Be Creative with Book Trailers

Tip of the Day: if you want to make your own booktrailer, don't forget to get all the rights or permission to use any songs, images, etc.

I'm going to be completely honest in saying that I don't watch many book trailers. As a librarian, I find most of my books through other avenues, such as review journals, book review sites, friends, etc. But I think book trailers are an awesome idea, especially to appeal to teens and tweens. If you friend a teen on Facebook and post a video, they are likely to look!

In the book trailers I have seen, there are a few things that appeal to me the most:

• Short
  
• Too-the-point
• Creativity
• Not revealing too much information
• Not showing too many images that I can't form my own when reading the book
  
• And music (which Kate already touched on yesterday)

There's nothing that I hate more than watching a movie trailer, then going to the theater and realizing that every good part was shown in the trailer. In fact, I try to avoid a lot of movie trailers now as a result of this trend. When they come on during the previews, I get the basic information, then I close my eyes so I don't see too much. And when I do manage to peek through, I've gotten really good at determining which movies have revealed too much in the trailer and as a result, I'm probably not going to fork over $8 to see it in the theater.

Book trailers work the same way for me. I only want a teaser. I don't want all the information, or even that much information. Just basic info to get me interested.

Like this trailer for Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick. It doesn't give too much away, opens with a great image of someone falling, has great music to fit the theme, and it doesn't show a ton of images that I can't decide how I want the character to look myself or the town to look when I'm reading (which is one of the reasons I personally read over watching movies).

I also believe that everyone is capable of making a book trailer that works, so you don't have to spend tons of money by hiring a production company to make one if you don't want too or don't have the funds. There's lots of inexpensive and even free movie making software out there, and if you spend a few hours learning about the software, you can make one yourself. Or maybe you could find a local film school or even high school to make one for you. We are doing a short clip for a book at my library and the high school students are going to make it for us as a school project.

Basically get creative. They can still be really simple, though, such as this one for Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride, which only uses animated text. Or this one from Meg Cabot in which she basically just talks about the book. They both do the job of telling you about the book. And really for me that's all I need.


--Emily, Miss Querylicious