The Book Trailer Manual

by Katie Davis

Darcy asked me to do a guest post about what I’ve learned about Youtube and doing videos. I wish I could fit everything here! But I can at least give you my top eight tips.

Tip #1 – Don’t Fear Failure.

A lot of people don’t do video because they think they’re going to look like an idiot. If I can look like an idiot, you can too!

Seriously, you don’t have to post it if you hate it. Try it, – maybe it’ll have a huge impact on the number of the visits to your site. My attitude is to try it and if it fails, learn from it and move on. The more you try, the better your chances are that you will succeed. I follow Pat Flynn and I loved his suggestion to people worried about being on camera – do a tutorial. You may need software to do it, but you won’t have to be on camera! (I use Screenflow for my videos but Quicktime has the capability to record your screen, too).

Tip #2 – Plan Ahead.

Videos are a Black Hole Time Suck. The more you plan, the more smoothly the whole thing will go. I plan because I am reflected when someone comes to my YouTube channel or sees a video I’ve made, I want that reflection to be of quality content. (We’ve all seen the many low quality videos out there that have gone viral, so take this advice for what it’s worth!) Still, the virals have something in common: mass interest for one reason or another. Consider your subject matter and what you want to put out there and how it will reflect upon you and your work.

When I say plan ahead, I mean:

• Write a script.
• Do a storyboard (stick figures are fine!)
• Think about offshoot videos.
  I created this one first.
  
  *|YouTube:vTE4snzX-e0|*
  Then, I created this one.
  
  *|YouTube:onrJ8XMPa7w|*

Tip #3 – Consider a Series

I produce a weekly podcast about children’s literature – the craft, the business, the product, etc., but because it’s weekly, I’m obligated to get it out there every week. It’s been a great discipline for me. However, with videos no one expects a series so that is less pressure.

Now I’m going to contradict myself.

Videos are great for SEO, especially if you learn to properly tag them (I’m not always great at that myself, but I’m trying to be better, and to learn how to do it better). I suggest reading this post about YouTube SEO, or listening to this podcast about book trailers and YouTube with Darcy.

But there is a reason that the phrase “content is king” is ubiquitous. Videos are content. If you have a series, you’ll be adding great regular content, and the spiders love video. I started a Katie Davis Video FAQ series that, shockingly, don’t take me long at all – that is, compared to something like my Little Chicken, Big Day book trailer or this Kindergarten Advice for Kids (from Kids!) video

Tip #4 – Spread the Love

If you are reading this blog of Darcy’s, you know you should start a YouTube channel! People can find your videos all in one spot, and you can double up on getting your videos out there – I have them on my site, and my Katie Davis Youtube channel.

And because most people, by this time, know how to watch a video on a computer, you’ll be getting your name out there to people who otherwise may not have heard about you.
The web is a visual medium, so video is a natural way to show things like your writing process, who you are, where you live, etc., which many fans love to see.

Tip #5 – Set Your Bore Alert on High!

One can easily be tempted to make long videos, which will then fall into the I-Have-No-Time-To-Watch-This category and then production time is wasted. Talking heads are boring. I will watch a one – three minute video. Unless you’re Alec Baldwin, it’s going to be hard to keep my attention for longer than that.

Tip #6 – Have Fun!

Book trailers aren’t the only kind of video you can have on your site. Think of all the visual ways you can relate to your fan base – or, if you’re just starting out, or are not yet published, your future fanbase! Do an animoto book review, interview authors you love, Skype visits with another author – but make sure you don’t end up with talking heads (BORE ALERT), give tips and tricks for others in your field – that would come under informational videos, you could do funny videos parodying books…the list could go on for many virtual pages.

Tip #7 – Use YouTube for All Its Worth!

Don’t forget YouTube is the second biggest search engine, after Google.

• Do tag searches and use the most searched for words in your description and title of your video.
• Find another video in your category that has gone viral, and do a video reply to it. You do that by clicking in the response field and then a link pops up next to it that says “make a video reply” and enter the information there.

  However, your reply will have to be approved by the video owner you’re replying to. So just like on any other social media site, make connections because if you know each other, you’re more likely to be approved. You can also make a reply to your OWN videos on your channel, which will lead viewers to your other movies.

• Once you upload your video, did you know you can add links to your videos? It’s under “annotations”. Go here for more info on that.

Tip #8 – Call to Action

At the end of every video, add a call to action. Anything along the lines of:

• Check out my other videos!
• Visit my site for more info!
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel!

And to that last point, I must thank Pat Flynn again for a recent new effort I’ve made with my videos. I created a 10 second call to action clip that I am now adding to every video, in hopes it’ll get people to subscribe to my channel. So far, it’s working like crazy, and by crazy I mean that in the one day since I put it up there, two people have subscribed. Since I had to take my old YouTube channel down and reupload it, losing all my view numbers and subscribers it’s now very new. So maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.

But remember tip #1? I don’t mind failing a bunch of times in order to succeed once or twice.

YouTube just improved its education/help center on this topic this week.

YouTube Copyright School video:

*|YouTube:InzDjH1-9Ns|*

YouTube Copyright Help Center

http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_center

If one of your videos receives a copyright complaint, they will require you to attend their Copyright School and pass a quiz. A second violation will result in termination of the user.

OK, this is not a trailer, but it’s a fun video about books. It’s a great example of stop-action video. Imagine doing this and featuring YOUR book somewhere in the mix. Put it in unexpected places. Or put a photo frame, stuffed animal or something else that relates to your book here. Great fun.

*|YouTube:cFnuP9niRUg|*

Guest post by Michael Kardos

When it comes to book trailers, it feels a little like the Wild West. Not so with movie trailers. That genre is firmly established, the trailers being well funded and highly produced. Even trailers for bad movies are often engaging. All the studios used to hire Don LaFontaine, that man with the really deep voice, until his death in 2008. After he died, they hired other men with really deep voices. Movie trailers often end with a loud boom, followed by a soft whisper, like a fireworks finale followed by an amateur’s sparkler. The entire formula is satirized perfectly here.

Book trailers are relatively new, are mainly an internet phenomenon, and, in my experience, often follow the same formula as movie trailers—to disastrous effect. The reasons?

1. Budget. Book trailers don’t have anywhere near the budget of movie trailers. Hence, the attempt looks silly.
2. Too melodramatic. Big-budget movie trailers, even for good movies, are usually highly melodramatic. So too are book trailers that copy the formula. Maybe because we expect our literature to be less melodramatic than our movies, the result comes across as really melodramatic.
3. Usurping reader’s imagination. When we read a book, we create a world in our mind. If the author does his or her job right, that world is as full and real and nuanced as our own. Do we really want that literary world presented to us visually ahead of time?

   A more basic way to state the problem is that movie trailers contain clips of movies. And movies are shot to be visually engaging. Books are printed on a page. The image exists only in our imagination.

What’s a Writer to Do?

So what the heck is a writer with a new book from a small literary press to do?

OPPOSITE of Big Budget. In my case: head to Wal-Mart, buy a white board, a black marker, and create the exact opposite of a big-budget movie trailer.

My talents as a visual artist have something like a Flowers-for-Algernon trajectory. Sometime around the first or second grade, my work became fairly impressive for a first or second grader. Squares? No problem. Triangles? Please. Then came glorious third grade, where I’d copy Dr. Seuss or A. A. Milne characters onto a large sketch pad and my teacher would display it on an easel for the whole class. I could draw, man. Hell, I could draw man. Woman. Yertle the Turtle.

That was the zenith. Before long, I was a not-so-impressive artist for a fifth grader. By the eighth grade I had become a hack. No one is impressed by an eighth grader who can copy a passable Winnie the Pooh from a book. In truth, my Winnie the Pooh stopped being passable long before then. My artistic abilities actually seemed to atrophy over the years to the point where now I can draw only stick figures.

But it turns out that stick figures were exactly what the job demanded. After all, the aim was to create the opposite of a big-budget movie trailer.

Script. For my trailer, I wrote out a brief script that narrated, sort of, one of the weirder stories in my collection. (It features talking funerary ashes and a godlike baby and a babysitting rabbit.)

Voice-Over. Then I convinced my friend Troy, who has this wonderfully anti-heroic voice, to read my script. He knocked it out in a single take. I edited out some pauses to speed up the pacing, then began to animate to the script.

Software. I’d found a program online called Monkey Jam that allowed me to take photographs with a web camera, string them together, and sync them to an audio file.

Trailer! For better or worse, the result speaks for itself—many hundreds of drawings on the white board, most of them awful, resulting in a clunky stop-motion animation. Yet in the end, I think, it is a fairly appealing trailer with an original and consistent vibe that conveys a sense of the book.

It’s no high-budget movie trailer, that’s for sure. It isn’t going to win an Academy award for animated short. But it is a trailer that people seem to enjoy and actually watch. It’s steadily accruing youtube hits, and people have passed it around on Facebook, and it recently appeared on the Galleycat website.

*|YouTube:EYdl9IO5LMU|*

Two postscripts

PS. The “blooper reel” was a complete afterthought. I was a little slap-happy from spending three long days at the white board. I already had the equipment set up, and now I had a little experience with the technology. So I banged that out in a day, using some drawings from the trailer and some new drawings, with my wife and me supplying the additional voices.

P.P.S. My trailer-making equipment—the white board, the black marker—is currently enjoying a happy retirement out in the garage, next to the dart board.

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and were cited as Notable Stories in the 2009 and 2010 editions of Best American Short Stories. Originally from the Jersey Shore, he currently teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.

Do you own the copyright to your videos posted on YouTube?

ReelSeo talks to Daliah Saper, Principal Attorney at SaperLaw.com and she explains the ins and outs of this issue.

For example:

Many people assume that if they hire a videographer to shoot anything for them, they automatically own that video, and all the copyrights to it. But as Daliah explains, that actually depends on whether you hired your videographer as a W-2 employee or as a freelancer.

And here’s a video about the YouTube terms of service:

(BTW, great use of alternating color and b/w in this video. And fantastic lighting and timing.)

Details of One Software Choice

The Book Trailer Manual reviews about a dozen types of software. Some are online exclusively, some you buy and download to your computer.

BEST USE: Adding movement to a static, boring slideshow.

Animoto.com is an online software which allows you to create book trailers with great simplicity. They call it the end of slideshows because they take still images and animate them with zooms, and special effects such as fade-in, spin-in, etc.

Animoto Accounts

Animoto Shorts (30 second videos) are free and you can make as many as you want; you can’t download videos, though, only embed them on the web.

Animoto Pro allows unlimited any-length video and downloads.

Animoto Business removes the Animoto logo that are present in the previous type of accounts and gives you access to a much wider range of music; you can also resell videos made this way.

What Makes Animoto Special?

Animoto is based on a unique type of software which takes your images and music and mixes them by adding motion: zoom, pan, special effects as the images come in or go out of the screen, etc. If slide shows are boring because they are, well, static images, Animoto videos are just the opposite. They are full of motion. Frankly, I prefer something in between those two extremes, but Animoto videos are much better than static slideshows for most book trailer efforts.

Create Your First Image on Animoto

Images. Animoto’s free account allows a thirty second video, which is about 9-20 images. Plan for one of those images to be a text slide with the title of your book and one text slide for your Call to Action (what you want a viewer to do after watching your book trailer; for more, see this section of The Book Trailer Manual.) Gather your images into one folder to make upload easier and faster. Once you’ve uploaded your images, drag and drop until the images are in the order you want. Click on the T to add text slides and drag and drop to desired positions.

Music. Animoto has a music lounge that includes music they have already licensed for use in their videos. Music categories include Featured Tracks, Romantic, Top 40 Pop, Indie Rock, Electronica, Hip Hop, Singer/Songwriter, Latin, Jazz, Classical, Country, Gospel/Christian, and Oldies. You can choose from one of their songs or upload your own (mp3 format only).

Speed. Animoto can spend a lot of time on each image, or not much time. Choose a normal speed for the first time.

Let Animoto Work. Click to create the video and then, sit back and let them do the work. You can close the page; they’ll email you when the video is done.

Remix. One nice feature is that you can ask Animoto to remix the video multiple times until you get what you want. Try remixing at half speed and again at normal speed. Add or subtract images, or re-sequence them until you are happy.

Distribute. Finally, grab the code to embed the videos and start spreading them around. Here are some of my Animoto.com videos.

Dear Fellow Author:

THE DREAM OF PUBLISHING MEETS THE REALITY OF PROMOTION

You’ve just sold a book and are facing the task of book promotion and publicity. Like all of us, you hope that your book will gain a wide readership. You want appreciation for your literary work, you want your career to jump-start, so you can write more books, not just this one. You’re hoping your name will soon be a household name and fans will anxiously be waiting for your next title.

But your publisher has a low budget for promotion and publicity for your book. Maybe you’re a mid-lister and you feel ignored. You understand that it’s hard to break through the cluttered media and capture the attention of readers. Really, all you want is to be able to explain your book, to tell the story behind your writing it, so the reader will understand it better.

No, what you really want is to forget all the publicity stuff and just write.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one, simple, easy way to get word-of-mouth started? Let your readers spread the word for you. Readers telling readers about your book, until they turn it into a best-seller, a classic. Fans telling fans about your book until there are enough fans they even start anticipating your next book.

In this uncertain world of publishing, there are no guarantees. But the online world has given us possibilities, especially book videos or book trailers. Think about how many times you’ve gotten email from a friend with a link to an exciting video. You watch it, right? Give people something to talk about with a great book trailer!

THE POSSIBILITY OF VIRAL BOOK VIDEOS

NOW Available.

The Book Trailer Manual puts that viral book trailer within your reach. It explains what to put into a digital book trailer, how to gather the images and sounds, how to actually create the video, and how to get the distribution needed for it to go viral.

On my blog, Fiction Notes, I’ve built my reputation as a writer teacher by taking complex things and making them simple, giving you concrete ways to approach your writing. My passion is to make things easy to understand, simple to do. For The Book Trailer Manual, I’ve spent the time studying the current state of videos about books, so you don’t have to. I’ve read the latest research, tested equipment, located resources, and put everything together in a simple package.

BREAK OUT: GRAB ATTENTION!

Book trailers, as an art form, are in their infancy. The Book Trailer Manual, along with the playlists I’ve created on YouTube.com, give you an in-depth look at what’s being done now. You’ll understand your options for telling the story of your book to readers. In the world of low-budget promotion, it’s an opportunity to take a positive step in helping promote your book.

By using The Book Trailer Manual, you’ll get these benefits:

• A way to take a positive step in promoting your book.
• Reach a world wide audience.
• Provide fodder for the word-of-mouth crowd.
• Learn what to say in a book trailer.
• Learn how easy the hardware and software choices can be.
• Learn how to distribute the book trailer for the most impact.

THE AUDIENCE OF YOUR DREAMS

You wrote the book of your dreams: Now, find the audience of your dreams.

• Everything from idea to viral.
• 14 specific ideas on content
• 10 options for images and sound
• 42 sites to submit to
• Recommendations for hardware and software

That dream audience is within your reach: your audience is online and is increasingly watching videos.

But that’s only kids watching videos, right? Wrong. Whatever the age of your audience, a book trailer is increasingly likely to find them online.

Age % Watching
13-17 5%
18-24 13%
25-34 29%
35-54 36%
55+ 17%

Yes, YOUR audience is online. And watching.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR MULTI-MEDIA ELEVATOR PITCH

Everything in The Book Trailer Manual is based on the most recent research available. You’ll learn more than just who is watching online videos. We combine conventional wisdom with research to answer these questions:

• What should you put in your trailer?
• What is the shelf life of a trailer?
• What is the best distribution strategy to get the most viewers?

The Idea: With 14 specific ideas for content and 10 ways to approach images and sound, you’ll be able to create compelling content. Need help or inspiration? The Book Trailer Manual Playlists on YouTube.com lead you through book trailers that illustrate your options.

5 Case Studies provide further examples of how authors successfully initiate book trailers or how they work with a publisher to make sure the trailer gets the most viewers. Joe Dull, a professor of digital film making, explains how beginners often go wrong and how you can avoid those mistakes.

The complete process is laid out clearly: creating an idea, writing a script, setting up the skeleton of the book trailer video, filling it in with sound and image, revising it, optimizing it so search engines can find it, and finally, distributing it. You’ll learn what to look for when you consider software and hardware; you’ll learn where and how to purchase stock photos, video or sounds.

Examples: I’ve even created a set of videos using various software for my teen fantasy novel, The Wayfinder. They all use the same stock photos, same audio file (when supported by the program), and same script (or at least as similar as each program allows). See The Wayfinder Book Trailers.

THE MOST POPULAR VIDEO = THE MOST POPULAR BOOK

The Book Trailer Manual takes you step-by-step through the book trailer process from the first inkling of an idea through the creation of the trailer to distribution and racking up viewers. It puts within your grasp, a positive step toward book promotion that could lead to a wide readership, to readers who appreciate your work, to a career where your name is a household word and fans anxiously await your next title.

Can a simple video do all that? No. Only your writing can really do that.

But if no one reads your writing, your career is stalled. You must do some book promotion and in today’s online world, the simple book trailer video makes sense. And The Book Trailer Manual makes it simple. Try it today. I’ll guarantee that you’ll have better ideas for the content of your trailer, an easier time of creating your own book trailer, and better distribution. If at the end of 90 days, you’re not happy, I’ll refund your money. No questions asked.

Sincerely,
Darcy Pattison
www.booktrailermanual.com

P.S. No one can guarantee huge sales of your book, not even your publisher. But The Book Trailer Manual gives you a chance. It allows you to reach a world-wide audience. It helps you find your audience online. It gives you the possibility of going viral. It gives you a positive step you can take yourself. Hey! Be sure to send me your good news at book@booktrailermanual.com!