Book Trailer for for Ballet Trilogy and Interview with Videographer Emily Hill
Book Trailers are one way authors introduce readers to their books. My dear friend, Emily Hill created a lovely book trailer for my ballet-themed books: 84 Ribbons, When the Music Stops – Dance On, and Letters to Follow – A Dancer’s Adventure. She took my ideas and massaged them into this lovely tribute to ballet.
After watching her work, I decided my blog followers might enjoy a peek behind the scenes of how she organized the trailer. Here’s her brief interview.
Your book, The Ghost Chaser’s Daughter had an amazing book trailer. When and how did you get started making book trailers? Please remind us of the link.
Paddy, first off let me say what a joy it is to have this opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the past, nearly ten years about the book publishing business.
I got into book publishing after discovering what Boyd Morrison and others called “the dark side”. In their wisdom to sell Kindles and fill those Kindles with reading material, Amazon reached out to independent authors with a 70% royalty contract, paid monthly. That proportion of royalty doubled what had been historically paid to signed authors who were used to waiting up to 18 months for their royalty checks to generate.
We were all sharing information openly in our blogs, thrilled with fresh discoveries, working around the clock to grab what Amazon was providing us – direct entry into the global market!
Independent authors were trying to grab the attention of readers by using every digital means possible: book trailers, blog tours, virtual book launches, face-the-camera YouTube interviews. Book trailers became one more way of entertaining readers with “book teasers”; and I was more than eager to learn the skill.
Here’s the YouTube link to the book trailer, “The Ghost Chaser’s Daughter” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USVmCRbCuUE&feature=youtu.be.
What do you find to be your biggest challenge making a book trailer?
The biggest challenge to making a book trailer is to know the genre and match the audio and correct music score. Readers intuitively expect the book covers, trailers, and branding for romance novels to have a certain look and feel. The same is true of mystery, horror, and fantasy novels.
After styling, nothing is more important than evoking a mood for your book via correct choice of score. When one thinks back on the Oscar winning and nominated scores and themes one realizes that the swell of the music, the thunderous timpani’s, the melancholy chords all lend to making a book trailer best.
What is most enjoyable about creating trailers?
Ahh. . . matching a visual side sequence to the chords struck in an audio track is brutal drudgery. You want the image of a book cover to PoP! just the downbeat strikes! You want the sweep of the score to match the Ken Burns panorama sweeping across a series of texts or video selection. A mis-matched beat of music to slide progression is as jarring as watching a
Netflix movie and the actor’s lips are not moving in sync to the audio of his words.
Beyond syncing a book trailers video and audio, the length is important. You lose a readers’ interest (in my experience) with 3 minute trailers that reveal every twist and turn of the book’s plot. Shorter is so much better. I try to construct book trailers that “reveal” a book’s cover three times within a 90-second sequence of stills and video stock.
People who live in the Edmonds, WA area know of your arts and events column, Artfully Edmonds, featured weekly in My Edmonds News. What additional writing projects do you see in your near future?
I’m laughing! Additional writing projects? None! While I was working as an independent author I was working 60-70 hours a week. Although I enjoyed a year of being on Amazon’s best seller list during 2012-2013, I lost touch with something that I cherish – the Edmonds community.
Learning the dark side of obsession tempered my compulsion to conquer every new horizon, and of saying “Yes!” to every offered project.
I am currently a part of a wonderful, engaging, loyal-to-the-community-it-serves news organization – My Edmonds News and the “My Neighborhood News Network”. Last year my column received over 68,000 views, for which I am grateful. It doesn’t get any better than that!
Paddy’s Note:
My thanks to Emily Hill for her technical skills as well as her continued friendship and support. Whether you live in Edmonds or not, I hope you will follow her online arts and entertainment column to learn more about the variety of arts and entertainment you can expect whenever you visit the Edmonds area.
Recent Comments