Why Book Trailers Boggle a Writer’s Brain

You need a book trailer for The Adventure…say what!?

Yes, that’s right, a movie-esque trailer…for a book. I mean, it’s words-on-paper-to-fuel-imaginations type of technology, not a movie for crying out loud. What do you even put into a trailer? More words on a page? That’s lovely…and totally boring without the actual book in hand.

But even Kickstarter encourages everyone to have a video, so I put it on my list of things, completely unaware of the massive project it would be.

So, when my calendar plan for The Adventure told me to write the outline for THE TRAILER, I wrote an outline, video reel rolling through my head with ideas. “Yeah, that’s totally possible,” I told myself. This shouldn’t be so bad. I mean, writing’s my thing, so getting the outline figured out was easy peasy…

But then I needed to do something with that outline. *Gulp*

I had in my head a flame sparking and then a match burning behind a DEEP MALE VOICE saying ominous things. This required three things that my writer’s brain hadn’t really figured out.

• One, music behind the voice, something to set the mood.
• Two, I needed a video of the match burning.
• And three, and most importantly, I needed the voice for “ominous things”

And this was just for the start of the trailer…

Music is a tricky thing and music rights even trickier, not to mention scary. Let me just say the Free Music Archive is amazing and super helpful. That’s where I found Cold Noise and the promotional music for the trailer. Thank you to Jaroslav Vyhnicka with Cold Noise! I love the music. (This took me days, nay weeks! to research.)

First part down, second part…um…

Filming is definitely not in my wheelhouse, but I know this amazing woman who’s like a pit bull once she gets an idea in her head. She’s called my sister, or, to the rest of the world, she’s Lucynda (Cindy) with Funsnapshots99 (I guess creative pursuits run in the family=). I mentioned my apprehension about filming the match burning. She started researching. On the spot.

And she ran with the trailer from there. I’m not even sure I actually asked her or if I was just venting at the time…can’t remember now…but she dropped everything and began digging into how to set up the trailer.

I couldn’t be happier that she did.

I think she spent well over 50 or 60 hours on this project and the trailer went through at least 8, if not more, revisions. Like I said, I had no idea the monster of a project I was taking on when I wrote it on my calendar.

Cindy’s hard work shows. Aside from the book itself, this is the one thing I’m most excited to share with everyone because it turned out absolutely amazing!

Check it out:

Two parts down…Part three…

DEEP MALE VOICE.

You might notice in the trailer that the voice isn’t a DMV. There’s a reason for that but this is a connection I want to dig into because it’s the coolest of them all.

However, this blog’s getting really long, so I’ll dig into that connection, and the reason the voice isn’t a DMV, Thursday. Check back and I’ll explain everything.

Until then, blessings,

Jennifer

P.S. Please share this! It’s such a great way to introduce people to The Adventure. Or, if you’d like to support The Adventure, click the link =)