Sex and the Austen Girl

[pegkerr]

Interesting book marketing.

Laura Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict and Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict now has a web series going, Sex and the Austen Girl.

When you publish a novel, people immediately start saying, "So when is it going to be made into a movie?"

When you tell them it's been made into a web series, all of them will say "Wow, that's great!"

Many of them will add, "Uh...what's a web series?"

There was a time when I, former Luddite and current new-media convert, would have asked the same question. A web series is no different than a TV series except that it's made specifically to watch on your computer or smartphone. Oh, and it's a lot shorter. A typical web series episode (or webisode) runs anywhere from a minute and a half to 4 or 5 minutes. I've seen 8-minute episodes, but that's sort of pushing the attention-span envelope.

My episodes will run about two minutes. Two funny, pithy minutes. Twenty of them.

Sex and The Austen Girl and it's a comedy web series inspired by my novels Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict and Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.

In it, two young women, the protagonist of Confessions and the protagonist of Rude Awakenings, have switched bodies, time periods, and lives. One is from Regency England; the other from 21st-century Los Angeles. The only thing they appear to have in common, aside from their devotion to the works of Jane Austen, is a propensity for romantic disaster. And so who better than they to face off over the pros and cons of life and love and being a woman in Jane Austen's world vs. the modern world?

How did this series come to be? After all, in my books these two young women never meet. It's sort of difficult to meet when you've switched bodies with someone in another time. And who would you be meeting, actually...yourself? Sort of twists the mind in pretzels. But in the world of imagination, anything is possible, even two women from two different times who have traded identities meeting in limbo to give each other dating advice, compare notes on how to survive in their respective centuries, and ponder the mysteries of changing your Facebook relationship status.

How this series came to be was the result of a wild idea I had in my car, where I thought it would be a blast to launch Rude Awakenings, which is just out in paperback, with bookstore events featuring characters from the books debating whether or not we are better off today or in Jane Austen's time, especially when it comes to relationships. After brainstorming the idea with my new-media-genius-filmmaker husband, it all morphed into, hey, let's do it as a web series!

Which is how I got to watch my heroines come to life. And meet each other. They'd like to meet you, too. Arabella Field and Fay Masterson are the amazing actresses who become these characters. So take a two-minute comedy break, and crack the code of dating and mating-Austen style. Watch Sex and the Austen Girl on Babelgum.com.

You can also follow along on Twitter: @TheAustenGirl. I've read the books, and they're fun, rather fluffy reads. Another article on the web series here.