A “motion poster” has been unveiled for Lionsgate’s adaptation of ‘The Hunger Games’, featuring the books’ iconic symbol (a golden mockingjay pin) set afire. This is a flash animation that has the shape of a movie poster, but the animation makes it something different. Is this a different type of book trailer? What do you think?
Be sure to have your sound turned on when you watch this.
Here, Alexx Henry talks about filiming a Motion Poster. He says the key to this type book trailer/motion poster is to start with a still shot, surprise the audience when it moves, then end with the same still shot.
If you upload your book trailer to YouTube, one limitation is the inability to have a clickable Call to Action.
In business terms, a Call to Action is a request to the viewer to DO something. Click here to take advantage of today’s discount.
Click here to buy. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Good marketing campaigns focus on the CTA and everything is designed to get the customer to DO this one thing. (ONLY one CTA per trailer, please!)
Up until now, you couldn’t get a CTA to be clickable on YouTube. You could put the CTA at the end of your video, but the viewer must type in your URL themselves.
But watch a video on YouTube and you’ll see a transparent ad across the lower section. And that ad is clickable.
ReelSEO has detailed instructions, including screen shots, of how to set this up for your video. Essentially, it’s a workaround. You set it up, but you never set it into action except for yourself on your own videos. It becomes a Clickable CTA for you, not an ad for someone else. It’s a detailed process, but these instructions make it easy.
You can see this at work on these two videos. NOTE: the overlay doesn’t show up on embedded videos, only those viewed on YouTube, so you have to go to YouTube to see this in action.
If you write for teens and are working on a book trailer for a young adult (YA) novel, you need to know what will capture a teen’s eyes for those precious one to two minutes.
Humor. Duh. Of course, humor motivates teen audiences. Spoofs, parodies, gross-outs, laugh-out-loud–make ‘em laugh and they will watch.
Sharable. And if they watch, they will share. “Hey, look at this, it’s funny.” That is golden. Look for the right places to share the videos, places where teens are very likely to pass a video along to a friend. (73% of teens are on social sites!)
Findable. Put videos where they can be found, but also make sure your keywords, tags and titles make them findable–and relevant to the teen audience.
Watchable. I’m throwing in here anything that will get a teen to watch more than 5 seconds of a video. Compelling images, script, music. Originality and creativity. Unique and fresh. What makes YOUR video–your book trailer–stand out in today’s crowded market?
The goal should not be “How do I get X to watch our video?” Instead, focus on how your video’s content and marketing can leverage your organization’s existing customer relationships and also further their development so you can benefit in the future. And always think about how your video will fit into your target’s normal browsing flow. Most consumers have decided how to interpret and judge a video by the time they click ‘Play.’ Quoting Benjamin Goering, Livefyre from the ReelSEO article
Storytelling.
Panel moderator Stewart Quality said, “social media is the campfire of which we sit around and share our stories.”
Think about your book trailer as something that adds to the story of our culture. Make it fun/funny, sharable, findable, watchable and tell a compelling story. And pull in the teen viewers.
What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!
August, 2011 Release
When I decided to create a book trailer for my forthcoming book, PRAIRIE STORMS, I knew I wanted something fun and useful for kids, parents and educators. We know the sounds of dogs, cats, horses, cows and goats. But do we know the sounds made by other common creatures? Skunks? For this trailer, I decided to focus on the sounds made by each animal in PRAIRIE STORMS. This post is about how I created that video.
Finding Audio for a Book Trailer
To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer today.
As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.
Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.
Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.
After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.
Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.
Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms
With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.
To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.
I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.
After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.
The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.
Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut:
These are the Moby Award Winners. Wow!
I disagree with so many of these, which just goes to show that there’s room for lots of videos. I added the number of views as of Friday, June 3.
Grand Jury/We’re Giving You This Award Because Otherwise You’d Win Too Many Other Awards: 149,944 views
-Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart.
I have seen this one before but never made it through the whole thing. The humor of a dyslexic author escapes me.
Book Trailer As Stand Alone Art Object: 7.666
-How Did You Get This Number? – Sloane Crosley
Great images in this video, a variety of cut-paper and innovative collage-type work. It’s a visual delight.
Best Big House: 24,399 Views
-Packing for Mars – Mary Roach. A spoof on body odor in a space suit.
Worst Big House: 39,205 views
-Savages – Don Winslow
Best Small House: 27,875 views
-Tree of Codes – Jonathan Safran Foer
I’m confused. The first video here is about Tree of Codes. The second is public reaction to the book. The Moby Awards winner’s page links to the second video. But I wonder if it shouldn’t be linking to this one.
And interesting: This one is not on YouTube, but on Vimeo.
-Pirates: The Midnight Passage – James R. Hannibal.
OK, this is bad. But it’s meant to be bad, isn’t it?
Worst Performance by an Author: 26,991 views
-Jonathan Franzen – Freedom
Most Celebtastic Performance:
-James Franco – Super Sad True Love Story
See above. Didn’t like it the first time, can’t believe anyone watched it enough to give it two awards.
What Are We Doing To Our Children?: 326,285 views
-It’s A Book – Lane Smith
Of course, this popular children’s book author wins the grand prize: the most views!
General Technical Excellence and Courageous Pursuit of Gloriousness: 1636 views
-Electric Literature
Most Monkey Sex: 7521 views
-Bonobo Handshake – Vanessa Woods
Nice use of video taken on-site.
Worst Soundtrack: 166,754 views
-GhostGirl
Aw, this isn’t any worse than any number of sound tracks that rely on just a song to carry the day. Besides with that many views, it appeals to it’s audience of teens. And that’s what matters.
Most Angelic Angel Falling to Earth: 3245 Views
-Torment – Lauren Kate
Critiques of the Videos
Optimization. Most of the videos fall short on optimizing their text and descriptions. For example, How Did You Get This Number, has only a one sentence description. Descriptions should start with a link to something, but the links are buried under the fold. And there are too many tags, about 10 is best.
Notice, also on It’s a Book, the description links out to 15 sites that “support” the video. Nice way to build traffic.
Could the videos have garnered more views? Optimization does help and how to do it well is covered in The Book Trailer Manual.
Audience. The videos with the most views were those for teens and children. For those audiences anyway, book trailers seem to be an effective way to reach readers.
Aesthetics. I argue that there are three aesthetics for book trailers: movie trailers, slideshows and “YouTube aesthetics.” Certainly all of these are represented in this collection of winning videos. The Grand Prize winner is a YouTube aesthetic, and perhaps that is why so many liked it.
The award was started last year by Melville House, which despite its small size and independent nature, managed to snag a lot of press for book trailers in general and the Moby Award in particular. Part of the fun of the award is the tongue-in-cheek nature of the awards, which look not only at the Best of the year, but also at the Worst. Last year, some of the best press went to the Worst category winners.
Here are this year’s categories. Notice that the children’s category is marginalized–it only gets one category, not two: rather lazy.
Book Trailer As Stand Alone Art Object
Best Big House
Worst Big House
Best Small House
Worst Small /No House
Worst Performance by an Author
Most Celebtastic Performance
What Are We Doing To Our Children? (good or bad, you decide)
Which would you rather win? The Best or the Worst category?
I’m speaking at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans on June 26, 2011 to promote my forthcoming picture book, PRAIRIE STORMS. I’ve joined with nine other nonfiction children’s book authors to do a session, NonFiction Book Blast. Of course, I volunteered to do a video to promote the session. This was interesting because it’s a group book trailer, a twist on a trailer about one book.
Concept. The idea needed to be literary, yet open-ended enough to accommodate ten very different books. The “Streetcar named Discovery,” courtesy of my brother-in-law Harry, was perfect. It alludes to a famous piece of literature and gives the idea of a neighborhood exploration, which can be extended as needed.
Music. I tried out just sound effects of a streetcar, but that didn’t seem to work. I anticipated that the video would be two minutes, so looked for either a two-minute piece of music or something that could be looped. I loved this upbeat piano tune of Dixieland jazz, and it about a minute long and sounded good when looped.
Images. Of course, this was easy: I needed a shot of the New Orleans skyline and a streetcar, but easily found those on Flicker as images licensed with Creative Commons–see the credits at the end. After that, it was just the book covers. I debated about using pictures of the authors, too, but I wanted to stay under two minutes and thought the extra images would make it too long. For transitions, I used–of course–page turns.
So, here’s the result!
If you attend the ALA Convention, stop by and say, “Hi!”
If you’re not attending, please pass this along to someone who is.
# “Book Trailer” uploads in the past week to YouTube.com – 584
By 9 am CDST, there were 46 uploads today alone.
So, in today’s crowded YouTube, what makes a trailer stand out?
Here are six to watch this week.
Food Illustrations:Toastvertising is still my all-time favorite trailer. But the use of blue rice and other nice foodies is interesting in this video, too. Interesting that they both mention Hawaii.
*|YouTube:Qlj2sdEelak|*
Juxtaposition. OK, let’s throw in a nonfiction and a religious one at that. Here, the interesting thing is the juxtaposition of a white boy/black boy that aptly addresses the key issue of the book.
*|YouTube:5QaeqZcIkvM|*
Movement and Craft. The music here is catchy and moves. The visuals move. Keeping the eye and ear busy there’s just a chance you might catch a mind. Crafty video!
*|YouTube:V_EvI3BERQQ|*
Authentic Narrator. Well, the voice sounds authentic anyway. And she reveals so much of her, well, naive attitude toward life. What’s not to love? (NOTE: With a June 7, 2011 release date, it’s interesting that the trailer is out so early. When the three-weeks shelf life is over, what’s next?)
*|YouTube:Rg_km4eUvuY|*
Great Movie Aesthetic. While I might prefer the YouTube aesthetic, when the big money is behind a book and its trailer, they do a great job. Love that Penguin has decided to “brand” videos with just a pic of the Penguin. Effective and simple.
*|YouTube:F3R0aU3YYQs|*
Another Great Movie Aesthetic. Of course, John Grisham gets the big-buck videos, too. *|YouTube:Y7P0h928UMI|*
