At our Tuesday Tell-All, CWILL BC members answer questions about their lives, their work, and their interests. Members with their own blogs post links to their sites. Others answer directly in the comments section.
If you’d like to contribute, even if you’re not a CWILL BC member, please feel free to post a comment (or suggest a future question!). We’d love to hear your thoughts.
This week’s question:
As a writer or illustrator, what are your feelings or experiences with book trailers? Are they helpful marketing tools, or a lot of work (and money) for nothing? Readers and book buyers – have book trailers ever influenced your choice of books?
The CWILL BC Society blog 
I created a ninety-second book trailer for my last book, “Kendra Kandlestar and the Door to Unger.” Because I’m an illustrator with a graphic design background, the only thing it cost me was time (but a lot of it).
I think I approached the trailer as a fun side project, just to see if I could accomplish it. Because of this, I didn’t have a very sound plan, and ended up spending countless hours on the trailer. If I ever do another, I’ll make sure I spend a lot more time at the beginning, storyboarding and producing concepts before I settle down to actually construct it!
I made my trailer in Flash and output it as a Quicktime movie. You can view my trailer at:
Whoops, for some reason, my URL was skipped out! (See how technically savvy I am?).
In any case, my trailer can be checked out at my website, kendrakandlestar.com.
http://www.kendrakandlestar.com/downloads/trailer.html
Pingback: why do they call them trailers if they come at the beginning of the book? « My Secret Elephant
I’ve put up my experiment with Book Trailering on my blog:
http//kcdyer.blogspot.com
And hey — I’m no Lee Fodi, so the level of ability is entry level at best…but I still had fun with it!
~kc
This question definitely got me thinking about the little book Albert’s Old Shoes which my son Stephen Muir wrote. It came out in 1987, sold over 67,000 copies and kids loved it. It is still available as a paperback and 4000 copies are sitting in a box at Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
Yesterday I made up an experimental test trailer and Albert seems to have come alive again.
It was a creative process and perhaps some might think the results of my efforts seem strange. I think if you click my name here it will take you to my blog called maplepancakes.
It may seem different but it was a lot of fun to make.
-Mary Jane Muir