Two weeks ago, I suggested you might not be able to make a great book trailer out of just standing around talking, even if you were Lewis Black. Rules, however, exist for Chip Kidd to break; here he is promoting his new novel, The Learners, by doing a set of celebrity impressions (and a weird baby hamster thing). His Jimmy Steward could use some work—okay, a lot of work—but for some lucky person who always wanted to know what the 23rd Psalm would sound like recited by Margaret Hamilton—and maybe UnBeige—a prayer has been answered.
What makes this work is the same element that makes the best writer’s blogs work: personality.
This promotional video for N.M. Kelby‘s Murder at the Bad Girl’s Bar and Grill, which is coming out in June, also displays a lot of personality, even considering the fact that it’s from my least favorite genre of book trailer, the “pictures and supertitles over music” variety. This short film does a pretty decent job of tracing the arc of Kelby’s transition from “serious” literary novels to rollicking Florida comedies, but I still wish Kelby was on camera addressing readers more directly. Of course, that may just be because I’ve hung out with her enough to know how good she’d be at it—and she’s told me that after the response she got from this film when it was posted to her website, she’s going to shoot more, for which she will be indeed stepping in front of the camera.
Of course, you don’t have to use your personality to sell the book via trailer; you can also try using the material. This three-minute film for a book about Los Angeles’s Velvet Hammer Burlesque takes viewers backstage for the pre-show preparations—which, be forewarned, contain an above-average amount of fleeting NQSFW imagery.
It’s a great film; the problem is that you wouldn’t know it’s there to promote a book rather than a stage show if it weren’t for the sidebar description on its YouTube page. Here’s a nine-minute “dramatization” from British author Andrew Crofts‘s forthcoming The Overnight Fame of Steffi Mcbride that’s definitely all about the book (and has a bit of language, but in a nice accent):
If you’ve been paying attention to earlier posts about book trailers, you can already guess my criticisms. Nine minutes? Nine minutes is too long for just about any promotional film, but nine minutes of static shots of an actress sitting in a room reciting the novel’s text, where the most visually exciting element is when she looks in a mirror? Just slap together an MP3 and call it an audio sampler. Because that’s not a dramatization. Now, McG‘s Celebutantes videos, those are dramatizations.