Tips For Creating Your Book Trailer

This past weekend I attended the Nebraska Writer's Guild Annual Conference. We had several great speakers, including Mark Coker, Founder of Smashwords, who gave a great presentation on the benefits of self-publishing and interesting data related to self-published books (more on that in another post).  Another great presenter was Doug Sasse with the NWG, who gave attendees a crash course in creating book trailers. Because of the growing popularity of book trailers, I thought I'd share some of his information with you.

Book trailers are simply multimedia presentation videos with a defined structure:

Act One--the intro--30 seconds long--grabs attention, introduces protagonist, antagonist, time, place, tone, mood and conflict; also includes an inciting incident.

Act Two--the midpoint/confrontation--60 seconds long--uses scenes from the book that move toward the cliffhanger.

Act Three--the cliffhanger--10 seconds long--provides a hook to interest readers (without revealing too much)

It's also important to have a "call to action" that asks readers to do something--visit author's web site, purchase the book, etc. This section is 10 seconds long.

Finally, there is a "credits" shot that lasts 10 seconds at the very end.

Sasse also outlined five different types of book trailers:

1. Synopsis--commonly used with romance books and is like using liner notes on the inside of a book. An example is "Never Surrender" by Deanna Jewell.

2. Logline--most common of all types of trailers. Take your book's log line and break it up throughout the trailer. Example is C.K. Volnek's "Ghost Dog of Roanoke Island."

3. Tagline--an ending line that makes a point. An example is from the movie "Apollo 13"--"Houston, we have a problem."

4. Pitch--a trailer similar to how an author might give an elevator pitch of their book to someone. An example is Robin Palmer's "Little Miss Red."

5. Character--the trailer is done from a character's point of view. A great example of this is "The Healing Spell" by Kimberley Griffiths Little.

Two of the easiest ways to produce your book trailer are using iMovie for Mac and MovieMaker for PC, which comes with Windows XP and Windows 7. You can find all kinds of royalty free stock photo, video clips, sound clips, etc. online.

But the most important thing to remember when creating your book trailer is to keep the images moving! Even if you simply have photos, you can pan, zoom, etc. The minute your trailer stops moving, it dies!!

As soon as I get the cover art for my middle grade novel, "Animal Andy," which releases this August by MuseItUp Publishing, I am going to begin working on its book trailer! If you have any other helpful comments about making book trailers, please let us know!

--KSR Writer