Book Project 1: Fan Experience

If I Stay fans everywhere are looking for another way to connect to the book and the characters, and here is your chance! Tickets to Shooting Star’s concert will be going on sale for a worldwide tour starting September 16th, if you fell in love with Adam Wilde in If I Stay- Just wait until you see him in concert and a chance to meet him afterward and swoon just like Mia did in If I Stay. “It wasn’t that Adam was such a popular guy….But he was cool. Cool in that he played in a band with people who went to the college in town. Cool in that he had his own rockery style, produced from thrift shops and garage sales, not from Urban Outfitters knockoffs.” P(33)

The concert will begin in the hometown of the characters-Oregon-and will travel around 15 states hitting New York, Cincinnati, Florida, Texas and many more. In the book the main character, Mia’s, life is centered around her boyfriend Adam Wilde. When his band starts getting big Mia begins to see a separate part of his life begin, one that she is part of when she attends his concerts and sees him perform the songs he wrote himself. Though the whole book is centered around music the author makes a specific point to connect Mia and Adam through their different music styles-classical and rock. In the book while Mia is on her deathbed Adam says to her, “Please Mia. Don’t make me write a song.” Illustrating what he had earlier stated in the book that he writes songs when something horrible has happened in his life or about things that make him sad. If fans of the book are have the ability to attend this concert they will be exposed to the side of Adam that was only alive in the book of fiction, now it will be converted into a tangible experience for the fans.

For people who aren’t fans of the book:

This concert will be made available to everyone not just fans of the book! Since there's already a big fan base of the book because of the movie that has just been released, others who have heard about it will be curious. With the popularity of alternative bands, such as one direction, and social media marketing it will be easy to sell tickets for the show and branch out to other groups of people apart from the readers. For fanatics of the book- or maybe later on the band- meet and greet passes will be made available for fans, as this was a big part of the book, it was a time to connect to the fans after the show, “When Adam finished his set, I was as panting and sweating as he was. I didn’t go backstage to greet him before everyone else for to him. I waited for him to go to the floor of the club. to meet his public like he did at the end of every show.”(P.98)it will help the people who read the book stay connected to the events that occurred throughout the novel.

The tickets will be customized to look like fans would imagine them, before the tour begins the marketing crew could have a competition for fans to design the tickets, as another way to keep them involved and get others to hear about the concerts, and the actual venues chosen would resemble those in the book, local clubs where there is a comfortable environment for fans. And for the shows to remain intimate, like the book, and not overwhelm fans the amount of people in each venue will be restricted to 300 opposed to 1000.

Example of what the tickets could look like:


(Fan made concert tickets)

What is a book?

It's easy in this day and age to be able to discard obsolete things such as typewriters, flip-phones, and other things of that matter, but the question that is arising, one that worries me, is are books going to become obsolete?

When I was about eight my obsession with books began, binge reading all of the books in the unfortunate events series, or in my older years the romantic series, became the norm for me. I would sit at a bench during lunch or recess with my nose stuck between the pages inhaling the too-familiar scent of my favorite books. As other kids played tag or gossiped I never felt alone, I had friends but I would much rather indulge in the lives of Junie B. Jones or Bella Swan (which I'm not proud of). So my childhood was a whirlwind of different lives coming together in the mind of a pre-adolescent to form her own opinion of the world. How do you tell someone like that that books don't matter? Sure kids in the future may be able to flip through their kindles and keep up with various characters and stories at once, but they would never get the satisfaction of marking their favorite pages and being able to pick up that old book and re-read the sentences that changed their life, and flip through the worn out pages as their hands guide the all familiar route to their favorite passages.

Joe Meno once said that the message is more vital than the medium it is shown through, and with this I agree. But if we only looked at the vital things in life, what pleasure would we get? Let’s say books were handbags, sure we could carry our purses in plastic bags but there is no pleasure in that and it is not appealing. The same goes with a book, anyone could type words on a computer and call it a book but I believe what essentially makes a book, a book, is the packaging that goes with it. What makes a book, a book, is the book cover artist working for months to ensure that when someone passes by this story no one can miss it. What makes a book is making sure that the book is the perfect length for the story and that the pages are distributed evenly to make the reading flow better. What makes a book is an eight year old girl lugging around her worn out copy of Twilight because she feels as it is a part of her, another limb. Sure with e-books we can get what is vital, but we can’t get the life of the “book”.