Charlie Higson's Zombie Trailer for The Enemy

Just saw this terrific new zombie trailer flagged on the Tall Tales and Short Stories blog.

Mind you, some author trailers manage to achieve Charlie Higson's look without having written a zombie book.

When superheroes get into social networking

My baby brother made this video - voiced it, shot it, drew it! I especially love the voice!

What happens when authors become cool online personalities

Not that YA author John Green (Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska) is a cool online personality only because he's trying to sell his books ... but look at what he got from his social network on his birthday -

And here was John's response:

If you can't be arsed to view the entire video, here's the most important thing John said:

People didn't make those songs or artwork or pictures and video clips in order to become famous or rich. They did it, to quote William Faulkner, "not for glory and least of all for profit but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

Mmmm. Human spirit.
He also said:

Every single day I get emails from aspiring writers asking my advice about how to become a writer. And here is the only advice I can give: Don't make stuff because you want to make money; it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you wanna feel famous because you will never feel famous enough. Make GIFTS for people. And work hard on making those gifts so that people will notice the gift and like the gift. Maybe they will notice how hard you worked and maybe they won't. And if they don't, I know it's frustrating. But ultimately that doesn't matter because your responsibility is not to the people who notice but to the gift itself.