We have this crazy rule at Columbus Publishing Lab: we won’t try to sell people things they don’t need, or things that won’t work.
Book trailers don’t sell books. If your intent is to increase the sales of your book, trailers are a waste of time and money.
If you insist you want to throw away your money so you can be the coolest author on the block, we’ll do our best work and facilitate it. But let me be frank: your book trailer is not going to be the exception, even if it’s exceptional, and it’s not going to sell books.
We’ve experimented with book trailers. After all, everybody’s doing it–almost all of our competitors offer book trailers, and we get tons of requests for them. We’ve made trailers with live actors and Hollywood-caliber production, top-notch stuff like the one below. This thing is awesome, but trailers don’t sell books, and this one was no exception.
Any promotional effort will have a fractional conversion rate. Which is to say, of all of the people who are exposed to your marketing, a percentage will actually buy the product. As an example, only a small percentage of drivers who see the billboard about a McDonald’s at Exit 38 are hungry, and fewer still will want a Big Mac. When it comes to marketing, a “conversion” is a person who is exposed to your marketing and takes the action you want them to take—i.e. buys a product, joins an email list, donates to an organization, watches a TV show, etc.
There’s a lot of variation based on type of promotion, but to generalize web marketing across all industries, a 1% conversion rate is good, .1% is fine (1 in 1,000 respond), and a 5% response rate is ungodly. ***NB: A like/retweet/comment/etc. on social media is great, but it should never be the objective and it’s not a “conversion.” An effective web marketing campaign should have a far higher response/interaction rate than 1%.
The goal of any book promotion (a “conversion”) is the sale of one book. This means that if 1 out of every 100 people who see your promotion buy your book, you’re doing exceptionally well.
What happens in real life is that authors end up spending their time promoting their book trailer. They promote the book trailer by graffiti-ing every social media platform with the link to YouTube. On a good day, 1% of the people who see the link actually go and watch the thing. Then of those who watch it, 1% (best case scenario) actually go and purchase the book. You’ve just fractionalized your fraction, and now you’re pulling a .01% total conversion rate on the project. Not good.
Instead of promoting a book trailer to promote a book, just promote your book directly. If our goal is to sell books, a well-crafted “Hey go watch my book trailer,” is about 1/100th as effective as a well-crafted “Hey go buy my book.”
And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that a really good book trailer will cost well over $1,000, if not far more. Your conversion rate on most of the poorly-produced videos on YouTube is virtually 0.
There are some exceptions:
- The book trailer is so exceptional that a viewer just has to share it with everyone they know. This is extremely difficult. Book trailers are essentially commercials, and how many commercials do you see shared on Facebook? The average cost to produce a national-TV-quality commercial is $342,000, and even these are rarely shared.
- The book trailer is a second-hit. We have a rule in our promotions—nobody does anything they’re not told to do at least twice. If your book is already saturating the general population, a book trailer can be an effective follow-up to seal the deal. As in, you were on Good Morning America this morning, and curious readers are now actively searching for materials about your book.
- If Crowdfunding is part of your strategy (i.e. Kickstarter or Indiegogo), a video works. Crowdfunding audiences are predisposed to watch videos, because it’s part of the culture of the platform. The format of this type of video will be different from a “book trailer.”
- Other types of videos can work. If you’re an expert or you have something to offer, and you can make videos that do more than just promote the book—for instance, solve a problem, explain a concept, or make people laugh—something which is genuinely good, entertaining and helpful, you can promote your personal brand and sell books as an ancillary benefit. This is a far different approach from a book trailer, however. In other words, not all videos are bad, just book trailers.
We believe that self-publishing works when it’s done right. The fact is, our clients think videos are cool and I wish they worked—they can be a lot of fun to make, and it would be a cool service to offer. But in good conscience, it’s not a service that we can stand behind.
At the end of the day, book trailers are more about the author’s vanity. And we don’t do vanity here. We do professional results and we do return on investment.
Take it from us, skip the book trailer and save your money. There are better ways to promote your book.
Have you ever purchased a book because you saw a book trailer? Let us know in the comments.
Every book is different. While this blog post is about a marketing method that doesn’t work, we have a toolbox full of methods that DO work. At Columbus Publishing Lab, we tailor a marketing plan specifically for your book, to meet your goals, using methods that are proven and effective. Contact us to discuss your book today.