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The Creation of a Book Trailer

A Look Inside the Book Trailer Business with Author Jenna McCarthy

by Jillian Bergsma Manning / September 2015

Movie trailers have been around since the 1910s, and the majority of moviegoers discover new films through these short clips, whether they are aired on television, in theaters, or shared via social media. The book trailer business set out to replicate this model, albeit on a smaller scale, as a way to build hype for books through video.

 

What’s in a trailer?

A book trailer should be under two minutes long (anything longer gives away too much) and should act just like a good movie trailer. Some authors act out scenes from the text, read especially good (but short) excerpts, or address the audience with the benefits of reading this particular book. Each genre has a stereotype for how to go about creating your trailer. For example, cookbooks often showcase upbeat authors or actors cooking and discussing the theme of the recipes (think along the lines of a Rachael Ray commercial). Horror novels feature creepy music, frightening or graphic photos, and powerful phrases that flash across the screen. Check out sites such as www.booktrailersforreaders.com for current trailers.

 

How Jenna McCarthy got started

Author Jenna McCarthy created a trailer to promote her book If It Was Easy They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing the Honeymoon: Living with and Loving the TV-Addicted, Sex-Obsessed, Not-So-Handy Man You Married (which is hilarious, by the way). The video has garnered over 30,000 views and was a great way for McCarthy to get word out about her book.

“I was a video virgin,” she admitted. “I knew that video was the ‘wave of the present’ and an incomparable SEO tool; I also knew that YouTube was important and that people were spending something ungodly like four hours a day on there.”

YouTube has become one of the biggest social media sites in the world, and some sources say it is the second most popular search engine, falling just behind Google. Beyond your book trailer, go ahead and post any book-related video you have to YouTube: interviews, promotional pieces—anything you have that will help amp up the hype. As McCarthy said, YouTube is a very high-traffic search engine and can be a great tool. The moment you have some usable book footage, create an account and start uploading. Include specific tags and titles (e.g., “Jane Doe’s First Book”) so your readers can have easy access to your videos.

“I wanted my video to be something that people would pass along to their friends and ultimately [crosses fingers] go viral,” McCarthy went on. “The videos that achieve that illustrious and sometimes elusive status aren’t necessarily the slick or overproduced ones, and they’re rarely the videos that are trying hard to sell you something. Like a good movie, good trailers make people laugh, or they make them think/cry, and hopefully they make people want to buy your book.”

 

What did it cost?

Creating a trailer can entail a bit of a cost, a number that varies based on the quality and the type of video you produce.

“There are really no rules here yet,” McCarthy said. “If you have modest acting and editing skills, you could pull off something like that for the cost of a video camera. You can get decent music for free online, and most of us have a friend or two we could talk into ‘starring’ in our videos for the reasonable price of a six-pack or something similar. My video cost quite a bit relative to all of that—but I enlisted a sponsor to help cover the production and distribution costs” (more on that later).

McCarthy chose to go the professional route, and while many folks may not have the budget, it does help to have a level of polish to the trailer. You don’t need to hire Steven Spielberg, but you also don’t want to record your video with grainy definition or create it on PowerPoint. Watch some iMovie tutorials if you’re going to try to DIY, or make contact with a friend or professional who has some video skills.

 

When do you use a book trailer?

Just as your website should be up before your book, so should your book trailer. We’re talking several months in advance so you can get your readers in a tizzy waiting for the release date.

“Publishers really like preorders (and the more you have, the more they are likely to print in the initial run), so I’d say sooner is better, within reason,” advised McCarthy. “My book was coming out in October, and my video went out late July. I think a little sooner would have been even better.”

 

How do you get the word out?

Post it on YouTube! Immediately! Link to it from your website, blog, Facebook, etc. E-mail it to a few friends (or your entire address book) and ask them to forward it. Everyone wants to watch a good video, and they’ll be even more excited to learn about your awesome new book.

McCarthy also recommends enlisting some extra help. “I had a publicist through Berkley [her publisher], so helped spread the word—and I also hired a publicist to help with placing it strategically in the blogosphere. Honestly, just promoting the video could be a full-time job, so you can’t get too caught up in it or you’ll forget that the trailer was designed to be a sales tool for your book. The trailer costs money; the book (hopefully) makes money. That’s a critical distinction you don’t want to forget.”

 

What about getting sponsored?

There are no guarantees here, and getting sponsored can be akin to finding that Ken-doll-perfect boyfriend with the convertible, mansion (with a hot tub), and impressive wardrobe. Sometimes it’s just make-believe. McCarthy, however, was able to get her book sponsored by Zestra, a company that specializes in “bedroom products” for women—a perfect pairing for a book about dealing with an all-too-human husband.

How’d she do it? “I made a phone call. Literally—it was very spontaneous. I hadn’t really decided how much money I was going to spend on marketing my book or how exactly I was going to market it, but I knew that I wasn’t going to do a lot of sitting around in dusty bookstores signing books being bought by friends who would have bought them anyway. I thought the video idea was fun and different and also—and this is critical—would make my publisher happy.

“When I found out how much the video was going to cost and how much updating my website was going to cost and factored in the time/resources it would take to get it out into the world, a lightbulb went off: I needed a sponsor! One company sprang to mind immediately, so I just picked up the phone and called. I had worked with them several times and knew and liked the CEO tremendously. I sat down and wrote up a one-page proposal. She made one tiny change, signed it, and I had a check within a week. Not only did I have someone sharing the bulk of the cost with me, but they have their own customers and their own mailing lists and weren’t just willing but excited to promote me and the book and video as well. It was a triple win.”

 

To wrap up

If you want to learn more about book trailers, check out the great links in the sidebar, and be sure to watch as many as you can to see what you like and don’t like from authors in your genre. As always, research is key to creating your personalized social media presence!

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