This industry never ceases to surprise me. Recently I discovered a little something called book trailers. A book trailer is exactly what it sounds like—a short video meant to entice audiences into purchasing your novel. So basically, to become a novelist today you not only have to be a writer and a marketer, you also have to be a movie producer!

Before I proceed, here’s the trailer for Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,”–the book I’m reading now:

After procrastinating for a while by watching various trailers on the Internet, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• Thrillers make the best trailers. Put on scary music, show a knife and blood and you’ve captured the readers attention. Easy peasy.
• Trailers also make a lot sense for memoirs. When you publish a memoir, you’re trying to get a stranger to want to read all about your life—a trailer is a good way to introduce yourself to the world and get people to like you.
• Women’s Fiction may be the hardest genre to produce a good trailer. Most that I’ve seen come across as really, really cheesy—like it’s going to be a terrible movie book.
• Trailers are high risk/high reward—while the good ones can definitely draw in a new crop of readers and create excitement about the book, a bad one can undercut all an author’s hard work. For movies, it makes sense that great trailer probably = great movie, but not necessarily so for novels. A wonderful writer may turn out to be (and probably will be) a horrible producer.
• There are millions of ways to produce a trailer all by yourself!  You can use Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, ScreenFlow and some other programs. This probably explains why there are so many bad ones are out there.

A couple of more examples:

Below is the first trailer I found under “women’s fiction trailers” in Goodreads.  I actually think it’s pretty decent compared to others I’ve seen.  She keeps it simple–that’s all you can do.

Famous authors usually just sit and talk about the book because they can do that.  Their faces and voices are enough to entice you!  Colson Whitehead’s trailer for Sag Harbor was one of the first I ever saw:

And here is the trailer for Terry McMillan’s new book “Who Asked You?”