Book Trailers Add Another Blow To The Mid-List

I had a whole other set of intentions when I began researching for this week’s entry. I’ve been watching the buzz about book trailers slowly start to take off, and I thought it might be nice to invite readers to offer their opinion about book trailers they have seen. There’s lots of chatter about them on the web, and most readers seem to feel they’re a fun way to learn about a book. A few reader responses to my questions about how much trailers influenced their buying decision would have been an interesting column.

But that was the blog entry I was going to write.

Then I started talking to authors about the trailers they had for their books, or the trailers they would have liked to have had for their books, and I also started watching more than a few trailers myself.

And that’s where my good intentions fell off the rails.

I quickly learned from authors who had already jumped on the bandwagon that book trailers can be hellishly expensive. HarperCollins has not disclosed just how much it spent on the trailer for Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, for instance, but it has very high production values. It certainly got a great deal of media chatter about it.

There has also been talk of using book trailers mixed up with real movie trailers at the cinemas. If that happens, the cost of book trailers will climb into the stratosphere. They have to. To compete with the awe-inspiring whizz-bang of movie trailers, book trailers will have to have all the production values and costs that go along with a Hollywood-made trailer.

I mentioned I’d seen more than a few trailers this last week. More than a few of them were…well, less than inspiring. Some of them were downright bad. And I discovered along the way that quite a few authors had made them themselves, using software readily available on most home computers. These trailers not only didn’t tell me much about the book, they left me with a desire to avoid the book. And that was the really scary part. Bad advertising usually leaves a reader feeling neutral. For a form of advertising to scare them away altogether?…Oh dear!

When the New York based mid-list crumbled at the end of the 90’s, many mid-list authors found lucrative careers writing for e-book and POD publishers, and have happily settled in here on the net. Once these new style publishers got the hang of presenting themselves properly, and putting effort into good covers, the books they were offering were indistinguishable from book offered by New York. This was a good thing. A great thing. It meant that hundreds more stories and hundreds more author voices were now available for the adventurous reader, giving you, me and everyone who loves a good story a chance to find different styles, voices, even new genres.

Readers do judge a book by its cover, or Amazon would never have got up off the ground. If book trailers are becoming more popular and readers begin to use book trailers as their primary source of judgement on whether to buy a book, then the small press, e-book and POD publishers who work on shoestrings, and rely on their authors to promote themselves, will suddenly find their sales diminishing, and many may be so affected they’ll be forced to close their doors, cutting off the new supplies and sources of great stories we’ve just started to get used to having around – and that many readers are still not fully aware even exist.

I admit this all sounds somewhat obsessive, and rests upon a couple of huge assumptions: That book trailers will really take off, and that readers will use them as their major buying-decision tool. So I will be very interested to see the net effect of book trailers on the publishing industry over the next couple of years. They’ll either go very, very big as I’m suggesting here, and will cause the second mid-list drought of the decade. Or they’ll die a fashionable and decent death, and we can all heave a sigh of relief.

Why a sigh of relief? Because there was one other thing I learned about book trailers while watching them all. If they’re made right, they’re pretty good at giving you a hint of the mood and atmosphere of the book, but none of them give you any idea at all about the writing, the author’s style, the major characters…the story itself.

Story rules, so far as I’m concerned. Trailers will never be a buying tool for me.

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August 2008 update:

I tripped over this old blog post this morning, and wanted to post it here even though it’s a bit dated, because there’s some interesting insights to add since I wrote this article.

1. Book trailers don’t appear to be dying.

Yet. But neither are they taking over the world. (My thanks to whatever deities for that.) Instead they’ve become just one more tool an author can use to get word out.

2. The quality of book trailers doesn’t seem to have improved a lot.

Instead, they’ve morphed into an animated slide show of stills, text commentary and music, that isn’t anywhere near as embarrassing as the live-action sequences trailers first offered.

3. Trailers won’t help you sell your books, much.

I speak with authority here. I spent over a thousand dollars a few months ago, purely as an experiment, with a PR company that not only made the trailer, they also spent hours uploading it everywhere they thought it would do any good on the web, including the social networks.

For two weeks nothing happened.

Then my sales rank on Amazon spiked for a whole day, from mid-six figure rankings, to low six-figure.

Then it instantly fell back to its old point, and hasn’t moved since. I think that represents maybe ten books sold (it’s hard to judge actual quantities via Amazon rankings, because it’s all comparative and relative.)

The trailer was … okay. It didn’t make me blush. But I wasn’t thrilled with it.

I freely admit that I am totally biased against trailers and it would have had to have been revolutionary in concept and quality for me to get excited about it. But that was the whole point: Being biased against trailers, and having an almost stone cold book to promote (it had been out for over a year, and only recently moved to print version, so I had a legitimate excuse to promote it) meant that any positive feedback or positive hit in sales wouldn’t have been wishful thinking on my part. If you’re curious, the trailer is here, amongst other places. Please offer feedback if you have an opinion!

Conclusion: I still believe book trailers are a waste of money. If you can do them yourself (and it’s possible with today’s software) and get a trailer that doesn’t look homemade, clunky and embarrassing, then it’s a good tool for promoting your book…but a minor one at best.

First appeared on Anchored Authors, August 20, 2008

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