Ask the Critic: Book trailers -- yea or nay?

A reader wrote in yesterday to ask my opinion of book trailers. I answered that I don't think very much of them. In my opinion, they're not terribly effective and probably a waste of money. (Although, if they can be produced cheaply, they probably won't hurt.)

When pressed for an explanation of why I think they don't work, I shared the following reasons (off the top of my head):

• Most book trailers are amateurish.
• They appear to be advertising something other than a book (e.g., a movie) and are thus confusing to the consumer.
• Most of the audience is unfamiliar with or unaware of book trailers, and thus their impact is minimal.
• Most readers don't seem to like them very much. I've never heard readers talk about them and never seen them generate word of mouth.
• They're a form of "push marketing" and thus have to be combined with additional forms of marketing in order to be effective -- but most authors don't use them that way. They post the trailer on their website and on YouTube and that's it. But how is the prospective audience supposed to find them?

I do think book trailers can be somewhat effective when used as part of a larger marketing campaign -- the kind of thing done for bestselling and other high profile authors. But for most writers, especially midlist and debut writers, I believe they're better off spending their (very limited) promotional dollars elsewhere.

But what do you think? Do you like book trailers? Do you ever watch them? Have you ever bought a book based on one?

Comments

[Dana Kaye]

I totally agree with you. I've never bought a book based on a trailer. In fact, the only time I've come across someone's trailer is on their website or when it was sent to, me which means that I was already aware of the author.

The trailers that have people in them always strike me as weird. Isn't the point of reading to imagine what the characters look like?

[Guyot]

I think you nailed it - these trailers only work for already established authors. I think the only ones that could really impact sales on a any level are the trailers shown on television. Literally, a commercial for the book. But that's big money.

Unless you have the money and power of a Sandra Brown, and have a publisher making fancy trailers for you, the trailers made by midlist (and lower) writers are only be seen by people who already know the writer.

I'm sure some authors will argue that with Youtube more potential readers/buyers can find them via book trailers, etc. But Youtube is barely a step above Myspace - which is the single biggest waste of time for an author.

Even with Youtube, you're only going to find a book trailer if you're looking for it or the author. Generally the trailers are on the author's web site - so perhaps one could say that the person is there checking out the author to see IF they want to buy their book, and a good trailer could convince them, but - as DJM stated - most of the trailers are goofy.

The majority of book trailers are pale imitations of movie trailers, and for me it's nothing more than a visual blurb. And not all blurbs are good.

If a midlist author is debating spending money on making a trailer, I think they could find better use for that money.

There's potential downside as well. Say a reader was thinking about buying an author's book, then saw a cheesy, cheaply made trailer and thought, "Well, I'm not buying that book."

[Keith]

I think it would be much more effective to produce a video that makes the author and the book look interesting.

You know, Joe Author in his favorite bar, talking about why he used this location in the book. Stuff like that.

It's cheaper, too.

[Alexandra Sokoloff]

I was skeptical about book trailers for all the reasons you guys list above, but now I'm sold. I think trailers are more effective for certain genres - romance, paranormal, horror, thrillers - but if you're a mystery writer looking to get readers from romantic suspense, for example - making a trailer can open you up to that huge book buying readership, emphasis on BUYING.

I decided to do book trailers for the paperback release of THE
HARROWING and for the hardcover release of my second novel, THE PRICE,
mainly because of bestselling author Christine Feehan, who very kindly
spent a long time with me at Heather Graham’s New Orleans writers'
conference talking about how doing a book trailer was in her experience
the most important marketing tool available to authors. Christine
emphasized that the company that does her trailers, Circle of Seven
Productions, doesn’t just make the trailer for you, but also distributes it to several dozen websites that feature book trailers, including Barnes & Noble, Borders and Powells' sites, which all now feature book trailers. That's a hell of a lot of exposure.

I signed up with COS to do both of my trailers and found their production values and distribution to be every bit as excellent as Christine had told me. In fact, the trailer they did for me for THE
HARROWING just won a Black Quill award from Dark Scribe Magazine for
Best Book Trailer.

Making a trailer is more of an investment for an author - of either your own time or money - than other marketing tools, but once you have a trailer there are never-ending uses for it. My publisher has sent the trailers around to their sales force and to bookstores and libraries to generate excitement about the books. Authors can link to a trailer in their newsletters, embed it on all their websites, blogs and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc), and send it to bookstores and libraries where they're appearing to advertise their appearances. Some book conferences like Romantic Times charge a relatively low fee to broadcast your trailer
during their mass signings (I found myself mesmerized by the trailers
at RT last year and am excited my trailers will be played there next
month). I've gotten dozens of e mails already from readers who bought
one or both of my books because they were so intrigued by the trailers.

In other words, I think it's been gold.

Sorry for such a long response, Monty, but I think you guys may have a gender - I mean genre - ;) bias against book trailers so I wanted to give another perspective.

You can see both trailers here:

http://alexandrasokoloff.com/books.html

http://alexandrasokoloff.com/books.html#price

Sorry I had to miss Love is Murder... hope to see you on the road soon!

Alex

[David J. Montgomery]

I hope I can say this without giving offense... But watching the trailer for THE HARROWING did not in the slightest way make me want to read the book. If anything, it had the opposite effect.

My other main question remains: how are fans who don't know who Alex Sokoloff is going to find this trailer? Why will they be clicking on the BN.com page for the book? How will they find you in MySpace?

That's what I think the central problem is. Assuming we could come up with a trailer that would really SELL the book -- and frankly I've hardly ever seen any that I think would -- how will the casual fan see that trailer in the first place?

I don't think it's a sex thing or a genre thing -- I think it's a practical thing.

[Pari Noskin Taichert]

Well, I'm a midlister with a video interview on my website and a couple other tiny bells and whistles.

The thing that disturbs me about book trailers -- the thing that will keep me from doing one -- is the media mix. I don't think that these potentially powerful commercials spur people to read . . .

Word of mouth remains the most dependable tool for sales. I think the idea for book trailers is that they'll generate this.

I think that's an odd leap of faith. People who like to watch aren't necessarily people who like to read . . .

[Doug Riddle]

My problem with trailers is that I think you are preaching to the choir with them. By that I mean, most trailers are viewed on the authors website, and if I am on your website, I am already interested.

Also, I think I have seen more bad trailers then good. I personally would much rather see a well filmed interview with the author talking about their book.

[JT Ellison]

I think Alex has a very good point here. Yes, a trailer does you little to no good if you just put it up on your site. But if you get into the distribution network, into the hands of the readers (which in the romance and thriller genre, there are numeral venues to do that) you can get a lot of eyes on your ad.

David, you're right about the "push marketing" aspect. There is no single thing that incites a reader to buy a book. But if you can have an economical trailer, it can be one more tool in the arsenal.

I just made myself a trailer. It was easy to do, I got my message in it, and I was able to bypass spending a lot of money on it. Is it going to win awards? Hardly. But it will be another facet in the marketing for the next book. Maybe one day we'll all have commercials, like the big dogs : )

[Alexandra Sokoloff]

But David, trailers aren't aimed at YOU. They're a way to reach a completely different audience - teenagers for THE HARROWING, romance readers who wouldn't necessarily pick up a mystery, and whoever it is that goes to all those book trailer sites out there. I've looked at the view count for both of my trailers on some of those sites and they're in the thousands, so obviously SOMEBODY is going to those sites.

If your point is that book trailers are going to turn off as many people as they turn on, well, maybe - I don't have any way of knowing that, but I suspect that people who don't like book trailers simply don't take the time to watch them, so it's not something to be overly concerned about.

[JT Ellison]

Numerous venues. Sorry.

[Alexandra Sokoloff]

Oh, and on the B&N site question - B&N is launching a trailer SECTION on their site. So people can randomly browse through trailers and then click through that to the specific book page. So they find the book through the trailer, not vice-versa.

If all those book chains are creating their own trailer sections, someone in corporate must think that it's a useful marketing tool.

[Keith]

I think trailers are this year's way of siphoning money out of authors' pockets.

How much does a good one cost? (For that matter, how much does a cheesy one cost, since cheese is the rule.)

How many additional books have to be sold for the royalties to pay for the trailer?

I'm going to take a wild-ass guess that $500 is low-end for a cheesy trailer. What's a paperback royalty these days? Ten cents?

Does anybody but the video people actually end up ahead?

[Keith]

Alexandra, someone in corporate thinks user-generated content with near-zero overhead isn't a big risk. If it doesn't take off, no loss, and if it does take off, they can start charging for it.

Or wait--are they already charging for it?

[David J. Montgomery]

But if most book trailers don't appeal to someone like me -- a person who's always on the internet, a person who likes new ideas and new technology, a person always looking for new and different kinds of books... At the very least, that causes me to raise an eyebrow at their effectiveness.

Don't get me wrong, I hope that eventually some new form of marketing like this will take off and become really successful. We're always looking for new ways to get the word out about books. My concern is that this ain't it -- at least not at this point.

[Guyot]

I like Keith's idea.

I think DJM's point is what I said - you run the risk of losing a sale as much (if not more) than gaining a sale with a trailer.

A writer friend of mine mentioned how people don't buy books the way they buy movies. You're essentially using another business's marketing tool, which may not fit with yours.

If what X says is true - that the pub industry is becoming more and more like Hollywood, and thus, Hollywood marketing needs to be used more - I think that's a sad, sad state of affairs.

If B&N and Border's, etc. are using the form, soon the whole industry will become so lazy that trailers will become the standard - then books won't be judged by their quality or their author, but by the trailer. Publishers will dump money into creating bigger and better trailers, and all the hype will be about opening, and nothing else... just like movies are now.

And I still say Myspace and Facebook are worthless for legit authors. All one need do is look at the hard numbers for these sites - the demographics, etc. - and you'll quickly realize it's all Snakes On A Plane.

[Keith]

David, my opinion is this can't be it until authors and amateur or semi-pro video production people are priced out of the game. Until then, it'll mostly be cheese--and the public only likes cheese when it's also a novelty. Which this won't be pretty soon.

[Guyot]

Keith mentions something NO ONE talks about in this day of marketing-above-all-else, Konrath stories of selling yourself, and everything else...

Is it worth it? Does the time and money invested in all this marketing/publicity really payoff at the end of the day?

I know several authors with very high internet and conference profiles who can't make a decent living off their book sales.

[David J. Montgomery]

That's an excellent observation. What's the point of having 10,000 MySpace friends if you're only making $8000 per book? What's the point of having a blog with 500 unique visitors a day if you've only got a 3000 copy print run?

Isn't there a better way that we could be spending our time, whether it's improving our writing or just doing more effective forms of promotion?

We're all grasping at straws in this business, because there's so little empirical evidence about what works and what doesn't. But that just means we need to be even MORE analytical, more critical, more skeptical about the "next big thing."

[Doug Riddle]

I have been thinking a lot about the whole "push marketing" that is going on in publishing, and as a yet to be published author it has me wondering....can I do all this maketing crap?

My god, I barely have time to write while holding down a fulltime job and raising my kids, what would I do if I actually got published and was expected to do all the marketing I see authors being pushed more and more to do?

And I have to agree with Guyot, how much of it really does any good when it comes to selling books?

Since the original subject was "trailers", let me just say that the first trailer I ever saw was on Michael Connelly's website, and I got the impression it was a little freebie for the faithful, like the CD and DVD he attached to a couple of his books. I don't see a MySpace page attached to his site, or a lot of other internet presence, and I only see his name connected to some of the bigger confrences, so how much of has any of that contributed to his position in the industry? It would seem not that much.

Why isn't it enough to just write a really good book?

And how did it become the authors job to have to sell the book? Seems like the publishing industry has slipped one over on us. Next thing you know we will be down at the printer packing boxes.

[Keith]

It became authors' jobs to sell books when we jumped up and said ME ME ME! I'LL SPEND MY ADVANCE! I'LL GO INTO DEBT! I'LL DO YOUR MARKETING! JUST PUBLISH MY BOOOOOOOK!

[David J. Montgomery]

I don't think it's a problem if authors do some of their own marketing, assuming they chose to. Where I have a problem is that the publishers have largely abrogated their responsibility to market the books they publish (except in the case of those particular authors they've chosen to push). To publish a book in a meaningful sense does not mean simply to print and distribute it -- but that's all that happens in most cases. That's why I've been calling for years for publishers to substantially reduce the number of books they publish, and then actually promote and market those books that they do publish.

[Guyot]

It became authors' jobs to sell books when we jumped up and said ME ME ME! I'LL SPEND MY ADVANCE! I'LL GO INTO DEBT! I'LL DO YOUR MARKETING! JUST PUBLISH MY BOOOOOOOK!

I've seen that guy's blog.

[Doug Riddle]

You guys are making me weep over here......lol

[M.J]

Here’s my take. A lot of agreement with a lot of what a lot of you have said. But in this case at AuthorBuzz.com we work with about 300 titles a year so I have some research for this.

First – no one will buy a book if no one knows it exists. So saying word of mouth is the best way to sell/market a book is true but false because you can’t get word of mouth unless first you get a sizable group of people to read the book and start talking about.

And to do that you have to advertise it somehow/some way. And if you look at any bestseller list you’ll see that every one of those books gets marketing dollars. Books don’t sell by magic or osmosis. And I know publishers tell authors advertising doesn’t work except everyone who says that spends serious money advertising their lead titles. The party line that advertising doesn’t work is code for we don’t have it in the budget for your book.

85% of all books get less than $2000 in ads/marketing.

So. They have to market your book. Or you do. And no one thing does that. Dozens of individual things do that.

And certainly a book trailer can be one of those things but if you think no one reads a book that they don’t know exists they don’t watch a trailer that no one knows exists.

So if you’re going to do it I usually offer this advice.

A: The trailer has to be part of a larger marketing effort. You can’t just shove it up at a few websites and expect anyone to find it or watch it. And you can’t rely on viral marketing. (Viral marketing works - or pass along videos only happen when video is so funny or amazing people have to pass it on. This happens with one in 100,000 videos. It worked with the first Vidlit.com because it was hysterical – but very few trailers are funny enough or amazing enough to get passed on.)

B. 90% of book trailers fail to make it clear from the start that this is a book we’re talking about and that’s a big problem. They do look like movie trailers and so confuse readers. The complication here is readers don’t watch books but we are asking them to watch a reenactment from the book in order to convince them to read the book. Its counter intuitive.

C. Author interview trailers as opposed to reenactment trailers sometimes are a better solution.

D. If you are going to do a trailer and expect it to accomplish anything you should do it the way Alex did it - but don’t even stop there. ExpandedBooks.com does author interview trailers and/or distributes their or can be hired to distribute others. Ditto for Circle of Seven – they do them trailers and/or distributes.

And then ad AuthorBuzz.com notes to get them in front of hundreds of thousands more readers, bookclubs librarians and booksellers. (You didn’t expect me not to make a pitch did you?)

E. I’ve done quite a few trailers myself – actually I think I was the first author to do one in 2001 – but of all of them the only one I think that worked is this one - its just a teaser - my goal was not to tell the story of the book but the readers experience. We ran this on cable TV shows and on the web - http://youtube.com/watch?v=FsbtOSflRro

[Doug Riddle]

Honestly though, I just read on Jason Pinter's blog about his trip from NYC to Seattle, and I thought to myself....Just how many books would you have to sell to make it worth the air fare and hotel room?

Years ago I read about Lawrence Block trying to beat the high cost of traveling to promote his books by driving a RV loaded with books from store to store. But with gas looking at $4.00 a gallon that isn't even an option.

"Coming Soon to a bookstore near you...The I Want To Be A Famous Writer Bicycle Tour."