How to Make a Simple Video Trailer for Your Book Launch

Video should be part of your book marketing efforts. It is a powerful tool that you can use on your website, in your social media and on YouTube to promote your book. Below are some tips to help make your an effective video. Your book trailer video should cover 4 basic topics and be 1 to 3 minutes long.

1. Who you are, your name.

2. What you have got, the name of the book.

3. What the book will do for you and what you will learn, use your Table of Contents to come up with your list of key points.

4. What you want the viewer to do next, buy your book on Amazon.com, go to your website, give them a call to action.

Smartphones work great for making nice simple, one take video book trailers. The quality is great and if you record in a quiet place the audio will be just fine. You can always improve but smartphones work very well for this purpose.

Key point for quality is to make your smartphone nice and stable, use a small tripod from Amazon.com or from a site like Caddiebuddy.com. Also turn off any radios or fans that might make extra noise.

Quick Tips
•     Almost any simple digital camera will do for making a video. This includes the smart phone in your pocket. The quality is amazing and most are connected right to YouTube.

•    A little tripod can really help with the quality.

•    Don’t have a camera, then use the Save as Movie option of PowerPoint or a screen capture program like Screenflow.com or Screenr.com.

•     Keep the video short. This is key; around 1-3 minutes is perfect.

•     If you can do it in one take, you might not need to do any editing. If you are editing, then make each shot at least 10 seconds; (count in your head). You can also add in still images, or video from a PowerPoint presentation.

Here is a video trailer I did for my Mandala Happiness 1 Coloring Book


•     Lighting is important. Turn on the lights or stand by a window. 
A dark video just doesn’t look very good. Watch out for backlighting such as a window behind you. It can kill your video.

•     Stay close to the camera for good sound, turn off any radios, and watch out for background noise. If your camera has a mic input, you can also add one for better quality, lavalier mics work well.
•     In your video, give viewers a call-to-action: ask them to do something, call, go to a web site, suggest something to get them to your web site.

•     Do some simple editing with iMovie on the Mac, MovieMaker on the PC, for more complex, use Premier. You can even edit right in YouTube or the new YouTube Capture app that works for iPhone. Many cameras also come with video editing software.

•    Add your web address along the bottom or lower third of the screen. Add contact info or a call-to-action at the end. Tell viewers that your book is available on Amazon.

•     Upload your video to YouTube, then link it to a blog, your website, Facebook and other social media sites.

The above text is from the International Best Selling Book by J. Bruce Jones, Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing is available at Amazon in Print and Kindle. J. Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 books and training courses for authors who are self-publishing their books.

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