You Oughta Be In Pictures!
Like pretty much every author I know, I’m always trying to find new ways of promoting my work to potential readers. It’s tough out there these days. We’re all watching our pennies, and for most of us our disposable income is shrinking. That means less money to spend on entertainment. Meanwhile, the ranks of writers are growing steadily. Sometimes it seems like there are three writers for every reader I stumble across.
One method of promotion that I see getting a lot of press lately is the book trailer. You know: those one to three minute mini-movies that are -- counter intuitively -- supposed to help sell books. As other methods of marketing are exhausted -- or just fall flat -- I see more and more ebook authors trying the literary version of the music vid. With mixed results.
I was recently reading an article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/fashion/11AuthorVideos.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=author%20takes%20a%20star%20turn&st=cse) about how putting together a book trailer is pretty much considered standard procedure now in mainstream publishing. Generally mainstream book trailers consist of a writer talking about writing, or reading from their latest work, but a lot of trailers are more dramatic, more theatrical. More like mini-movies.
One thing the NYT article pointed out was that it’s difficult to draw a direct correlation between book sales and book trailers, but then it’s often hard to draw a direct correlation between most promotion efforts and book sales. Besides, what works for one author and one book, may not work for another.
Still, there is a native appeal to the idea of a book trailers. We’re a visual generation. Most of us grew up with TV, movies, and way too many of us spent our formative years watching music vids and playing video games.
Plus, a lot of us dream of seeing our work on the big (or even little) screen, and for the vast majority, a book trailer is as close as we’re going to get.
Not everyone thinks book trailers are a great idea. Laura Miller of Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/01/26/book_trailers)
thinks they’re pretty much a waste of time and money if only because the average book buyer is unlikely to ever see a book trailer. (Unless they’re already checking out the book and the author, in which case…the trailer is probably moot.)
I tend to agree with Miller, both about the effectiveness of book trailers and the difficulty of getting the right people to see them. Still, they are an interesting development in book marketing, and my feeling is, since it’s all cumulative anyway, can having a book trailer possibly hurt?
Well, yes. If the trailer is really bad, it probably can hurt. An amateurish or unattractive trailer might actually be worse than no trailer at all -- this is certainly my gut feeling scrolling through the offerings at YouTube. But a good book trailer can set you back anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and most of us in the indie publishing sector don’t have that kind of dough to throw around on an “iffy” marketing tool.
Bringing us back to the problem of finding new ways to promote your work in an increasingly crowded market. I mean, how many banner ads can we run or excerpts post before it begins to seem like we’ve exhausted another resource? This is how I happened to be pricing book trailers one day and came across a casual reference to the fact that most of us with computers already have “movie making software.”
Say what?!
I checked my laptop, and sure enough. I’ve got something called Windows Movie Maker right there in my programs. Macs have their own movie making programs. But even if you’re computer doesn’t come with a DIY movie maker, there are all kinds of free downloadable programs on the web.
Anyway, I clicked to open WMM and -- totally intimidated by what I saw there -- immediately closed the program. But I was curious enough that I began surfing the web for articles on Do It Yourself book trailers.
There are tons and tons of articles on making your own book trailer. To be honest, I found most of them confusing. They either took too much for granted on the part of the student director or they got too technical. Let me just tell you now that you need to read a number of them and then you need to play with your movie making software. Be patient. Be prepared for a slow learning curve.
A couple of articles I found useful -- not least because of their helpful list of additional links -- were:
http://thewriterslife.homestead.com/booktrailers.html
I won’t reinvent the wheel by writing my own article on how to make a book trailer (or at least not until I feel I’m better at it myself), but I’ll share my tips on things to remember when creating a book trailer -- as both a fan of book trailers and a novice book trailer producer.
1 - Find good music. There are plenty of royalty-free sources. If you are not using a royalty-free source, use only a snippet (the ideal book trailer length is less than two minutes long), credit the artist, and promote the buying of the song/album by posting your book trailer to YouTube where buy links will be attached automatically for copyrighted works. I don’t know that I’ve ever bought a book based on a book trailer, but I’ve definitely bought albums based on them.
2 - Go easy on the text. Rather than thinking of your book trailer as a mini-movie, I’d think of it as a music vid. Instead of offering blocks and blocks of text like a book jacket, restrain yourself to key phrases that capture mood and theme. In a book trailer, mood and theme are actually more important than plot and character.
3 - Avoid spoilers. I can’t believe how many book trailers give away key story points -- the very things writers would be shrieking at their publishers for. You’re not actually making a movie of the book, so don’t reveal the name of the killer or the climactic moment of the book. Don’t tell us how it all ends. The idea here is to get someone to buy the book.
4 - Keep it short. The basic rule of thumb is between one to three minutes, but most people seem to agree about a minute and a half is optimum for a DIY book trailer.
5 - Use large enough photos and art. Unless you’re deliberately going for a blurry effect, you want sharp, clear photographs and film clips. That means selecting images of 400x500 and up. Anything smaller is probably going to be blurry.
There are all kinds of other tips and tricks, but those are generally covered in the majority of book trailer articles.
As for my own results…I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with book trailers. I’ve yet to sell a book based on a trailer (at least that I know of). The biggest benefit, oddly enough, is that planning out the book trailer in advance is a great way of clarifying in my own mind the tone and theme of a book I’m working on. Book trailers as a writing tool! Who knew.
Oh, and I suppose it’s only fair to share one of my own trailers. Here’s the trailer for my m/m mystery romance Fair Game, due out from Carina Press August 2nd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61zbV6jHiug
Fair Game
Coming from Carina Press in August!
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