6 Ways to Promote Your Book Trailer
Marketing a book in today’s competitive media landscape can sometimes feel like trying to sell salad at a food festival. While salad is delicious and good for you, you’re up against vendors hawking their LOUD, bold, empty-calorie flavours. You might feel that it’s hard to get peoples’ attention.
Fortunately there are many salad book lovers out there. The challenge for you as an author is to cut through the noise and reach them. And one excellent way of doing just that is to adopt for your book marketing one of the best-performing promotional methods from the film industry: the trailer.
Book trailers have exploded in popularity in recent years, mirroring the growth of online video in general. Video is now a necessary component of any successful online marketing campaign — especially for authors. An effective book trailer serves as a dynamic and well-edited showcase of the why behind a book — whether it’s a romance, a memoir, or a children’s book — to generate excitement and interest in your potential reader.
The reason Hollywood shows trailers before every feature film is simply because they work. And while you don’t have theatrical distribution at your disposal, the fact you’re reading this article shows that you do have Internet access. With that, here are 6 different ways to ensure your book trailer captures your target audience’s attention:
1. Social Media
Post your video on all your social media channels! Videos are a dynamic method of interacting with your social media community and a powerful way to connect with viewers. The days of exclusively text-based social media are over, so having an eye-catching, dynamic piece of visual media promoting your book is a great way to get a viewer's attention and keep it.
Research also suggests that videos on social media result in 1,200% more shares than posts that are still images and text. Be sure that you choose an interesting thumbnail when sharing your trailer on social media. This will pique the viewer’s interest and get more people to click on the video and watch it all the way through. Video is also a format that is friendly across multiple social media platforms. You can post it to Instagram (via IGTV), Twitter, Facebook, and — of course — YouTube easily. Be sure to post an attention-grabbing title on the post, too. “My Book Trailer” won’t make users pause as they scroll, so do some research and get creative!
2. Explore Reddit
Reddit is a social media platform that hosts online discussions. Within Reddit exist many thousands of subreddits — or forums — dedicated to specific topics. Reddit is a great platform to find and connect with specific groups of your target market. This year, Reddit said it now has 52 million daily users, up 44% year over year. While this number is smaller than other social media platforms, Reddit's format allows for specific interaction based on specific interests, so your book trailer is much likelier to reach an audience that is authentically engaged with and interested in the subject matter of your book. As with other forms of social media, the video format of a teaser trailer will be an advantage to engage viewers. Whether r/YAlit or r/history, exploring and engaging with the right subreddits can pay huge dividends.
3. Online Advertisements
Social media platforms now have the ability for users to pay for ads that will boost their posts. While we cannot speak directly to the revenue earned from authors’ boosted posts, your trailer is a good source of content if you're interested in exploring this avenue of promotion on Facebook or YouTube. As with unpaid social media posts, video content is good for these paid ads as it provides more information about your book (good bang for your marketing buck!) and has a higher level of potential engagement than other post formats. As such, it’s more likely to catch your audience’s attention mid-scroll. In fact, a video ad increases the viewers' chances of purchasing the product by 97%!
4. Author Website
Your author website is a one-stop-shop for everything about your book and you as an author. Your teaser trailer is an attention-grabbing way of succinctly sharing information about your book. Research also suggests that 88% of users stay on a website longer if it has a video on it. Put your trailer at the top of the page or on your homepage to immediately capture people's attention when they first arrive at your website. As you’ve done on social media, ensure there's a compelling title to draw people in. A call to action beneath the video (like “Buy the Book Here”) can further push viewers to engage with you and, ultimately, purchase your book.
5. Amazon Author Central
Authors on Amazon.com are able to create an Amazon Central Author page that provides more in-depth information about titles listed on Amazon. You can add information about you, your book, your website, and your book trailer to one centralized page. As with the other channels, adding your teaser trailer to this page not only provides more engaging information about your book, but it will also help you stand out in the crowded Amazon market and increase your perceived legitimacy with readers. If you’re a FriesenPress author who needs assistance setting up your Amazon Central Account, our Promotions team is happy to help.
6. Trailershelf.com
Trailershelf is a free-to-use website dedicated to sharing and promoting teaser trailers and video-related promotions for books. Authors can submit their book trailer to be included on the site. Trailershelf is a resource that readers can visit to find inspiration for their next read, and so can be good exposure for your book to a broad and diverse audience that you might not otherwise find. There's also the opportunity that your trailer can be picked as a Staff Pick or a Monthly Must-Read to be featured in the sidebar of the website.
To commission a book trailer of your own (or to learn other ways of helping your book stand out in the marketplace), FriesenPress can help. Give us a call at 1-800-792-5092 to learn more about our Publishing Paths and promotional services.