Book Trailers

[A few weeks ago] on my LinkedIn updates there was a comment in the ALA forum about Cinematic Book Trailers. Having no idea what the commenter was talking about I checked them out and they were awesome! Two of them totally got me interested in looking up the book.

Many of the book "trailers" I've seen are actually book reviews (guilty here) a la Reading Rainbow. (And who didn't love RR's "but you don't have to take my word for it!" section?) But who says we can't push the envelope a little? I like the idea of snagging a reader through a sort of visual book jacket blurb, especially as the summer reading program is starting up. What better way to market a One Book, One City Reads campaign than a highly visual trailer? This one produced by Red14Films totally made me believe that a movie was due out for the book.


Okay, so the envelope is being pushed a lot. This has great production value and after I realized there isn't a movie due out, I said to myself, well, I gotta read the book! Which is the point, right? I was speaking with a co-worker who used to run a GameStop store and he told me he instituted a similar strategy to increase pre-order sales. He loaded the video trailers of the upcoming games on a laptop computer and had it running on loop and bam! Pre-orders rose from nineteen a week to nineteen a day.

Now, I've got all kinds of opposing thoughts as well. As much as I enjoy the production quality of the book trailer example above, I wonder to myself about... Update: 7/17/2014 I must have forgotten my opposing thoughts because I can't remember one. If you have an opposing thought, please list it in the comments section and we can have a conversation. Oh! Wait, maybe one of the opposing thoughts is that the production quality of these book trailers is so high that it feels impossible to "compete" with them if you are a small community group looking to have some video fun with a group of kids making a scene from a book. But, who cares? Kids aren't in it to compete, just to have some fun expressing their favorite parts of a book and for every book with a professional trailer, there's gotta be awesome books without... right. **end stream of consciousness argument**

Other book trailers to get ideas on making one.
http://reederama.blogspot.com/2014/01/award-winning-book-trailers.html
(Check out the Mr. Wuffles trailer)

A very cool reader's map guide to How to Make a Book Trailer
http://www.booktrailersforreaders.com/Prezi+On+How+To+Make+A+Book+Trailer


Using a mix of live action and pages from the book. This sample brings up questions about fair use of books when making a trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2gN_8P9yts