How to Make an Effective Book Trailer

The first truly effective book trailer that I ever saw was one for a book by K.M. Weiland, Behold the Dawn. It was just like a trailer for a movie, and it made you feel that you knew what kind of book it was, that you could almost taste it, without ever having sampled a single page of the author's writing.

Here it is embedded below. What do you think? Is it an effective book trailer? Does it make you want to read the book? And if so, how does it achieve this effect?

Many of the best book trailers are quite brief. It often does not take more than two minutes to get across to the potential reader what sort of book it's going to be, what kind of world it depicts and the main conflict that it seeks to resolve.

Consider this trailer for the new best selling science fiction novel The Galactic Mage by John Daulton.

Notice that the trailer for The Galactic Mage manages to make its point in a minute and a half.

When I started making book trailers myself, I had trouble keeping the message that brief, For instance, the trailer for my children's chapter book, Ping & the Snirkelly People, is over three minutes long.

Coming in at three minutes and six seconds, the trailer for Ping & the Snirkelly People may seem a bit on the long side. After all, this is a children's chapter book. Why should it take longer to get across what the book is about?

The problem is that sometimes conceptual conflicts take a little more effort to explain. Learning language and the intellectual struggle that it entails, and then discovering that once you've mastered language, the cultural divide is still there is what Ping & the Snirkelly People is about.

Did the subject matter require a longer trailer? Maybe. Or it could be that it was my first book trailer, and I could have brought it in at two minutes, if I had been a little more experienced.

The next book trailer I did was for John Wheatcroft's book, The Portrait of a Lover.

The Portait of a Lover is a high concept, literary novel. Getting across the feel of thing is a little bit different from relating the story of a historical romance or a science fiction fantasy. The background music, a piece by composer Jackson Hill entitled "Magnolia Blooms" creates a somewhat disturbing effect. And the trailer is by no means short.

The next book trailer I made was for our upcoming book A Thousand and One Stories of Pericon de Cadiz, which is an English translation by John Moore of the flamenco classic by Jose Luis Ortiz Nuevo.

The music I used was played by the translator, and since this is an oral history by a famous flamenco singer, Juan Martinez Vilchez, the video features a recording of one of the stories in the book.

The length of the trailer, in this case, was determined by the length of the story and the musical accompaniment.

The shortest book trailer I have made so far is for my novel, Vacuum County, which is coming out on April 19 of this year. Making this trailer was a major breakthrough for me. Not only does the trailer come in at little over two minutes, it also manages to skirt that difficult question: "What is this book about?"

"What is your book about?" People used to ask.

"It's about commercial chastity," I used to answer cryptically.

This did not satisfy anyone, but I always felt I was lying when I just gave them a brief synopsis of the plot. The plot implied to their minds a genre that the book did not belong in. Now, if anyone asks what the book is about, I tell them: "Watch the trailer!"

Of course, the trailer can be misleading, too. One friend who had read Vacuum County many years ago, upon seeing the trailer, asked: "Have you changed the book?"

No. I haven't changed the book. Just the way I'm presenting it.

In my zeal to keep all my trailers short, I kept the first trailer I made for Our Lady of Kaifeng, my upcoming novel, down to under two minutes. But then I got some feedback from someone who could not read the text in the amount of time allotted. He told me that with the Chinese-like font I was using he would need more time for each caption.

Watch it yourself and tell me what you think. Is the video posted above too short to understand? Is the longer video posted below easier to follow? Leave a comment with your opinion.

Some books defy categorization because they are somewhere between reality and fiction. One such book is Transatlantic Lives by Jesse Bier, coming out this week from Inverted-A Press. Somewhat of a memoir, it still has elements of fiction.

For the trailer of Transatlantic Lives, I used photos provided by the author that went well with the themes of the story. Since this is not a plot-based book, no attempt was made to spell out the plot, and a two minute plus video was the result.

I'm not sure yet what the real solution should be or whether one size fits all. We can often boil down the plot of a novel into a succinct summary. For such a book, the shorter the trailer, the better and more effective it will be.

Other books do not have a plot, because they are not novels. For episodic memoirs, like A Thousand and One Stories of Pericon de Cadiz, highlighting a single episode by telling its plot may be a good way to go. But.some books are a collection of vignettes, like Transatlantic Lives, where the meaning of the book is more in the relationships of the characters than in the things that happened to them. In that case, a short video that sets the mood is better.

But for those books that have a story to tell with an unusual twist, maybe adding an extra minute to the trailer would not go amiss.

For some books, you want a cinematic feel, You want the people watching the trailer to feel as if they are going to the movies. But we can't always have actors to do the scene for us. However, if you have a beautiful cover drawn by a professional artist, then you can just take different shots of the same sequence, in order to get the feeling of going in for a close up.

This is what I did with my latest trailer, for the book Theodosia and the Pirates. The beautiful cover illustration by artist Lanie Frick came to life when viewed from different distances.

(c) 2013 Aya Katz