Customer Reviews

Secrets of Producing and Selling Successful Videos

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This is not one of those get rich quick type of books. It methodically shows you the slow but steady way to produce and market special interest DVDs to the buying public. Special interest DVDs include instructional, sports, travel, health, children's videos and other non-fiction DVDs.

Landen founded www.videouniversity.com and was a camera operator for 60 Minutes, 20/20 and QVC. He knows the business and has opened his vault to share his treasured secrets.

You'll learn which video topics sell well and which don't. He includes chapters on scriptwriting and producing. Chapters are devoted to budgeting, marketing, legal issues, working with distributors and mail order.

Landen has insights into the video publishing business, and he profiles a variety of successful producers from Ken Burns of PBS fame to Fred Levine, a videographer working out of his mobile home who made the first road construction video for children.

The 40-page appendix alone is worth the price. Here Landen shares his secret Google Adwords, he explains how to get public domain footage, he lists the major distributors; and he even includes release forms and FTC guidelines for testimonials.

I am in the video production business, and I have seen many entrepreneurs lose their shirts by producing a video that they could not sell. If you are willing to invest the time and energy to earn residual income for your videos, then this is the book to get

Author Hal Landen, a film and video businessman of 25 years' experience, shares his hard-earned wisdom in Secrets of Producing & Selling Successful Videos: How to Make Money with DVDs and Streaming Video. Chapters address the core qualities of successful producers, how to choose an attention-getting video topic, the basics of the video publishing business in general and the educational market in particular, the "need-to-know" lowdown on laws and contracts, how to sell on the web step by step, a crash course in running one's own mail order business, and much more. "Another type of fraud you will encounter is from people who buy your product with no intention of keeping it. These customers are abusive but be careful. Most responses you might consider, such as dropping your guarantee, will hurt your business more than help it. This is why you need a good database or invoicing program to help you find and stop such problems." A "must-have" primer for anyone contemplating producing and selling their own videos for profit, whether as a primary or side business.

While the book is fairly well written; and the author clearly has a strong background in the subject matter, I found a number of things disturbing in his book.

Specifically, he is focused on larger-scale productions than the title infers... regularly referring to hiring personnel, renting equipment, and dealing with crews as a larger producer, rather than what is now common in the business as super low-budget quality production.

The most disturbing comment in the book is the encouragement to operate as a sole proprietership as a producer of videos... pooh-poohing other business structures that lend themselves to protection. He doesn't even mention LLC's (Limited Liability Corporations) that act like a sole proprietership, but offer liability protection against personal assets. The LLC has become the standard for small business operations... and even some very large businesses, yet the author completely ignores the option.

Overall, the appendices were worth the price of the book, and SOME of the material was useful, but in these days of prosumer cams and HDDV formats, the production methods proposed by the author should be reserved for the higher end of the business, not the likely purchasers of the book. In my opinion, he does not fully address his likely readers.

Expand your ideas on how and when to use videos in your business. How? By making the whole video "production process" something that is practical and manageable, not to be dreaded but embraced.

YouTube, videos online, $100 camcorders, videos are the way to communicate effectively, they are multimedia...Sound, images, graphics and special effects. All are relatively easy to do now on video.

Mr. Landen explains this process methodically and well. AFter you read this book you'll think..Sure I can do this, I need to do this.!

Joe Large

[...]

We were always cynical about 'how to' books and dvd's, but we put our cynicism aside to purchase Hal Landen's guide. We have used Hal's exceptional tutorial every step of the way during our
recent production and promotion of a trilogy of battlefield tour films, 'The American Road to Victory', which are airing on PBS stations. From the development of our idea,to the early phases of production, clearing rights and mastering dvds, this guide has been inspirational!

Heidi
The American Road to Victory
Livingbattlefield.org

Landen's book is a remarkable compilation of how-to knowledge and resources for any reader to fit to their particular needs and style for production and/or sales of successful videos. In addition, this work helped me to improve the way I market an existing non-fiction CD set on the Vietnam War, which I produced in 2001. Very happy with the purchase.

Non-profits need all the help they can get, and this book is a "must" in my marketing toolkit. Mr. Landen has written a marvelously helpful book!
Linda Jones
Executive Director
Salisbury Symphony