THE UN-NEED FOR BOOK TRAILERS, Part I: Why making a book commercial that looks likes a movie trailer won’t get you anywhere

Last July, the publisher SHOMI—whose titles include Netherworld, Twist, Moongazer, Driven, Wired, Hidden, Countdown, and the outlier double-word titles, Time Transit, and Phenomenal Girl (a series, apparently)—sponsored a book trailer competition. They hired Stephen King to judge it. The parameters were simple. Participants were asked to “create [their] very own book trailer based on [their] favorite SHOMI novel.” As a marketing campaign, it follows one of the popular rules of contemporary promotion: get your audience to advertise your work for you. But whether the results proved efficacious seems less important than what such a contest suggests about the ubiquity of book trailers themselves. For SHOMI to plan this event, the concept “book trailer” has to be part of the colloquial language. No matter who is judging such a competition, if the potential applicants don’t understand the term in advance, the game can’t work.

The book trailer—that one to three-minute voiced-over montage—is designed to attract readers, using images and sounds, to a non-visual, non-auditory product. Pre Youtube, an affordable venue didn’t exist for book commercials, so very few PR departments made them. Historically, television has not been the place to sell a book, unless an author was appearing on a talk show. But now, due to the accessibility of hosting platforms, anyone with a novel or a memoir or a history can create, on virtually any computer, the sort of advertisement that ten years ago might have seemed prohibitively expensive. In the modern market, everyone–from Stephen King (Just After Sunset) to Electric Literature to Flatmancrooked–produces trailers. Three years ago, because these commercials were largely still a novelty, just making one guaranteed some press. Now omnipresence may be hampering their usefulness.

But with ubiquity comes the need for innovation. For fans of Stephen King, the N animation, produced in conjunction with Simon & Schuster and Marvel Comics, was not just an advertisement for Just After Sunset; it was an autonomous “work of art.” Simon & Schuster called N a web series, and released the animations daily for almost a month. Effectively, this created an internet show whose sole sponsor (and subject) was a book of short stories. The collection debuted at #2 on the New York Times fiction best sellers list at the end of November, and stayed in the top fifteen for eight weeks. For King this was not a resounding success, but the book was traditionally less marketable (novels always sell better than collections, and Thomas Friedman always sells better than everything).

Because the technology to make a book commercial is widely accessible, and because the mere existence of such a commercial is no longer extraordinary, the book trailer itself must now be exceptional. N qualifies as extraordinary because of its scope and quality, even if the underlying narrative language (and plot) is mediocre (at best). For smaller presses, though, partnering with Marvel isn’t an option. And stringing together some images with a soundtrack and a voiceover isn’t sufficient—that’s the thing everyone can do. In the next few years, most small publishing houses will produce an internet commercial, and most of their efforts won’t stand out. The majority will adhere, most likely, to the tropes of this fledgling medium. The outstanding ones, on the other hand, will re-contextualize the work they’re promoting.

It may even be a misnomer to call a book trailer a trailer. Film trailers get distilled from the films they’re promoting. But books don’t start out as movies. To summarize a book, therefore, may not be the best way to endorse it. Part of making successful book commercials in the second decade of the 21st Century shouldn’t be approximating film trailers. Instead, the micro publishing industry must create new, autonomous work that relates directly to the book being pushed, but which provides its own independent entertainment. On Thursday I’ll give some examples of presses that are already moving in this direction.

By James Kaelan, with special help from Molly Gaudry