The Book Trailer as Personal Testimony

By Neal 

I’ve talked a lot about how the power of a successful book trailer lies in the storytelling. This short video from my friend Karen Spears Zacharias for her book Where’s Your Jesus Now?, which comes out at the end of the summer, brings to mind a new metaphor: the power of testimony. I’ve long been interested, at varying levels of abstraction, in the idea that blogs and other online communication tools can function as platforms for witnessing one’s faith, and the basic concept—speaking authentically and truthfully about your experience, in the hope that others might learn from what you’ve discovered about yourself and your relationship to the world—has profound application to writers whether they are concerned with matters of faith or more worldly affairs.

Watch this video with that in mind. Zacharias’s monologue doesn’t give easy answers, but she wants to force viewers into deeper consideration (and ideally, of course, to see what more she has to say on the subject).