Jean Marie Pierson had a perfect hook for a book trailer to promote her debut novel, No Good Girls: The story had originally begun as a screenplay—Pierson had been an aspiring filmmaker in collage and beyond—and when she converted it to a book, she kept the original format for the opening scene, a conversation in a diner between the protagonist and her two best friends. “It’s not a device,” she explained recently via email. “It’s actually part of the plot.” As she elaborated in an online essay about the shoot, “The scene itself, which may seem like an introduction to the characters, is really a foreshadowing tool for the story. Meaning, pay close attention to what each character says as you might see it happen in the book.”
But, on a pragmatic level, she had a self-contained scene that shows off the personalities of her three main characters and requires a minimal setup. So, over the space of an evening last Decemeber, Pierson and a five-person crew (director, sound, camera, and makeup, plus one assistant) took over Brooklyn’s New College Diner and shot this short movie—with some of the best production values I’ve seen in a book trailer so far. Because she had so many friends in the crew, though, Pierson was able to keep her costs down; she estimated that the full budget for a project of this scope might be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 otherwise:
“I just happened to have the background and some connections to do it myself,” she emailed. “I also love this stuff so although it was an enormous amount of work and time, it was fun. For me, I was revisiting my film school days. But it’s entirely too complicated of a process to start it yourself if you go at it alone. You could wind up spending an enormous amount of money and time with a product that doesn’t look all that great in the end.”
So what do you do if you want to make a trailer for your novel, and you don’t want it to look homemade, but you don’t have $5,000 or friends who’ll do you a favor? There are ways to look sharp on a low budget, if you approach the project with a clear vision of what you want to accomplish and a solid plan for getting it done.
You could, for example, take a simple route and introduce readers to your main character directly. In this trailer produced by Morrow‘s marketing department for Andrea Kane‘s Twisted, an actress plays the protagonist, Sloane Burbank, as she sits in her office and tells you her backstory—former FBI agent, forced out of the agency by a crippling injury to her shooting hand—then elaborates the plot of the novel, which manages to cram an impressive number of genre clichés into less than two minutes of narration: “Success comes at a price,” “I don’t have to tell you how that man turned me upside down,” “so this case is starting to come together… and I don’t like it one bit,” and my personal favorite, “Derek says I fit the killer’s profile, but there’s no way I’m going to live my life in fear.” Still, the actress makes the most of the script, until the final seconds, when, as the trailer fades to credits, she goes and picks up the gun with her right hand, the one we’ve established is too weak to pull the trigger. Argh! It’s those details that’ll get you, every time.
(Mind you, I haven’t actually read Twisted, so for all I know maybe the climax does involve her miraculously finding the strength in that hand to make the shot. Personally, I’d have expected the opposite tack, with Burbank relentlessly teaching herself to shoot lefthanded but leaving plenty of room for doubt about whether her aim’s going to be good enough when she’s only got time for one shot and she has to make it count.)
In principle, though, this is a perfect approach for a book trailer to take. Consider: You’ve got a consistent visual aesthetic, you have (some) action, and the whole thing is anchored by a strong personality—all key components in a successful short film. Heck, for all I know, romantic suspense fans might find the heavy emphasis on genre convention comfortably familiar.
This trailer for James Howard Kunstler‘s dystopian World Made By Hand, a novel set in a “post-oil future” much like the scenarios described in his nonfiction book The Long Emergency, takes a more elaborate, Ken Burns-style approach, as a woman narrates a rough outline of the book’s plot while old-timey music plays over a stream of sepia photographs. Although the execution isn’t quite perfect, the strong look-and-feel of the video helps it to stand out from other trailers that rely upon mashing music and pictures together. (Also, one gets the impression that some of these photos may have been shot explicitly for this trailer, rather than being extracted from image banks.) The official website for the book also has an extended interview with Kunstler that, while simple in format, allows him to elaborate on his most pressing themes at substantial length. (For example, while it doesn’t appear that Kunstler intended this to be a science-fiction novel, he shows an excellent command of the worldbuilding skills that writers in that genre need to succeed.)