Book Trailers

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Wikipedia

Book Trailers

A book trailer is a film or video advertisement for a book which employs techniques similar to those of movie trailers. They have been used increasingly in recent years. Since 2002, the term has been a US-registered trademark of Circle of Seven Productions, who began using it connection with their advertising campaigns starting with that for Mind Game, by Christine Feehan.

There is a very fine line between producing a trailer which allows the reader the freedom to create their own mental images of the characters and locations and one which goes too far and looks more like a trailer for a movie. This is a design issue unique to the book trailer genre.

Like anything else the skill consists of finding the right balance, the happy medium between cinematic over-production and an uninspiring series of stills and straplines.

Another fatal mistake is to produce a cinematic book trailer which looks and sounds more like a music video interspersed with short pieces of text and no voice-over. This seems to provide very little impulse to read anything let alone read the book that is meant to be the main reason behind creating the trailer.

The Guardian - On a Screen Near You

Read the book? No, but I loved the trailer

The days of judging a book by its cover are drawing to a close. Publishers have finally tapped into the MTV generation, and now it is possible to make your literary choices in advance online by watching a sequence of rapid-fire images accompanied by a thumping score, big flashing words and, if you're lucky, a deep-voiced American talking about 'one man' and 'his quest to find meaning in a world gone mad'. Yes: there are now trailers for books and soon, according to Steve Osgoode, director of online marketing at HarperCollins Canada, they will be everywhere.

Turning literature into moving pictures is a risky business. So how does one go about representing a 400-page tome with delicate themes and complex characterization in a 40-second video?

Newsweek

Seen Any Good Books Lately?

The movie rights for "The Thieves of Heaven," a new thriller about a secret Vatican treasure, have only just been sold, but you can already view a trailer online. Of course, it's not teasing anything that can be seen in theaters-the trailer's for the novel. Publishers and authors are increasingly commissioning trailers for books-some with dramatizations by actors that could easily be mistaken for movie trailers-that can be viewed on their Web sites and even aired on TV and in movie theaters. "We've seen a huge increase in interest [for book trailers]," says Sheila Clover, whose company, Circle of Seven Productions, pioneered the concept in 2002 and has trademarked the term "book trailer." "We're already booked solid this year." Other companies are now producing "book videos." HarperCollins Canada started offering book trai-sorry, videos-on its Web site in February, and The Book Standard last week announced the winners of a contest in which film students created videos for three new Bantam Dell titles.

SF Gate

Seeking readers via 'book trailer'

In his quest to bring literature to the masses, Jeffrey Lependorf turned to an unlikely ally: YouTube.

Lependorf, executive director of the Literary Ventures Fund in New York, recently invested $10,000 to help promote a French memoir on the verge of being published. Instead of the usual press releases or book tours, his money was

used to create a short video about the book that was distributed on the popular online video site that attracts an estimated 20 million visitors per month.

The "book trailer," as the promotional video is called, is living up to its name. Complete with actors, arty cinematography and a noirish voice-over, it's the closest the book industry has come to a movie-style preview for a new title.

Big Bad Book Blog

Book Trailers: Now Showing at a Bookstore Near You
By Dede Schatz

We all love movie trailers. They pull us in with drama, comedy, even fear, and get us longing to go to the theater. Now publishers are joining the act and producing "book trailers"-short previews to show off how books will keep their audiences on the edge of their seats. But how can a book trailer reach the number of people who see movie trailers?

Actually, a good book trailer can reach more people. Thanks to popular sites like YouTube.com-which has 900,000 unique visitors a day-iTunes, Google Video, and Yahoo, publishers and authors can post their trailers for the world to see. The key is to create a video that people want to pass on to their friends and connections. To add more punch and make the trailer viral, use special offers, humor, or suspense.