See No Books, Read No Books: Advertising with Cinematic Book Trailers
Friday, June 12th, 2009
amateur trailer for THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak
The means of advertising books and movies are many: posters in trendy locales, website ads, reviews in papers or blogs, displays at stores, entertainment segments or interviews on popular news and talk shows, and word-of-mouth that becomes increasingly easy to pass along through digital means. There are avenues, no doubt, and lots of them.
But the most ubiquitous is the movie trailer. It is the a popular and effective method of reaching people because we are an extremely visual culture. We want to see. And trailers indulge us in this craving. We are tantalized by the thirty-second or one- or two-minute glimpse a trailer offers us of the movie to come. They can be clever, dark, funny, mysterious, odd. They plant in our minds an excitement, an anticipation of something that might not be available to watch for over a year. And yet we love the trailers and their shorter brethren, the aptly-named teasers.
In recent years the publishing industry has capitalized on this success by producing their own counterpart: the book trailer. The challenges for the book trailer are unique. Those producing book trailers must start from scratch, gathering relevant words and phrases and key ideas and then translating them into images. The trailers come in multiple forms: still images with words, words by themselves, clever image-collages, flash movies, the rare animation, and on rarer-still occasions, live-action actors on sets.
It is the latter ones that I find the most intriguing. continue reading


Many individuals—myself included—have aspirations of writing a witty, fun, insightful personal blog and it becoming a wildly successful digital memoir. It’s a romantic idea, really: baring your soul to the world and the world eating it up with a spoon the way an enthusiastic child devours an ice cream sundae. One can only hope said metaphorical dessert of a blog has the success of, for instance, Neil Gaiman’s
Ah, the digital age. Gone are the days of pesky human interaction, reading body language, interpreting facial expressions, and actually putting clothes on in the morning. More and more authors are embracing the advantages and savings that online promotion can bring them. And the hottest way to make yourself known on the web? Blog tours.
In this day and age of hyperinteractive media and communication, it is essential to maintain routine contact with your readers and clients. There is nothing like personal contact, but let’s face it, communicating via e-mail is often a preferable way to correspond. E-mail allows us to be clear and concise, saving us lots of time. It also lets us edit what we say before sending and customize our message so that it is attractive and attention grabbing. An eNewsletter is just what the doctor ordered!
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