Book trailer. An oxymoron, right? Once, the answer would have been a resounding ‘right!’ but this growing trend is just one of the ways in which digital media has changed our experience of buying and reading books.

So what is a book trailer? Think of the trailers you watch before a movie, or on YouTube, and you’re thinking in the right direction.

But a book is not a movie, so should a book trailer be just like a movie trailer? Well, yes, there is one pretty big similarity – both have the sole purpose of introducing a viewer to a story, ‘teasing’ us with glimpses of character, plot and style.

After this the two diverge; not only do book trailers not have ready-made footage, but reading a book is quite a different experience to watching a film. So book trailers don’t always look much like movie trailers, and the variety (and varying quality) of book trailers is a reminder that we’re dealing with a different kind of product.

Let’s not be down on book trailers, though. It’s this point of difference that makes the genre (if I can presume to call it that) an exciting tool; having no pre-made footage takes the lid off a box of possibilities. The movie trailer genre, on the other hand, has been locked down hard and fast for years.

So if we want to make successful book trailers, how do these bad boys work? No film footage to splice together, no hard-and-fast genre conventions – and ‘no thanks’ to a synopsis scrolling up the screen in text!

Great trailers respond to the style of the book with any techniques that suit: animation, still photos, film grabs, voice-over, text… the trick is to find the heart of the book and build a short video around that single idea, not re-create the story in movie version. It doesn’t necessarily need a huge budget either. How the story is introduced and hinted at is where creativity is let loose.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of creatively taking a single idea from a book and making a ‘teaser’ is the trailer for Gone by Mo Hayder.

I’m also proud of this trailer made by our very own Amanda Curtin for her new collection of short stories, Inherited, which you can find on UWAP’s YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/UWAPress?feature=mhee.

If you’re interested in learning the basics of creating your own book trailers, writingWA offers a yearly workshop on this topic.

Kiri

Sales, Rights & Marketing Coordinator

Image: Salvatore Vuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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