Book Trailers: The Key to Successful Video Marketing

It used to be a big deal when the author bio on the back of a book included contact information such as an e-mail address or a Web site. Now hardly anyone bats an eye when a writer—new, emerging, midcareer, or veteran—blogs alone or with others, sends out missives via MySpace or Facebook, and checks in on occasion with Twitter, GoodReads, RedRoom, or the latest Web 2.0 social networking site. But none of these Internet marketing approaches reflects the publishing industry's struggle to convert the latest technology into increased book sales as forcefully as video content—specifically the book trailer, an idea that's turned into explosive reality thanks to broadband Internet connections, the astounding success of YouTube as a distribution channel, and the almost desperate need to capture the attention of a younger generation that is allegedly reading far less than the previous one.

In an attempt to tap into this potential market, a growing number of authors and publishing professionals are producing videos promoting the latest literary releases. If it's interesting enough to watch, the thinking goes, surely it's interesting enough to read. What was considered a novelty back in 2002, when the term book trailer was coined and trademarked by Circle of Seven Productions, is now not only commonplace, it's de rigueur.

As with any other marketing initiative, however, there is no hard data to track whether watching a trailer translates into book sales. An article published in the Wall Street Journal last June found that a series of trailers for Chad Kultgen's debut novel, The Average American Male (Harper Perennial, 2007), racked up millions of views on YouTube—and that more than twenty-five thousand copies of the book were sold, according to Nielsen BookScan, which is said to account for 70 percent of a book's sales—while a trailer for Jami Attenberg's The Kept Man (Riverhead Books, 2007) was viewed only a few thousand times and did not boost copies sold beyond the three thousand mark, a typical figure for a work of literary fiction.

Both Attenberg and Kultgen created attention-grabbing videos that reflect the tone and voice of their books—brash and comic in Kultgen's case, dreamlike and lyrical in Attenberg's. The gulf between their sales figures likely reflects the speculative nature of such publishing ventures, not a causal relationship between book trailer and consumer behavior. What's easier to quantify is what happens when a book video is not good. And because of the form's growing popularity, there are many more bad book videos than there are good ones.

"At the most basic level, the trailer needs to give the viewer the information necessary to purchase the book," says Erik Anderson, founder of BookScreening.com, a new Web site designed to be a clearinghouse for such videos. "Some of the book trailers we've received have left out the author's name and, in many cases, an image of the book's cover."

The first thing a fledgling author can do to produce a book trailer that readers will pay attention to is to remember the obvious: The video must make reference to the book and its author in some way. But how can writers avoid less obvious traps and sidestep the indignity of their book video's being deemed "too cheesy"? Kassia Krozser, who hosts the publishing industry blog Booksquare, believes the key to a successful book trailer "is to offer up some lagniappe—something that can't be found on Amazon, something that isn't a repeat of the cover copy. Authors are really well positioned for this, especially if fiction is their forte, because catching the attention of people today requires creative thinking."

If you're lucky enough to have a publisher willing to produce a trailer for your forthcoming book—or if, like the majority of authors, you need to create your own trailer—the following points should be kept in mind before embarking on this difficult and time-consuming yet potentially rewarding and creative process.

“Kassia Krozser, who hosts the publishing industry blog Booksquare, believes the key to a successful book trailer 'is to offer up some lagniappe—something that can't be found on Amazon, something that isn't a repeat of the cover copy.'”