Posts Tagged ‘lemony snicket’

Five reasons this book trailer rocks

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I for­get where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of qual­ity I’d like to see in more book trail­ers online:

Having Tim Curry as a nar­ra­tor is prob­a­bly out­side of the range of what we can afford as SF/​F writ­ers, but still.  Let’s go over what makes this awesome:

  1. Tight pac­ing. 2 min­utes long, and packed with infor­ma­tion.  If there’s a neg­a­tive here, some of it is too fast.  But that is prefer­able to too slow.
  2. Rapid-​​moving, well designed motion graph­ics. The move­ment is var­ied. It’s not a bunch of slow zooms or pans on a graphic like many book trail­ers I see. Stuff comes in and leaves the view at an angle.  There’s per­spec­tive.  It has a coher­ent visual style also.
  3. Illustrations! This is much eas­ier when your book has illus­tra­tions already, but maybe an invest­ment in an illus­tra­tor would increase the “stick­i­ness” of a book trailer.  It’s a visual medium, and you need some imagery to catch the eye.  Simple stock pho­tos prob­a­bly aren’t good enough. And you can only use your cover so many times.
  4. Professional nar­ra­tion, with the high­est qual­ity sound. So many book trail­ers I have seen end up sound­ing like they were recorded in a bath­tub.  PC micro­phones are a trav­esty.   Studio-​​quality audio is not cheap.  Alas.
  5. Prominently dis­played URL at the end. This isn’t a crit­i­cism of other book trail­ers as I usu­ally don’t make it to the end in other ones I have watched.  But I liked how it left you with a call to action (go to the web­site!)  I don’t know how much pro­mo­tion Lemony Snicket really needs for these books, but if I didn’t know about them already, this would have sent me run­ning to the site.

My After Effects and Premiere skills are pretty rusty, but I think I’m going to try and add them back into my skillset.  I have a voice actor stu­dio I’ve done work with in Denver at the old day job, and so I think I could prob­a­bly offer a decently afford­able, high qual­ity book trailer ser­vice.  Youtube is the third most vis­ited web­site on the web.  It’s power to bring your book before a new audi­ence is unpar­al­leled.  I’d really like to offer a ser­vice to tap into that power.