Chaeya

You’ve seen them. Those little miniature videos advertising a book. Some of them are really cool, and in this day and age, you will definitely need one if ever write a book. But here’s the tick, I’m not sure how much they account for sales because I’ve yet to see any statistics regarding them. However, when a reader goes to check out your website, it does look professional to see not only photocopies of your bookcover, but a video advertisement of your book. It says to the reader that you are a professional and take your writing serious.

You don’t want to skimp when it comes to graphics and booktrailers, especially when you’re a self-published writer. You need all the advertising you can get. A few stigmas which haunts self-published writers is that they self-published because they couldn’t get accepted by a pro publisher, the quality of their writing is poor, and their stories are too personal to them to be of interest to anyone else. Being that we self-published authors have these strikes against us, it’s important to maybe spend a few extra dollars getting decent graphics and a book trailer to add to your website. Don’t have a website? No worries, there are numerous sites such as myspace, google blogger, ning and multiply where you can get a free website to promote yourself. They have numerous templates which will offer you a professional feel and readers can take you serious. You can now get your own url for cheap from places like Godaddy.com and buy like two and three years at a time. There are numerous cheap hosting sites, for instance, I pay only $5 a month for this.

So give you’ve done this, here’s so resources to getting a booktrailer:

Most book trailers are made with PowerPoint. Most computers come with PowerPoint, if not, I’m sure you can find a copy of Office somewhere. You can pick up Office 2003 at ebay. And you can do pretty well with that version.
There’s also cheap movie editing programs such as Roxio Movie Creator and Magix Movie Edit Pro. I have version 12, but I think they’re up to 15 now.

You can, of course, hit up that friend or cousin of yours with the fancy schmancy video editing programs. But honestly, you can do quite well with the above.

Royalty-Free Pictures:

http://www.istockphoto.com

http://www.dreamstime.com

http://www.fotosearch.com

Royalty-Free Music:

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/

http://musicbakery.com/

These are just a couple of sites. If you google any of the above you can find lots, however, these offer some quality music. Tracks will cost anywhere from $15 to $50. May sound like a lot, but it’s so worth it to have quality music on your trailer.

Here’s a good article on how to create your own book trailer and if you just find yourself lacking on time or just too intimidated, it provides a list of companies you can pay to do your trailer for you: http://www.squidoo.com/booktrailers.

Once you get your book trailer, upload it everywhere you can. Even if people have no intention of reading your book, if they watch it and rate it, it will move it up in the ranks and someone else may see it and decide they wish to purchase your book.

So hop to it, and happy book trailer-ing.

Tags: authors, book trailers, self-publishing