Our topic this week is basically book trailers and how
effective they are as a sales tool. My colleague K. A. Krantz said earlier: “Usually,
book trailers are done because the author simply likes having them.”
Yup, that's exactly why I happen to have any. They were fun
to do, not that I have the skills to make them for myself! But I enjoyed the
collaborative process of picking out images and music, and working with
creative people who did the video making. I LOVED having what I viewed as mini
movies of my books. Who knows if I’ll ever get actual movies made of any of my
stories? (Came close once but hey…Hollywood, you know?)
So I have… I don’t know
five or six book trailers maybe? And I worked with four or five different
people, and the experience varied each time but overall was cool and fun. Do I
think any of the trailers sold any books? No.
Besides
making me personally happy, the videos are useful to add to blog posts, tweets
and Facebook. I had several featured on USA Today Happy Ever After blog when
they reviewed book trailers. Not sure they even do that anymore. (Yes, I am a contributor
there but I had no influence over the tastes and choices of the person who was
the video critic.)
A couple of the older videos are wayyyyyy too long. One is
now cringeworthy as tech has moved beyond where it was at the time. I saw a lot
of the stock photos I’d chosen used by other authors since, on covers etc., as
we’re all using the same sites and models. I always envied the authors who
could afford the actual made-for-them videos with actors and vignettes from the
book, but I was never going to have that big a budget and even if I did, I
couldn’t afford TV ad time.
Will I ever do any more? Not unless my book take off into
the stratosphere or I win the big Powerball lottery and thus I have money to
burn, so to speak. I make wiser choices with my marketing pennies nowadays. I
got over my “gee whiz I have a mini movie of my book!” phase.
I’ll share my biggest budget trailer, for Star Cruise: Marooned, and my most
recent, for Hostage to the Stars,
which was the last one I had made, and was about four books ago. The trailer
for Hostage was on the low end of my
cost curve but I loved it. Cheri Lasota was a joy to work with.
SFR Galaxy Award Winner Hostage to the Stars is still on sale as an ebook for $.99 by the way!
SFR Galaxy Award Winner Hostage to the Stars is still on sale as an ebook for $.99 by the way!
