Book Trailers

Book trailers are an increasingly popular way of advertising a book, especially with the success of YouTube. In many ways they can act as visual blurbs, pulling in readers in a way that only moving images and sound can really do.

On the other hand, they can also prove disastrous if done wrong. A bad movie trailer has stopped me seeing good movies, so a bad book trailer would stop me reading a book I might otherwise pick up on the basis of just the blurb on the back. Even worse, authors who create sloppy and unprofessional book trailers create an expectation of similarly sloppy and unprofessional writing, even though the book itself could be amazing.

Therefore an author needs to decide if they are qualified to make their own book trailer, and to do this they need to look at exactly what they want to achieve. Novel Publicity splits book trailers into four categories: 1) movie style trailer; 2) author interview/reading; 3) slideshow; 4) mini scene.

These are relatively self-explanatory, with the first being the most costly and difficult to produce, but also potentially the most impactful, while the second provides a personal touch by introducing the author to the reader. The third is overdone and usually where the sloppy stuff shows up, as it’s cheap and easy to do. YouTube even has tools that allow you to load up some images and write in some text to create a ‘video’ in minutes, but it’s not the real deal, in my opinion, and generally looks awful. The final option is a fully acted out scene from the book, which could be mixed with the author narrating it.

If an author has absolutely no technical knowledge of video production or the software used to make good videos, then they need to bring in someone who does. A poorly produced video will have a monumentally negative impact on book sales if it’s seen by a large prospective audience. No video at all would be better than something that scares readers away.

Personally I intend to work with the movie style trailer and the author interview/reading approach, all in separate videos. The trailer will be the main attraction, using animation of the characters and scenes from the book. I have some background with animation and will probably use Flash for this, but if I find I cannot achieve my goals I’ll bring in some one who can. The other videos will be easier to make, as they’ll mostly be me talking to the camera. I intend to do a series of interviews, as well as a series of book readings. I may even combine a reading with some animation.

All of these will be available through my YouTube channel, along with other videos of interest. I don’t imagine that many readers search for books through YouTube, but it can never hurt to tackle as many avenues as possible when promoting a new book and/or author.