Nobody knows if book trailers work. The book trailer is a very strange beast for selling books. I just did a book trailer for my new novel The Pitcher and I went with a very simple setup. I told the story how I came to write the book. My thought is a book is not a movie and never will be. There is no way to make it look like a movie unless you are getting one made by a studio. And so why try and take that approach. A book is a story.
And a story is what the reader wants. So I sat on some stands around a baseball field and told how I had come to write the novel. No bells and whistles. But I think the only chance to pull readers in is by telling a story. I cannot stage a baseball game or hire actors. I cannot recreate the book. But I can tell the original story of the old Major League Pitcher I met who helped my son with his pitching one hot night in Florida. I can tell how I took that moment and built a book about a kid with a dream and an old pitcher at the end of his dream.
After that it is up to the reader. My other trailer we used rockets and a remote control helicopter camera. It was a lot of fun and we tried to tell the story of Rocket Man. But when it was all said and done I probably could have just told the story sitting on a bench. Not as much fun but it is a book after all.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher Book Trailer
And a story is what the reader wants. So I sat on some stands around a baseball field and told how I had come to write the novel. No bells and whistles. But I think the only chance to pull readers in is by telling a story. I cannot stage a baseball game or hire actors. I cannot recreate the book. But I can tell the original story of the old Major League Pitcher I met who helped my son with his pitching one hot night in Florida. I can tell how I took that moment and built a book about a kid with a dream and an old pitcher at the end of his dream.
After that it is up to the reader. My other trailer we used rockets and a remote control helicopter camera. It was a lot of fun and we tried to tell the story of Rocket Man. But when it was all said and done I probably could have just told the story sitting on a bench. Not as much fun but it is a book after all.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher Book Trailer
