Do Book Trailers Actually Sell Books?

During the past couple of years, I’ve been on the fence about book trailers. I’m all for any new form of promotion and I’m always brainstorming about new ideas, but as with any marketing expenditure it comes down to cost and effectiveness. In other words, if you have a strict marketing budget, is a book trailer the best way to reach potential readers?

When I asked some author friends about book trailers the usual answer was: “Well, they can’t hurt.” But I’m not sure this is true. If a book trailer is poorly made, I think it can have a negative effect, since your trailer might give someone his or her first impression of your book. If that first impression brings up adjectives such as shoddy, amateurish, or dull, then I think you were better off having no trailer at all. The last thing you want your trailer to do is turn someone off who might otherwise have bought your book.

While it’s hard to quantify what sorts of publicity actually work, I think a well-made trailer is a great way to create buzz, especially if it can attract a new audience that you wouldn’t ordinarily draw.

There are a lot of wonderful trailers out there. One of my favorites promotes Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Price.



I like that this trailer is simple, stylish, to the point and, most importantly, it makes you want to read the novel (and everyone should read it, by the way--it’s one of my favorite books of the past few years). The trailer’s fairly brief too, which in my opinion is a big plus. People online usually have short attention spans, so a trailer needs to grip them from the get-go. I know that when I click on a random Web video the first thing I do is look to see how long it is. If it’s longer than a few minutes I immediately become impatient. Unless Martin Scorcese directed it, I don’t think a lot of people are going to stick around to see a four- or five-minute book trailer.

To promote the new-mass market paperback edition of The Follower, I decided I wanted a trailer of around two minutes that would pique readers’ interest about the themes of the book and reinforce the title and cover art. Initially, I “cheaped out” and tried making one on my own. I’m reasonably good with Movie Maker--I can make a mean birthday party video--and I thought, How hard could it be? Well, I discovered that while it’s not difficult to make a book trailer that sucks, it’s very hard to make a good one.

So I hired Michael Gaylin at Aurora Video to put together a trailer for The Follower. I think Michael did a terrific job of capturing the suspense and milieu of the book, and you can see here:



I’m wondering: What are some of your favorite book trailers? (Please tell where to watch them on the Web.) Has any book trailer ever made you want to go out and buy a book? And has a book trailer ever persuaded you to not read a book that you would have ordinarily have picked up? Comments welcome below.