Using Video Promos to Promote your Book
by Brad Grochowski
Obviously, Youtube and Myspace, as well as other similar sites, have revolutionized the way that video is presented on the web. Used to be, you had to host bandwidth-hogging, giant-file-sized videos on your own web server, and embed them in your site with HTML code that you wrote yourself.
It was tricky, and it took the right setup to make it work.
But now, not only can you, simply, upload your video to someone else’s server, your video is search-able, view-able, rate-able, and comment-able within a community that is out there just looking for new video material to watch.
Not only that, but these sites offer cut-and-paste embedding that make it really so simple to get your videos onto your own site - again, without a band-with or disk space cost to you.
This is all happening at a time when video promos of indie-published books are really catching on as a way to get attention for your book.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of time/money or resources to pull together a pretty great promo video. Especially now with the suite of applications that come standard with a Mac - including GarageBand and Imovie - with a little bit of savvy you can pull together a nice teaser.
Or, if you would rather not do it yourself, or would rather push it to a higher level of professionalism, you could always hire a video promotion company to put it together for you. This will cost you more, of course. But it may well be worth it when you consider the time and effort you will save, to say nothing of the higher production quality you are likely to end up with.
One company that specializes, in fact, in promo videos for books recently contacted me. I took a look at StoryPromos.com, and generally liked what I saw. Their sample videos look really well done. They seem more comfortable producing “scary” videos with baritone voice-overs and chilling music - but this may be a function of the material they have had to work with.
But in any case the pieces work. There is a great promo for a screenplay called “Malled” which, considering the stretched pun of the title, and the fact that it seems to be about a shopping mall that comes to life and eats people or something, I probably wouldn’t have given it much of a second though.
I have to admit that “Malled” is presented so well in the short clip - the voice talent sounds top-notch - that I am far more intrigued than I would ever have been had I seen only a website.
You can see some of their samples at their MySpace page, or look up their services and rates that their website.
So anyway, all of this to point out that I would be foolish to not recognize this trend, and incorporate it into AthorsBookshop.com. Because you have control over your book’s information, and because most of the fields are HMTL enabled, you can embed your promo video right into your book’s page! So, you can place the best tool for selling your book in the exact spot where shoppers are going to have the option to buy it!
In the near future I plan to set up a more integrated method of posting your videos to your book’s page, but in the meantime it seems to work really well. Here is an example which, though it isn’t a promo (it’s a clip from a local news program) it demonstrates how effective the combination of YouTube and AuthorsBookshop.com can be:
www.authorsbookshop.com/thisbookcooks/
I certainly don’t think video promos are the end-all marketing tool that will, alone, push your book sales into the best-seller stratosphere. But, combined with the many other tools and strategies that are surfacing, they can be a powerful tool to hook people into what your book is about.
About the Author:
Brad Grochowski is the founder and owner of AuthorsBookshop.com. He is also the author of The Secret Weakness of Dragons.
