If I lived in Laredo, Texas, I’d quit my job and open a bookstore.
According to CNN, as of January 16, the town’s only bookstore closed on January 16th. That means a city with approximately 250,000 residents doesn’t have a store. The closest bookstore is 150 miles away, in San Antonio.
I see opportunity written all over the news of that closing. Especially when you learn that the B. Dalton store that was closed was making money.
Barnes & Noble says it closed the Laredo store as part of an overall strategy to shut down the chain of mall-based bookstores. Even though the Laredo store was profitable, the overall chain was losing money, according to company officials.
I’m not going to completely fault Barnes & Noble for their decision. Mall stores like B. Dalton are going the way of the Dodo bird. Bigger stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders offer more selection and a better shopping atmosphere.
But as the town’s only bookstore it was making a profit!
What businessperson in his or her right mind would close a profitable store—especially when you have a monopoly in your city?
Unless there are some plans by B&N or some other store to open a big store, I’m really scratching my head at this decision. (Are the demographics of Laredo such that they couldn’t support a bigger store? Maybe a Texas native like ChicagoJo could chime in.)
It’s not like Laredo residents won’t be able to buy books. (There’s always Amazon.com.) And instead of complaining about the store closing, I’d start finding investors that would be interested in opening a better bookstore—one that had so many books and was so fun to shop at that people would drive from San Antonio to buy their books. Local and national authors would be knocking down the doors to do book signings because of the store’s popularity.
Having worked in marketing for nearly a decade, it’s been interesting to watch people and companies jump on the “latest and greatest” way to improve their marketing ROI without taking the time to understand what they were getting into.
Take blogging, for example. I started a personal blog in 2000. I blogged because I liked the idea of sharing my thoughts and ideas with friends and family members. When I told people what I was doing, most of them just raised their eyebrows and wondered why I was doing something like that. Quite by accident, I started getting a following and learned the ins and outs of what it took to attract and keep a following.
A few years later blogging become the thing to do. Not only was everyone encouraged to have a blog but businesses were told they needed to have a blog in order to attract new customers, and fill their sales pipeline.
So everyone started blogging without understanding or knowing what they needed to do to make their blog successful. They just started doing it. As a result people spend a lot of their time blogging only to give it up once they realized no one was reading it. On the business side of things, CEOs and VPs of marketing become frustrated because they weren’t seeing the magical results that all the business magazines and websites told them blogging would give them.
The problem was that both people and businesses started blogging without a rhyme or reason. Rarely did they have a target audience in mind, a focuses message, or a way to measure the success of their blogs. Instead they did it because everyone else was doing it.
So what does this have to do with book trailers?
In the book publishing world, book trailers are all the rage. Every publisher and author are creating them in hopes of propelling their book to the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
For those who haven’t seen one book trailers are like movie trailers in that the try to generate excitement for an upcoming book. Everyone is doing them but, like blogging became the rage years ago, no one has the slightest clue whether or not these trailers are successful at selling books. Still, that fact hasn’t stopped people from shelling hundreds or thousands of dollars to make one.
(Full disclosure: Yes, I want a book trailer for my upcoming novel. I wouldn’t even mind one for Room for Two. But I also don’t want to waste my money or my publisher’s money on one unless it we can have some way to measure how effective it is.)
After having watched hundreds of book trailers over the last couple months, I’ve noticed some good, bad, and downright ugly ones and have compiled a list of 5 tips for publishers and authors should follow when they decide to make a book trailer.
1. Don’t Make A Mini Movie
It’s one thing when Hollywood takes a book and adapts it to the big screen. It’s something else when a publishing or marketing company tried to sell a book by making a mini movie from a scene. Because reading a book is an intensely personal experience, readers have their own ideas about what the characters look like. When you try to reenact a scene from a book, it’s doesn’t work. I almost cried when I saw the following book trailer for Michael Connelly’s novel The Brass Verdict.
That wasn’t the what I pictured the characters at all. Not only that, but the whole thing seemed poorly produced – something you wouldn’t expect considering they were promoting one of best active writers and storytellers.
If you want to see the book on the big screen, then option the rights to Hollywood. Don’t try to make mini movies from the book you’re trying to promote. It’s generally doesn’t work.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying don’t use video. I’m just saying don’t reenact scenes from books. To their credit, I think the trailer from The Brass Verdict where the narrator reads the opening chapter of the book works since it’s not action or character driven. It helps set the tone for the book and doesn’t concentrate on what the narrator actually looks like.
2. Make them short and to the point.
Most commercials run 30 seconds or less. A good radio ad can get its point across in about the same time. Most of the best book trailers I’ve seen run 60 seconds or less. Check out the one below for Wake by Lisa McMann. At 61 seconds I think it does a decent job of generating interest book.
Here’s one for Behold the Dawn by K. M. Weiland. It runs a little over two minutes. The production values are good but the middle half drags. Could have cut 45 seconds out of it and made it even better.
3. Always have a call to action
The purpose of a book trailer is to generate excitement for a book and get people to either buy it or want to learn more about it. About 70% of the book trailers I’ve seen don’t have a call to action. At the very least they should tell the viewer where they can go to by the book and a URL to the author’s or publisher’s website where you can read the first three or four chapters of the book. Even better if they can provide a direct link to a website to take the next step.
Here’s the trailer for Skinned by Robin Wasserman. Pretty decent trailer in that it’s under a minute, does a good job of generating interest in the book and even gets third party validation on why it’s a good book. However, note the lack of call to action at the end.
Sadly most book trailers are this way. In fact I struggled to find one with a good call to action. That doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Leave a comment below if you find one and I’ll post it!
4. Use Analytics to Get Data
Okay, this one’s for marketing geeks. Data rules the marketing world. As an author or publisher, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people watched the whole trailer or many of them stopped watching halfway through? Would it help you to know many of them links to buy the book or downloaded the first couple of chapters? This information is not only vital from an ROI standpoint but can help you make future trailers better.
And don’t tell me it’s not impossible to get analytics information from Flash or video. It’s not. The company I work for has the technology to do it if it’s hosted on a website you control. Successful marketing is always about learning what works and what doesn’t. Book trailers are new enough that no one had an exact handle on the best way to make one. Good analytics can help improve the process.
5. Sell the story, not the author
Unless your Stephen King or JK Rowling or another author with a dedicated following your name and/or face isn’t enough to make books fly off the shelves. Therefore you need to sell the story and make it tantalizing enough that people want to at least pick up the book. That means no pointless interviewing or face shots of the author in the book trailer. It has to be about the story!
Take Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes. Not only is it too long, she interjects herself about 35 seconds in and interrupts what is, up to that point, a decent beginning to a book trailer. (See also narrates it which, in my opinion, in generally a mistake.)
The creative team behind Stephen’s King’s Duma Key book trailer concentrated more on the story than King’s name. The result? A great book trailer that’s only 32 seconds long!
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not against post interviews with authors and putting them on the web. For the fans, those are great ways to keep them active and interested in the author and his or her work. As promo pieces, however, they fall flat.
So there you go – 5 tips to making good book trailers. If any of you have book trailers your particularly fond of, drop me an email or link to them in the comment section below.
In the latest issues of Wired, Clive Thompson writes:
Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn't embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, rife with layoffs and restructurings. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?
To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark's perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.
Every other form of media that's gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn't happen to books is that they're locked into ink on paper.
Release them, and you release the crowd.
I hope every publisher in the world reads Thompson’s article and breaks out of the old, archaic ways of publishing and marketing books.
Most publishers still don’t get it. Sure, they’ll publish a chapter or two online. Maybe even make slick trailers to get some hype. But only one publisher that I’m aware of allows the entire content of their books to be published online. Publishing entire novels online and giving people a chance to share that content or hype it on social networking sites is, as far as I know, unheard of.
Yet there’s never been a better way to market books to people then the Internet. Posting an entire book online and providing a way for others to share or highlight portions of that content on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, GoodReads, Shelfari, and other sites is a great way to build an audience and SELL books.
In an industry that suffering from cutbacks and lagging book sales, publishers worry about losing books sales if they post the content online.
Guess what? They won’t.
They’ll actually sell more books because more people will be exposed to it. I’m willing to bet they’ll even find a market for some of their books that they didn’t know existed before.
Writes Thompson:
You're far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you're far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.
Still publishers wring their hands when they think about posting the entire conents of their books online. "What about Napster?” they say. “It almost bankrupted the record industry.”
Here’s the dirty little secret of the free online music days: CD sales actually rose during the heyday of free digital music. That’s right. People bought more music because they had a chance to sample it first. Musicians who would have languished in obscurity suddenly found an audience because more people heard about it.
Instead of embracing the new technology and trying to find a way to share music and make money from it (like creating slick online stores where people could by songs and albums), the record companies sued the hell out of everyone they could think of. Instead Apple came in and filled the gap and turned their company around. Now Apple is raking in billions of dollars that could have gone straight to the record companies and musicians if they had embraced technology instead of fought it.
Right now publishers are in a unique position to develop technology that allows people to read books, share portions of the content on their websites or social networking sites, allow readers comments and feedback, and link to places where their books can be bought. Something akin to Google books, only on steroids.
And for the record, I have no problem taking my just completed novel and working with a publisher to post the entire contents online for people to read. As far as far as I’m concerned, it will not only help me sell more print copies but give me a chance to see who the book really resonates with. My guess is that, like my memoir, Room for Two, I’ll discover a completely underserved market that is hungry for its contents.
The challenge is finding a publisher who’s willing to be the vanguard and embrace the digital revolution that has consumed the rest of the world.
Online videos are quickly becoming an effective way for authors to promote their books. Best-selling author Michael Connelly has just posted a video on his website that depicts two scenes in his upcoming book The Brass Verdict. The next video will be released next month. You can watch the video below. It gave me all sorts of ideas for making a video for Room for Two and my forthcoming novel.
