Book Teaser Videos are the newest and hottest ways to promote your book on the Net: Book Videos, or trailers. Just like a movie trailer, the book teaser video is intended to create a buzz about your book. This is a great way to get the word out about your book. You can post your video to Google Video, Yahoo Video and of course YouTube. YouTube has received a steady increase in traffic over the past year, in fact, more people visit YouTube than MySpace. So what makes a great trailer? Here are some general guidelines to follow:

1. Keep it short—30 seconds is about perfect. Most people do not have the attention span to sit through anything longer. You want to make sure that the viewer lasts to the credits —the place where you should tell them how to buy your book!!

2. Flash is the program I recommend to stream your video—a short video should load immediately. Other videos or players will take much longer to load and will usually be pretty big files. Example, a Flash video we created for the book Accidentally Engaged is 225k - as a Windows Media video it would have been much bigger, and therefor taken much longer to load and view. Plus, the market penetration is much larger with Flash. You want to reach as many people as possible.

3. Avoid using poorly produced video and bad acting. Still shots can be just as engaging and paint a vivid picture—leave something to the imagination of your viewer! For me, there is nothing worse than having the characters on the cover of the book, because frankly the characters in my head never look like the ones on the cover; you could be deterring interest in your book if your not careful.

4. Make sure that your music is Rights Free, or that you own the rights. You can always try to buy the rights too, the choice is yours.

5. Make sure to include the cover of your book and the web site where your viewers can buy your book.

That’s it. By this time next year I predict that book videos will be like web sites—everyone will expect you to have one. For now, it’s the best way to get that added exposure across the Net and drive traffic back to your book.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Website Wow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.