How I Made My Own Awesome Book Trailer on a Shoe-String $19 Budget
If you're a self-published author, like me, marketing your book while staying on budget is a huge issue. Very few authors have thousands of dollars to spend on their launch and instead have to make every penny count. A book trailer-or, should I say, a GOOD book trailer, can be an incredibly powerful tool that pays dividends both before and after you publish. With mine, I was able to not only create a great book trailer on a shoestring budget, but the way I used my trailer to strategically market my debut allowed it to find readers and earn sales even though I had, effectively, no social media platform and set my debut book up for long-term success. My total cost for this incredible marketing tool? $19. That's not a typo-I spent nineteen dollars. In this blog, I'll teach you exactly how I did it.
I spent a lot of time looking at book trailers while I was editing and revising my debut novel The Last Dragon Princess and I jotted down elements from the ones I found most engaging and elements from those I found most boring. Most book trailers are... terrible. There really isn't any other way to say it, but some were incredible and made me want to go out and buy the book immediately. I paid attention to both. Having a good idea of what makes a bad book trailer is, arguably, even more important than knowing what makes a good one. Once I had a good idea of what would work best, and what didn't work at all, I set about designing my own. Here are the most important factors I wanted to work around:
(1) Length. Most book trailers I found were well over a minute long and a lot were over two minutes. This is way too long and it always felt like there was a lot of padding. Padding is boring. Your job is not to recreate the story from your book or to give a summary-your job is to sell your book. Think about commercials for new movies-those things get cut to fit 30 and 45-second add spots and are still incredibly effective. Aim for 30-45 seconds of actual trailer plus a Call to Action. My book trailer is 42 seconds long with an additional 12 seconds at the end to show the book cover and create a Call to Action (i.e. go to Amazon and buy my book).
(2) Pacing. The pacing of your trailer should match the pacing in your book and it should gradually rise in tension until your Call to Action. If you wrote a sweet romance then your trailer needs to be gentle and easy to watch with soft music and soft images. If you wrote a horror then your trailer needs to have harsh transitions and in-your-face images. An action book will have a much faster paced trailer than a cozy mystery. The Last Dragon Princess is a fast-paced Fantasy. I chose fast-paced music that suited the mood of the story and focused on sharp images and seamless transitions.
(3) Setting. You want to communicate the same things in your book trailer as you do in your cover: setting and genre. Is your setting contemporary? Futuristic? Historical? Is you book a science fiction? A romance? You don't want your viewers to be confused about either the genre or the setting by the time they get to your Call to Action, and you do not want to waste precious time pointing it out to them in text. In fact, you don't want your viewers to be confused about either of these things ten seconds into your trailer. In addition, you also want to intrigue them with the briefest of summaries of your plot, which brings me to...
(4) Brevity. Lengthy voice-overs or too much text can quickly overwhelm a potential reader. I'm not a fan of voice-overs and wanted to make sure I gave my viewers plenty of time to read each line of text. I ended up with five short lines in my trailer totaling only 28 words. Each line got about 5 seconds of screen time, which left room for a few breathers. Breathers are important-remember that. Go on Youtube and watch a bunch of successful Hollywood movie trailers and time how much of the trailer is spent on text or voiceover and how much of it is just imagery and music. It's probably at least half breather. My 28 words set up the basic premise of the plot and left the reader with several questions. Start out with a line that says what the opening problem is, and then move very quickly to what the main point of the plot is. Also, just like in your book cover, you want to avoid wasting space by duplicating information. The Last Dragon Princess is about... dragons. In my trailer, I show a clip of a flying dragon-that means I don't have to waste precious text space on the word 'Dragon.' Many of the comments I got from viewers were "I love dragons! I'll have to check that out!"
(5) Don't get too fancy. The video editing software allows for countless types of transitions, text options, and filters. Feel free to play around, but when it comes to producing your trailer keep it simple. You're an amateur at this and that's okay-a simple framework executed well will feel 1,000X more professional than an attempt at fancy that doesn't quite hit the mark.
Now that I had a framework to design around, I had to figure out how to... design. The day before I started to tackle this project, I had very little video editing experience. I dabbled many, many years ago with MovieMaker for a lone work project, but nothing before or since. I basically had to relearn everything.
Fortunately, there is no lack of information out there on how to teach yourself a new skills so long as you are willing to put in the work. I watched countless YouTube videos comparing various free video editing software and finally settled on ShotCut. It's open-source, free to download, reasonably intuitive software and-most importantly-there are more tutorials and YouTube videos on how to work with ShotCut than with any other free software. That last point alone was a big reason why I chose to go with Shotcut.
After that, it was time to go shopping for content. My budget was best defined as "as little as possible." I used websites like Pexel and Unsplash which provide free-for-commercial-use high-quality images that do not require attrition. Basically, that means you can use their stuff with no strings attached. These are wonderful services for the debut self-publisher. I also used various channels on YouTube to find similar copyright-free videos and music that I would be allowed to use in my trailer. It's very important to triple-check that you are allowed to use the images and videos and fonts and music you choose to use, otherwise you are setting yourself up for possible litigation. Plus, using other people's work without permission is just bad-form. I wanted some stylized fonts to use in my video and I got them from dafont.com, which is a site that allows creators to sell their fonts. Many fonts are free for commercial use and there is a filter available to search for just those fonts.
To download the YouTube videos and music files, I used y2mate.com, which is a free online converter. To do minor adjustments and resize the images I used Canva, which is a free online photo editing software. Canva has its own learning curve, but is a powerful free tool that I use all the time.
Now, even as willing as I was to do the work and to learn to use multiple new programs, I couldn't do everything I needed to do by myself. There were some photo-shop level things I wanted to have in my trailer, but I do not have Photoshop, nor do I have any experience using it. The cost to get Photoshop was prohibitive and I really only needed a few things done. So, to remove the background of several images and to alter some features of other photos, I hired two Fiverr Photoshop pros. One gig was $10, the other gig was $5. Each gig had a $2 service charge for a total of $19. For this cost I had five images stripped of background and three images altered to my specifications. I didn't use all the images, but having some extras gave me some wiggle room since I wasn't sure exactly what I would need.
After that, I spent a full day playing with Shotcut with absolutely no intention of actually producing anything. This was a day of learning how to use the program and watching YouTube tutorials whenever I got stuck. After that full day, I had a pretty good idea of how to make my trailer. I slept on it, then went back to it in the morning. It was slow going, but by the end of the second day I had a completed trailer. I made two nearly identical versions where only the Call to Action was different-the first was for pre-release use and said "Coming this Fall" with my website address, and the second said "Available on Amazon."
In Part 2 of this blog series I will explain exactly how I, as a new and unknown author with a very small social media presence, used my book trailer to market my book and drive sales.
In the meantime, if you're interested in a fast-paced YA romantic fantasy that reimagines Greek mythology with a sci-fi twist, check out The Last Dragon Princess on Amazon here, available in paperback, ebook, and on Kindle Unlimited. You can also read the first chapter for free here:
Attrition:
Attrition is not a requirement for the content I used to make my book trailer, but it is certainly good manners. Special thanks to the following content producers: I couldn't have done it without you.
Photographers: Hanna Postova, Evren Aydin, Karol Wiṡniewski, and Jacob Plumb
Videos (YouTube channels): FootageIsland & MotionBolt
Font designer: Manfred Klein
Music: "Galactic Damages" by Jungle Punk
3D Book Cover Template: CreatIndieCovers (Derek Murphy)