A great book trailer can be a powerful addition to your book marketing campaign. Like a movie trailer, a book trailer is a short promotional video. It can be used across multiple social media platforms to help you grow your online presence and reach a wider audience. Bets of all, it doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Here are five tips to help you make a book trailer on a budget that will get noticed.
1. If you don’t know where to start, use your book’s back cover text.
Think of your book’s back cover text as your book’s trailer script. It is brief and precise, and it grabs the potential reader’s attention right away. It illustrates the main marketable plot points or themes and has a creative spin. In the video above, I used the first paragraph of my book’s back cover text.
2. When it comes to online content, it’s best to keep it short.
Even though the video above is only 27 seconds long, it sets the scene, highlights the overarching theme of the story, and leaves the viewer wanting to know more. When making your book trailer, aim for twenty-five to ninety seconds in length because people’s attention spans are short when it comes to online content.
3. Make multiple book trailers.
By simply using my book’s back cover text, I made one book trailer per paragraph. As you can see in the videos below, using different photos, video clips, and music makes all the book trailers powerful, unique, and captivating.
4. Target your audience.
By merely writing a new sentence and picking out a few of my favorite lines from my book’s back cover, I made the trailer below that targets fans of Comic-Con.
5. Use quality photos, video clips, and music.
I used promo.com to make these four videos. Promo is a really solid platform with over 15 million videos their library and over 130,000 free clips plus 1,000,000 free photos and a wide verity of music. It’s a very affordable way for a small business like mine to be able to produce quality video content.