BOOK TRAILER ON A BUDGET

You’re just starting out as a writer and don’t have a lot of cash. The little you have, you want to expend on necessities like swag and perhaps one or two ads or blog tours, right? What about book trailers? Probably not in the budget.

Think again.

You may not afford a fancy book trailer, but you can afford a video collage. Which is really just another term for…book trailer. Let me tell you how.

How it started

Okay, so I’m a bit of a gamer. A few years ago I got into creating my own tabletop games. I have now invented five games. My friends love them, and I’ve even sold a few to friends of friends. In addition to a cool concept, I needed artwork to represent my game’s theme. I love learning new things, so I downloaded a few apps onto my iPad.

Touch Draw – A general image program that lets me add text to pictures, manipulate photos and so on.
Cut-out – A program that lets me cut out individual elements from other pictures and stick them onto the background of my choice.
Instablend – One that allows me to blend two image into a superposed image.
Snapseed – And a program that allows me to age, distort, reverse or add effects to pictures.

You don’t have to get these programs. They just happened to be the ones I tried out on my iPad and I got quite good at using them. There are hundreds more out there, not to mention entire suites for your PC.

What about the book trailer?

Patience.

My book Divide and Conquer is due to be released in February 2015, so I haven’t received an official book cover yet. However, I wanted a picture I could show around, a picture that represented what the book was about. Which is why I produced my first photo collage.

I found photos either from my own collection or off the Internet. You can buy stock photos or use any of the thousands of free stock photos available with a few key strokes. Since Divide and Conquer is set in Seattle, I needed a photo of the Space Needle, the most iconic symbol of this great city. For my two heroines, Lea and Nieve, I needed women in the right poses (one crouching, one in the midst of a kick), and two faces I liked. Nieve fights with a hanbo, i.e. a mid-length fighting stick, and Lea has a dagger. Finally, to add a threatening feel, I needed fog, which their enemies use to hide themselves and their prey.

Next, I cut out the elements I need. Using the same app, I assembled the pictures one by one. I stuck Nieve’s face onto Nieve’s fighting pose and gave her a hanbo. I stuck Lea’s face on Lea’s crouching body and gave her a dagger to hold. Next, I cut out my finished Lea and my finished Nieve and stuck them, together with the Space Needle and a plume of black fog onto a white background.

The result was a bit crude, I admit. Not to worry, because I used an app that transforms photos into a sort of pastel watercolor, which really appealed to me.

Finally, I added text in the font I’d already used for my website name banner, and I was done. I nowhad something to show around and guest-blog with. As long as I make sure people understand this is just a collage, it won’t interfere with my book cover once I receive it.

What about this book trailer/video collage I promised?

Actually, we’re closer than you think.

I downloaded a movie app (iMovie). You can make your video from scratch or use one of the templates they have, which is what I did.

If you use a template, all you do is add photos and text to it, then click save. It already comes with its own music. For the pictures, I made up similar ones to the ones I used for the photo collage and details from the photo collage itself. I also made up a title page. A dark alley. A dark alley with text. A dark alley with more text. The Space Needle. The Space Needle with text. And so on. In the end, I simply added these photos in the right order to the template.

Yup. That was it. I’m very pleased with the result. You can see for yourself if you check my margin on the right, or on You Tube. The template didn’t give me enough space to tell my story through text, so I added text to some pictures. The key is to keep the text short, because some pictures are in view only a short time (the template will even tell you for how long). You can add or delete photos and play the video until you achieve the perfect result.

When you’re done, add it to your web page, show it off on your Facebook page, upload it to Youtube, or just watch it by yourself at night, reminding yourself that your book is a reality.

By the way, you can just as well do this on the computer or on an iPod or on you phone. You just need to find the right applications. And by the way, it only takes a few hours of tinkering with your new apps to learn how to use them proficiently. Once you do, you’ll be able to use your new skills until your writing affords you a full team of publicists to do the job for you.

If you have any question regarding the apps I used and how to work them, leave a comment. Or just let me know how you like the result.