Sunday, July 01, 2012

gay ken dolls in love: or, do you really need a book trailer?

It's a (blessedly) boring Sunday afternoon and I'm crawling the web reading about book trailers.

A book trailer, in case you don't know, is a bit of web video made to promote a book. Just like a movie trailer, but for... a book. Are they useful as a marketing tool? Probably not. Are they a waste of time and money? Almost certainly.... unless you just really enjoy doing this kind of thing--I have seen some very impressive amateur videos on YouTube. Will I ever make one? Probably not.

Nevertheless, some of my beta readers recently expressed excitement at the thought of such a video (they are flatteringly and unwaveringly certain that The Curse of Jacob Tracy is going to see daylight sometime... ever), and because I am a writer and endlessly narcissistic about my work, and also a little bit because it's fun and a way to feed the story-making machinery with images and moods, I have been sort of half-assed-structuring a trailer script in my head. Mostly, trying to distill the story down to two minutes, and conceive a way to tell it in a way that requires a minimum amount of money, time, and investment without looking incredibly stupid.

Which is why I greatly appreciate this video here:



Brilliant. Funny, clever, and just enough tongue-in-cheek that the crudeness of its execution adds to, rather than detracting from, its charm.

1 comment:

Lynette M Burrows said...

I can see it now, Miss Fairweather IS Barbie (You'll gen up an appropriate costume, I'm sure). And Ken is Trace. Boz - hmmmm. Why, it's ethnic Ken, of course. And I'm sure there's one for Chin (I'm not sure I spelled that correctly). What a hoot! But I would agree that some books would not sell no matter how good of a book trailer you made and others will sell well no matter how good a book trailer it has. . . *shrug* It all depends on what kind of marketing your readers will respond to.