When you look up book trailers, you usually find very
dry, dull, and most of all, cheap videos that leave you less likely to buy the
book than when you started watching. I
don’t think this is from a lack of trying.
I think it’s from a lack of looking at it from the reader’s point of
view, and a lack of creativity.
There are a lot of trailers that have the author reading
the book. In these cases, I can’t even
tell you what he’s saying. When given
visual and audio cues, we tend to take the visual. I hear “Person talking, person talking,
person talking, person talking.” It’s suggestion
through visual leads. There are many
other trailers which show cliché images, like a person’s shadow while a
narrator, (usually the author,) reads a part of the story which doesn’t show
how the book stands out. And then there
are those trailers with just words. I
might as well just read the description at that point.
What works is making it look like a movie trailer, using
the elements that make people go, “I wish I was watching THAT right now.” If it’s a book, people will want to read it
to get those same images in their head.
In doing this, the most important aspects are
twofold. First, be clear about what it
is; and second, show how it stands out.
If you show a trailer that makes it look like every other book of the
genre, people will just go, I’ve already seen it.
As for being clear, understand that this doesn’t
necessarily mean showing it in chronological order, or showing whole scenes, or
even telling the whole plot. Sometimes
getting the idea across includes showing a series of shots that express your
story or theme. In the case of many
fiction stories, this means just showing clips of single lines of characters
mixed in with other shots appropriate to the genre.
In non-fiction, the best route to go, I find, is some
sort of documentary. Make it clear that
this is a true story, and make the images, words, and music go along with it.
How to get these images is the biggest question. You’ll have to make a budget for it, but
don’t break the bank on this. You can
get great stock pictures at several sites, like Pond 5 or Shutterstock. Shooting actors in front of green screens
makes it possible to put whatever you want behind them. And sometimes what you want are images you
don’t have to create. For instance, if
it’s non-fiction, you often want images from the true story itself, including
photographs and newspaper clippings that are probably already in your book
anyway, so you have the rights to them.
And if you’re not planning on showing your book on TV or
some other place that requires all the rights to be cleared, you can get away
with a lot more. Youtube actually allows
you to post video up of other people’s material, as long as you’re not making
money on it. If you’re doing a book
trailer, you truly are not wanting to have other people’s commercials on it,
because the trailer itself IS a commercial.
Therefore, you don’t need to be having commercials on it and making
money from it. Below are a couple
examples of how I’ve done this.
Relic Worlds – Lancaster James and the Search for the
Promised World: I used all sorts of
images from other movies and video games, intercutting my actors in front of
blue screens that were replaced by backgrounds that looked like the places in
the movies and game videos, so they looked like they were in among the other,
better visuals. The cuts are usually so
fast that most of it looks like it’s all part of the same scene. Also, in true trailer form, I have a
character start talking in one shot, and it carries over the next, which gives
even more of a sense of connection. To
top it off, I used music from Battlestar Galactica, which not only sounded better,
it appealed to BSG fans. Youtube allows
me to have this up, as long as I’m not making money directly from the
trailer. And I’m able to post the
trailer up in various locations.
The Great Heist – I mixed typewritten information with
images from the book. I then put it all
to the music of The Untouchables, which is thematically appropriate to the
material. Again, while it’s not music
that I own, as long as I’m keeping it on Youtube and not making money directly
from it, it’s okay.
Two of them that I’ve had a lot of luck with are the ones
for Pro Bono and the Pick Your Path books.
Pro Bono – I did two videos in this case. One of them was a semi-documentary where I
mixed footage of an interview with my father talking about the case with images
of the case itself all to Bruce Springsteen music that was written about the
story. The other is simply a real
documentary that was made in the 1970s about the case. This has been extremely popular, as it is a
documentary lost to history about a case no one forgot.
The pick your path books actually allows the viewer to
pick a path. They get the initial video,
which takes them onto a planet where they follow the main character to some
ruins. He looks at three doors, and the
reader gets to click on whichever one they wish to go through. This takes them to a video that shows them
what happens when they go through that door.
(Each one, of course, just leads them to one of the books.)
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