Well, my friend, that is how it starts, sure. Hey, just do a small one, it’s no big deal. Everyone’s doing it. Here, you can have a few hits on mine to try it out.

Then you start getting more and more into it. You lose your job because you’re always surfing for images and video editing until 4am and missing work, you end up selling your furniture to buy the latest video editing software and a faster computer, your spouse leaves you because you’ve become distant and completely absorbed in your computer.

Or maybe you’re not a pusher, you’re just a user. You start watching book trailers, but it is just a gateway medium, and next thing you know you’re into podcasts, and then maybe even reading. You get busted accessing online magazines at work, and then fired after your search for “fantasy fiction vampire private dick” pulls up a goth porn site. You are trying to read that epic climax while in traffic and get into an accident. You become alienated from friends and family, living in fantasy worlds.

Next thing you know, you are on the street corner, begging for change so you can get a little something from the use book dealer to carry you over, or do a few hits on youtube at the local cybercafé.

And hey, it’s okay you got so into your book trailer that you forgot to pick up your daughter from school. Just tell her you were busy getting high on creativity.

And let’s not even talk about the side effects. I mean, clearly it leads to short-term memory loss, not to mention short-term memory loss. Just look at your item 1), and then what you said by the time you got to item 6). It may already be too late for you, I’m afraid.

But that’s why I’ve written a book, “Breaking Free of Book Trailer Addiction” – watch for the book trailer for it, coming soon to a computer near you.

Like the other posts here, I am also not convinced of the efficacy of book trailers. But there are several reasons to do them anyway.

1) Because trailers are (relatively) new, there’s a “Wow, shiny!” effect with them, so you can hold viewers attention a little longer.

2) It’s free. Besides my time, and maybe a few bucks for some stock images, it cost me nothing to create a video and post it on Youtube. One thousand and thirty people have seen the ad as of this morning.

3) Other people are doing it. While this may seem less convincing at first blush, think about it this way: If ten publishers have book trailers for their book(s) and you, small press publisher, do not, then what does this say about your press? I believe it’s important to show that you are behind your product (i.e. book) in every way.

4) It’s cool. Even if it doesn’t sell that many books, it was fun to make and people enjoy watching it.

5) Image is everything. You may not sell many books with the ad, but you may give an impression about your press, what it’s capable to do on a small budget, that a print ad simply cannot do.

6) “Shiny, wow!”

But while I’m all for podcasts being nestled in amongst actual written fiction, I do have some very serious concerns when it comes to fiction podcasts in general. Some of these concerns transfer over to trailers as well.
Concern One: hearing the names of people and places that I’ve read about now being pronounced all wrong. And by all wrong, I mean not the way I imagined them, which trumps both the actor’s interpretation, and the author’s intent. Okay, yeah, so when I first encountered the word “paladin,” I was pronouncing it the same as Aladdin (“puh-LAD-in’). But the point is, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I don’t appreciate your whacked out pronunciation thank you very much.
Concern Two: I worry about the further erosion of the written word as an entertainment medium. This is, however, ameliorated by the fact that people tend to listen to podcasts or watch these trailers at times when they wouldn’t be reading anyway. Like when driving, or shopping, or surfing the web for pictures of Salma Hayek as a cat furry. Which leads to the next concern:
Concern Three: crying like a baby in public places. In my youth I read everywhere, I always had my nose in a book. But it is actually pretty difficult (and not entirely wise) to read a book while you are driving, or doing your shopping, or in a boring wedding ceremony (hopefully not your own, but hey, clock’s ticking, so who are we to judge? I did get irritated looks from a Groom once though, even though I later gave him a kick-ass Best Man’s toast where I worked in several lines of dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail – but I digress), or reading while in line at the Emergency Room to get the nanobots flushed from your system before they completely transform you into a lime-colored monkey boy (long story).
However, podcasts (and arguably book trailers if you have an iPhone or other portable ether-device) allow you to experience the emotion of, say, Menolly being accepted as a Harper, or Talia being accepted as a Herald, while you are in the process of being accepted for temporary residency in the crypto-zoology lab at QuantuMAge University (as I said, long story). And while I am far too manly to cry during such moments, I do, occasionally, get dust in my eye, and I’ve found that “emotional” scenes in books somehow tend to generate an ocular-dust attraction field around my head.

But Really, I Digress: What were we talking about? Oh yes, book trailers.
Well, unless the trailer includes a lot of text or a voice-over, I agree with Clint and Michael that it would be hard to get a real understanding or feel from these trailers on what the book is about and whether I would like it.
And while I think Matt’s trailer is beautiful and well done, I personally would rather get all that same info in 5 seconds by reading it on a static image or a review than have to wait 1 minute 49 seconds for the info to be slowly displayed to me over pretty music. But that’s me. That’s why we have advertising on Lucky Charms boxes and Happy Meals and Billboards and Television and T-shirts. It’s because the ad style that grabs the attention of one person or demographic may not grab the next person’s, so the wider variety and greater number of ads you have out there, the more people you are likely to reach.
And then there’s the possibility it may also hook in new readers, those kids who are sitting in front of their computer youtubing at 2am. They stumble across a cool video about Lego vampires – and hey, there’s a book about this? Maybe I’ll check it out. And then they pass the cool video along to my friends.
Or maybe they just go play Lego Star Wars on their Xbox.

Nice video!

Check out the fantasy section. Apparently, there’s a book about a girl who wants to “dance with gypsies”, a vampire a gothic manor in England (?) where the servants of every room are there to “pleasure her every need.”

Not quite sure how that works. “Um, hello, I’d like a pastrami on rye. I’m feeling a little hungry after all this dancing.”

“Would you like me to pleasure your pastrami on rye?”

“No?”

Okay, the budget is very, VERY low on most of these. It’s cool though because it’s very indy…seriously though, some of those made me want to make LOL-speak icons. And some are just awful. Cringe-worthy.

If I ever need to do a book trailer, I think I’ll save up my pennies and have Don LaFontaine do the voice-over work. At least pick through the local junior college for some acting talent (rather than just cropping some grainy pictures off somebody’s MySpace page), and try to pick out better snippets than what people have been dropping between random pics they swiped from Flickr.

Sure, I picked on one (Hungarian Rhapsody). The author is probably the nicest person on the planet. Some of you might know her even. The book possibly rocks proverbial socks off. However, in all fairness, I have only a cheesey book-trailer to base my opinion on…say, isn’t that the point of a trailer? The selection of amateur bondage videos which appears at the bottom crawler once the video is done is either NSFW or just plain creepy. (bookmark now set).

On the other hand, there was an illustrated video in the science fiction section (Oblivion Society) that was done much better. I might read that book, but I might be disappointed if it’s not a cartoon throughout.

Apologies/Congrats to the authors featured. It’s just my opinion anyway. Others should check the site to make their own decisions.

And possibly to pleasure their every need.

I’ve never seen one, but now I’m curious. Since movie trailers are generally tiny snippets of scenes it seems really difficult to capture the brevity as well as the in-the-moment feel for a book.

Where can I go to check out some examples?