There Is No Such Thing as a Decent Book Trailer
Movies have trailers. TV shows have trailers. Video games have trailers. And they all work.
But book trailers? They’re terrible. Utterly terrible.
Lost in Translation
A movie/game/TV trailer is the perfect synergy of product and advert. It’s a visual representation of a visual medium.
A book trailer is a translation: a representation of one form of media (words) by another (visuals/audio). And as when anything is translated – page to stage, stage to screen, French to English, something is lost in that translation. Some emotional component, some nuance to the message.
Have you ever heard a TV or movie trailer on the radio? If so you’ll know what I mean. It’s very hard to convey how good something is when the audience can’t experience fully what it is you’re selling. Book trailers are the wrong type of advert for the product.
Interacting with the Box
Now that books are a part of the digital media fixture it should be the case that that problem is fixed, and that book trailers would be better; that through hyperlinks and hypertext embedded in trailers online you can connect with readers, taking them to a place where you can get a sample for your e-reader or an interview with the author, or exclusive content. But this just isn’t happening on any grand scale. Let’s take Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as an example:
Now, all that trailer tells me is that Haruki Murakami has a new book out, that it’s called 1Q84, has two characters in it called Tengo and Aomame, and that things are not what they seem. That’s fine, but I can get that same information from a billboard or an ad in the newspaper – something I don’t have to go out of my way to click on. It’s just like every other book trailer – it’s just a box that, unlike the book, you can’t interact with or get emotionally involved.
You’re just watching, and you don’t watch a book. You take part in it.
Frankly, asking for something like a hyperlink in a book trailer is asking the bare minimum. That’s stuff that should have been happening five years ago. As the e-reader/tablet market has boomed the word has become another thing to prod with our fingers. Perhaps then the book trailer is obsolete. Telling a potential reader about a book in a 30 second moving picture show just won’t cut it. You need to create something someone can react to with a tap of the finger and/or something that will draw people in and want to find out more about your book. You need to create the itch.
The Itch
The purpose of an advert of any kind for any product is to connect with you. It’s to soothe an itch you didn’t know you even had. But rather than a connection there’s a weird fracture between a book trailer and it’s book. A book trailer always feels like a shadow of the work, rather than a representation. I think that’s because a book is a very personal experience, more so than any other medium of entertainment.
You and a book have a symbiotic relationship. You allow a book to sit in your mind, feeding it your imagination and being entertained by the results. You get out as much as you put in, and what you put in is your experience of the the world: all the accents you’ve heard, all the lips you’ve kissed, all the fear that’s slithered through you. Books are the ultimate interactive medium, so shouldn’t their trailers try to emulate that interactivity?
None so far have. They can only tell you what the book’s about, and maybe throw in a few adjectives for good measure – “Exhilarating!” “Moving!” “Hilarious!” – and the result is something like the 1Q84 trailer. Something that feels like a (well-made) Powerpoint sales pitch rather than something that’s trying to connect with you. There’s just no itch.
It’s all about You…
I wish I could think of a way to make book trailers better, or to find a replacement for them. I’m sure there’s a replacement/evolution, but I’m not an ad exec so I don’t know what shape that replacement would take. All I do know is that using a book trailer to notify people just that a book exists is unforgivably wasteful.
Books are about emotion, they’re about journeys; they’re the companion on the commute and the nightstand; they’re the conversation you share with a friend when you’ve both finished the final chapter. In short, Books are about YOU. What YOU get out of them. And the sooner book trailers understand the need for interactivity, and find a way to communicate it using the tools at hand, the sooner we won’t have to wince while watching them.
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Do you agree? Does watching book trailers grab your interest and get you excited for the book? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
Image courtesy of Adam Rose.
Robert Smedley is a TV Reviewer and Writer. When not staring at moving images or being creative with ink, he can be found at any bar that serves a good martini.
Great post. Wonderful thoughts.
I’ve never heard of a book trailer before now. I’m intrigued by the concept, especially as a video editor. But I agree that it is hard to connect on a personal level like you can with a book. Perhaps there is a way to improve this, but I don’t know. No ideas are jumping to mind. But if anyone would like to collaborate on trying to improve on the idea of a book trailer I wouldn’t mind taking a stab at it.
I agree with you that there’s a disconnect between trailers and books. The dust jacket of a book has been the “trailer.”
Perhaps the trailer you would like is the one that shows the physical book. For example, I bet you would like the 2nd trailer on this page, even though most people would prefer the 1st:
http://francistapon.com/Books/The-Hidden-Europe/#trailer
I enjoyed watching your book trailer, Francis.
Very well done! and I love the images of all the European places. It made me want to visit them.
I create book trailers for friends who have written e-books. I have even had a few paying clients (believe it or not, Robert).
If you have a few minutes, check them out at the “Book Trailers” page of my website:
http://www.video-ad-creations.com/video-ad-creations_006.htm
I love book trailers. Yeah, there’s a medium translation going on, but it doesn’t bother me in the least. But then, I also don’t mind audiobooks, or book-to-screen adaptions, or illustrated fan art.
I’m going to the midnight showing of The Hunger Games (dressed up as Effie Trinket, which is cosplaying, another media-bender), and one thing I’m looking forward to most is seeing the new trailer for Legend by Marie Lu. The one on youtube is horrible, but a more professional one would thrill me.
I actually downloaded a sample of 1Q84 on my kindle, and wasn’t thrilled about the beginning. After seeing the book trailer in this post, it made me want to give it another chance. No, the trailer didn’t tell me much about it, but it got me excited enough to think maybe there was something I overlooked when I read that sample.
This is probably the most effective book trailer I’ve seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWrNyVhSJUU
I also bought this book because of its trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVEaYz4-LdE
I thought both of those were so cool, I ended up sharing them with friends and family members. Word of mouth + media presentation? Win win.
My favorite book trailer is Jeff Strand’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwA8M7k8oOM
For video created by an author, but that can’t really be called a book trailer, it’s Parnell Hall’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LBfECGdGUc
Mostly what I’ve seen for book trailers are done as badly as infomercials. To make them work, they have to be amusing or give a reasons for people to want to read. People who watch videos DO read, but using one medium to promote another starts off with a request for people to change what they’re doing.
Oh, I like the Parnell Hall book trailer, too.
Thanks for saying what I’ve more or less been thinking ever since I came across book trailers.
Most trailers seem to get made because authors/publishers believe that they have to. I respect the passion that goes into trying to promote the work (particularly indie authours and small publishers) but creating film and video is really it’s own craft and it’s obvious that book trailer makers are really out of their own element.
It’s OK if you’re not a gifted film maker or commercial director, but why would anyone try to sell their 1st rate story with 3rd rate production values? It really seems like the quickest way to sell you and your work short. If one is a professional-grade writer, what sort of first impression is an amateur-grade movie going to make?
For good or bad, we’re rather spoiled with having very good standards for TV and movie production and lots of little things that good film crews can look after become glaring errors. To say nothing of basics: I’ve seen some book trailers that feature an author reading their work, which is simple enough, but then failing to use tripods, good sound recording or out of focus shots.
I’d go on about the use of bad actors, bad special effects or bad sound but I think you’ve gone deeper when looking at how the trailer subverts and undermines the wonderfully subjective aspect of reading a book into something more objective and less personal.
Thanks for the post.
Sometimes I think a better book trailer for some would be to have exciting excerpts read aloud with stirring, cinematic music playing in the background. They could even scroll the text on the screen in some dramatic way.
Some of the book trailers I’ve seen–thank God they were AFTER I read the book–seemed so fake and thrown together. I understand these are not done by a big production, but some of them almost turn me off from reading the book. Almost.
Yes, a book trailer is a translation, from one medium to another. And things can get lost in a translation. But is that all?
I give you Salman Rushdie’s thought about translations: “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.”
I agree the vast majority of book trailers are beyond awful. This is the only trailer that I have ever liked http://youtu.be/PYiw5vkQFPw and the only one that has ever worked on me. I bought the book. But I think they must have spent a heck of a lot of money on that trailer.
I’d only ever seen one book trailer before and I thought it was so innovative and new. It was for Night of the Living Trekkies where zombies start prowling a Star Trek convention. The trailer was set up like a low budget cheesy B-rated movie, but since that was kind of the feel of the book it work perfectly! I haven’t bought the book, but it did influence me to want to buy it.
I think book trailers can work – as long as they have the feel of the book. A book plays like a movie in our heads, so the trailer has to embody that movie for us. Though I agree that move book trailers don’t do it that way and are a bit pointless. If it’s not going to get you excited to read, it’s not doing its job.
This is how you make a Book Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ06vNDt7E8