Book Trailers
Book trailers look cool. Are they worth the cost?
When I first learned about book trailers, the concept intrigued me.
Who doesn’t love movie trailers? I like to browse through YouTube and check out the latest trailers for upcoming movies and TV shows whenever I need a few minutes to relax. It’s fun to get a sneak peek and see if there are cool must-see shows or movies for me to check out on the horizon.
If trailers can work to hype up a movie or TV show, it can do the same thing for an indie author marketing their book, right?
In theory, yes. In reality, no.
Book trailers pose a few major hurdles for indie authors. And, honestly, the costs and time involved rarely outweigh the rewards.
Creating a trailer with high production values is difficult for many authors to do on their own with a limited budget. Video editing requires mastering a whole different skill set than writing. You need to engage the senses with relevant sound and imagery for one or two minutes and that’s not as simple as it sounds. Choppy editing and/or boring imagery will turn away readers faster than it will attract them to your book. Licensing music for a trailer can be costly and sampling copyrighted music without written permission will open the door for a lawsuit.
Discount services like Animoto will let you create a book trailer at an affordable rate if you choose to do it on your own. They have a library of licensed images and licensed tracks for you to use.
But here’s the catch with low cost book trailers: they do practically nothing to move the sales needle.
I won a free book trailer for my novel Pandora Reborn in a Facebook group a couple of years ago. I enjoyed the finished product. I liked how they put creepy music against some images of the front cover and reviews praising Pandora Reborn.
Did the trailer make a difference in boosting sales? Absolutely not.
I can’t think of a single sale I can trace back to having a book trailer. I shared my Pandora Reborn trailer on social media and posted it my author website. It was greeted with an indifferent response.
Marketing services geared toward indie authors will often charge a princely sum to produce a book trailer. Why? Creating a book trailer with production values mirroring book trailers from major publishing houses requires spending thousands of dollars. If you make such a hefty investment, you will literally need to sell thousands of books to accrue enough royalties to recover the trailer costs. Many indie authors are simply not in a financial position to roll the dice in such a manner.
Ultimately, book trailers can be a fun marketing tool which may draw a few more eyeballs to your book. Just don’t expect it to be a silver bullet that cracks the Amazon algorithms and shoots you to the top of the bestseller list.
I don't think I've ever seen a book trailer that wasn't awful, to be honest. And it's nothing to do with the quality of the book, or even the skill of the filmmaker or artists involved. I just don't think that books and movie-style trailers are compatible. Books happen to be read with your eyes (usually), but they're not a visual thing. Translating that into a video trailer is always going to be extremely awkward.
There might be exceptions of course - children's picture books have strong visuals built-in, which could theoretically be adapted into something fun. But even then, you're really talking about adapting the book into a cartoon, if you want it to be good, and translating a picture book into animation is no minor endeavour.
To take advantage of video, instead of pretending to be a movie it's probably better (and likely cheaper) to do a high quality video reading of the opening chapter, or some sort of behind-the-scenes segment. Not sure that'd move the sales needle either, but I reckon it'd be a more useful bit of awareness-raising at least.
I learnt how to do montages from scratch using screenpal. Pixabay, unsplash and pexels all have free to use images, video and music. A voice over and moving images do wonders for interest