Let's Talk About Book Trailers.

Are they worth it?

This will be a short newsletter because I am having a carpal tunnel flare-up, and it is hard to type with a compression brace—plus, I am in pain! This is what moving in your 50s is like.

Chances are you’ve seen a book trailer at one time or another. I am old enough to remember when book trailers became a thing—except they never really did. They started as a montage of blurbs for books set to bad music and morphed into slickly produced videos. Sometimes, we’d show them at sales conferences (especially the funny ones), and other times, we’d shrug our shoulders and wonder what good a video would do for a book.

Today's problem with book trailers is that they compete with Instagram Reels and TikTok. For every basic book trailer, there are millions of more entertaining videos to watch. So the question is, are book trailers worthwhile? My answer is sometimes. Some romance authors have sexy, sleek book trailers and an audience who will watch them. This is one example where people would buy the book no matter what, but the book trailer is there to excite them. The same could be said for other genre writers. None of these videos will entice the masses to buy a book, but they can be good branding tools to share with an existing audience on a social media platform. However, if an author has a robust platform and wants to build upon it, they are better off creating videos themselves (I can hear you cringing).

These days, movie and show trailers are a big deal. My husband is a superhero fanatic, so I see it whenever a new Marvel movie trailer drops. Movie and streaming studios have the resources and distribution channels (including enormous social media followings) to create buzz when a trailer drops. Book publishers do not. I don’t mean that as an insult; it is a fact. If trailers are used to entice booksellers and they are effective—great. They are not going to attract consumers, though. They never have. It has always been challenging to justify the cost and time of producing book trailers without a marketing plan behind them. You can’t simply post them on YouTube and hope people find them, and you can’t magically obtain a movie studio budget to create them. The issue publishers now face is whether to keep producing book trailers that don’t have much ROI (return on investment), or experiment with other marketing activities. I vote for the latter.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Have you ever seen a book trailer that made you want to buy the book? Do you think book trailers are useful? Sound off in the comments—but please be nice!

--Kathleen