Week 9: Book Trailers

Book trailers are super lame.  It's difficult enough to get quality book covers that accurately and enticingly portray what's in a book - why would you push the envelope further?  People like movie trailers because they are like book excerpts, or hearing an author read aloud from an upcoming book.  They show a sneak peak of the actual material you are interested in consuming, and present it in an enticing way.  Book trailers suck because they fake you out -they present stories in an entirely different medium than the actual content that's being sold.  When they include the author talking I think it's especially bad - consumers want to figure out as quickly as possible if they are interested in content, they don't want to listen to someone talk about their own work when deciding whether to read it.  They trust reviewers a lot more to tell them if the book is worth their time.  Its like how usually no one wants to watch videos of a movie director talking about his movie production before they've even had a chance to watch it.  When we decide what upcoming books or movies interest us, we want to see enticing juicy bits from the actual footage / writing, or read trusted reviews.  I can't imagine book trailers becoming a real thing any time soon.