Book Trailers

I've noticed quite a bit since my Twitter experience just began that a lot of authors are using book trailers. The idea, I imagine, stemmed from the traditional movie trailers used to showcase movies in theaters and television. It works for movies, why not for books?

With this in mind, I employed the help of my 19 year old daughter (also my illustrator for two of my books) and we came up with a plan. First of all, I decided that I most definately did NOT want to sit in front of a camera and try to talk about my books. After all, I've just recovered from cancer. My hair is only about seven inches long. I lost all my bottom teeth to cancer, and so cannot wear my top denture until I can afford to get a bottom one. My skin is dry and flaky in places.

My daughter had used PowerPoint to make slideshows frequently for school projects. PowerPoint came with my brand, spanking-new Microsoft Office 365 that I purchased to publish with (and that I'm still learning to use!), so we started messing around with tiles and trying to be creative. There were different animations for slide transitions, even animations for text lines. Each transition is adjustable to duration and timing. We spent several hours over the course of a few days working on this.

The end result was, in my humble opinion, so well-done that I plan to run them on the laptop during my upcoming book signing at my local Hastings bookstore. I also managed to get them uploaded to YouTube (I got a lunch of junk food from McDonald's while borrowing their high-speed wifi signal!) so that I can link to them. Today I added them to the 'link' list at the top right of my blog pages. I'd appreciate any comments on them if you'd care to watch them. Since most of my "interneting' is done through my phone, I can watch them, but often my signal strength is poor and I'm not sure I'm seeing the video at the proper speed.

Will it make a difference in sales? Only time will tell. But I'll tell you this: I intend to do the same for my two upcoming novels (due out next year) well BEFORE my release date. Possibly this will increase interest. So, it's just another lesson I'm trying to learn in the WWM: the Wide World of Marketing!