Janet Reid recently posted a blog on book trailers, in particular the trailer for Micheal Connelly’s latest novel, The Brass Verdict. She asks, “Are book trailers effective in boosting sales?” and isn’t really sure of the answer. Then she goes on to talk about the market for book trailers and expects that it will increase in future years.

So what is a book trailer?

It’s like a movie trailer except that it’s for a book, rather than for a movie.

I did an informal survey of my own with guests from a dinner party last night.  All of the guests were avid readers, two of them work in libraries.

Book trailers? They had never heard of them. Would they buy a book based on a trailer? Why?  A book trailer is a movie-maker’s interpretation of the book, not the writer’s. They want to know what the writing is like, not someone else’s interpretation of it. 

These mirrored my own opinions.

We discussed it some more, in particular the writing/film cross-over.  We all agreed:

• That the film of a book is a totally different beast to the book itself. Just because you like a film doesn’t necessarily mean that you will like the book, and vice-versa. Ditto book trailers
• You cannot judge the quality of a book from the quality of the film. You have to read some of the text before you know for certain whether you are going to read the book.  The same can be said of the trailers.
• Even if we see—and enjoy—a film based on a book, we seldom read the story the film was based on.  We will do the opposite, however, and go and see a film based on a book we read and enjoyed. Likewise, we might view a book trailer—if we knew about it—because we wanted to see what they had done with ‘our’ characters.

If book trailers don’t do anything to make us read a book, why would anyone bother to create them?

It seems that the main reason you would do it is not so much a means to get new readers, as to remind readers of earlier books that the new one is out. Even Janet Reid said that she had read Connelly’s earlier book and would probably have read the latest one when she realised it was out—but she hadn’t realised at the time.

So it seems to be a form of publicity that targets existing readers, rather than new ones. And if the trend to more professional videos take off, it could be quite expensive marketing too.

It will be interesting to see if book trailers take off in this video age.

Meantime, if I can’t read a few pages of the book, there’s no way I’m going to buy it.

I started this blog I because I thought it was a unique idea and that while there is lots of information about how to write, there is little physical evidence of the actual process that writers go through to change their work.

Not so. Brandon Sanderson, who has written a number of books but is currently famous for picking up Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, has a lot of information about the writing process, deleted scenes, commentary on chapters and so on. It’s a great read.  Settle in for the afternoon—or maybe the weekend, as there’s a lot there. It’s a real treasure trove of the writing process.

I actually got his site from a post Robin Hobb did on sff.net/My Space. Readers asked her how her draft process works, so she explained some technicalities with how she does her drafts. After which she posted portions of a sixth and seventh draft from the prologue of Dragon Keeper, her new book.

Both these sites are worth looking at.

All writers have strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is dialogue. I can write a whole novel in dialogue. (I know, they’re called scripts, but my stories sprawl so much the end result would be longer than a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.)  One of my weaknesses is emotion. Calder goes through the stories after I have finished the first draft and adds emotive moments throughout.  Another weakness is fight scenes.

I can’t write fight scenes.

I can picture the fight in my head as I’m writing. I know what happens, but getting it down on paper is another thing altogether.  The first draft is a wire-frame outline pulled totally out of shape  The fight has no excitement, no emotion, and not much happening, and then suddenly it’s over.

So I rewrite it with more description and it turns into one long boring ‘he did this’ and then ’she did that’ and then they did it all over again. The fight takes forever, and any urgency is lost. Not only that, I still can’t get past the ‘he did this’ text for what is actually happening.

At least my scenes are realistic by then, if somewhat boring. I have a writer friend who specialises in the impossible fight. You know the ones. Where the antagonist has his back to the protagonist and then she (the protagonist) shoots him between the eyes. Or the physically impossible contortionist scene where she’d have to be Elastagirl to pick up the weapon the bad guy dropped.

Another writer friend suggested we could both benefit from taking a fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie and trying to describe it.

I think I might try it.

Expect our next few books to have kung-fu-style fight scenes.