Week 9: Assignment 2, Book Trailers

Assignment 2:  A search of YouTube for book trailers brought up a lot of trailers for teen books.  The trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters used actors and looked like a movie trailer.  The Clockwork Prince also used actors but did not have them speak.  The only other trailer I looked at that had live action was Darth Paper Strikes Back: an Origami Yoda book.  The author, Tom Angleberger, shows how to make an origami Darth Paper in the trailer.  It's a great tie-in with the book, although it doesn't tell the audience much about the story.  So many of the trailers I found on YouTube were for teen books, that I wonder if they are more appealing to younger readers.
       Almost all the other trailers I look at used still pictures with text describing the book, and with background music.  I thought they functioned much like jacket blurbs or summaries.  They portrayed the atmosphere and setting of the book through photographs or drawings.  Often the characters were portrayed by photographs of actors.  The trailers were like a taste of the book, but without detail or a real hook to capture the interest of anyone who was not already be interested in the author's work.
       The other thing about the trailers which I found interesting was that many of them were not featured on the author's webpage.  I found most of them through YouTube, and I wonder how they would help marketing the book if they are so hard to find.  Carla Neggers has a video on her website that I did enjoy.  It's about an e-novella prequel to her Shape and Donovan series, so maybe the video is designed to direct fans to the novella who would not ordinarily find it.  Neggers does a voice over description of the novella while pictures of Ireland and Maine, the setting for her books, are displayed.  I found Neggers' description of her fondness for Ireland provided a personal touch that was more compelling than the more static trailers. 
      The trailers I saw were fun to watch, but I'm not sure they really tell you much about the books.  Most of them would only appeal to people already interested in the author or, maybe, in that particular genre.  None of them really made me want to read the featured book in the way that a good book review does, by telling the reader about the main theme of the book and all those appeal factors we looked at.  I do not think I will use book trailers for readers advisory because most of them do not give the viewer enough information about the book to tell if it is something they would be interested in reading.