Simon Spurrier’s novel A Serpent Uncoiled now has a very bitter but very good book trailer. I usually say book trailers don’t sell books—at least, not by themselves—but in this case it’s at least done it once, because after watching this I will definitely be buying a paperback copy…
He also has a related post on his blog, On Success.
Have a good weekend!
Welcome to Backpacked Week! This is where, for one week, I post about the newfangled self-publishing stuff I’ve picked up from self-publishing my third book, Backpacked, which is out now, and thereby slip numerous reminders about my new book, Backpacked, being out now, into my blog posts without you feeling like I’m just incessantly bombarding you with the news that my new book, Backpacked, is out now. (And only $2.99 on the Kindle store. Bargain!) You can see the week’s schedule in yesterday’s post but for today, our topic is book trailers. Where I got the ideas for mine, how I made them, buying music for them, where to put them and whether or not you even need one in the first place.
One of the reasons I know that self-publishing and promoting my own books is what I’m supposed to be doing with my days is that it’s the only thing I can think of that gives me the opportunity to use all of my skills, skills which are basically useless individually. For instance, mini-movie-making. Starting back in 2005 when I had my first season abroad in the Netherlands, I’d take pictures and video clips, work some Windows Movie Maker magic on them and then send to friends as a little memento. When I went Mac in 2009 – yes, “went Mac” is the, ahem, technical term – I practically salivated at the wonders that iMovie could add to my little memories DVDs, and it was iMovie I used to make my first book trailer, The Story of Mousetrapped.
(If you can’t see the video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)
This video was basically a slick version of what I’d been doing all along: putting personal photos and video clips to music. For this, I also added in a voiceover just by recording narration using my Macbook’s built-in microphone. But at around three minutes, it was a bit long – online attention spans are very short – and so I also made a short, 60-second, much more dramatic version, using a lot of the same footage. Aptly, it was called Mousetrapped in 60 Seconds.
(If you can’t see the video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)
Now I love these little videos, and the fact that I’ll be able to look back on them in the years to come makes making them worthwhile for me. But did they sell any books? No, I don’t think so. At least, not on their own.
The biggest challenge facing every self-published author is alerting people to the existence of their book. I think its relatively easy – relatively – to convince would-be readers to buy your book with things like your cover design, Amazon listing, website, etc. The problem is connecting with them, to making the path of your book and the path of your potential reader intersect. It doesn’t matter, for instance, if your website persuades anyone who as much as glances at it to run off and buy your book, if nobody is finding their way to your website in the first place.
So how do you get people coming to you and your book out of all the millions and billions of attention-sucking things on the internet? Sign-posts. Something that says, “Follow me – I think you might like this…” These are things like blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, etc. Obviously the more sign-posts you have around the place the better, and I also think the more varied you can make them, the better as well. This way you maximize your potential audience.
That’s where something like a book trailer comes in, because it’s another different thing to add to the list. You can put them on you YouTube, Vimeo, your blog, your Facebook page, your Smashwords listing, your Goodreads author profile and even on Amazon Author Central. I don’t think anyone watches one of my book trailers and then immediately buys a book, but I think they might watch it and then go check out my website, or look up the Amazon listing, or Google the name of the book, and if they do, that’s enough.
And, hey – book trailers are fun. Let’s not forget that we need to have some of that as well, or else what are we doing all this work for?
And so, to Backpacked. I really like my Mousetrapped trailers, but I don’t think they’re as effective as they could be. Their main problem is that they have a singular purpose: to give people an idea of what my book is about. But a book trailer should not only do that. They should also give people a reason to watch the video even if they have no interest in the book or the book’s subject matter, because that’s what’ll get people to ultimately watch them. They should have some kind of secondary value. For instance, I don’t read romantic fiction but if someone sends me a link to a book trailer for a romance novel and says, “Watch this – it’s hilarious!” then I’m going to watch it. And then I’m going to know about the book.
Now while my photo albums are absolutely fascinating to me, they’re really only of mild interest, if that, to everybody else. I had to do something different for Backpacked, something that would get people watching the video. And I knew what that should be.
The idea started forming a few months back, when I downloaded Jing, a program that lets you record what’s happening on your computer screen. (€15.00 for a year’s subscription and totally and utterly worth it.) I bought it so I could do demonstration videos, this “Publish a Paperback with CreateSpace” being one of them:
(If you can’t see the video, click here.)
While making that video, I had the thought: wouldn’t it be cool if someone recorded their entire self-publishing experience, start to finish, i.e. from writing the book to seeing their Amazon listing, and then shared it online as a video? This led me to, hey – that would be, like, the best book trailer ever which led me to, Haven’t I seen something like that before? Something about a cover design… And I had – in the book trailer for Blameless by Gail Carriger. In this super-slick and amazing book trailer, you can watch the book’s cover being designed from scratch to finished product in just two minutes. It’s fantastic.
(If you can’t see the video, click here.)
So now I had Jing, which let me record everything I did onscreen, although it would only record in five minute increments so I could hardly record the writing of the entire book – an idea which didn’t sound too appealing to me anyway. But I could, on a smaller scale, chronicle the work that goes into self-publishing a POD paperback. I recorded myself typing into MS Word for the titles, and recorded video of the paperback and the book as it appears on Kindle simply by holding them in front of the Mac’s in-built camera, and flicking through them.
All I needed now was some music. There was a piece, ‘Drive-In’ by Jon Brion from the soundtrack to The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that was absolutely perfect. It was so perfect, in fact, that I considered paying for the rights to use it. Through ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and their “ACE” database, I was able to find contact details for Jon Brion’s publishers, Universal Music. I e-mailed the contact, filled out a form explaining what music I wanted and what I wanted it for, and sent it off. A few hours later, an e-mail came back with a quote.
Of $10,000.
Yes – ten thousand dollars. And because music licensing is so ridiculously complicated – I’m currently on my third attempt of trying to apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, and that seems simplistic by comparison – there might be even more fees to pay later on. And so while I was crushed not to be able to use what I thought was just the perfect music track, it wasn’t ten thousand dollars perfect. Or even one thousand dollars.
I Googled “royalty free music” and ended up on a website called Media Music Tracks. It took a while to trawl through all the songs on there to find something suitable, but when I did find one it only cost around €17 ($24) to download the piece and the license to use it. That was a lot better than ten grand, as I’m sure you’ll agree.
So after all that, I got this:
(If you can’t see the video, click here to watch it on YouTube.)
If you like it, kindly spread it around like a virus. (Well, maybe not like a virus. But you know what I mean!)
My new book, if you’ve forgotten in the minutes it took you to read that post, is called Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America, and it’s out now in paperback ($14.95) and e-book ($2.99). You can find out more about it here.
A few years back I happened upon the blog of a children’s writer living in the west of Ireland who had just got a €10,000 ($14,000-/£9,000-ish) bursary from our Arts Council to effectively stay at home and finish a novel she was writing. She had no contract, agent or anything other than a demonstrable talent for writing, but yet she had been deemed worthy of Arts Council funds. At the time I was working for Satan in a job that was depleting my will to live and so getting enough government money to chuck in the 9-5 and write for a year sounded too good to be true.
And for me, it was.
As soon as I downloaded the form and the information booklets, I realized that my art of choice – commercial fiction – was not favored by the powers that be. Still, I decided to go ahead and apply. Couldn’t hurt to try, right? The guidelines said bursaries could be used for general living expenses, i.e. pay bills so the writer is freed up to write instead of work, but yet the form demanded an itemized list of all expected costs, broken down and twelve months in advance, and, at the end of the year, receipts would have to be provided. A headache, but understandable – it was tax payer’s money, and would have to be accounted for. I soldiered on. But then I got to the small print about drawing down the money, and worked out that even if I got the full amount I was applying for (which was unlikely), it would mean payments of something like €300 once a month. I’d be better off quitting my job and going on unemployment benefit, which (at the time) would’ve worked out at around €800 per month and required considerably less paperwork. This was all for nothing anyway, because the only projects the council supported were those with a strong Irish streak. I was Irish, yes, and writing in Ireland, but my novel was set in the States. And it was commercial. I was doomed to fail.
But here’s what I could have done instead, and here’s what you can do now to fund your creative projects: Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative types, be they inventors, writers, film-makers, sculptors, musicians or something else. The idea is that you create a project, tell people how much money you need to do it, offer them a reward for contributing and then, if you reach your funding goal, you get the money. I had heard of it before but I assumed it was a place to go if you were a venture capitalist or otherwise rolling in cash, and looking for something to invest serious money in.
But it’s not like that at all, as I discovered this week when a link on Twitter sent me to a Kickstarter project.
Here’s what I didn’t realize about Kickstarter until now:
Before we go any further I should tell you that at present, to start a Kickstarter project you have to be (i) a US resident and (ii) have a social security number, although anyone can pledge money and be a backer. Sucks, I know. They’re working to open it up to more countries but for the majority of people reading this blog, everything I’m about to talk about is something to think about for the future, not do right now. Unless you can find a US resident to partner you in your project, of course.
The best-looking “fund the writing of my novel” project I’ve come across on Kickstarter is Scott Morris and Gaines Green. His pitch is extremely professional, well thought-out and even has some Hollywood star power – Armie Hammer – the actor who played both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network – which alone would get my vote… But, ahem. Anyway… His funding goal is $12,000 but you can donate as little as $1. Rewards include a signed copy for pledges of $100 or more and your name in the acknowledgements for pledges of $5,000 or more, among others. You can check out his Kickstarter page here.
I’ve discovered that browsing Kickstarter projects and wanting to back them can quickly become Twitter-like addictive, but no wonder when there are just so many great projects on there. Here are three I’m seriously considering backing:
And here is a project that boy oh boy oh boy, did I wish I’d backed. It closed on May 3rd so now I just have to wait for the finished product to hit the market, and rest assured I’ve already signed up to their newsletter so I’ll know when it happens. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Coffee Joulies.
Quite possibly the best coffee-related idea ever (although they work for all hot beverages), I am so buying me some of these. They are actual magic (coffee) beans that thanks to some fancy thermodynamic fairies, first absorb heat from the liquid around them, cooling your coffee from Burnt Tongue to I Can Actually Drink This, and then slowly release it back in, keeping your coffee warmer for twice as long. Such an amazing idea that despite only asking for $9,500, the Coffee Joulies boys raised more than $350,000!
As in the example of Scott Morris above, you could simply ask Kickstarter users for the money to pay the bills while you write your novel, and as a reward offer them something like a signed copy or their name in the book. But I really think it’s the pledge-as-a-product-pre-order model (like the Bound Custom Journals) where self-publishers can take best advantage.
You could, theoretically, use Kickstarter to get your readers to cover your upfront self-publishing costs. Let’s say that I’m self-publishing a sequel to a book that had a large readership/great sales. This time I’m only doing what I do now: POD paperback and e-book. Well, editing is going to cost a few hundred dollars, let say, and cover design another bit onto that. If I got 500 people to pledge $3 on Kickstarter, I’d have more than enough money to pay for it. In return, those 500 people would get a coupon for a free e-book download. Essentially, they’re paying me in advance for the e-book they’re going to buy anyway. If you were clever about this and had a project page that convinced people to pledge the money, Kickstarter could be a really effective way of raising the money needed to self-publish well.
Just yesterday I was kicking around ideas for a proper book trailer for my novel, with Gemma Burgess’ amazing trailer for The Dating Detox (above) as my example of perfection. I’m not 100% on board with doing it yet, and the main reason is that I’d probably have to spend around €500 ($714) to do it, and when your whole approach is No-t0-Low Risk that’s a lot of money on something that may or may not translate into sales. But what if I turned to Kickstarter? Backers could be rewarded with discount coupons, free e-books, pride of place in the acknowledgements or even special limited edition signed copies depending on how much they pledged.
I know for sure that it beats filling out grant applications…
What do you think of writers using Kickstarter? And aren’t the Coffee Joulies the best thing in the history of civilization like, ever?
UPDATE: FundIt.ie is a similar set-up available here in Ireland.
Someone either tweeted or blogged about this video a couple of weeks back, and I’ve completely forgotten who it was. Damn my addled brain. But if it was you, please let me know so I can credit you with pointing me in the direction of it, because it’s brilliant. And sadly quite accurately reflective of the obsessive behavior incessantly checking your Amazon sales ranking can lead to…
And also: this is essentially a book trailer, in that it’s an advertisement for these people’s books. This, ladies and gents, is how it’s done. There’s no hard sell, no silly overstatements – in fact, you barely notice that they’re advertising their books at all. It’s total genius!
I love this cute little trailer for Lane Smith’s It’s A Book, a beautifully illustrated children’s title that aims to remind our little people that books work just fine the way they are, thank you very much. (Despite what Jeff Bezos might say.)
“Watch as a book-loving ape and a tech-savvy donkey exchange words…from bestselling author Lane Smith comes this adorable nod to traditional books.”
In case you missed my endless stream of tweets on the subject, I was at the One Stop Self-Publishing Conference in Killiney, Co.Dublin on Saturday, and in case you didn’t quite understand why for about half an hour I was evidently tweeting about myself in the third person, I was speaking at it too. (The lovely and most helpful Alison Wells took over the live tweeting duties while I was otherwise engaged.) I was one of the last speakers late in the afternoon and having made sure that I was continuously sipping coffee throughout the day, the number one word used to describe my talk on how I used social media to sell books was “bubbly.”
Indeed.
For those of you who were there on Saturday that I not so subliminally encouraged to come check out my site – and for those of you who weren’t there but might have a passing interest in what was said – here are my notes from the talk, expanded enough for people other than me to understand them. (Looking at the page now I see things like, “CENTRAL!!!” scrawled in the margin; I don’t know what it means and I’m the one who wrote it.) I’ve also included links to things I didn’t have a chance to talk about or that were perhaps outside the parameters of the talk’s topic, but that you may find helpful as a self-published – or even traditionally published – author looking to turn your Twitter habit into book sales.
I’ve also included some of the things I forgot to say. Coffee does wonders for bubbliness, but not for recall. And so, without much further ado, here’s how I used social media to sell books…
- I self-published a travel memoir in March 2010. I used the Print on Demand service Createspace to produce the paperback, and Amazon DTP and Smashwords to produce the e-book. With the exception of a few copies in my local independent bookstore (where I had my launch), the book is only for sale online and therefore I sell direct to my readers.
- Almost a year ago, in November 2009, I had nothing in the line of an author “platform” or a social media presence other than my own personal Facebook page, etc. Today, my blog has had 19,000 hits, I’ve sold 900 copies of Mousetrapped without spending money on marketing or promotion, I’ve raised my profile as a writer and I’ve secured representation for my novel.
- Releasing or publishing my book was one of the last things I did. Using social media to sell books is a great tool that can be highly effective but you must do the work before the book comes out. You must get readers anticipating your book.
- The subject matter of my book was so niche that rather than just target specific groups (such as Disney fans), I aimed to get people interested in me as a writer and/or liking my writing style.
Useful links:
- My first blog was on Blogger.com. I recommend this for first time bloggers as it’s really easy to use. When I felt like I knew what I was doing and I wanted a more professional site, I moved to WordPress.com and this “blogsite.”
- A blog is an online journal that is updated frequently. A website is a more static affair where you would normally have information about yourself (About the Author, Contact, Books, etc.) and a news section that is up to date. What most authors have nowadays is a “blogsite” or a combination of the two.
- I recommend blogging between 3-5 times a week, but you can get away with less. (Although not at the beginning.) The length of your posts doesn’t matter as much as the quality and topics covered. Decide what you’re going to blog about (3-6 themes or subjects) and stick to it; don’t just blog about whatever comes into your head. (That’s fine of course, if it’s a personal blog. What I’m talking about is focused blogging where your aims are specific, such as raise your profile as a writer.)
- I started blogging about my adventures in self-publishing, or self-printing as I call it. That I think is the real “pull” of my site. But I also blog about writing in general, coffee (the blog is called Catherine, Caffeinated), book reviews, space (Astronuts) and some miscellaneous stuff. If someone discovers your blog due to a specific topic, they’re only going to wait a maximum of 4-5 posts on other topics before they leave you. I always try to come back to self-publishing or a related topic at least once a fortnight.
- Name your blog. On a list of blogs, the one with the interesting name – as opposed to just the person’s name, i.e. “Catherine Ryan Howard” – stands out.
- How to get people reading it? Start reading other people’s blogs and comment on their posts. When someone comments on one of your posts, respond. This is how blogging communities get built and blogging friends get made.
- How to improve your hits: blog about topical issues. When a post gets a lot of hits, figure out why and try to repeat.
- You can also use free WordPress.com blogs to make a separate website for your book.
- For about $15 a year you can upgrade your WordPress blog to have your own domain name, i.e. instead of www.catherineryanhoward.wordpress.com, I was able to have www.catherineryanhoward.com.
Useful links:
- Twitter is the single greatest thing I ever did for my writing career.
- It’s very hard to explain what it is if you’re not already on there, but it’s like a conversation you can drop in and out of. It’s all about interaction and communicating. People share links, information, videos, tips, advice and their lives. I’ve made some amazing contacts on there, and even met up with my “Twitter friends” in real life.
- It’s the best way to get people reading your blog. If you use WordPress.com, you can set it up so that when you post, a tweet automatically gets posted with the link.
- Sign up on Twitter.com and start following people. (Start with me!) Read Inkygirl’s extremely helpful Twitter Guide for Writers.
- Twitter should not be used only for self-promotional reasons. (Just like in real life, no one likes a relentless self-promoter!) I limited my self-promotional tweets to 3-5 tweets one day a week – Monday – and marked all these tweets with the hashtag “#mousetrappedmonday”. To complete the campaign, I “released” the book on the “final” Mousetrapped Monday.
- There is a fantastic community of Irish writers on Twitter. Great for support, friendship and fun!
Useful links:
- You should have a Facebook “fan” page. I’m not talking about personal profile.
- I don’t think a presence on Facebook has translated into sales, but it can’t have hurt. It also helps you capture the attention of people already using social media, and it is very useful for updating people with news of your book, special offers, etc.
- I found it most useful for organizing a book launch as you can set up an event on Facebook and Facebook users can RSVP to it.
- Once you have over 25 Facebook fans (or “Likes”) you can personalize your Facebook page URL.
Useful links:
Now that you have a blog, a Twitter account and a presence on Facebook, you need to start adding content and linking all these outlets to each other, thus building your author platform.
Prior to Publication
- Book trailers. Read more of what I have to say about book trailers here.
My short book trailer: Mousetrapped in 60 Seconds
The longer trailer for Mousetrapped: 3.5 minutes
- Video blogs. Ali McNamara is currently promoting her debut novel using video blogs very successfully.
- Release your first chapter as a PDF. There’s little point in doing any of this if visitors to your blog can’t get a sample of your writing/taster of your book.
At or After Publication
- Hold contests. Read more about the contests I held here.
- Sign up for Amazon Author Central. This will complement your Amazon listings.
- Sign up for an author profile at Goodreads.com. Take advantage of their great book giveaway program.
- Offer your blogging friends complimentary copies of your book to review (no obligation).
- Have a virtual book tour. Author Keris Stainton did this most effectively.
Useful links:
- Don’t be sporadic. Do all these things with regularity. It may take a lot of time at the start but once you get going it won’t be as much. Right now I spend maybe 3 hours a week blogging, and update Twitter and Facebook when I can.
- Don’t be negative. Be positive. It’s fine – it’s encouraged – to tell the truth on your blog, i.e. I detailed both the highs and lows of my self-publishing experience. But don’t moan, or do something stupid like catalogue your rejections.
- Don’t give up too soon. When you start all this, it feels like you’re doing it in a void. No one is reading, no one is stopping by, no one is following you. But the effect is cumulative: it starts off as a snowflake and then overtime snowballs. So keep at it.
Just under a year ago I had just finished writing the first draft of my novel and was about to start on the road to self-publication with Mousetrapped, my travel memoir. I decided to start a blog because every writer seemed to have one and I started using Twitter because in the little village where I wrote my novel that was the only thing that would properly download in such a broadband black spot. Since then:
So if you started work on your social media platform today, where might you be in a year?
_____________
Later in the week I’ll be posting about what I learned from the other fantastic speakers at the event – which was a lot – and maybe even telling you a bit about what I did on my holidays. (Remember them? I only got back last Tuesday but already it seems like a month ago… ) Thanks to Vanessa O’Loughlin and Eoin Purcell for organizing such a great event, and for inviting little old me to speak at it.
And if you’re one of the people who was there on Saturday, do say hello in the comments below…
Read all my self-printing posts.
Read about Mousetrapped, the book I self-printed.
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I’ve blogged before about book trailers and to summarize what I said then, here are some handy bullet points:
Today I’d like to draw your attention to bullet point number four. In my previous book trailer posts, I ranted about live action book trailers, i.e. the ones that act out scenes from the book and show us what characters from it look like, sound like, etc. I said I didn’t like these because I felt like I didn’t want to know what anyone looked like or sounded like; I wanted to form my own pictures in my head as I read the author’s words. The book trailers that intrigued me were the ones that had nothing to do with what happened in the book, like Roland Denning’s On Meeting an Agent and The Making of a Book Cover for Gail Carriger’s Blameless, and the fact that I’d never seen a live action book trailer that didn’t make me cringe might have also had something to do with it.
Then I saw this, the book trailer for The Dating Detox by Gemma Burgess, and I completely changed my mind. (more…)
