Now I’m a Movie Maker

Authors these days wear a lot of hats. Not only do we write books; we have to be our own marketers, becoming website designers, bloggers, tweeters, Facebook aficionados, and who knows what else on the social media circuit. We design bookmarks, organize blog tours and interviews, and do whatever we can think of to get awareness of our book out there.

One of the hats I wore this week was that of a movie maker. In that role, I created a book trailer for my new novel Breathing Space. It was quite fun putting this together, although time consuming. Step one was to write the script. Having read somewhere that the trailer should not simply copy the blurb description on the book cover but be more poetic and abstract, I composed something akin to a poem. Once I had the words, I needed the images. This took the most time as I searched through my own photo files and stock photo websites. I had certain ideas in mind and finding just the right photo and/or video was not easy. Eventually I was satisfied with what I had collected and proceeded to put them together to make a succinct little film. The last step was to find the music, which I did by visiting the website of one of my favourite composers of royalty-free music, Kevin MacLeod.

After putting it all together, there was lots of tweaking, making sure the timing was right in the coordination of the music with the images. Finally it was finished. Want to see the result? Here’s the link.

By the way, this isn’t the first book trailer I’ve made. My first novel, The Unraveling for Abby Settel, also has a trailer posted on Youtube. If you’d like to watch it, click here.