A Mixed Bag Of Book Trailers

I've been known to voice reservations about book trailers. (I seem to voice reservations about most things.) I've also read that publishing people wonder if they sell books.

I find a lot of book trailers a bit amateurish and...sloooooow. Often times I could read a couple of paragraphs and get some real info on a book in the time it takes to get through some of these things that don't do much more than try to create atmosphere. I don't have time for atmosphere! Life is short, people!

Last month (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm always behind.) The Spectacle ran a post on book trailers that included three examples. I liked The Adoration of Jenna Fox very much, but I don't know if that trailer would have hooked me. It's an example of what I meant by slow. I doubt I would have sat through it if I hadn't already read the book. The Nightmare Academy trailer seemed generic to me. It seemed as if it was just promoting another scary story.

The trailer for Shiver, though--How beautiful. It didn't really tell me much, but it's so stunning that I watched it a couple of times, and I went to the author's website to see what was going on with that story. And now I am interested, and I do want to get hold of that book.

So while the trailer doesn't communicate a whole lot (which I think a trailer really ought to do), it still worked because it is, as Parker Peevyhouse said at The Spectacle, a work of art. Not many people are going to be able to pull that off, but Maggie Stiefvater who wrote Shiver and made her own trailer, did.