In March, as most of the United States began to shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, I received word that my publisher was willing to return the publishing rights for my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt to me. This was not altogether a surprise. I knew Lachesis Publishing was changing the focus of its business. Still, Lachesis had treated the book well and they had sold lots of copies, helping it to reach Amazon’s bestseller lists a couple of times. What’s more, it meant that the beautiful trailer I helped to produce with Eric Schumacher would be out of date since the trailer showed the original cover and pointed to Lachesis as a source for the novel. Fortunately, with the help of Eric and our director of photography, R.S. Francis, I was able to turn this issue into an opportunity.
First off, as anyone who has watched a movie based on a book knows, screenplays are rarely a play-by-play of scenes from the book. You may get lines from the book and scenes that look just like a moment is described, but its rare that the movie is exactly the book. This is because books and movies have different requirements. A novel gets to spend a lot of time in a character’s head, giving the reader their thoughts. In a movie, you have to see the character’s actions. When we translated a scene from the novel to the screen, we did our best to give the impression of what was happening in a tense scene where telescope operator Mike Teter must leave astronomer Claire Yarbro alone in the telescope control room. Most of the scene focuses on Claire and what happens while she’s alone.
When I got the rights back, I had the opportunity to give the novel an additional edit. For the most part, this edit was pretty superficial. My editor at Lachesis had done a great job, though there were a few dropped punctuation marks and a missing word here or there. However, one thing that was especially fun was that I had the opportunity to revise the scene with Claire and Mike that we showed in the trailer to be more like the version we depicted. Again, it’s not exact because movies and novels have different pacing issues to consider. Also, the trailer has to tell the viewer things the reader already knows by this point in the novel. Still, I think I succeeded in making the scene from the book look just a bit more like the scene from the trailer.
What’s more, our cinematographer and effects artist, R.S. Francis stepped up and revised the end of the trailer to show the new edition of the book and update the information where the book is now available. It’s also been updated to even higher definition, so it looks really great if you watch this on a big screen. Without further ado, here’s the updated trailer:
If you dare open The Astronomer’s Crypt after watching the trailer, you can find the new edition at the following places:
In print:
As an ebook:
David Lee Summers' Web Journal 