Lulu Blog

Book trailers. You’ve seen ‘em and thought to yourself, “I could do that.” Perhaps you thought “I could do that better!” I’m here to tell you how!

• First, write a book. This is the most difficult part of creating a book trailer. Once you’ve got that down, you are almost finished.

• Publish your book on Lulu.com. This is imperative and will ensure that your book trailer will better than everyone else’s.

• Be creative. Some book trailers have narrators explaining what the book is about, some book trailers are just words on the screen describing the book. I say make it interesting. You are obviously a creative person, you wrote a book! Use your imagination. Try asking some friends to act out an important scene in your book or maybe explain why people should buy your book using interpretive dance. What ever you do, be creative.

Avoid the book trailer pitfalls of despair:

• Don’t do a book reading via webcam! The sound is awful, the picture is terrible and image is stagnant. You will surely put your potential fans to sleep.

• Make sure you have good lighting! This is so important, as video cameras don’t show contrast as well as film.

• Sound is incredibly important! People can tolerate a bad picture more then they can stomach a loud annoying hum sound or low inaudible talking. You also want to make sure the volume of your trailer isn’t too high or too low.

• Don’t use copyrighted images, video or music! There are lots of music, video and images available on the web that you can use, but avoid the stuff that is copyrighted.

• And the best thing you can do is keep it short! You don’t want to bore your legions of fans to sleep, you want them to get out their credit card and order your book!

Great gobbily-gook! You took my advice and made the BEST book trailer. You are well on your way to fame, fortune and the cover of People magazine. But wait! These next tips are vital for getting the most exposure possible for your book trailer.

• Put a link to your storefront or book in the trailer AND in the video’s description box. This is very important because people can’t copy and paste a link from the video, but they can from the video description. Be sure to include your name and the title of your book in the description as well. You want search engines to direct people to your video, right?

• Put your video EVERYWHERE! Seriously! There are so many video sites, it’s silly to limit yourself to YouTube. The more sites hosting your book trailer, the better your sales.

• Make your book trailer work for YOU! Post links on your blog, on your friend’s blog, in forums, everywhere you can! You are a published author, shout about it!

Congratulations! Now you can sleep at night knowing the world is watching your book trailer AND shelving out cash to read your book!

For help creating your book trailer with Windows Movie Maker, visit: www.canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing/2007/02/make_a_book_tra.html
For copyright free images, video and music visit: www.creativecommons.org
For an example of a scene from a book acted out in a book trailer, visit: www.novelfilmtrailer.com/nft-badbosstheory3.htm