Book Trailers

In general, I'm not much of a fan of book trailers.  The publishing people (except for a couple of exceptions which I will note later) cannot seem to get it into their heads that books are in fact not movies and should not be treated as such unless they actually become one (and sometimes not even then).

Movies can easily have trailers because they can take some of the footage and place it on the screen with a bit of editing.  Books, however, have no natural visual footage to take advantage of so the promoters will likely take quotes out of the book and write them on the screen or have them read in the background; as far as I'm concerned, this actually reduces the excitement I have regarding a work since there is a distinct lack of substance elsewhere.  Sometimes they'll try to compensate for this by panning promotional artwork, which is beyond tacky and should remain with the fan trailers, not with professional ones.  Reenactments of scenes is another avenue sometimes chosen by the book's promotional people, but because the work to make the visual right is nowhere near the levels taken by movie people and, again, makes it look unprofessional.

Let me start by showing you what is possibly the least professional trailer made by someone who really should have known better:

It looks like it was made by a teenager playing around with some default program in an hour or two.  I just looked up the history of the video and it was made in three hours by the author herself.  I would like to beg all the authors out there to not take it upon yourselves to make a trailer that looks bad and post it for the entire world to see.  It will only be appreciated by friends of yours and fans you have already--and it may send away your potential or even current fans.  If your promotion looks like crap then the reader may begin to believe that the product is also crap.  (I haven't read the whole book yet--only the promotional chapters--but it appears to me that the book might be fairly good and better than the first one).

I should mention that the following Shades of Milk and Honey book trailer is the exception to the authors making their own trailer rule.  Of course, it should also be noted that the author was a professional of the visual arts long before she started writing novels.

It's nice and I like it, but it seems like it's missing something that I can't quite put my finger on. Oh well, I'll figure it out later.


Here's a trailer that went for the whole "reenactment" thing.  (Ironically, the scene is from the book before this one and says practically nothing about Crossed itself--probably because there was very little plot, but that's another story).

I'm pretty sure that more than one fan was not happy about the casting decisions--and this is probably the main reason that people decide to dislike trailers like these.  As much as they want to know more about the characters they love, they do not want official people to define exactly how they look and sound.  It's much better to keep it to the imagination and if the audience is going to get an actor put in front of them, they'd better be good.

Here's a trailer for a book I'd like to read someday but haven't started yet:

It might get some people excited to read this book, with all the cool exploding words and stuff.  But honestly, the narration sounded like (and probably is) the back cover version of the book.  If I'm going to watch a book trailer, I'd like a little more than what I've already found out by checking out a synopsis.

The only book trailers I have truly enjoyed are those that do not behave like a movie trailer.  Rather, they behave like in-world promotional material.  Below are two such book trailers.

The first is one of three videos promoting Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, where the video is aimed at encouraging characters of the books to follow the rules of their (falsely) utopian society.  (I'm not going to post the other two here; I will note that there is a fourth video promoting this book, but it goes all synopsis-y and isn't as enjoyable as the "infoganda").

The second is commercial aimed at prospective buyers of synthetic humans some time before everything went wrong in Dan Wells' Partials.

Neither of these are cut-and-paste jobs.  They add depth to the world, piquing the interest of those familiar and unfamiliar with the book alike.  And neither of them look like crap, which is always a good thing.