I’m a slut for a great movie trailer, especially when they’re combined with epic music, action, and effects. I’ve caught myself rewatching movie trailers multiple times even after I’ve seen the movie because good ones are such a rush. So when I started seeing book trailers popping up on twitter and Instagram, I was intrigued.
Intrigued though I was, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make one for Epic of Helinthia. I’d seen some really good book trailers that honestly made me want to investigate the book more, and I’d seen some that I just scrolled past, and a few that made me cringe.
Like with book covers, I believe any kind of exposure for your book needs to make the best impression possible, otherwise, whether it’s fair or not, it’s going to reflect badly on your story. Having a poorly constructed book trailer, in my opinion, is worse than not having one at all.
Of course, there are the exceptions to this rule, where exposure being reaaaallly bad can drive traffic just from sheer hilarity or outrage, but that outcome is most often accidental, and the results are extremely unreliable, and often unfavorable.
In my quest to lure readers to my book, I’ve been exploring Canva, learning how to create Brand colors, fonts, and templates to reuse for social media, then slowly progressing to animations, graphics, and even swag items like stickers, posters, banners, and bookmarks. Though I’m no expert, I’ve found Canva to be a decent tool with a minimal learning curve, and well worth the $9.99/month for the Pro version. If you are tackling book marketing and publicity on your own, this is an excellent investment.
But I was not ready to take on creating a video with Canva. That’s a whole new level of savvy… right?
So, I looked into Fiverr to see about hiring someone. Fiverr is where I found my cover designer, and I’ve received soooooo many compliments on my cover, I could not be more pleased with Sadie at Lune View Publishing. So I figured it would be a good place to start looking for someone to do a book trailer too. But after browsing a couple of portfolios from some of the top-rated sellers, I decided that this wasn’t the route I wanted to take.
So what did I do? I went to youtube, of course, and found a few tutorial videos on how to create a video in Canva. And you know what? It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Canva has a vast database of videos, audio clips, music tracks, photos, everything you need to create your own book trailer. I used the pro version, but even the free version had an insane selection to choose from, so if you’re not sure you want to take the plunge and invest in a subscription, I still encourage you to check out the free version and play around with it, I bet you’ll be shocked what you come up with!
The creation of my book trailer began outside of Canva, with a script. I’ve spent a lot of time creating, tweaking, drafting, and recreating a short description of my book in various lengths for dozens of different sites now, so it didn’t take me long to piece together a short script briefly describing the synopsis of my story, and then I’ve also had several amazing reviews which I decided to use as well.
Having a script made it a LOT easier to sift through Canva and find elements that worked together to create something epic and aligned with my book. I started with the text of the script, finding relevant background videos, then added sound effects, then added music, and continued tweaking everything. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so it took me all day to create a book trailer I’m proud of, but it was actually a LOT of fun.
I hope you’ve found this article helpful, and I would love to know your thoughts on book trailers in the comments below. I hope you enjoy my book trailer and if you do, preorder links are below!
Pre-Order Epic of Helinthia:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
Draft2Digital
