Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing

Helping authors achieve their dreams

Guest Blog Week: How to Make a Book Trailer

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Myrlin A. Hermes is the author of THE LUNATIC, THE LOVER, AND THE POET, which will be published on January 26th by HarperCollins

Book trailers are all the rage these days, but it can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have one professionally made—an expense your publisher will probably be reluctant to shoulder unless yours is a genuine blockbuster. And most of them, quite frankly, still end up looking generic, cheap, and dull. But it’s not that hard to put together your own book trailer for next to nothing; and many of the same creative issues we deal with as writers–such as establishing tone and setting, creating vivid characters, pacing, and remembering to edit–are also applicable to creating an effective video.

You don’t need fancy equipment, either–I put together mine using Windows Movie Maker on a tiny 10″ MSI Wind netbook. Just a disclaimer: I am not endorsing any product–of course, if you have Photoshop and professional video editing software, or even a Mac with iMovie 2, the mechanics will be easier. Nor am I claiming any particular expertise–in fact, I had never done any video editing before–but I’m willing to share what I learned through trial-and-error as I put together the trailer for my novel The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet. It took me about four days to make–in retrospect, I would recommend scheduling a bit more time for the project, especially if your plans also include eating or sleeping!

First, you’ll want to select your background music. This can be very helpful for establishing the tone and genre of your book, but it’s important that your selection be royalty-free, so you don’t run into rights issues. Kevin MacLeod’s site Incompetech has a very good selection of music clips searchable by both genre (examples: African, Electronica, Silent Film Score) and feel (Driving, Eerie, Uplifting). These are all available for use royalty-free: he requests only credit on YouTube (or wherever the final piece is uploaded) and a $5 donation per clip used. I was so happy with the short piece I found for my book trailer, I donated $25. Still a bargain compared to hiring a professional!

Once you’ve chosen your music, it’s time to pick out your images. This is where you as the author have a real advantage over the professional video-editor, who may not have even read the book. Take some time to “cast” your characters and choose images that resonate with your themes and settings. Again, you’ll want to make sure that these images are in the public domain or that you’ve secured the rights to use them. There are stock image and video sites on the web where you can pay a flat fee per image or clip, but I was able to find everything I needed for free on Wikimedia Commons. To edit and resize my pictures and add the text, I used the open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP.

Don’t get too wordy or complicated with your text–a few phrases about the premise and characters are fine; repeating the entire jacket copy on plodding powerpoint slides, as so many book trailers seem to do, is a sure way to cause eyes to glaze over and browsers to click shut. Yes, your target audience is readers–but remember–this is a visual medium. Let the words support the images.

Windows Movie Maker allows you to drop photos and movie clips onto a storyboard, cut between them using several different transitions, and apply a variety of effects. These effects can be a lot of fun to play with–but, just as 90% of the time the effectively invisible “he said” is a better tag for dialogue than its showier (muttered/sputtered/exclaimed/interjected) replacements, I would stick mostly to the basic cut and fade transitions, unless you want your trailer resembing an ’80s music video. In my minute-and-a-half long trailer, I only ended up using four “specialty” transitions.

One thing you can’t do on Windows Movie Maker (at least on my version, 5.1 for Windows XP) is the pan-and-scan or “Ken Burns effect”–a nice way to give a cinematic and dynamic feel to still photos. For this, I downloaded a piece of Freeware called Digital Clip Factory. It’s another video editing program, and in theory I could have made the entire trailer using nothing else–but I found WMM a bit more versatile and easier to use, so I mostly used DCF to create short video clips of 1-2 second pans across individual photos, which I then imported to my WMM storyboard.

Try to vary your pace a bit–just as you wouldn’t want to fill an entire page with sentences of the same length, mixing longer and shorter shots and alternating pans and zooms helps to hold the viewer’s interest. I also included a fun bonus “easter egg”–a flyaway page of the Poet’s writing (which I put together using GIMP) passes by too quickly to be read, but can be perused at leisure on my novel’s Facebook group.

In general, shorter is better–aim for under two minutes, and don’t worry if that doesn’t give you time to cover every twist in the plot. Get across the genre, setting, and general premise of the book, briefly introduce a compelling character or two, then direct the viewer to your website or blog for more extensive information. Remember–the point isn’t to win an Oscar for your brilliantly complex cinematic achievement, but to get people to buy the book!

How effective is a book trailer as a promotional tool? Well, that depends on how you use it. Sitting on your website, it probably won’t help much–after all, those readers have already heard of you! But posted in relevant communities or sent to targeted recipients in the media, it can act as a virtual “calling card” for you and your book. These days, people are accustomed to multimedia grazing on the internet, and it’s easier to click on–and forward–a YouTube video than download and read a sample chapter.

Want to see what I mean? You can check out my trailer, below. (You’ve got to be a bit curious about it after all this, right?) If you think the book looks interesting, or know someone who might like it, wouldn’t it be easy to share the YouTube video, tweet it to your friends, or repost it to your blog or Facebook page? In fact, why don’t you take a minute and do that right now? No, that’s fine, go ahead–I’ll just wait right here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  6. goldhawk says

    So, I bothering with a publisher because? If I'm doing all the work to promote my book, why should I pay for a rubber stamp from a publisher? Why don't I just ePublish it (with POD for those diehards) and save myself some money? It seems to me that publishers are working themselves out of a job.

  9. J.C. Hutchins says

    That's a terrific trailer! With access to free sound effects, stock video footage and more, authors are often far more empowered than their publishers on matters of marketing and publicity.

    Further, authors can go beyond traditional expectations of book trailers and be truly innovative. I recently combined the "book trailer" and "book blurb" concepts in the promotion of my supernatural thriller. The end result, a video blurb, was the first of its kind. An example:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyyX1iN8gG0

    With creative thought and innovation, authors can become incredible advocates for their own work — a very good thing indeed.

  10. Arabella says

    For a book trailer, this is dramatic and eye-catching. I'm not usually impressed w/ book trailers, but yours is a notch above the rest. Good show. Jill

    p.s. I probably wouldn't read a historical for this part of history (I'm really snobby w/ my history preferences), but I'm REALLY interested in your work w/ Aphra Behn (that I learned about from your site). I will have to check back for your progress on that.

  12. maine character says

    A second kudos on the Blasphemy section, and all the way through there's nice subtle touches of fades and zooms and timing without all the gimmicky schtick most video programs offer. The Hamlet manuscript page worked well, too. Thanks for the tips!

  13. Jordan McCollum says

    What a useful post! Just one note: I have Windows Movie Maker 5.1 as well, and you can actually do some "pan and scan" effects on photos, if I understand what you mean.

    (I don't remember how right off the top of my head, but I've done it before. I'll have some more free time this afternoon and I'll figure out how to do it again, then post instructions here if no one else has.)

  14. rose says

    That was a delight to watch! Congratulations on a professional looking trailer and thanks for the informative, helpful blog.

  17. Dara says

    I made a mock book trailer for NaNo. It was lots of fun.

    Thanks for the links to everything 🙂 I may have to try and "remake" mine now.

  18. Jil says

    Your book trailer is excellent- and very professional.Hard to believe you could glean all that from the internet and put it together so dramatically.

  21. D. G. Hudson says

    Loved the trailer, Myrlin. Thanks for sharing the techniques you used with the readers of Nathan's blog.

    I'll watch for the book to appear at my local Chapters. I tend to like these alternate takes on historical figures.

  22. Mira says

    I love posts like this – thanks, Myrlin. A step-by-step how to on a book trailer – really helpful!

    Your trailer is fantastic. I love the dark theme, the medival music and graphics and then the wicked sense of humor coming out at the end. Very nice.

    If I get a book published someday, I may come back to this post and look at it for instructions, or I might just see if you're available for hire to make one for me. 🙂

    Best wishes on your launch next month!

  24. Molly H says

    Consider me interested! The book looks amazing and the trailer is perfect. Some of these book trailers just make me cringe (especially when the actors are a bit stiff and awkward-sorry, that's a personal pet peeve.) But this one just sings! The use of paintings and antique-looking text set a lovely mood. Plus, you manage to drop in some humor. Nice work. Thanks for sharing some cost-efficient ways to promote our own stories!

  26. Priya Parmar says

    Thank you! My boyfriend is a trailer editor and my book comes out in january 2011. We are starting work on my book trailer now and were not sure where to begin so this is really helpful!

  29. Myrlin A. Hermes says

    Wow, thanks everyone, for all your compliments! I had a lot of fun making the trailer, but then I love this sort of obsessive, painstaking creative art project–I could easily see how someone else would find it really frustrating! My boyfriend got used to getting up in the morning and finding me still awake, hunched over the computer tearing my hair out, going "why is it STILL half-a-beat off-sync with the music!?!"

    @Jordan McCollum—I was able to zoom in and out using WMM, but couldn't figure out how to pan across a shot. Of course, as I said, I was just fiddling with the programs, figuring them out as I went along, so it may well be possible–just not obvious!

    @J.C. Hutchins—Thanks for posting the link to your trailer! I think it's a great example of what I'm talking about here–really gets across the genre and emotion of your book without getting bogged down in too many plot details.

  31. Jordan McCollum says

    @Myrlin—This might be the same place you found the zoom effects, but there are a few more options that allow for moving across the pictures. (However, they're not named super well, so it's easy to miss them.)

    Once you've got the picture on the timeline, right click on the image and select Video Effects.

    Ease In/Out essentially creates a zoom in/out effect.

    Pan Upper Left to Upper Right (and vice versa) moves the picture across the screen, but cuts off the bottom for some reason. (No idea why they don't have more options for that one.)

    Zoom In/Out has several options: upper/lower, right/left. This does actually zoom on one of the corners of the picture (or start in a tight shot on the corner and pull back), but it gives an easy corner-to-corner pan effect.

    (There are also Zoom effects that are static, focusing only on the chosen corner without moving.)

    Are those the effects that weren't enough for your trailer? (I'd like to know b/c I do plan to do this eventually and probably won't have a better movie making package by then.)

  32. Houston A.W. Knight says

    Awesome blog! Love the trailer you did for your book! Very exciting…I will buy it!

    I hope you don't mind but I'd love to link you up on my blog for my viewers to come see you.

    Good luck!
    Hawk

  35. Jen P says

    Interesting, I particularly love the choice of fonts used – and thanks for the link to royalty free music – a bonus. I use Apple Mac and Final Cut Express which is a great tool.

    Question: have you shared this as a draft with anyone you wanted to 'approve' or view it, ahead of its public release, and if so, how? I have been using the 'private' function on YouTube, but find it a bind as there's several steps non-familar users can go wrong with password/login and so on – the files are too large for email and not everyone has FTP client access, and can be a pain to have someone install who isn't too familiar with it. DVD hardcopies work, but are slow and can get lost. Any experience there you could share?

    Good luck with the book – your name alone should sell it – fabulous!

  36. Anonymous says

    Sorry, but the Powerpoint style "trailers" don't do it for me. Plenty of stock video available out there, Use it.

  37. annerallen says

    Really useful post–and what a great trailer! Better than a number of professional ones I've seen. It's beautiful to look at, and the music is powerful without overwhelming us. Plus you gave us that little hint of humor at the end. Impressive work.

    I'll be keeping an eye out for the book.

  38. Other Lisa says

    Wow, what a useful post! Thanks for so clearly illustrating the process.

    (I am guessing you can use iMovie on the Mac but honestly have no idea…)

    And the book sounds great! Congratulations!

  43. mesmered says

    Wonderful trailer, inspiring enough to make me want to search out the novel . . . and a rather interesting response from Goldhawk. Does Goldhawk have a point, that if such a powerful and professional trailer can be produced by an author (and one imagines that other parts of the marketing could be handled equally professionally), what's left for mainstream marketing and publicity to do? I'd be interested in your response and also in Nathan's over this point. Great stuff!

  45. Myrlin A. Hermes says

    @Jordan McCollum–Are you using Windows Vista? I have XP, and a slightly different menu pops up under Video Effects–it has Ease In/Out but none of the pan or zoom effects. Of course it would have been more convenient to be able to do it all in one program!

    @Jen P–When I finished the trailer, I sent it as an email attachment to my agent and my editor before uploading it anywhere. I don't know if there's any sort of password-protected or "invite-only" YouTube equivalent, but it seems like a good idea!

    @Anonymous–I agree, a lot of the "Powerpoint" trailers end up looking cheesy–but then again, so do a lot of the ones made with stock footage! I searched through a lot of clips, believe me–but because mine is a historical novel, I found it easier to find relevant images in old classical paintings. Of course, this will vary depending on the nature of the book.

    I was fortunate to find the perfect Raphael painting for my cover–Bindo Altoviti (the 16th century Florentine banker who sat for the portrait) is truly the image of my androgynous, cross-dressing Prince Hamlet–who also ends up as the fair young man with "a woman's face" from the sonnets. So I searched for artwork from the same period to complete the "universe" I was creating.

  46. Regan Leigh says

    Wow, this is great timing for me. My novel is about to go through it's last beta round, so it's not anywhere close to being published. (crosses fingers) But I very recently made a trailer for it. There is a thread in the forums here that discusses this topic.

    I love independent bands and was able to find the email address for one of my favs. I emailed them last week and they immediately responded and granted me permission to use their song. That's an avenue for people to consider if they have a certain song or band in mind for their main character.

    I also found preview images of pics that were free. I just didn't get the nicer larger sizes because of the cost. (And since I'm not using my video commercially, aka not even to the publishing stage, it's all legal.)

    I used iMovie and it was actually very fun to do. I agree that I would never pay anyone a great deal of money for such a thing, especially since I was unsure of how worthwhile it would be. But I do have to say that I've gotten a great amount of buzz and positive feedback from my video. It's starting to make me wonder if it's a bigger tool than I'd once thought. I'm sure to get wonderful beta help from this one! That's good enough for me right now. 🙂

    I'd suggest others consider doing a similar one, even if only to point out what type of book they're working on.

  48. Jan Markley says

    Awesome! My 12 year old niece/marketing director created the book trailer for my debut novel Dead Frog on the Proch. And I paid her in chicken wings and chai tea!

    Check it out on my blog …

  49. Christine says

    Nice trailer, although I have to say that in my opinion, Maggie Stiefvater's trailer, Still Wolf Watching, for her book Shiver is my favourite book trailer ever.

    Great post though, and your book sounds really interesting! 🙂