Presentation on Creating Book Trailers

[Dennis]

I was invited to speak to our local authors club about book trailers. I posted a blog piece about this session and there are links there to various book trailers that I used as examples in the presentation. Hopefully, both authors, and readers will find this useful. I'd love to hear your comments.

Preaching to the choir presentation

[Justin]

Interesting article. I do agree that not everybody makes the best quality book trailers whether it be because they used the wrong video maker or they simply rushed it and it doesn't look it's best. However I am curious as to whether your trailers you made have been a hit. Did you get a lot of views and did those views lead to sales?

[K.P.]

i bought moviestorm to make my trailer lolz it's fun

[Kat]

K.P. wrote: "i bought moviestorm to make my trailer lolz it's fun"

iMovie for Mac is really fun and easy to use too! Well... I've only tried making lyric videos but I'd recommend it for those who aren't tech savvy.

[Dennis]

Collecting specific data about trailer results is difficult. There are agencies that can be hired to do so, but most of us cannot afford such luxuries. That said, I can see bumps (sometimes considerable) in book sales when I post a link to a trailer. I have several trailers out there, some are just experimental and I don't make any noise about them, but several have been very effective.
The two that have the most impact are:
1. Building a fire, rubbing sticks
2. Ham Radio Hiking Gear

I mentioned the first one in the blog piece, the second I did recently. The second one is ham radio themed and since the book has a bit of ham radio, I tailored the video to that specific audience. This has proven very effective. Again, I don't have solid research data, but anytime I publicize a video, I see direct results in new readers and sales.

Nether video is high quality, far from it. I tried to make up for that with a strong message and gave the viewer useful, informative information. I think too many book trailers concentrate on selling books. It is much better to let the reader decide if they would like to read the story and give them something in the video that they can take away with them.

In answer to your question, the fire video is 112,613 views as of this writing and the ham radio is at 4,568. Even though the radio one has smaller numbers, it has had a fantastic response with people Tweeting about it and writing me to tell me they found the book because of the video.