The Big Bad Book Blog

We often hear from authors who would like to add video—book trailers, interviews, etc.—to their Amazon product pages. While Amazon currently does not allow most publishers to add video content to product pages, they announced last week that authors may now upload video directly to their Amazon Author Page.

If you don’t have an Author Page already, now is a great time to get one by signing up at Author Central. Author Pages gives customers a summary of you and your work, and the new video content makes the pages an even richer way to make yourself visible to readers. If you already have an Author Page, uploading video is simple—just sign in, click the new “Videos” tab at the top of the screen, and upload the file. Videos must be less than 10 minutes and under 500 MB. See additional video content guidelines here.

Along with video, Amazon announced an updated Events section, which you can use to post upcoming signings and other appearances (like this author); they also announced more links to Author Pages, which will now be linked in search results. Read more about what you can do with Author Central here.

Our friends over at the book trailer blog share an insightful way for authors to use video as a promotional tool for their books, appropriately titled, “Steal This Idea.”

The video just so happens to feature author Neil Gaiman, which you big bad book blog readers may recognize as a favorite of mine, and an extraordinaire at modern book promotional techniques.

Authors and publicists, share with us some of your favorite techniques for combining digital tools and marketing efforts for your books!

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

There isn’t much to say about YouTube that hasn’t already been said, but it would be careless to exclude this mammoth of social media from our series. And “mammoth” is no exaggeration: YouTube is big, hairy, and, er, tusk-wielding. Well, at least it’s the first of those three, unless we were to explore some extended metaphor. Get this: YouTube has the eighth largest audience on the Internet, pulling in 55 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Read: YouTube’s no fad. Google doesn’t pay $1.65 billion for fads. And fads don’t hold this much book marketing and publicity potential.

So, what exactly does YouTube—or at least the technology it employs—mean for book publishing? continue reading