“I confess, I always thought book trailers were sort of empty publicity—the publishing world talking to itself,” Austin Grossman (right) emailed me this morning. But that was before his no-frills “animated” promo for Soon I Will Be Invincible went online, and the reader response was near-instantaneous. Even Leila Roy, who said she’d been fed up with book trailers, was won over by Grossman’s lo-fi charms.
“Oh, wow,” says another new fan. “If your trailer doesn’t do THIS, don’t bother. I don’t even LIKE this kind of book, but I want to read it.” It’s like I said: Tell a great story—something beyond “hey, my book comes out this week”—and people are going to notice.