On Book Trailer Videos

I was on LinkedIn recently and someone was posting about book trailer videos. I built my own book trailers on Animoto.com. Not Oscar level work, but certainly workable. I could tell when I finished one and in watching it, it made me want to read my own book.

You do of course have to divorce yourself, your evaluation and consideration of the final product from the effort you put into it. You can't take the tact that you worked hard on it and so it should just be good. Obviously. Either it is good or not. Don't hesitate to ask for someone else's consideration before making it public. The book trailers I made are now on my TheJZMurdock account on YouTube. Check them out if you want to see what I'm talking about.

I learned how to do it, I did it and then I moved on. I also learned how to do audiobooks on ACX  and have three out now.

It's worth trying these things as it saves you money, you learn more, and you may like it. I liked all over it, just discovered that it was very time intensive.

My comments on videos:

We should consider that there are a variety of things a book trailer video should do. It's not just there to sell one book. The priority of what you want it to do is important. Not necessarily prioritized:

• Make people want to read that book.
• Make people want to read another book of yours, or check out another project you are invested in.
• Make people want to talk about that book, or that trailer, or you, so others might want to read that book (or others of yours).
• Make people want to know more about who you are as an individual, a writer, expert, or what have you.
• Make people want to look up your other pages, your web site, your blog, your Facebook page or whatever.
• Make specific industry professionals want to look you up or contact you.

The main thing is to get people to know you brand, your name, your works. So if it is a bad video and it has people talking about it, it may be doing it's job. If however it gives the impression that you are a bad writer, then it certainly failed.

The point is, in marketing, things are not always as they appear.

I have been contacted by professionals in the past through things totally unrelated to what I was trying to do in my brand marketing. Things that have led to other projects and other connections. Networking is good. Trying to open as many options as possible is good and now a days, quite necessary.

You can spend a lot of money that you will never see come back to you. In branding and marketing, you do not always get what you pay for. Sometimes you do. I would suggest however that before you get into spending a lot of money to promote your works, try doing it yourself, try doing it for as cheaply as possible.

Try to turn out a quality product, not a cheap product, because "cheap" can mean several things and not all of them need to be bad. In trying to do it yourself, you will not only learn about something, maybe pick up or better a skillset, but you will have a better idea of what you are paying for, if you decide to pay others to do it for you.