A friend asked me yesterday if I had thought about doing a book trailer. She even pointed me to a list of the ten most viewed book trailers of all time: https:\/\/film-14.com\/the-10-most-viewed-book-trailers-of-all-time-updated\/<\/p>\n
I watched them.<\/p>\n
I don’t get it.<\/p>\n
It is not that they are not good. They are as slick as any Hollywood movie trailer. There is a reason that the site that created the list is a film site, not a book site. They are all great examples of cinematography and acting. If I was a teenage girl I would totally want to watch those movies.<\/p>\n
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Wait. What? These are supposed to be book trailers. They are supposed to make us want to read the book. But they don’t. They engage us with the lead actors. They engage us with the tone of the cinematography. They sell us on watching these actors play these parts on these sets. And then they disappoint us with a book cover instead of a release date. They make me (or the teenage girl part of my brain, anyway) want to see the movie. Not read the book.<\/p>\n
In other words, this is classic bait and switch.<\/p>\n
Is it as simple as that? Is it so impossible to gain traction by promoting a book as a book these days that you have to promote it as a movie and then switch it up at the end and try to sell a book instead? And if so, does that actually work?<\/p>\n
I have another theory. Bear with me and let me know in the comments if this makes any sense. Fan fiction has become a huge thing. Fans wanting more episodes of their favorite shows than the networks could ever commission or shoot, write their own episodes as short stories and novels and share them among themselves. It has become so big that the networks have caught onto it and continue popular series in the form of books and comics. They write their own fanfiction. Sometimes they even publish the fan fiction written by fans.<\/p>\n
In some sense it is easy to see the appeal here. The fans already have pictures of the setting and the characters in their heads. No need for tedious scene setting or description in the books. They can just get on with telling the same stories over and over and over again, world without end, Amen.<\/p>\n
I assume that reading these books is a somewhat different experience from reading the book from scratch. The imagination is already populated with images and the reader almost certainly will project the faces of the actors and the sets and locations onto the books as they read, creating what is essentially an extension of the TV watching experience.<\/p>\n
Reading, in other words, becomes a post-TV experience, an extension of TV viewing. And if that is what reading is to you, then perhaps you need that TV lead-in to the reading experience. Perhaps without it you will lack the capacity to form images of people and places as you read the book. If that is the case, the role of the book trailer can be seen very differently. Essentially it serves to quickly populate the reader’s mind with those essential images that they no longer have the capacity to form for themselves.<\/p>\n
Let’s look at an example:<\/p>\n