Week Nine: Book Trailers

Assignment 1

Read the Chicago Tribune and New York Times articles on Book Trailers, and watch a few popular ones on YouTube.

Assignment 2

Book Trailers. My knee-jerk reaction, what the ? what do we need book trailers for? Sounds like a dumb idea. I hadn't actually seen one before. Where are they hiding? I spend a good amount of time online and never even see them. Then I recall that I did see a few trailers on the Penguin for teens site, but I ignored them.

After reading the New York Times article on book trailers, I was more skeptical. How unfair to authors. What if they don't want to be in front of a camera. It seems like it would just add more stress to promoting a book. Now they have to come up with a clever idea AND look half-way decent for the camera? But, after looking at the trailer for The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, all I could think was "I need to read this book" so then I was on to the next. I looked at the trailer for Lit by Mary Karr, I'd Know You Anywhere, by Laura Lippman, and 11/22/63 by Stephen King. I think they were interesting narratives that  explained the authors' insights and could be useful tools for readers advisory: either watching them myself or directing customers to watch.

That was the positive, now to the negative. The Chicago Times article discussed the side of book trailers I don't find so appealing. At the risk of sounding too "get off my lawn" ACK, I just don't like seeing the book acted out in a film clip. The trailer for Packing for Mars was amusing, but I couldn't even watch it all because I started to get motion sick from the herky-jerky camera. I don't see the point in this sort of promotion--it came off as a commercial to me--but it may be popular with some readers.

The low down is that it depends on the book and how the trailer is done. I enjoy seeing the author talk about what they were thinking about when they were writing the book. I'm not interested in mini-videos of a book, but it may be interesting to others, so I'm not going to knock it.