Authors Electric

Do I need a book trailer? Reading posts from other authors, the jury is most definitely out on whether or not a video trailer for my historical novel will represent ROI (that's Return on Investment by the way).   But sometimes things just happen. Like being in the golf club on a day when everyone else is out on the course, leaving both me and the barman at a bit of a loose end.  He lets slip (?) that in another life he is a video producer. And I feel obliged (as you do) to tell him about my other occupation and how there's a school of thought that says in this age of short attention spans and social media/multi-media, authors need video book trailers. With which said barman not surprisingly agrees.  So three days later I'm in the local cafe drinking very strong coffee quite early in the day with Gavin Allen soi-meme . He has never done a book trailer, I have never worked with video.  To help us on our way, he has  a one-page 'scrawl' of my idea...

     So, you’re an indie writer. You might be self-published, or you might be a small-press author. Either way, a lot if not all of the marketing for your new book is going to fall on you.      We all know that social media is the way forward for this, but it’s often difficult to judge that fine line between actively promoting your work and being, well, a bit of a pest. Nobody wants to be That Author - you know, the one who Tweets a variation of ‘buy my book! Please RT!’ 25 times a day. People start to blank it out. It’s just words - which is fine in a book, but what I’ve realised increasingly is that the internet is a very visual medium and people tend to respond a LOT better to images and video.      So we come to the subject of the book trailer.      Apparently, we’re all supposed to have one nowadays, although it seems to me to again be a very fine line between something that will generate in...