Do video book trailers work, and how do you make one?

I have been questioning the impact of video trailers on book sales for some time. I’ve seen some very good trailers – usually with specially shot video – and some very poor ones where scrolling text describes the whole story for seemingly endless minutes.

I played around a bit with some utility apps that I had on my Mac (and I do love messing around with software), but I really didn’t know where to start. I checked out Animoto – a free app – but although it was quick and easy I didn’t really like the fact that I had no control at all, and with little more than the cover of my book to work with, it just didn’t seem to deliver – so I temporarily gave up.

However, I was impressed with the impact that a good trailer could have when I went to one of S J Bolton’s Amazon pages and saw a video taster for one of her books. Once I’d got over the fact that the actor chosen for her leading man was nowhere near as sexy as he seems in the book, I watched the video and I was hooked. I’d gone there to purchase the book, as it happens – but if I had stumbled across that page by accident, I would still have bought it. The video worked.

I knew that I couldn’t produce anything as professional because S J Bolton’s video was made with specially shot footage, but I thought I might be able to put something together that gave a flavour of my book.

First of all I explored Adobe After Effects. I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Suite and I thought that my knowledge of Photoshop would help. It didn’t. I spent a whole day trying to get to grips with After Effects, and while I am certain that it’s a fantastic piece of software in the hands of the right person – that person isn’t me!

I then discovered an app called iMovie on my Mac. There were no clues about how to work with stills – but I thought I would just have a go. It’s not super-sophisticated, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. (I understand there is an equivalent for the PC.)

Check out the video here so that the following might make more sense.

These were the steps I took:

• I found a piece of music that was 30 seconds long – the length that I thought would work best as I only had two images! I had to pay for this soundtrack, and I bought it from iStockPhoto.
• Using Photoshop and the original PSD file for my cover, I extracted various layers. If you’ve never used Photoshop or equivalent software, images are created using different layers – a background layer, then layers that hold different parts of the final image – in my case the girl, the headlights and the text. The Back Road cover has over 70 layers!
• I selected the same section of each relevant layer so that I could ‘build’ the images on the screen as the action developed – when you look at the video, this should make sense: the empty road, the road with the girl, the road with the headlights, the road with the headlights AND the girl
• I played around with colour a bit.

Manipulating images in iMovie

The first thing I did was to add all the images that I wanted to use. Each of these is nominally given an on-screen duration of 4 seconds, but that’s a long time to look at a still image. Fortunately in iMovie there is an option to set the time to fractions of a second. There is also a great feature that allows you to select an area of the still image shown at the start of the shot, and the area at the end. The software creates a moving image of the still by zooming in or out accordingly. The selections don’t have to be centred – you can start in the bottom left corner and end in the top right, if you want to. This adds movement to your still images without resorting to effects. In the example below, I chose to start wide, and end where the red rectangle is. This happens over a period of 4.9 seconds

Transitions

There are a number of different transitions between images to choose from. They are a bit limited but you can wipe screens, spin things in and out, fade, dissolve etc. Most of these transitions weren’t really relevant to the type of story I was trying to tell.

Titles

After all of the transitions are in place, you may want to add some words, and iMovie offers several title options, from ‘sideways drift’ to ‘boogie lights’. In general I wanted them to be quite simple in my trailer – I didn’t want loads of flashy stuff to take away from the message. What I did find, though, was a lens flare option. This normally flares around the title words, but I’ve used it a couple of times without any words at all. This tied in nicely to the car headlights which feature in the movie.

Music

Finally, the music track can be selected from wherever it is stored on your computer. I downloaded mine into iTunes. When the track is added, you can start tweaking so that the dramatic moments in the music are matched by changes to screen images. This can be achieved by shortening clips, playing with transition times, increasing the duration of titles, etc. Some people would probably choose to put the music track down first, and then match the images to the track – but I had a clear idea of the structure of the images, and then I tweaked until I was happy. You can see where the peaks are in the music, so that you can match up transitions.

You can apply different video effects too – such as changing to a sepia effect, a negative, etc. I didn’t use any of these – but they’re there if needed.

So there we have it. One video, which – if I hadn’t faffed around playing with tools that were far too sophisticated for me – I could have done in about three hours. An expert would do it in about 20 minutes.

I have now been bitten by the bug. I would like to use moving footage next time, but I’m not good enough to shoot it so I will have to buy some clips. I reckon that to create a 30 second video using the clips I have found will cost me around £80 (including the music that I’ve already bought).

So we have to ask – is it worth it?

If the video is just going on YouTube, I doubt it’s worth it at all. If you have a website, and it’s getting a decent amount of traffic, it’s certainly worth considering. You can also add it to a Goodreads page and your Amazon Author page.

My video is on my book page on Amazon. An author can’t upload video in this way as far as I’m aware, but this was organised between my agent and Amazon as part of the Amazon White Glove programme.

I don’t think the video has driven more people to my product page, but I do think that it may well have converted more page visitors into purchasers.

What do you think? I know the video is far from professional – but I would love to know if this would be more or less likely to persuade you to buy the book.

Click the book cover to go to the book page and see the video.

The Back Road to Success – defining a winning strategy

As many regular readers of this blog will know, my second novel – The Back Road – was launched just four weeks ago, and being my usual obsessive self I had a carefully considered (and very long) marketing strategy.

Based on my experience with Only the Innocent and its startling success, I had tried to analyse what made it shoot to the top of the charts and stay there for so long, and my plan was based on identifying those key points and making them work for me again.

My expectations were lower. There are not only more books out there now, but other authors are much more savvy about how to market them (I knew I shouldn’t have blogged about my methodology! 🙂 ). On top of that, until the day of launch there were still lots of 20p books in the charts, and my book stood no chance against them. Fortunately for me, the era of the 20p books ended (for now, at least) just as I was about to publish – but had left in its wake a plethora of books at 59p or 65p. The desperation to get into the charts and get noticed gave authors and publishers little choice and due to Amazon’s price matching policy and the will of other distributors to discount heavily, the days of cheap books are not quite over – and indeed, might never be.

So what did I expect?

UK Indie Authors – Tax on US royalties

If you are a non-US citizen and you have self published your books in the US, you will already be aware that there is a 30% withholding tax applied by the distributor, and if you’re selling a reasonable number of books, that could be quite a bit of money!

But you CAN do something about this.

I put it off for far too long, and when I eventually got around to it, I found a website with a great article by Karen Inglis – and I followed her instructions to the letter. The whole process was straightforward, and so I thought I would ask her to write a post for me to share with you.

I should point out that I made the decision a few months ago to form a company for my publishing activities. That may or may not be the right way to go for you – it depends on a number of factors and the best person to advise you would be your accountant – but it certainly made it a whole lot easier to deal with the procedures in the US, as you will probably see from Karen’s article.

I hope it proves as helpful to you as it did to me.

Guest Post : More Indie Author Marketing Tips from Sean Campbell

I came across a great blog recently at 90 Days Novel and immediately asked if one or both of the bloggers, Sean and Daniel Campbell would be interested in writing a guest post for other indie authors. They have some great perspectives on marketing, and they have been kind enough to share them here. I’ll hand you over to Sean …

Hello all!

I’m Sean, half of the duo behind 90daysnovel.com

Rachel invited us to guest on her blog to share our thoughts on marketing for indie authors, and we thought that the best way to do this would be to put together an outline marketing plan showing step by step exactly what we would do when bringing a book to market.

Hitting the Amazon #1 Spot : The Marketing Plan

Killer Plan or Lady Luck Part III – The Marketing Plan

The next post in this series was supposed to be on formatting. However, I have been persuaded to skip that bit for now, because there are lots of books and bits of advice out there that are probably much more detailed. What people want to know, I guess, is how I got to number one – not how I formatted the book!

However, I will say this. The formatting of your book is seriously important. You need to look like a professional. A badly formatted book automatically shouts INDIE, and not in a good way. If you don’t know how to do this, I have already written a couple of posts here and here that will get you to the point where you are almost ready for Amazon, and you will at least have tidied your book in preparation for upload.

The other thing that I was going to talk about was the cover. Again – there is a lot of advice available in that respect. Sometimes people say the cover doesn’t matter. Don’t listen to them. Whilst people may not ultimately choose to buy your book because of the cover, it needs to attract their attention when there are twenty other books on the screen. So go the extra mile.

Now – back to what people seem to want. Marketing tips.

Guest post : A Free Tool for Writers—the Writer’s Knowledge Base

I came across this amazing resource for writers a couple of weeks ago, and I contacted Elizabeth S Craig to see if she would be kind enough to pay a visit and tell us all about the Writer’s Knowledge Base. If you don’t know about this, you need to visit the site and bookmark it, because it is crammed with really useful information. We agreed to swap posts this week. I have written one on her site for Indie Authors : Getting those All-Important Reviews and you might want to check that out too.

Here’s what Elizabeth has to tell us.

A Free Tool for Writers—the Writer’s Knowledge Base—by Elizabeth S. Craig

The Writer’s Knowledge Base, or WKB, is a free search engine that’s specifically for writers. For years, I got frustrated with Google when I was trying to find articles on the writing craft. There were tons of writing blogs out there, but these individual blogs, frequently with fantastic tips for writers, were getting buried by other, non-relevant sites.

If I were trying to find an article on POV, internal conflict, scene structure, or dialogue? The highest ranking posts in Google for any given writing search were frequently either an assignment that a college professor has posted (an assignment on the topic, not a resource), or a vague article by a content mill site that didn’t address the topic in any kind of depth.

Guest post : Scott Hunter on Marketing your eBook

As promised when I started the series of “Killer Plan or Lady Luck?” I have asked other authors for their input and to let us know what they did to become a best seller. Today’s guest is Scott Hunter who writes thrillers – historical and contemporary. His eBook, ‘The Trespass’ is an Amazon bestseller. His website is at http://www.scott-hunter.net

It’s very interesting to me to check out the commonality between his comments and mine. And, of course, where we differ. Both are important, and I hope you pick up some good tips reading his thoughts. Bear in mind that some of Scott’s comments refer to a printed version of the book, not an ebook, and he is clearly British – so some of the store references relate to the UK only. But the vast majority of his thoughts are appropriate to any format and any country.

So, you want to be an Indie Author. Where do you begin?

The Beginning

• Write a great book in a genre that people want to read

Review: The Viper Contract by Chris Broyhill

EXCELLENT STORY WITH FAST PACED ACTION

Overview

The Viper Contract tells the story of an ex US Air  Force fighter pilot, Colin Pearce, who has been forced to take up a career as a contract pilot, ferrying businessmen and the like around. The money’s good, but it doesn’t excite him the way his former profession did.

And then something happens to change all that. He is approached by the CIA to act as an undercover agent in a daring and deadly airstrike which could have disastrous consequences reverberating around the world.

A Killer Plan or Lady Luck? Part II – It’s all about the book!

This post is the second in the series Hitting the Amazon #1 spot – A Killer Plan or Lady Luck?

It goes without saying that the most important aspect of getting to #1 on any best seller list is having a book that people actually want to read. If you choose to write in a genre that is less popular, you have to set your expectations accordingly. Choosing to write a thriller – a very popular genre – wasn’t part of my Killer Plan. It really is simply Lady Luck that I love thrillers.

Taking advice on some aspects of my writing and trying to do better, however, was definitely part of my plan, and so this section aims to share some of the hints that were passed on to me.  Once again, I am definitely not trying to set myself up as any sort of expert. I still have so much to learn, and there are so many ways that I can improve my writing. But maybe this post will help others who are on the same journey.  These are a few of the things that I have been guilty of, and some things that I have noticed when reviewing indie authored books (naming no names, of course!).

An interview with Alan McDermott – Author of Gray Justice

I was delighted to be able to interview Alan McDermott, author of the fast-paced thriller Gray Justice. I read Alan’s book some time ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has been receiving amazing reviews, and his responses to my interview questions give a real insight into his thinking.

Gray Justice is Alan’s debut novel, and tells the story of Tom Gray, an ex-soldier running a successful business until his world falls apart. His young son is killed by a joy rider and his wife, overcome with grief, takes her own life months later. When his son’s killer walks free from court, Gray decides that the current justice system needs an overhaul, and kidnaps five serial offenders. Parading them on the internet, he lets the people of Britain decide if they should live or die, and the government are powerless to stop him. Gray believes he has the perfect plan, right down to the last detail, but one man travels four thousand miles to prove him wrong in an explosive climax.