Greetings from the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

My name is Jeff Reid. I am the creator and CEO of Storycasting LLC, and we operate a fun new website (www.storycasting.com) that enables ordinary people to extend their imagination by "casting" current movie stars in the roles of favorite fiction. We've only been "live" for 6 weeks, but in that short time we've had 20K pageviews from 4,000 visitors in 50+ countries. We also have about a dozen authors - several of them LDS - who have come on the site and "cast" their own works.

Of course the site is fun for people who read books and like movies, and we think that LDS authors should be as much a part of that picture as their fanbase will allow. As the search engines find the works on our pages, the internet traffic for those authors will go up, and eventually people searching on particular actor names will land on the works of LDS fiction that have been cast on our pages. But we also created the site to help engage those reading, writing, and teaching literary fiction as well as genre fiction. Because many young people like movies but think books are boring, we think that the site has the opportunity to plug "movie fun" into literature, by having students cast works of literature and then return to class to discuss it. For that reason, I would like to encourage more of the LDS community to use the site, and to engage in a casting dialogue with their fans there.

It is, of course, free and non-spamming for both readers and writers, and quite anonymous - except for published authors, we make no attempt to gather real names or any other personally identifiable information beyond an email address. Because of federal child protection rules, we have also tried to limit access to those 13 and older. Additionally, we are not booksellers, simply pointing purchasers to author websites and Amazon for those activities.

When I walk through our local Deseret bookstore, I see so much appealing fiction on display, and I'm sure that much of it must be by LDS authors. However, our database only has about 70K titles, and we don't even know to add something until somebody suggests new titles that they'd like to cast. Someday, we'd like to have every work of fiction in the store available to "cast" on our site, and every LDS actor. (To be fair, I'd like to have all the fiction titles from the "evangelical" crowd, too - we're not trying to censor the library here.) The community we're creating will one day be a viable commercial operation, but for now it's just for fun, and it will be enough for now if we can grow our base of authors, titles, actors, and users. We're also going to expand into short stories, poetry, screenplays, and graphic novels - many of them have characters and tell a story, and so considering a cast is a reasonable activity as part of their themes, settings, and messages.

So, I hope I have sufficiently engaged your interest so that you'll take a look at the site, consider the LDS authors that might want to know more about it, and share the site with them. We offer authors a special "author account" whereby they can cast and comment on their own works "as the author", and authors seeking that account can email directly to authorsupport@storycasting.com.

Regards,

Jeff Reid
Storycasting.com
"for the movie in your mind"

On Facebook as Jeff Reid
On MySpace as Storycasting