

Why?

As The Great Game points out, Afghanistan figured very prominently in the calculations of British strategists since the time of Napoleon, because Afghanistan is the road to India.

Since the Russians were advancing towards the Turkish khans on the way to India since the time of Peter the Great, although only with success dating to the 1830's, and the failures involved having to eat frozen camels in one hundred mile an hour sub-zero winds, Afghanistan was the scene of an Anglo-British rivalry that lasted more than a century, and a rivalry that eventually extended from the Caucasus mountains and head of the Persian Gulf to North Korea and Lhasa; like the U.S and Russians now.

The Great Game also produced lots of eccentric Brits with funny and tragic adventures, as well as worthy Russian opponents, who correctly spoke for example of how "Russia advanced to greatness on the top of bayonets," or that "Russian soldiers just advance till they drop, we will beat your ass." (Loose translation on the latter)

True enough, although anyone with a comparative history bent would find very interesting similarities betweeen the rise of Russia in what we now call the "stans" and the American campaign against the Western Indians: The Great Game is fair to the Russians, who had to nothing to live for but vodka or killing Turks or Brits in godforsaken wastelands of Central Asia.

Speaking of the latter, lands that are pretty too, the Turkish people of the Stans, i.e. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kygyzstan, and boy, that is a lot of stans, were defeated by the Russian imperial advance, as were the Ottomans in the Caucasus, although the Chechens fought hard under Shamyl then, like they did under Shamyl in the nineties.

Thus, when Russia is strong, by definition geographically, it has more say both in the Caucusus, ask how the Georgians feel lately or take a look at Grozhny, and, per the point of this article, more to say in Afghanistan; like now.

Medvedev started talking about it in January, about Russia's role in Afghanistan's political settlement, so it is back to the future.

Now, as to the relation of these two books to the current situation, first, the Khyber Pass makes a very, very good point about what Afghanistan is, and what it is not.

Like many, I have been a little too quick to say that Afghanistan is ungovernable.

Actually, historically speaking Afghanistan is either dominated by some external empire, Cyrus, Genghis, Timur etc..., or it is dismembered in between empires in a civil war, like in the nineties, or, it is unified, sometimes under the Pathans, and crosses over into Pakistan and sacks Delhi, again, which is very, very interesting given the attack on the Pakistani base last week, given that there are more Pathans in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, and, given the Paki family jewels, so to speak, like Mohamed the Ghaznvid Holy Warrior in 1000 A.D.

( I like Pathan because the Brits always said it that way, like, ..."when a Pathan warrior cuts your genitalia off after a truce, because, well, that is just how it is there.")

Per the Great Game, what is curious to note is that if the British always wanted to use the Afghans to make the "Russian Bear dance on a hot Turkish roof," the Russians by contrast, always wanted to use India as bait for one of the periodic excursions of the Pashtuns to burn Delhi to the ground, again, and rule what we call now Waziristan, but also especially the more liveable Punjab.

Maybe some day the Pathans will just want the Paki family jewels?

If you want to get a sense of who the players are that we are dealing with in Afghanistan now, and what we want to avoid, and one of the things we want to avoid is the beautifully rendered tale in both books of the British Forty Fourth of Foot deploying in their infanry square to be the last fifty of the former British garrison of the 16,ooo men massacred in the first Afghan War in 1842, save one cold doctor, one can do no better than start with these two books.

Book Reviews

Thursday, October 15, 2009

“How to Pitch - Mediabistro.com” plus 2 more

“How to Pitch - Mediabistro.com” plus 2 more

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