More on the Book Trailer

This has been quite a week in my writing life. For reasons I'll save for later, this is a week that I may look back forever and say it marked a turning point.

I had an opportunity to show the book trailer to my local chamber of Commerce. My daughter and I had collaborated on a video mash up promoting Baltimore as a place to retire (Inner Harbor). We took two dogs of a video, and combined the best scenes, substituted some of our own original photography, and video swapped out the pathetic sound track with an appropriate killer track, and boom, we had a great video. We showed our local chamber that this is the kind of video we could create for our town.

As an example of the video editing prowess of my daughter, Liz, I showed them the two minute book trailer for The Fastnacht League, my book. Now I need to remind you that there are a number of flaws in that video. But those flaws are known only to Liz and me because we have seen the video countless number of times.

For instance, we know that in one instance the words do not match the image. We also know that one of the clips we used is too short to convey what we want. But these things are known only to Liz and me. When we showed the video to the group, they were absolutely blown away.

I am starting to understand another problem with book trailers. The first problem, and the one made known to me by my writing mentor, was that book trailers attempt to mimic movie trailers and give away too much information. We were very, very careful with this video NOT to do that. In fact, we were too subtle in the first versions; nobody could understand what we were talking about. That all changed when we put the 1873 baseball game shots into the video story.  The second problem seems to be that the video was too effective, if that is at all possible.

The "star" of the video

They wanted to know when the movie was coming out. A little voice inside of me was laughing his head off. Another little guy in my head was wishing I had this full-length movie all completed. I immediately came right back to earth when the next question was asked:  How much will it cost to do this for us?

You can view the trailer at   www.amishandbaseball.com on the trailer tab.