Book videos

[Dawn M. Kravagna]

Hi. Has anyone created a book promo video for your website? Did it help your book sales? What format did you post? Quicktime??? Flash? And has anyone viewed any author book videos? Is it worth the time? I'm considering creating a video for my cartoon novel series, Cattle Capers (tm), but I'll have to draw the animation, which'll take some time (shortened up quite a bit by Flash). Is it worth it? Working full-time, I don't have a lot of extra time and energy for pursuing loose threads. Thanks!

[L.J. Sellers]

I hired someone to film a live-action a trailer for my book, but it's not done yet, so I don't know how it's working out. I spent the money because I'd heard many authors say that it helped book sales. As for format, I don't know, but I really should know these things. Full-time jobs really get the way, don't they? I think making a video will be worth your time and energy, especially if you can find a lot of places to upload your video on the web.

[Daniel Hatadi]

Plenty of people here have done it and talked about it.

[I. J. Parker]

I posted a flash ad (provided by my publisher) on the web site. No appreciable effect. As to having trailers made: I learned elsewhere that the results depend on how many people you reach with them. If you can run them on national TV, that should help a lot. On the internet, or on your web site, probably not. The competition there is huge and your target audience is bombarded by other people's trailers.

[Darren Laws]

It is an interesting option, but the main thing to think about is distribution. Getting the trailer in front of people who are willing to be informed and curious enough to follow up and actually buy, order or remember the next time they take a trip to their local book store. So how do you ensure your promo gets prime of place on YouTube or the myriad of other sites competing for our attention. Make it damned good, damned memorable, damned original or damned funny or just throw a load of cash at it and be damned. They look great but I am yet to be convinced that a video promo has influenced one buyer on the net. If you buy a spot on a cable network station that may be another story. I love the idea of the video promo but feel its like farting in a hurricane.

[Anne Frasier]

i don't feel they help sell books, but i enjoy making them. i used imovie to make my last one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM7NtgZ_xi8


i would say do it if you're looking for another creative outlet, but i don't think it will do much toward increasing sales.

[John McFetridge]

i used windows moviemaker to make mine - and got some friends to take the pictures. It is fun, but it's not about book sales.

And Anne, just so you know, I've always felt that farms were scary......

[Anne Frasier]

heh! yeah, farms are scary as hell. so are small towns.

[Amanda Stevens]

I grew up on a farm outside a small town. I can attest to the scariness. And, Anne, your Pale Immortal trailer did help convince me to buy the book. (Well, that and the music on your MySpace site.) That trailer is still one of my favorites. But I agree they are mostly about the fun.

[Anne Frasier]

Amanda, I love your trailer for The Devil's Footprints!!!!

[Amanda Stevens]

Oh, thank you! I'm lucky to have kids who are filmmakers.

[Anne Frasier]

i firmly believe in child labor. :D

[Mari Sloan]

We originally created the video using the WMV format. Unfortunately this created a very thick file, almost 40mb, so we converted it to flash. This reduced it to only a few mb. We found out later that you can upload almost any format to YouTube and they will convert it to flash for you. then connect it right from YouTube to yoour website. The advantage to creating your own flash is that you can embed it on your website but if you just link to YouTube, you keep your website lighter. You can download a free flash conversion program easily enough from online. They are easy to find.

We used pictures from a royalty free website to create the frames, making many mistakes along the way. Evenually we realized that picture frames alternating with word frames, made on photoshop or printshop, work best for that.. Our dream is to get hold of a video camera OR a real picture phone and create an animated one, like some of the wonderful ones we've seen. Right now we're a real low budget team.

And no, we haven't noticed the video influencing book sales at all, but we have received a lot of nice comments about it. You can buy an inexpensive program that will convert your files to DVD, VCD, or other video formats, but some of the convertters leave the name of the program in the corner, so you have to experiment. In fact, isn't experimentation the whole reason for existence?

Mari