Book
Trailers, Book Videos, LitVids and Book Promotion
This is an in-depth look at the
subject of ‘Book Trailers’
otherwise known as ‘Book Videos’,
‘Video Book Promotion’
‘Lit Vids’ and ‘Book
Previews’. The phrase "BOOK TRAILER"
and "BOOK TEASER" are registered trade marks
in the U.S. to a company called Circle of Seven Productions,
Inc. However for clarity I will use this phrase throughout
this article.
Popularity of the Book Trailer
Video
Movie trailers pull us in with
drama, comedy, even fear, and get us longing to go to
the theatre. Film producers have long understood the promotional
value of "previews" or "trailers" to entice the public to a particular movie. As a promotional
medium the trailer has always proved a winning formula
and a crossover to the literary world has been inevitable
due to the recent changes in the Internet.
What is a Book Video Trailer?
Put
simply, a trailer for a book or novel should be a short
preview to illustrate how the book will keep the reader
turning the pages. It is true that trailers work better
for some titles than others. Books that have really powerful
and broad images associated with them are obvious examples
of dynamic presentations, but there is no reason why a
short promotional video cannot be created in some form
for every piece of literary work.
The success of YouTube
YouTube made major headlines in 2006 when Google bought
the video giant for $1.65 billion.
YouTube is incredibly popular. The
success of YouTube and other video web sites illustrates
that people are indeed looking for web sites that have
some video content and are indeed marching in droves
to the web to watch video. Add in the other available
services like Google Video, Yahoo Video and Netscape
and you have a genuine phenomenon, which in turn presents
an inexpensive yet effective advertising opportunity
to help authors increase traffic to their web sites.
What’s so special about
YouTube?
According to the BBC News Site, within 15 months, Youtube.com
has become one of the Internet's most watched
websites, with 25 million hits a day. One of
the reasons that online video has proved such a phenomenon
may be because of the spread of broadband - but this
is surely is not the only reason: YouTube and Google
Video are all about sharing video experiences, combine
this with the fact that clips are searchable due to
the inclusion of meta tags during uploading and the
formula is explosive. The whole business of video
sharing is set to grow even more rapidly especially
with high speed Internet becoming available and affordable
to almost everyone.
How the
online video Websites save you money
It is easy to embed your movie into your own website
pages so that it displays in your site. As YouTube and
Google video host the actual video file on their server,
they take the bandwidth hit every time someone views
your trailer. Without this, your service provider might
soon be asking for an increase in their subscription
fees should your trailer prove popular. A worse case
senario would be that you even exceeded your bandwidth
limit and had your site closed down temporarily.
Increased traffic to your
author site
Should a video be lucky enough to reach the front page
of YouTube it really excels in terms of viewing figures.
Admittedly, with the huge amount of new videos being
uploaded this is difficult to achieve, but who would
have imagined that "the evolution of dance"
would have been watched by 29 million people over the
course of 3 months?
After uploading your book trailer to both YouTube and
Google Video, you still have the option to increase
web traffic further by hosting the promo on your own
website as well. By adding descriptive content or surrounding
the video with on-page relevant text, it is possible
for a listing on the major search engines and sites
such as Singing Fish etc.
How to gain top ranking on
YouTube
With over 100 million videos being watched a day, it
is very important to gain top ranking on YouTube,
however there is conflicting advice around the Internet
on just how to reach the top spot.
Some suggest that the key to getting on the front pages
is not by the number of views but by the number of people
that have marked it as a favourite. One thing is for
sure: the exposure a particular video gets from YouTube
is directly related to its traffic and its ratings.
High-rated and high-traffic videos are usually featured
on the main pages.
Making
your video book promo easier to find
As the YouTube network is flooded with content, they
allow users to include a series of basic meta-information,
including the title, description, tags, language and
video category. This optimisation is imperative. The
YouTube Website gives the following advice when uploading
movies:
“When you upload your video, we require you to
choose at least one category and enter at least one
tag to describe the content in your video. Adding this
information helps other YouTube members find your video,
so if you want an audience, help them out! The more
accurate the tags are on each video, the easier it is
for everyone to find cool videos to watch.
Make your tags as descriptive as you can—if
you took a video of your friends at the beach, you might
want to tag it like this: party beach surfing. Each
tag is separated from the others by a space.”
Other ways to increase viewers
to your Book Trailer
To increase web traffic to your book trailer once your
video is online an optimized, you should first send
an email link to friends and family and any mailing
lists you may have already have set up – asking
them politely to vote and leave comments on YouTube.
Next on the agenda could be bloggers and other book-lover
websites, many of whom pass them on through their own
email lists.
It is also possible to get people to view your video
by visiting popular forums where users are looking for
videos, like the eBaum’s World forums, where you
simply post a link to your YouTube video. You can also
submit your video to web sites such as Fark and Digg
and hope for the best.
How YouTube works
YouTube converts your uploaded video to a set format
(Flash) so it’s very important to start with a
good quality video. Once you have your Book Trailer/Promo
ready, the YouTube website states the following advice:
“Save your videos as either QuickTime .MOV, Windows
.AVI, or .MPG files— these are the most common
formats and they work well within our system. We specifically
recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution
with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications
before uploading will help your clips look better on
YouTube.”
Remembering to include the page title and tags, (the
more accurate the tags are on each video, the easier
the video is to find) you are finally required to wait
a short while for the flash conversion to take place.
Next the fun begins: it’s time to start your publicity
– allowing as many people to know about your book
trailer as possible.
The qualities of a book trailer
The book video (Upper case initial capitals) makes it
possible to reach the broader, Internet-savvy reading
audience who might skip the traditional newspaper book
review section.
The main goal of your Book Trailer should be to have
a video that is something people would find
entertaining enough to leave YouTube and visit
your web site. The ultimate aim is to give the viewer
a hint and leave them wanting more. Even possibly leaving
them so intrigued, they'd want to go out and buy the
book.
It can be said that in this highly media-saturated world,
there is only a limited attention span and we must use
this time by pulling the viewer into the world of the
author. The product that we’re selling is not
a car, washing machine, a perfume. It is, in and of
itself, storytelling.
So how does one go about trying to capture the spirit
and feel of a 400-page book with complex characterisation
and delicate themes and in a 60-second video without
imposing a lot of key elements — like the look
and feel of characters and settings?
Firstly it is really important to remember that readers
want to imagine what the characters and settings look
like for themselves; by trying to emulate this too much
you may just take away the fun of reading the book in
the first place.
It is also important to keep the book trailer short;
otherwise you are likely to lose your audience. Two
and half minutes are the maximum length allowed by movie
theaters, so their experience shows that’s long
enough.
Another production technique that is also to have some
sort of cliffhanger at the end of the video, or possibly
even interrupting the video in the middle and displaying
a message that reads: "For the rest of this video,
visit MySite.com." There are lots of tricks of
the trade to learn from the movie industry regarding
trailers. The most vitally important element for any
book trailer must be to remember to include a plug for
your web site in the video itself.
The future of the book promo
video
The YouTube phenomenon which leads to other large companies
such as Google, Yahoo and MySpace launching their own
video sharing website does not come as a surprise. It
can be estimated that this surge of people wanting to
watch video on their PC will continue to increase substantially.
So will there be an Oscar or a Lizzy Award for the best
LitVid of the year soon?
Well it’s already happened with the Book Standard’s
2006 Book Video Awards world-premiere screening at Manhattan’s
Tribeca Cinemas in May 2006. The Book Standard’s
Managing Director, Jerome Kramer said: "The Book
Video Awards combines emerging literary and film talent,
and gets the results out across an unprecedented digital
network."
Why in the future also just post your book video on
video sharing sites? Why not post your book video on
plasma screens at airport bookstores, In author press
rooms , on your book’s Amazon.com page and also
in email pitches to bookstore buyers and media?
U.S. company, Circle of Seven Productions,
a company started in 2002, has been evolving over the
last few years as a leader in the book video business.
They have recently purchased an online television station
and their online book TV station and interactive book
video games will be available later in 2007. http://www.cosproductions.com/ Conclusions
In the near future it may prove that the days of judging
a book by its cover will draw to a close. Authors
and Publishers are starting finally to tap into the
MTV generation, and realize that now it is
possible to make your literary choices in advance online
by watching a book trailer or video promo. The changing
consumer habits in the world of technology are a wake-up
call to the publishing world –the same wake-up
that the music industry is currently experiencing. The
introduction of book trailers is not desperation; it
is evolution.
Books, more than other products, rely on word of mouth
because they don't usually receive the huge prerelease
marketing budgets that CDs, movies and even video games
enjoy. Anything that promotes reading is good.
It's good to see authors and publishers are not just
waiting for people to walk into bookstores and discover
a book: they have to go out and grab people where they're
spending their time and bring them back to the books
- this is just the most compelling example of how to
do it.
Latest News
Dorchester Publishing in conjunction with the legend Stephen King are holding a competition to create your very own book trailer based on your favorite SHOMI novel to win a trailer premiere in New York City and at your local theater!
Stephen King will be judging book trailers submitted for the contest in which amateur and professional filmmakers produce book trailers (similar to movie trailers) based on the SHOMI imprint—a series of modern-day fantasy fiction. The SHOMI Trailer Contest—arranged in partnership between Dorchester Publishing Co., Circle of Seven Productions, and international bestselling author Stephen King—challenges filmmakers to channel their literary experience into a visual one.
Please be aware though that the SHOMI Trailer Contest is only open to legal residents of the U.S. who are age 18 and up and once your book trailer (video) is submitted it then becomes the sole property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. The video can be also edited at Dorchester’s discretion.
The SHOMI Trailer Contest begins at 12:01 a.m. on July 21, 2009 Eastern Standard Time (EST) and ends December 30, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. EST ("Term"). More details can be found here.
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