Book Trailers-- Now showing in select blogs.

When I told people I was working on book trailers, no one seemed to get the concept. It's easy though, I swear. A book trailer is a short video that gives you information about a book the way a movie trailer does for a full length film. It hooks your interest and then makes you want to read it... well, if it's good anyway.

They are great because they get people interested in reading a book that might not have picked up otherwise. It gives you a little more information than the back of the book might, but not enough that it gives the entire plot away.


I've seen some great book trailers out there, and now I've finally done some of my own. It started out being for one of my classes, but it turned out to be a lot of fun (well, minus the citations-- does anyone think citations are fun?). So, I'm hoping to do some more once I get a little more time. Woot!

The book trailers are for Jeanne DuPrau's The City of Ember, Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, and M.T. Anderson's Feed. Check out a previous post to get a full book review for The City of Ember.

All of them are young adult novels that feature kids in future dystopian societies who realize that their worlds aren't as they seem. These kinds of books make readers really think about the society we live in.

They are short, around 1 1/2 minutes, so it doesn't take too much time. Check them out and leave me a comments!

The making of a book trailer:

If you're interested in making your own, or were just curious about what making a book trailer entailed, I'll tell you how I did it.

To do this, I had to use all images and music that were able to be shared-- like, I wouldn't get sued if I used them. I used Creative Commons, a great search engine for finding all images and music that you are able to use for free, so long as you credit your sources. I credited mine on YouTube in the description section.


Once I had all the pictures and music saved on my computer, I used Windows Live Movie Maker to put it all together. It lets you upload pictures, music, video, etc., and you can stitch them together, put captions on them. I wrote "scripts" for each book trailer, and worked from those to decide what types of images I should use for each slide.

You can just have words on the screen, or you can upload audio to add to it for a narrated book trailer. I would have done this, but my voice is high and squeaky and doesn't really fit the tone of the books. It would be like having Alvin and Chipmunks do Darth Vader-- it just wouldn't make sense. After I was done, I just uploaded them to YouTube, which you can also do through Window Live Movie Maker- it can turn them into a movie file (it makes them .wmv files), and then it can connect with your YouTube account to upload them directly into your account. Pretty sweet right?  If you want to share a book trailer, I'd love to see it!