Book Trailer: Archived Video and Purchased Music

Today, I’m officially unveiling a new book trailer for Prairie Storms, my nonfiction picture book.

I’ve done tons of research for the past two years ago and wrote The BookTrailer Manual, which will be totally revised in time for the 13th annual SCBWI Winter conference on January 27, where I’ll be speaking at the pre-conference Marketing Intensive on the topic of book trailers. So, check back in at www.booktrailermanual.com about then or sign up for the newsletter at the site to get notification of when it is available.

I created this trailer myself. The old film comes from public domain video that I found at archive.org. When I saw the ice skating bison, I knew it could be an interesting video, so I looked for something humorous to go with it. Research says that humor is the most often shared content on videos, so I’m searching for funny things. For the music, I bought the track at istockphoto.com for about $5. NEVER use copyrighted music; besides the obvious reasons why, I just saw that YouTube can recognize some instances of copyrighted music use and they have permission from the copyright holder to insert ads on videos that use their music. So, you may get unwanted ads when you do this.

I use SonyVegas HD software. There are tons of free software packages out there, including free ones that come on every computer (iMovie or Windows Movie Maker) and those from YouTube partners at www.youtube.com/create. But I like the Vegas program because it has great tutorials, I can burn a DVD and thus show the trailers at conferences, and it has more flexibility than many of the free programs; for example, it records my voice when I need to do voice overs.

When I want to shoot my own video, I use the Kodak Zi8 camera because it is light weight and mostly because it has an external microphone jack, the only small camera like this to have that option. I just plug in a cheap lavalier microphone (clips onto your shirt) and record that way and it has good sound quality. I like the Zi8′s HD quality, too.

To upload, you create a YouTube Channel and basically follow instructions. For the Vegas software, I make sure the video is edited as I want and then it’s a simple matter of clicking the option that I want to upload to YouTube. It then creates the video in a format optimized for YouTube, accesses my channel and uploads it. Once uploaded, I can log into YouTube to edit, annotate, fill in descriptions, etc. as needed. Most software has a similar option, so you don’t have to worry about the technical specs of YouTube–they all assume you want to upload to YouTube and make sure it is easy.

You can also do something as simple as use your iPhone’s video and upload that. It can be as simple or complex as you want. I guess what I emphasize is that with some basic experience, you can quickly get up to speed on creating the video files. But it’s the ideas that will grab people and make them want to share your video. Rarely does a simple rehash of your story’s plot line get many views. The YouTube audience wants entertainment. The manual has 14 types of videos and more suggestions on combinations of text, sound track and images.

The Bison v. Woman Skating Competition

This new video is an example of a YouTube Aesthetic Book Trailer , an informal, humorous video that only addresses the content of the book tangentially, but nevertheless, creates interest. The humor is meant to be shared! I chose this aesthetic, instead of the Movie Trailer Aesthetic or the PowerPoint Aesthetic, because I believe it has more potential for drawing in viewers on YouTube.

Please watch the video. Enjoy, laugh. And pass it along–I need your help to get lots of eyes on this!

If you can’t see this video, click here. *|YouTube:oRle8t3dHLs|*

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I’ll be speaking at the NYC SCBWI conference at the Marketing Intensive on Friday, January 27, 2012.

I’ll be talkking through two topics: book trailers and little known features of Facebook. I’m planning a presentation packed with practical information.

Book Trailers for Author Promotion

eBook by Darcy Pattison

I have written the ebook, THE BOOK TRAILER MANUAL (www.booktrailermanual.com). Articles about book trailers have appeared in the 2012 Writer’s Digest Market Guide and How to Write a YA Novel for Dummies by Deborah Halverson.

Here’s my latest book trailer for 11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph

If you can’t see this video, click here or visit Darcy Pattison’s YouTube Channel. If you visit my channel, glance at the description of each video and notice what goes first. Why? I’ll explain in NYC.

Little Known Features of Facebook

I’ll also be speaking about using Facebook. How to get the right name for your page, how to use groups or events and more.

I’ll draw from my experience with my own page, tips from about the internet and the Random Acts of Publicity week, an event I sponsored mainly through Facebook.

Here’s an early tip: when you create your Facebook Page (a fan page, where you will talk about your book) be sure to select the right UserName.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the animal sounds. Jeremy Doss, my nephew, is a talented film composer with experience in creating the musical moods needed to accompany and enhance images. A graduate of Film Score program an University of Southern California, he also writes music for video games and other uses.

We talked about what sort of music I needed and Jeremy was fantastic to work with. Contact him at jersam1995@sbcglobal.net

Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.

Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.

After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.

Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.

Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms

With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.

To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.

I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.

After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.

The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.

Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut on this site:

*|YouTube:uaUirE0ed6Y|*

TEACHERS: If your school blocks video through your server, please email me (darcy at darcypattison dot com) for a copy of the file to show to your class.

AUTHORS: Need more on how-to create book trailers? See my sister site www.booktrailermanual.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

At the recent conference for the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media, I did a session on book trailers for use in the library. As part of that session, I asked librarians to participate in making a video. Those interested in become a YouTube star answered this simple question:
What do you do when you get lost?

Here’s the video:

*|YouTube:1NZmSXuxynA|*

Great fun!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Greg Pincus, of The Happy Accident, invited me to write a post about book trailers. Here it is: Librarians and Teachers Love Book Trailers. Come read it and please leave a comment!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

We’ve done several 30-days series over the last few years. I’m considering topics for a couple “30 Days” series this year, probably March and October. What topics would you like to see? Plot, publicity, career, voice? Something else? Leave a comment, please, and let me know what interests you!

Newly updated 30 Days series

30 Days to a Stronger Picture Book

Favorite 30 Days series

• 30 Days to Stronger Scenes
• 30 Days to Stronger Characters
• 30 Days to a Stronger Novel

Other Popular Resources

• The Book Trailer Manual
• Novel Diagnosis Series
• Psychology of Revision
• Villains: 3 Part series

What other resource would you like next?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Want to put YouTube videos on your Facebook?

ReelSeo has a couple tutorials for you:

• How to Add a Video to Your Facebook Welcome Page
• The Definitive List of Video Apps for Facebook Pages

Book Trailers: Is It Budget or Aesthetics that Matters?

On my sister-site, BookTrailerManual.com, I’m having a discussion with Melissa from YABookshelf about teen book trailers. What’s the most important thing in the success of a trailer? Is it the budget, how much you spend on the trailer? Or is it the idea, the aesthetics with which you approach the book trailer? Come and join the conversation.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Popular on YouTube

Media Bistro this week interviewed Kevin Allocca about YouTube’s new Trends Dashboard, which lets you see what’s popular in different areas, and by age, gender. YouTube Trends Blog also points out interesting videos or topics.

If you’re doing book trailers, you should check out what’s popular with your audience!

Should Your Kid Become a Writer

An interesting spoof!

*|NfWQTa2a2Wc|*

P.S. Can you tell? I’m inn throes of figuring out what to write next!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Celebrate Reading, Book Trailers and More

SLJ’s Trailie Award Finalists are Announced: The Best Book Trailer Award

The voting is open. On my sister site, BookTrailerManual.com, I’ve posted the videos for you to watch. Be sure to vote for your favorite. Awards will be announced on October 22.

1. Celebrate Reading

   Holly Cupala is celebrating! She says, “In honor of YALSA’s Teen Read Week and National Book Month in October, I invited a bunch of my favorite bloggers to tell me what they’d like to see on the YA shelf. “

   My contribution will be up on Tuesday, October 4. Read the series and comment to be entered in her contest for great prizes.

2. 5 Myths about Book Selling

   True or false:

   • Newspaper reviews sell books.
   • Bookshops are only interested in best sellers.
   • The buyers in the big chains know a great deal about retail but not so much about books.
   • Publishers can bribe their way to the front of store
   • Book Promotions, such as Buy 3 for the Price of 2, are too powerful. (This is a promotion technique used at Waterstone, a UK bookstore.)

   Read the answers here.

3. Literary Agents Open the Door to Self-Published Writers IF . . .

   What makes the difference? Why would this self-published author be of interest and NOT this one?

4. Agency Pricing for Ebooks

   Where in the supply chain is the value? Does the author had the value for the reader and everyone else just gets in the way? I’m still trying to sort out ebooks and how selling them works best.

5. Malcom Gladwell’s Story Process

   Some have criticized this non-fiction author of popularizing and simplifying information too much. Still, I like Blink! and his other books. Read about his story process here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The School Library Journal has just established a new award for book trailers! Wahoo!

The Trailie Award

Voters must select the best video in six categories:

• publisher/author created for elementary readers (PreK-6)
• publisher/author created for secondary readers (7-12 grade)
• student created for elementary readers (PreK-6 grade)
• student created for secondary readers (7-12 grade)
• adult (anyone over 18) created for elementary readers (PreK-6 grade)
• adult created for secondary readers (7-12 grade)

A committee of librarians will choose four nominations in each category, and the winners will be announced at the School Library Journal Leadership Summit on the Future of Reading on October 22, 2010 in Chicago, IL.

Anyone is eligible to nominate a video, but it must be produced between January 1, 2006 to July 1, 2010. Just send an email to SLJbooktrailers@gmail.com. Include the name of the video, the video’s creator(s), the author, the title of the book in the video, the URL to view the video, and no more than 200 words describing how it draws in potential readers.

Look for more info later on how to vote on your favorites.

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Visit The Book Trailer Manual site for more information on how to create trailers. Sign up for our newsletter now and receive a free special report, 43 Sites to Upload Trailers.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win