I made a book trailer

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Mike Dunn · #1 Post by **Mike Dunn** » Sat Apr 23, 2016 11:17 pm

I made a trailer for my long-delayed first novel, which now is ready to go for publication next month.

Here's the trailer. I'm going to advertise on Facebook and the trailer will be the main advertising vehicle. Feedback welcome. Budget for this was about $50. I can explain how I did it if anyone is interested.

YouTube · #2 Post by **DanD** » Sat Apr 23, 2016 11:36 pm

That's awesome!

roncollins · #3 Post by **roncollins** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 12:03 am

Awesome ... definitely interested in details. :)

Morris Ragland · #4 Post by **Morris Ragland** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 12:40 am

Snazzy.

#5 Post by **John** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 12:40 am

Love it! And not too long to wait for release!

#6 Post by **Leones** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 10:04 am

The choice of presenting written rather than spoken material is very good. It draws the viewer in better. Very effective and well done.

#7 Post by **Arroyos** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 11:40 am

Snazzy, catchy, kudos to you, Mike!

#8 Post by **Borealis** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 2:16 pm

Nice!!!

Mike Dunn · #9 Post by **Mike Dunn** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 4:29 pm

Wind Dancers wrote:definitely interested in details. :)

Here you go. I learned about this on a self-publishing forum. One of Adobe's video creation programs is called After Effects. And folks make what are called templates that you can purchase, then adapt.

I found this one, perfect for my trailer:

The photos shown there are obviously placeholders. I purchased a license for the template here for $33. This allows me commercial use for one end product.

Then I searched for music and found some great soundtrack material at Kevin Macleod's website.

Who is Kevin Macleod?

MacLeod has made over 2,000 self-composed pieces of music available for download under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 license.[3][4][5][6] His licensing options allow anyone to use his music for free as long as he receives attribution, which has led to his music being used in millions of YouTube videos and thousands of films;[7] as of March 2015, MacLeod has over 1,800 composer credits listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).[8] His music has been used in Hugo, several commercial video games, and videos by online content creators such as CollegeHumor, Good Mythical Morning, and many other popular YouTube channels.[9]

I found one of his works, Ryno's Theme that seemed perfect for the project and was a far better fit than the music that came with the video template. For about $6 I purchased his higher-quality .wav files for the project.

Then I downloaded the free 7-day trial for Adobe After Effects. I created 10 graphics for use in the template, with some of the art from the cover art of my book and some from Pond5 stock photo/video site. (They have a lot of free-for-use material). I created the graphics using the freeware paint.net.

Creating the still graphic "cards" for the trailer took some time. In retrospect, I should not have downloaded the After Effects trial until I was ready to use it, as 7-days is not much. But when ready, I inserted the ten graphic images into the template then exported to an .avi. Then I used Adobe Audition (which I own) to edit the music, taking the final minute of the longer theme. Then I downloaded the free (7-day) trial of Adobe Premier to actually render the full video, with audio and closing credits.

In all, it took about 20 hours of work for a 1-minute trailer. But the financial cost was low, and I believe it looks pretty professional. And I believe a well-made trailer can help sell books.

There are tons of After Effects templates available at numerous sites, some even free. And there are folks, like on Fiverr, who will do the production for you.

Hope that helps.

#10 Post by **Nigel** » Sun Apr 24, 2016 5:02 pm

Hope it goes well for you Mike, that's an awesome trailer

Mike Dunn · #11 Post by **Mike Dunn** » Sun May 08, 2016 7:14 am

I took the day off from work Friday to finish book-related stuff. I had already done the Createspace print version but needed to also do the Kindle version. I also finished up my landing page for my marketing efforts.

So now the book is for sale, eBook and paperback, though Amazon has yet to link the two pages. Apparently that takes a few days.

This morning (Sunday) I was woken too early by the dogs, and after walking them I sat down at my laptop, logged into my brand new Kindle Direct Publishing account, and found this:

I sold my first book

. Not quite sure how anyone found it, as I've done no marketing yet (waiting for the two versions to be linked). But yet someone did find it, and decided to plunk down $4.99. This is old hat to a veteran like Ron, but it makes me want to do a happy dance.

Hopefully more sales to come.

#12 Post by **John** » Sun May 08, 2016 10:52 am

Check your stats again and you just may notice another spike in the graph.

roncollins · #13 Post by **roncollins** » Tue May 10, 2016 5:51 pm

Very cool! I'll chat about it on the blog here shortly. :)

roncollins · #14 Post by **roncollins** » Tue May 10, 2016 6:01 pm

And you should see an Amazon review up there whenever they get around to processing it. :)

Mike Dunn · #15 Post by **Mike Dunn** » Tue May 10, 2016 6:31 pm

Thanks so much Ron, that review is much appreciated. And it made me laugh.

And thanks John for grabbing a copy.

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