Book trailers: The good, the less good and the ugly

Book trailers. When I bring up the subject, most people look at me like I'm making it up.

"Is that like a movie thing, but about a book?"

Well, yes and no.

Book trailers are videos used to market books. It's a new technique that uses an existing technology in a (wait for it...) novel way. (I couldn't resist.)

Book trailers explained?

A book trailer is a short video meant to get you interested in a book. Some of them are dramatizations of the book's story, much in the way a movie trailer is a clip-montage that tries to tell the beginning of the story. Others are a combination of an interview with an author, some endorsements for the book from other people, and a little about the story. And I just saw one that was more meta- it was about the way the book was written and how the author evolved in her thinking about how to market it. As marketing.

So, it can be a lot of things. The cool thing is that there is no exact way to explain a book trailer. They are so new that there isn't a right way yet. It's an approach that is still learning about itself.

The good

Jonathan Gunson wrote a post on "The Best Book Trailer I've Seen in Years," and I have to agree with him. It's a stellar article about a stellar book trailer. Go there and watch it. He says:

"[It] works so well because she tells the ‘story of her story’ and makes it deeply personal."

I think that's pretty spot on. The author spends most of the video talking about how she wrote the book and how people reacted when she started talking about it. She talks about how they got bored when she said it was about science, but got interested and even excited when she talked about how it was about a story of saving lives. That's valuable information for anyone trying to figure out how to use video to market books.

It's less about hyping up the book than it is about connecting with what people, your potential readers, are interested in and excited about. It's personal.

When I get to the end of this trailer I think, where do I click to buy this book?

The less good

Many book trailers I see look like the author and/or his/her marketers were doing the best they could with a limited budget. I've been there and I've put out video that isn't up to par. My take on most book trailers is like what Ira Glass says:

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

That's where most book trailers are to me. They're new. They're trying to be good. And we all know what makes a good video, but few of us know how to make one. And those of us who are authors, well, we know how to write and create visuals and emotions in peoples' heads, which is a very, very far cry from knowing how to make something that is visual in its core nature.

I'm not going to single anyone out. What I do know is that it feels like a home video. These trailers have voice-overs telling the beginning of the story and/or telling you to get excited and go buy this awesome book. The visuals are all photos that take turns on the screen, along with some home videos.

I get to the end of the trailer and I think, well, maybe I'm interested. But when I think about it in relation to the compelling videos I see for so many different products, including books, on the Internet, it's not pushing me any closer to wanting to buy. It's ok, but not amazing. And my perspective is that if you're going to make a video, it needs to be a great video with good sound, stellar visuals and compete with any other marketing video out there. Good enough is not good enough, in my opinion.

The ugly

It's still the wild west out there in book trailer creation land. There are a lot of what I would consider "ugly" book trailers out there. I've seen people get their friends to dress up like characters and try to act out a scene. That sound fun, but it's not a good trailer. I've seen people do some fancy Ken Burns effects with pictures and read an excerpt of their book recorded on their laptop. Again, that sound fun and you can do it in an hour or two, but it looks like what it is- homemade.

There are more examples there, but the core is: If you don't make videos for a living, don't make one for your book. It's not going to help, and it may actually hurt.

Get a professional.

I'm curious about everyone out there who buys books- have you seen a good book trailer? Has a book trailer ever led you to buy a book? What did you think of the one I think is so good?

Images courtesy of theunquietlibrary via flickr and bbcworldservice via flickr