Promoting Your Book Video

Even though book trailers have been done since COS Productions first premiered Dark Symphony by Christine Feehan in 2003, it's considered a relatively new market.

Partially because of the technical requirements to make them - although they can be made with Windows Movie Maker or any other simple editing program, it takes a high quality video to get real notice. Partially because the expense - as I've been saying here, the market that can benefit most from these book videos is the small published market, which has trouble affording them. Although over the span of an author's career, the initial investment in a book video will be highly justified.

So the question is - where's the best place to promote your book video once it's complete? We know YouTube can get views, but it's not your target audience. You can pay for advertising it on a number of smaller sites geared at niche markets, which may be worthwhile, but it's always a question of risk - is it worth the investment? Especially after you've purchased the video.

The answer is: Amazon! Your Site! Your MySpace!

Three places most likely to get you immediate sales. And it's easy to do!

1) Amazon

What better place to have an advertisement to sell your book, than to someone who's actively looking to BUY a book? If you get someone to land on your book's page at Amazon, and you have a high quality (preferably Way Out Sortie - hah) video on your book's page... You just sold another copy. Not to mention whatever word of mouth it generates. To place your video on Amazon.com, you need to sign up for the AuthorConnect (available through your books page on Amazon - and it has to be a print book. E-books sold on Amazon are not available for AuthorConnect yet). Once you've signed up for AuthorConnect, had your publisher verify you are the author, you can create a blog entry and "Upload your video" to your blog. This allows it to show up right on the book's page. Excellent!

2) Your Site

Whether you have two visitors a week (mom AND dad), or you have thousands of visitors a day, posting your book video on your site ties all your branding and self-promotion tools together. Your site is (hopefully) already geared to send potential readers flocking to the nearest book store to purchase your masterpiece. Now, you have a video that will dazzle and delight them for 1:30 to 2 minutes and leave them with tears of joy in their eyes, and credit card in hand. The easiest way to place your book video on your site is to simply take the "Embed" code from YouTube's page and copy and paste it where you want it in your HTML pages. It takes access to your HTML code (through FTP or a control panel) to change, but it's not rocket science. Just skip the boring stuff at the top, find where your text is, and find a nice gap to paste it into. Viola!

3) MySpace (or..uh... yourSpace)

Of course we want to promote ourselves on MySpace. It isn't called Social Networking for nothing. This is real easy. If your producer already uploaded your video, just search for it by name to find it. Once you click on the video, there's a link on the right-hand side that says "Add to my Profile". Click on that, and you're the proud owner of a multi-media rich MySpace page! If your producer didn't upload the video, simply go to MySpace Videos, and follow the easy-to-use instructions to select the video file from your computer (MySpace supports about 6 of the most common formats), and wait patiently while it's uploaded. It will take a little bit to be converted and made live, but once it is, you can find it under "My Videos" link at the top of the page.

That's a start! Three of the best places to market your Book Video and get your promotion going. I'll be following this up soon with some additional places that focus entirely on book videos and teasers, and also other ways to promote your video - like, through your publisher!

For more details, or to check out some of the wicked videos being produced by Way Out Sortie, head on over to http://www.wayoutsortie.com today!

Creating an Author Video Teaser Hook - Shelby Reed

This time, we'll take a look at Shelby Reed's author video.

An author video presents an entirely new challenge to creating a proper hook to tie in throughout a video teaser. In this case, we're going to be looking at an entire career, an entire library of books, which may all be similar (as is the case with Shelby's), or may be entirely different.

This also presents an additional challenge - how do you sell these books when you're (hopefully!) just providing a few seconds each to them. I can't possibly represent an entire blurb, much less an entire overview of the story, in a visual-rich 15 seconds. Even if some authors think that would be the best way to do it - it isn't! Focus your message. Writers know very well this is often one of their problems. Because they're writers! Telling a writer to "not write so much" is not going to get you very far.

In Shelby Reed's case, I took the term "teaser" across the board. Identifying her greatest strengths from a promotional side (the pouring in of outstanding reviews), and the hook we're trying to create (an interesting draw to get readers to learn more about her), and tie them together.

So we start with "Shelby Reed invites your on a journey...", an for each book we throw on screen, we put a great quote from her reviews, or two, along with a portion of the journey we're moving through. Although the ... ellipses signifies that we are, indeed, writers (don't all authors love ellipses?), it does tie the journey together and allows each book to make a statement that would work an overall.

"Shelby Reed invites you on a journey through wild inhibitions." All the way through "Shelby Reed invites you on a journey through erotic promises." And this sets us up for the hook, as we end with a menagerie of terms to continue the hook: Through love, passion, sex, etc. Before we clear everything, black the screen, and end with our hook. "Shelby Reed invites you on a journey through ROMANCE." and type out the web site address.

Like Leslie's trailer in the previous entry, this creates a nice emotional pull with the music and the message, bringing it all together in a nice, tight, little package.

It doesn't always work out across the board like this, but it's the primary focus of Way Out Sortie - promotion video teasers with a hook. Find out more at http://www.wayoutsortie.com