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Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Camcorders, Tech and Random Rants Blog
Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Sep 17, 2008 12:00 AM
Posted by Joseph Devlin
Every Book Needs a YouTube Trailer
Posted by Joseph Devlin
"We are living in a time where the WORD has been replaced by the IMAGE." So says Seth Greenland in a YouTube trailer promoting his novel "Shining City". A video trailer for a book? You'd think that the world of literature would be the one place that didn't need video to hype its product. You'd be wrong! Or at least that's the premise of an NPR report I heard over the weekend. Turns out that using YouTube videos to pimp books is all the rage these days. And no, we are not talking about books looking to become motion pictures. The assumption here is that you need video to build an audience for paper. Like most other book trailers, Greenland's video does not attempt to provide you with a video plot synopsis. It's a commercial whose sole purpose is to grab your attention and get you to remember the name of the book (that's why Greenland is not wearing pants in the intro, and why the cuties in the background keep whispering the book's name.) Home brewed book trailers Producing book trailers that can be streamed on YouTube or projected at book shows is quickly becoming big business. Some authors choose to create their own homespun videos.  For example, Meg Cabot the best selling author of the 'Princess Diaries' books creates her own videos recreating favorite literary scenes using Barbies and other dolls as puppets. This sort of video may be great for keeping your name in front of an existing audience. On the other hand, if you want a book trailer that can grab new readers you might want to get some professional help. Book trailer production houses hoping to grab some of this business. are popping up all over New York and LA.According to a recent Wall Street Journal article most home-brewed video trailers do a really lousy job of moving books. It's not good enough to create a compelling video these days. The world is stuffed full of these. Publishers also need the help of professionals who understand how to stuff product under the noses of a receptive audience. Circle of Seven The best known of all the newly-minted video book trailer production houses is probably Sheila English's Circle of Seven (COS) Productions in Brentwood, Calif. COS has great website that includes samples of its work, price lists for that work, and a couple of useful white papers and PDF books about the subject. If you create or plan to create niche market video there is a lot to emulate in this website. I like the fact that the COS website stresses that the number video  views is a lousy measure of success in this market. Video views that translate into sales is the desired goal. There is an interesting audio interview with Sheila English, the CEO of COS on the Pixel Head Networks. Let me paraphrase some of what English says in that interview. "I love it when I hear someone say 'I haven' picked up a book in ages, but your video intrigued me'. English believes this happens only when she successfully delivers the right video to the right audience at the right time. She advises "It's a big mistake to create the video first and then go looking for the venue. Start by creating a plan detailing the channels you are going to use to distribute the video. English claims that her company uses almost 400 different social networking services to help target trailers correctly. Her company has created a host of channels that people can use to see her videos. Casual browsers can start at Readers Entertainment.TV, which lists all of the current COS titles. Or you can chose to just peruse videos about your favorite literate genre (say horror or young adult) in one of many nooks and crannies set up within ReadersEntertainment.TV. COS also has channels on all the popular aggregators such as YouTube Book Trailers or blogspot trailers. COS also feeds video into genre outlets such as Romance Times. English also distributes video book reviews into Amazon.com, Veoh, REC TV, Current TV and Brightcove. The idea is to make the video as easily available as possible. The next step is to use various delivery platforms and social networking sites to reach out to audiences that are appropriate for each particular book. "Follow through it incredibly important in this field. That's we are constantly blogging, posting bulletins and interacting on the social media sites where your video lives in order to bring as many new eyes to your video before, during and after your book is released." At the end of the interview, English talks about the importance of analytics. Every client is given regular reports that describe the audience the video has been able to gather and a summation of any feedback they have gotten. COS uses whatever statistics it can gather from YouTube, MySpace or any other service it is using. The company also works a great deal with Tube Mogul "because the data it provides is great". English admits that the statistics provided by all these services is still primitive, hard to integrate, and must be filtered though sanity filters (when someone reports that their profession is a Ninja you have to take that with a grain of salt"). But, the reporting we are getting from all these services is getting better ever day. Technorati Tags:
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