I Can Do a Book Trailer

1/30/2012 book trailer , storyboard , windows movie maker 0 Comments

On Saturday I was doing some research on marketing and discovered I could make my own book trailer from the comforts of my home.

For those of you who don’t know what a book trailer is, it’s like a movie trailer, but for a book instead. It’s pretty cool, actually.

There are so many ways to do a book trailer.

You can do it just like a movie production with actors portraying your characters, if you so desire to.

But for me though, I want the reader to conjure up their own image of my characters in their minds, instead of planting the image of them before hand.

Does that make sense?

You can also use animations to do your book trailer, or still photos, set to music with the storyline written on the photo, which is the one I'm going to use.

I know I’ve mentioned that I’m a moron when it comes to computers/technology, but I think I can do this. Of course, it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to accomplish, but I think it will be fun to do. So why not try, right?

What's the worse that can happen?

I can’t figure it out and my time was wasted?

But would it really be a waste?

I guess that would be a matter of perspective, huh?

I think for me personally, I’d look at it as another experience I could put in my repository with the rest of the experiences I’ve had in my life.

Anyway, there’s a program called, ‘Windows Movie Maker’ that I can use to make the book trailer. I discovered I already had it on my computer, but those computers that don’t, can easily (so I’ve read) upload that program.

Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t know crap about the program. However, there are websites to teach you how to use it. There’s also YouTube as well, which is cool because you can visually see how to use the program.

Before I came across this information, I thought I’d have to come up with my own music and pictures to do it. But I don’t, which rocks. I discovered there are websites with free pictures and music you can use without violating copyright laws.

How cool is that?

So before making the actual book trailer, what I’m going to need to do is first and foremost, go to YouTube (I love YouTube) and watch a ton of book trailers to see how they did it. After that, I'll need to storyboard my ideas out and consider how to convey the idea of my book in such a way it’ll capture people’s interest enough to buy my book. When that’s done, I’ll need to spend a day finding and saving pictures to my computer, and then I’ll need to find the right music to fit the mood I’ll be aiming for. Also, book trailers should last no longer than two minutes, so I’m going to have to factor that in while I’m creating it.

Once I have everything together, I can then go into the Windows Movie Maker program and start creating my book trailer. What I’ll probably do, though, is play around with the program so I can get familiar with it before hand.

The only thing that really concerns me at this point is summarizing my book for the trailer. I’m still struggling over writing my blurb for the back cover of my book, so it’s going to be a huge challenge for me to break the storyline down in such a way that it’ll grab people’s attention.

*Big sigh*

I know it can be done though, because other people have done it. What one man can do, another one can too, right?

Maybe once I get my blurb written, it won’t be so hard to write the summary. At least, I’m hoping so.

When I do start this project, I’ll post how I’m doing it, step by step, so you can experience it with me. I’ll even post the websites that I’ll be using, just in case you might want to check them out.

I won’t be starting it for a while though, because I still have a TON of things to do before hand. However, once I do, I’ll start posting about it.

Well, I better get back to work. :)