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With the pending release of the book trailer for my series, The
Noricin Chronicles,
I am looking for suggestions about places to
post the trailer.  Obviously I'll be putting it on YouTube, Facebook,
here on Published Authors and on the remaining Ning Networks, but I was
just wondering if anyone knew of any sites specifically for the
use of book trailers.  Imagine if Scribd and YouTube were to breed -
that's kinda what I'm interested in finding.

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I may be wrong, but I understand that Amazon now offer a video trailer for books they sell(UK and or US?)
Place the video on YouTube and use the YouTube embed code to have the video follow the book; blog postings, reviews sites, marketing platforms, ecommerce sites, etc. Try to avoid hyperlinks that will pull users to the video and away from the current content, especially ecommerce sites. Try to do the same with other marketing materials. The more you bring TO the customer means more interaction, higher conversion and strengthened brand loyalty.

Chris Glennon
SmartSymbols Book Marketing Platform
Thanks!!!
Hey guys, I've started a list of Book Trailer sites on Scribd, so please check it out and if you know of any others for me to add, just let me know!!!
Is it possible to make your own instead of going to a publication site? I'd like to grab a camera and film my own, place it on youtube and go from there. I have the whole thing in my head but I don't know if a production company would do it the way I want it. I'm a bit of a control freak.
Kim, I made both of the trailers (http://www.youtube.com/user/marksheldon1221) I have done so far by myself using nothing but Photoshop and iMovie. I just had one friend write the music, and another do the voice over for the first one, but everything else I did myself. I say, if you have the vision, the tools, and the resources, go for it! You'll save yourself a lot of money and know that you are getting the vision that you want to express.
cool!!! I want to have a few sword fight scenes, I have a friend who's a swordsman, and a few other things. I'll need the music and voice over of course. Can I use any music or is there 'free' music out there that I can use? Or do I need permission to use someone's music? And can I make it before the book is published? I'm going to publish my book either traditional or e-publish. And thanks!!
I checked out your trailer, it looks really good. And your book looks interesting. If I were to send you my email address, would you be willing to give me a quick step by step instructional on how you did this and I'll post it on my blog for others, and me, to use? I think folks could really find it useful. I know I could. Thanks.
Be very careful with music. There are several sites that offer "royalty free," much like Stock Image offers "royalty free" images, but you need to read the fine print extremely carefully, to make sure there aren't any loopholes that will come back to haunt you. If you're going to use music from somewhere other than one of those sites, you most definitely need to get permission. Even classical music is dangerous, because someone, somewhere, owns the copyright on the recording/performance, even if the music itself is in the public domain.

That's why I would recommend having someone write something for you - you know where it came from, who it came from, and you can get a specific written agreement that you are free to use the music for your trailers. Not only that, but it will be specifically tailored to your trailer and people will not have any previous associations with the music that will distract them from the trailer.

I am in the pre-publication stage of my books, and putting the trailers out has undeniably helped me. I have gotten several responses from people saying that seeing the trailers made them want to read my books, where the summary blurb I had released hadn't really caught their attention. So I would say definitely put it up beforehand. There are very few ways it can hurt you (namely, if you make a bad trailer), and a number of ways that it can help you.

I am going the self-published route for a number of very carefully considered and weighed reasons. I most definitely would not enter into this route lightly, and be prepared to spend the majority of your time devoted to promoting your work (seriously, it's basically taken over my life).

Also, if you do go self-published, be sure to hire a professional editor. There's a very negative stigma attached to self-published authors, and that is largely due to the number of people who simply publish their writing without having a professional edit it first. The only way for us to combat that stigma is to take responsibility for our work and ensure that what we publish is of the highest quality.

Having not gone the traditional route, I can't say what a publisher's take on you doing your own trailer would be. You might find a publisher willing to let you have a fair amount of input, but from what I understand they would most likely require to be at minimum heavily involved and have final say.

Good luck!
So how did you make the trailer? And what is Imovie? What suggestions would you give to someone in order to avoid mistakes that you had made with the trailer? (Sorry, but I love doing interviews.)
iMovie is basically Apple's basic movie editor. I believe Windows has a similar program, but I don't know off the top of my head what it's called. You can easily find something for free or very cheap. You don't need anything fancy, just a simple program that will allow you to edit and re-order clips, do a few different fades, at least two tracks of audio, and subtitles.

Both of my trailers were all animated, so they were a bit easier than what it sounds like you're planning, since I didn't need a whole bunch of extra equipment, actors, costumes, etc.

I'll just go through the process for the first trailer, for efficiency of time since it's the simpler of the two (I hope you have some experience with Photoshop, because I don't know how much of this will make sense without knowing something about the program...) I created the trailer in three separate sections.

The first section is the image of the rain coming down on the Snisnar gates. I created the image of the gates, and then found a couple tutorials on-line (Google is a wonderful thing) that showed me how to create the rain and lightning effects.

The difficult part was the growing diamond of light. Had I know at that time about Photoshop's tweening effect (an animation effect that fills in the frames of animation for you), it would have saved me a lot of time. As is, I created the diamond at its full size first (because if you start with a small object and make it larger, the quality is degraded), and then gradually shrunk it in intervals of ten pixels.

Once I'd gotten that right (it took a couple tries) and reversed it so that it went from small to large instead of large to small, I added in the text and the symbols as separate layers and then duplicated each of those layers several times, so that I could gradually delete each symbol frame by frame to create the slow fade in. Again, this would have been expedited by the use of tweening, but I didn't find that wonderful tool until I started on the second trailer.

The third section of the trailer was the easiest. I did it in Photoshop, and just created frames of text on black, and then the image of the book. I set each frame to a few seconds, and voila.

I then exported each of the three sections out of Photoshop as videos, and imported them into iMovie, where I did a couple edits, and the visuals were done. I added rain and thunder sound effects (that I downloaded for free - again, thank you Google!) to the opening shot of the gates, and recorded the voice over with my friend and my computer's built in microphone. Then sent the video to my composer friend, he sent me back an MP3 of music, I imported the MP3 into iMovie, exported everything, and uploaded to YouTube.

The biggest thing I've learned is to play around with Photoshop before setting out to your final product. Play around with it so that you get your animation right, and once you've got your "tricks" all figured out, then go back and start putting together the animation, text, etc.

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