At the time of this posting, the 100 Years Later series will have just come to a close. After leaving Paris and traveling across the channel to London, we hit several tourist attractions around the city starting at the Courtauld Gallery. We then got a spectacular view of London from the Sky Garden before heading to another famous garden in East London: St. Dunstan’s East Church Garden.
We then walked past Tower Bridge on our way to catch “Much Ado About Nothing” at Shakespeare’s Globe, which I followed with sharing a song from my upcoming music album “Star Crossed.” The next day, we started at Victoria Tower near Parliament to recreate one of Levi’s photographs. We then went to Westminster Abbey, passed the royal guard outside Downing Street, visited the National Gallery, and even joined a flash mob in Piccadilly Square.
On our final day in London, we spent all morning at the Tower of London before going to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the evening. There, we got a look at the famous whispering gallery, climbed the dome, and recreated our last photo on this trip.
Overall, while London was one of the shortest parts of the trip, it was the most memorable for me. It had been a life goal of mine to see the city, as it has been a source of literary inspiration for me for decades at this point. Getting to see the city that inspired so many of my early writing projects was an incredible experience, especially with as much as we were able to cram into the short time period.
With the trip coming to a close also means the end of the 100 years later series. This video series started on January 12th of this year and has totaled 1 hour, 31 minutes, and 18 seconds of content. With a video posted nearly every day, it has reaped a decent following across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and even LinkedIn.
In the first blog breaking down this series, I talked about the marketing theory behind the episode format as established by the Italy section. Then, after the France section, I published this blog taking a look at the analytics across social media platforms to check the performance of this campaign. Here, with the series coming to a close, it is finally time to see whether this campaign has succeeded into turning into book sales.
However, in the final weeks leading up to the original release date, I ran into an interesting hiccup in production: international copyright law. Despite the fact that all of the photos I took were my property and the items I took photos of are within the public domain, because those images would be for commercial use within my ekphrastic poetry anthology, I needed to get permissions from a range of museums and civil authorities. While some offered the images free of charge, several others charged fees for the images publication that I could not afford.
With weeks to go until the book release date, I had to make a decision: do I remove the photos, thus removing the context for several of the poems in this book? Or do I postpone the book release date by months in order to get the legalities in order?
I decided to do neither of these things. Instead, I came up with a creative solution that will be announced in the coming days.
It has yet to be seen if this creative solution to a timeline problem will still result in funneling people into purchasing the poetry anthology. However, based on the positive feedback across social media channels, it is likely that this series will increase sales beyond those who know me personally, which was ultimately the goal of this series.
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