So I've been hearing all the hub-bub about book trailers and apparently I'm the last kid on the block to actually try my hand at it.
I did some researching, and watched a lot of sample trailers. By the way, there are some fantastic ones (and some not so fantastic ones) out there. Some of these writers have to be paying mucho bucks to have theirs professionally done. Since I'm not in the tax bracket to be able to afford such luxuries yet...(heck...I consider buying non-Suave shampoo a luxury), I had to make my own with what I had available.
Luckily, I do have Windows Movie Maker. If you have that..while it won't make the 3D Hollywood special effect trailers, it will get the basic job done. And, while mine is nothing fancy...I also probably don't know how to do everything the program is actually capable of. But overall, I was very pleased.
What I did for MY BOOK TRAILER for Summer of Hope was first figure how much I was going to reveal in the trailer...what did I want to say. I also tried to think about how long I wanted it to be, because that gave me a ballpark figure of how many images I was going to need. From there, I thought about what music I wanted to use. Obviously with the subject of my book...I couldn't go to happy-boppy with my music...but I I didn't exactly want to play a dirge either. I was a little stuck at first since I go from depressed to happy to uh-oh/tension. Not too many songs I could think of really spanned those emotions in less than two minutes (which was about where I was shooting for length.) I also wanted to look for an artist that would appeal to my target demographic...which is mainly female YA. That's why I went with Taylor Swift. She's a shoo-in with most in that age group that read this genre.
So, once I got all of that, I went through all my photos. I'm also a freelance photographer and photobug, so I have a mess a photographs stored from through the years. I just went searching through all my files of any that related to anything in the book...or lovey-dovey. I was able to get most from my own personal files....although I did have to go to a stock photo site to get I think three of the ones I used. (which I then stated on YouTube under "description" that some images were from these sites. I couldn't credit specific photographers since the stock sites didn't list that in the "free" section.) I also made sure to list the artist/title of the song I used (and where I purchased it from.)
I also thought it would be nice to add an actual review the book had received, so I placed that on at the end.
I just used basic fades between the photos, and the "caption" feature over the picture. You probably don't want to use anything too wild...because it will just distract from the text...or actually make it look hokey.
I'm sure there are plenty of other programs out there you can use for trailers, this one just worked well for me and was very user-friendly for my purposes. Upload to YouTube was painless, and then it can be put on Facebook or other websites.
What about you? Have you tried your hand at a book trailer? What program did you use? How did it go?
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