Making Your Low Budget Book Trailer Interesting

A book trailer you make on a small budget can be as captivating and entertaining as one that costs thousands to make, but you have to be ready to invest a good deal of time on effort on it. When I made the book trailer for my middle grade book, Pirates Off the Deep End, I had never used video editing software before and was pretty clueless about how to begin. Finding blogs such as this one can be invaluable resources. In fact, one blog I found handy is The BookBaby Blog.

For my second book trailer, The Zombie Next Door, I had a handle on what I was doing and could get a little more creative. I wanted to create a scene from the book that involved a nightmare the main character Goldie Rich had. She wandered in a creepy graveyard at night, of course, and admired the beautiful angel statue, which proceeded to turn into a hideous gargoyle right before her eyes.

Fallen Angel

  

Although video and .jpgs can be incorporated into your trailer, if you have any ability with photo editing software such as Photoshop, you can produce some ‘book trailer magic’ as well. I am not a Photoshop expert by any means, but after taking a class and playing around with it, I can generally get projects put together the way I envision them. Above left is a 5-inch angel statue I photographed at a fountain store. I turned her into a headstone using Photoshop to use as the first photo in a series that changes the angel into the gargoyle show below.

Haunting Goldie’s Nightmares

  

The gargoyle above was a two-foot high statue at the same fountain store. Since I only photographed the statues and didn’t purchase them, it didn’t cost me anything. Using Photoshop, I converted the angel into the gargoyle with two photos that underwent a combined 18 stages. In each stage, the main subject was slightly skewed, shrunken, and re-colored. For the final pictures, I flipped the gargoyle vertically and colored the eyes red.

I was happy with the results, and my SCBWI critique group that watched the video thought it was a nice touch. I also used the technique to make the voodoo doll in the Zombie video wink. If you’re thinking…zombies, graveyards, voodoo doll…pretty cool, check out my book The Troubled Souls of Goldie Rich: The Zombie Next Door on my Amazon Author’s Page. And good luck with your trailer.