The thing about book trailers being so easy to make now is that if they’re going to be at all effective (which is still open to debate) they need to really stand out from the competition. And I gotta admit, this one-minute video for Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob, a memoir by Bob Delaney about the life as an undercover law enforcement officer that preceded his current career as an NBA referee, is everything I like to see in a book trailer. There’s real film footage—sorry, I know everybody tells you how easy it is to take a bunch of stock images and string them together in iMovie with some public domain music, but that just doesn’t do it for me anymore—and no time wasted. Delaney gets straight to the point and tells you enough about his story to get you interested in hearing more.
(Of course, the still-pictures-and-music approach can still work, but a lot depends on creating a consistent overall aesthetic to supplement compact but precise storytelling. I liked the trailer for Robert Alexander‘s The Romanov Bride not just because the montage verged on History Channel documentary quality, but because it’s “shot” in widescreen, something you don’t see too often, as most people work in the 425-pixel-wide YouTube mode.)