{"id":4848,"date":"2011-06-22T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-06-22T06:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/?p=4848"},"modified":"2014-12-23T17:14:17","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T11:44:17","slug":"book-trailers-five-things-shteyngart-gets-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/book-trailers-five-things-shteyngart-gets-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Trailers: Five Things Shteyngart Gets Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Guest: Thomas Doane<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EfzuOu4UIOU\" width=\"450\" height=\"286\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>1. The \u2018Viral\u2019 Element: Style\/Content<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The style of the trailer reflects the content of the book. Shteyngart\u2019s book is a satire; therefore, his trailer is satirical. Obviously, this particular trailer is hilarious, which helped it to become a viral sensation. At 150,000 views, this is not exactly Rebecca Black\u2019s \u2018Friday,\u2019 but it&#8217;s pretty damn good for a book trailer. I\u2019m not going to go super in-depth into the math since these things are always highly variable, but if the conversion rate on views-to-sales was 5% then that would make this book a bestseller.<\/p>\n<p>Which, in fact, it was. The book charted at Number 11 on the <em>New York Times<\/em> bestseller list the month it came out.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, not all of us write satires. The important thing is to match the style of your trailer with the content of your book. If you do this it will engage the audience you\u2019re targeting.<\/p>\n<p>But how do you disseminate your trailer to your target audience? That brings us to the next step in our dissection of Shteyngart\u2019s trailer.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Use all media outlets.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This trailer went viral because it was disseminated across all available platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, blogs, PPC, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.exacttarget.com\/products\/social.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">email marketing<\/a>, etc. It was on the publisher\u2019s site. It was mentioned on Fresh Air. Not all of us get interviewed by Terry Gross but YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are available to everyone \u2013 for free! In some cases, you (or your agent) might want to hire someone to amplify and accelerate this process of dissemination across these mediums. Or you could invest some time into learning how to optimize this part of the process yourself.<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty of materials teaching you how to most effectively use social media to promote yourself out here on the blogosphere. You get to choose your own level of engagement obviously, but the whole point of making a trailer is to leverage your impact across these platforms, so don\u2019t neglect this step. More or less, you\u2019re guaranteed to get out of it what you put into it, but you could get a whole lot <em>more out of this step than you put into it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You want your trailer to go \u2018viral\u2019 on some level\u2014whether that means hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of views \u2013 and you will be scaled according to a few factors. One of those factors is your level of prior exposure\/popularity. That may not be something you can control. But another factor is: How effectively are you using social media? That\u2019s something you can control.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. Interviews\/Budget<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Notice the trailer is packed with interviews. Interviews are cheap to shoot, easy to edit, effective, informative and engaging. That\u2019s why. The convention grows out of common sense and is dictated by the generally small budgets we have available to shoot our book trailers.<\/p>\n<p>It would be nice if we all had the budget to \u2018engage\u2019 our audience with exploding cars and supermodels. If we had that kind of money, maybe we wouldn\u2019t be so concerned about pumping up our sales. Since we don\u2019t have that kind of budget\u2014and since exploding cars and supermodels are often completely superfluous to the books we\u2019re promoting\u2014interviews will have to do.<\/p>\n<p>Choose great subjects, edit lovingly, and this part should go just fine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Timing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Note that Shteyngart posted his trailer on YouTube July 7th when his book came out on the 27th. That gave the trailer three weeks lead time before the book hit the stands, and the timing calibrated it to coincide to the weekend when most people would have been reading pre-publication reviews for <em>Super Sad True Love Story<\/em> in <em>The New Yorker<\/em> and <em>Harpers<\/em>. I\u2019m betting that Shteyngart\u2019s agent told him to drop the video on that date.<\/p>\n<p>Not all of us are lucky enough to get reviewed in <em>The New Yorker<\/em> or to have an agent for that matter, but that doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t follow Shteyngart\u2019s lead here.<\/p>\n<p>This may be obvious, but your trailer should come out a few weeks before your book. If your book is being reviewed prior to its release, reviews will be coming out at the beginning of the month. You should time your trailer to coincide to the time when people will be reading these reviews.<\/p>\n<p>If your book is not being reviewed, you should still release your trailer a few weeks before the book itself is available. This adds to anticipation, and whets the consumer\u2019s appetite. People often want what they can\u2019t have. If your book hasn\u2019t been released yet, and they find your trailer interesting this might\u2014ironically\u2014influence them to buy your book more strongly than its presence on the shelves or on Amazon\u2014one among the millions of other possible choices. This is part of how we must, of necessity, \u2018manufacture scarcity.\u2019<\/p>\n<p><strong>5. Length<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Shteyngart\u2019s trailer is 4 minutes and 42 seconds long\u2014skirting the outer limits of recommended length for a book trailer. The point of doing a book trailer is that more people will watch it than will watch an author interview. People who do not know you and your work will sit and watch the advert\u2014then listen through the pitch. Shteyngart\u2019s video would probably not have gone viral if he\u2019d stretched it out to 10 minutes in length. So he kept it down to five. Go and do likewise.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-4853\" style=\"margin-left: 10px;\" title=\"Thomas Doane\" src=\"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/avatar-300x254.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"189\" height=\"160\" \/>Thomas Doane works as a freelance writer and content manager for several internet concerns, writes novels and blogs at <a href=\"http:\/\/g0spel0fj0hn.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">gospel(s)<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guest: Thomas Doane 1. The \u2018Viral\u2019 Element: Style\/Content The style of the trailer reflects the content of the book. Shteyngart\u2019s book is a satire; therefore, his trailer is satirical. Obviously, this particular trailer is hilarious, which helped it to become a viral sensation. At 150,000 views, this is not exactly Rebecca Black\u2019s \u2018Friday,\u2019 but it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[353,3],"tags":[506,9,493,504,286,507],"class_list":["post-4848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bbmtc","category-book-marketing","tag-author-videos","tag-authors","tag-book-trailers","tag-book-videos","tag-book-trailer","tag-shteyngart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}