Moving Pictures: Books Trailers Are a Hit among Book Fans
This may be the best excuse to riff off that rock album title.
An ingenious media marketing gimmick, introduced within the last decade or so. for novels and even non-fiction books is the Book Trailer--essentially a movie trailer that may be as simple as a slide show of images to live action actor performances to an animated feature.
One of the most popular YA books today is The School of Book and Evil, check out the Book Trailer of the novel and you'll see why the hype around the book is as good as it is.
It may have been started by devoted fans of some popular author who wanted to have more people know of the book other than personally endorsing the book on a blog or on You Tube. Then people took notice and now even publishing houses release their own book trailers for their best selling authors.
Orbit Books official book trailer for M.R. Carey's horror bestseller, The Girl with all the Gifts (M.R. Carey is also Mike Carey writer of Lucifer, the Vertigo graphic novel from DC Comics.
All rights reserved to Orbit Books and You Tube.
Any novelist can see all the different kinds of shorts on You Tube, and book trailers really provide more than just a good look at what your book's all about. Or it can be a complete mess of things--bad actors or cheap looking animation.
Book trailers have also spawned a cottage industry by
both DIY and professional marketing services by creative media artists
and there is plenty of good work shown right now on You Tube that have
raised the awareness of novels and fiction as well as other books as a
story experience more than just the idea of reading a page until you
finish. Book trailers may even coax the viewer to check out the book reviewers to see if the book is worth its salt.
HarperKids' crazy popular title: The School of Good and Evil by Sonan Chainani, which has an upcoming movie too.
All Rights Reserved to HarperKids You Tube channel
Making book trailers cost money and time. Creating a good trailer often takes trial and error for the uninitiated. But digital filmmaking tools are readily available and sometimes free. If you just want a slideshow, that works too. Making a good book trailer is what you are looking for.
Some purists might thumb their noses at people who buy books based on watching a book trailer, but if publishing houses are jumping on the wagon to push their product to be on equal if not better footing as actual movies, then a book trailers have something good going for them. If more readers are hooked to books pushed by a visual tease, that ups the ante for books as an immersive entertaining experience as movies.
Book trailers are just ads. Dedicated to pique your curiosity and engage you to buy that author's stuff. Some authors command the celebrity status of rock stars so you see some book trailers working off just having an author talk about his new book. But like music videos and movie trailers, book trailers are an art of their own too.
A classic favorite, HarperKids' The Graveyard Book, a YA novel from rockstar comic book author Neil Gaiman. All Rights reserved to HarperKids and You Tube.
Many readers are inspired to do fan-made book trailers
the same way fan-fiction writers fall in love with some stories and
write more stories about their favorites on mobile apps like Wattpad. Fan-made
stories are great PR too for the books they push, and more often than
not, if a fan makes a book trailer of your novel, it must be really
inspiring that strangers are pushing your book to other readers too.
As
content marketing, book trailers present an extraordinary opportunity
for creative media designers to cut their teeth on a medium that
promises plenty of rewards for making almost any publication product a
viral hit if done well. Expect better and more creative book trailer
for not only fiction books but non-fiction properties as well.
A YA book that became a winner of the HUGO award along with China Mieville's City and the City, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi All rights reserved to megustaleer and You Tube
If making book trailers grows on kids as another creative outlet aside from sharing stories like they do on Wattpad, expect all schools and art classes to have plenty of book trailer projects as one more reward for kids who are book fans. Who said homework needed to be rote and droll?
