Yes, books have trailers now.
Yes—as is utterly obvious even on first viewing—I make my own trailers. It would actually be cheaper for me to hire someone else to do it. You can get a professional-looking trailer for around $5 if you know where to look. This trailer cost considerably more than that (I paid for music, actors, and three video clips).
The thing is, although I can barely navigate iMovie (or anything more complicated than a text document with a few hashtags and such for coding interactive fiction), I just adore putting together book trailers. For me they’re a great way to draw people quickly into the mood of the tale. And although I’m overwhelmingly not a visual artist, I admire it when I see it, and I like to dabble.
So without further ado, here is the first trailer for The Monster Apprentice:
NB: I accidentally deleted the rest of the credits on the Monster Apprentice trailer, which will eventually read:
With thanks to
ACTORS STEPH MATTHEWS AND ROBBIE MATTHEWS
BATTLE TRAIN MUSIC BY RJ WILX,
VIDEOS BY VIDEODIVE, CAPESCAPE, AND VIDEOSTUDIO
This trailer kicks off a new series, for a new audience (children/tweens rather than adults/young adult) and is certainly has a different feeling and style to my other trailers. I’ve played it about a dozen times for my kids (and of course, roughly a million times for myself).
Here’s my other two (so far) trailers:
Antipodean Queen 1: Heart of Brass
Antipodean Queen 2: Silver and Stone
I will be doing two more this year! One for Murder in the Mail: A Bloody Birthday (that’ll be interesting—the trailer will need to explain how it all works), and one for Antipodean Queen 3: Iron Lights.