Book Trailers

I say why be active when you can be inactive? I'm unable/unwilling to spend money on advertising, but aren't there free ways to advertise? Without using social media, I mean?

My recent experience with almost being scammed has gotten me to thinking about book trailers. I started a YouTube channel under my pen name years ago, but only posted three homemade videos before abandoning it. I could certainly create more of them. I've never tried ClipChamp, instead using the old Microsoft video editor, but I might give it a whirl to see whether it has better tools.

Of course, making book trailers is time consuming, and thus I would need to feel motivated to even attempt one. I'm certainly not going to steal from my precious writing time to do it. But if nothing else, book trailers would provide new content for my author site.

When I was deep into creating music videos for my band, I obviously didn't have to worry about background music ~ it was our music ~ now I would have to utilize royalty-free pieces, which can work. I employed it for the couple book trailers I have on my YouTube page. I have no idea whether ClipChamp offers that. I also have learned that only "some" of its features are available to Microsoft subscribers, which seems unnecessarily stingy. I'm paying for 365, after all.

This is all speculation right now. I'm not sure I'm interested enough to dive in. I do know that I certainly can do it better than a place that charges $3,000 for a trailer (so outrageous). Honestly, pull up Creative Trailer House on YouTube and you'll readily agree. Really? Three thousand dollars for that? (Their videos convinced me that the "offer" I received was a scam.)

Creating one's own book trailer isn't hard. It is time consuming, because you want the photos you use to populate the screen at the right time, so fiddling with time intervals is a pain. And of course, you need to find the right pics, royalty free, because you wouldn't like it if someone used your content without permission. Arranging and rearranging the sequence until you're satisfied can take time, too, and you might want to also add effects. It is possible to find some free stock video as well. Vecteezy is a site I found just by doing a quick search, although I have not explored it yet, and it appears that most of their video is not free. I know there are others, too ~ free sites. I've used some of them in my music videos. People like moving pictures.

What you really want to accomplish is establishing the mood of your book. Remember, a trailer isn't supposed to be lengthy, and depicting specific scenes, even if you really love them, won't mean a thing to someone who hasn't read the book. Use captions to highlight the theme or insert a couple of lines from your book instead. **Don't forget to stick your book cover in, either at the beginning or the end ~ or both.**

The inherent problem with book trailers is that they won't be discovered by anyone organically, so you'd still need to promote them somehow. That's mainly why the only reason I'm considering doing it is to embed them on my website.

For my purposes they're still more useful than newsletters.