Book Video Trailers: From A to B
So, yawanna make a book trailer, but don't
have the $20K to hand over to professionals,
and your geek friend says she's too busy?
Then this is your lucky guest blog!
I'm going to outline a general scheme for making a book trailer, DIY,
touching on issues of design considerations, hardware and software, video
sources, and editing.
What this isn't is a tutorial on video
editing software - the bad news is, if you want to make your own trailer,
you're going to have to take the plunge and learn how to work the software,
hunt down cheap and rights free videos and images, and put in the editing time.
Trial and error is required, where you'll have to experiment and not be
afraid to mess up a lot. The reward is some control over your promotional
activities for your book. These days, very few publishers are going to make
(read: pay for) video trailers for books.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Video Dude (VD for
those in the trade). I am by profession a biomedical scientist, who also
happens to be a writer, who taught himself the minimum of what he needed to
know to make promotional videos for his debut novel. No training. No film
school. No worries. :)
Keeping that in mind, here are examples of
trailers for three of my novels:
READER:
So, if you generally liked what you saw,
let's continue and I'll explain what you need to do to get started on making
trailers like this.
The Program
This isn't exactly a how-to step, but
nothing will get done if you aren't convinced that a video can help you promote
your book. After all, unless you make movies for a living, the time and
money investment, even for a DIY, will be significant (well, the money depends,
the time, you can count on it!).
Unfortunately, I don't have any research
studies on the impact of video trailers on the sale of books. However,
the use of video, with its visual stimulus and ability to emotionally engage
the viewer with sight as well as sound, certainly works for many types of
advertisements.
Once upon a time, publishers
promoted books with jacket blurbs, bookmarks, and author tours. Then six years
ago, YouTube changed the rules of the game. Today publishers are spending as
much as $20,000 a pop to create book trailers—30- to 90-second teasers, à la
movie trailers, designed to generate virtual and word-of-mouth buzz and, of
course, to sell titles. “Trailers are definitely a staple in our marketing,”
says Diane Naughton, HarperCollins’s vice president of marketing. - The Big Tease
2. Ingredients
To create your book trailer, you will need
the following:
Editing Software: There are many of these, from cheap to professional grade. Do a little web search for your platform, pocketbook, and preference for layout and features.
iMovie Screen Capture for Trailer
for The Ragnarök Conspiracy
I'm on a Mac, and I use iMovie. I can say
that iMovie lacks many things that would make the design and editing of
trailers much easier, BUT, it's very
cheap, intuitive, and makes about 75% of the work easy. However, the
other 25% can make you pull your hair out.
Format Conversion software:
This sounds weird, but I found it a must have. The reason is that you
will be (1) needing to covert the video clips you download online for your
trailers into formats that your editing software can handle, and (2) converting
the output of the editing software (your trailer) into many different formats
for web viewing (.mp4, .wmv, .m4v, .mov, .mpg, etc.). Here is a list of several. I've
liked the program Miro Video Converter a lot, but
I've used many others, including Quicktime Pro.
Video clips and still images:
Unless you film your own stock (which, if you don't know what you're doing,
will look very amateur, believe me), you'll be stuck with using other people's
video. You'll need to search sites that offer such video without strings
attached. What this means practically is that you need to find websites
that for free or for a fee will let you download clips and images royalty free,
and which are allowed to be used online for your own promotional videos. There
are a lot of sites for these purposes. Some of the ones I've used (or at
least visited):
http://archive.org/, http://bottledvideo.com/,
http://www.stockfootageforfree.com/,
http://www.stockfreeimages.com/,
http://www.pond5.com/,
http://www.istockphoto.com/,
http://www.gettyimages.com/footage,
http://www.artbeats.com/,
http://footage.shutterstock.com/,
http://vimeo.com/groups/freehd
Some of these are free, some are
expensive. Some (usually the free or cheap ones) have low-ish quality video,
some have breathtaking shots (the expensive ones). You mostly get what you pay
for. But remember, a simply "ok" video if used the right way -
briefly, action oriented, etc - may do well enough for a small trailer size.
If you need slow, higher-quality shots (say for a romance novel trailer),
some of the free sites have decent "natural footage” for free (vimeo
is an example). You just have to try and see. Also, this list is by no
means complete, and these video sites popup and disappear a lot.
Remember, just because it's on YouTube
doesn't mean there are no copyright issues. In fact, there usually are
copyright issues for videos on YouTube. Make sure the clips you get are clearly
noted with a contract that you can legally use them. In the joyful event
that your video/book goes viral, and you get 700K hits, you will get noticed by
the owners of the video and they will not be happy. Also, YouTube now has a lot
of very competent algorithms for scanning uploaded videos and comparing the
images and music to databases of copyrighted material. If you have ripped
off stuff, they usually find out. Sometimes, they will just stick ads on
your video in that case, which is a nice compromise and avoids unpleasantness.
But still, you never know.
Music: The
effect of music on the viewer CANNOT be overemphasized. Let me repeat this:
Music, often more than the video itself, can emotionally move the viewer. A
weak score for your trailer will leave a weak impression. A powerful musical
score can turn "ok" video into something with a punch. It seems
counterintuitive, perhaps, but sound often does as much or more for the impact
of a video trailer as sight.
For this reason, I ended up spending the
most money for my trailers in getting the rights to music. For this, I
did two things:
(i) Searched Youtube for musical samples
of "trailer" music (yes, it's an entire category with composers who
make a career of it). There are different genres (action, epic, romance,
horror, etc). You can listen to the clips on YouTube and identify those
you like and look into the rights by contacting the companies handling it.
Many of these companies won't talk to you unless you are a Hollywood
group, but you can try anyway and curse the darkness when they ignore you.
Some of them will work with you, however.
(ii) Used sites like this one
set up for downloading (for a price) trailer music that is royalty free and
licensed for online use.
YouTube (or similar "cloud"
storage) account: You'll need to either host the
movie file on your server, link to it with something like Dropbox, or upload to
YouTube and link/embed via their tools.
3. Design Considerations
Theme:
You've likely written short blurbs about your book for promotional
purposes. In a similar manner, you need to visualize a short "scenic
blurb" that will grab a viewer and make them interested in your story.
The idea is not to tell the story, the book does that, but to give hints
and suggestions about the content and genre through the medium of moving
images and sound.
Go to the Apple
web site and watch 10 trailers for films that are
close to your book's genre. See how they do it. Some things you
can't emulate like dialogue etc (best to keep your characters shadowy for the
reader to imagine them), but the atmosphere, pacing, music, and editing will begin
to guide you. I recommend movie trailers for viewing over book trailers
for the simple fact that movie trailers tend to be much better. The world of
book trailers spans beginner to amateur, and you can hit a lot of them that are
just awful. The film industry at the least has polish and tight
professionalism in their products, and it's a good standard to aim for. But
it's also good to view some book trailers as well, as the products being
marketed are obviously different.
Storyboard:
Plan out the visual scenes of your trailer and how they will connect. Start
lining up draft images/clips to get a sense of the assembly of it in the
editing software. Re-work this until you are happy with the overall flow of the
trailer, the timing of music and edits. Then do the hard work of finding the
best royalty free clips that you can afford, replace your drafts, re-edit to
optimize.
Length:
Many go by the rule of thumb is 60 to 90 seconds. However, like
movie trailers, there are a lot of exceptions to this.
Music: Again,
the power of music is usually not appreciated. If you are going to spend time
and money, make sure this is a place you do it. Get good music, and edit with
the visuals PERFECTLY. Here is the place to be OCD. Time the musical
beats, changes, moods to the images. The music gives soul to the video.
Voiceover:
Very few people can do voiceover well. It really is a talent, a gift. So,
that means you will typically pay for it. However, I got discounts by letting
some know I was a struggling author who promised to send a signed copy of my
book to them! You can also use text super-imposed over images or dark,
transitional screens. You have to work within your budget.
4. Editing: The Key
Assuming you have decent clips, great
music, sound effects, a good plan for your trailer, and editing software, now
you have to edit. How you edit the trailer will literally make or break it.
I spent several tens of hours editing 2-4
minute trailers. You may be looking at my trailers and reading this and
thinking: "that's just sad." Perhaps! But even to get them to the
level they are took me a lot of work.
The issue for my trailers, being trailers
for thrillers and science fiction, was to create a sense of tension, momentum,
and fear, while revealing just enough of the story to get the viewer interested
in my book. Editing involved usually cutting more and more from clips, syncing
them to musical phrases and beats, and overlaying 3, 4, 5 or more sound effects
and other videos/images over the main video.
However, if your book is a romance, or
something else lighter, your use of editing should reflect the mood of your
narrative. A high society, historical romance will not do well with fast paced
edits and industrial epic music. A global thriller like some of mine, however,
does well with that, and will fall flat with a romantic soundtrack. Use common
sense.
With amateur video editing software, many
of the limitations will drive you nuts as you try to achieve certain effects.
Sometimes, you won't be able to accomplish what you have in mind due to
technical limitations, and you'll have to rethink your approach or storyboard.
It can be very frustrating. Save your work frequently. Make backups. If you
make big changes, rename the files or projects (e.g., Trailer1_v1.1). You never
know: a corruption of a project file can literally kill a week of work, and
more of your lifespan.
5. Get feedback
Show your draft trailers to the least
friendly people you can trust enough to open up about doing this. People who
get bored easily.People who aren't going to try to like it. Grumpy assholes.
Watch them as they view it (if you can). Listen to what they say. And make
changes. However much it hurts, the final goal is not to feel you did a good
job and great about yourself, but to engage your viewer.
Remember, you are a beginner, at best an
amateur. You have generally lousy stock clips you paid $10 for online. You have
non-professional software. You aren't a movie-maker. Your trailers will reflect
this. Your job is to pretend you are a kick-ass producer of film and fake it
the best you can, and produce something that will do more good than harm in the
promotion of your book. If it's more harm than good, scrap it. If your feedback
is that "it's not bad" or better, congrats, you have a video promotional
tool!
Good luck! (we all need it)
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