Here’s A Riddle For You

by Karen Harrington

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many pictures would it take to represent almost 80,000 words?

The answer: Only an artist could say for sure. But in my experience, it takes a powerful 2.54 minutes of heart-pounding video to display a pictoral representation of my novel.

In other words, I now have a book trailer.

A book trailer aims to convey the same hook and lure movie trailers attempt for a film. It is quickly becoming vogue in the world of publishing. Not only do publishers produce print ads to sell books; now they add image, movement and music to the mix and create what this writer believes is one of the most compelling innovations in the publishing industry in decades.

Author Brenda Coulter disagrees however saying that most trailers are simple slideshows with a soundtrack. She also dislikes that so many of the trailers cannot be viewed by a huge percentage of Americans due to slow dial-up connection. Now, to be fair, Ms. Coulter wrote her opinion two years ago. The method has come a long way, baby!

The trailer for Ann Patchett’s latest novel Run shows an aqueous blue background with bubbles continuously floating over images of people, houses on the rich/poor ends of the spectrum and selected descriptive passages from the novel. The singular piano accompaniment to this trailer creates an inviting, if not subtle, undercurrent of mystery and secrets. You could probably view this trailer in a library.

By contrast author Caro Ramsey’s book trailer for Absolution comes at the viewer full stop, with ominous images of knives and crosses bouncing across the screen in a shaky hand-held camera style, all set to an eerie single violin Silence of the Lambs-esque piece that would likely get you summarily shushed by a librarian.

This art form is not limited to fiction. Photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo’s Evidence of My Existence views like a mini-documentary of the lens through which he photographed the world, with a bend toward the compassion he has for his subjects. I’m not certain if I wouldn’t rather view his book as a PBS special than actually read the book. Still, I am intrigued.

I am intrigued by the very way images, music and ideas come together in less than five minutes to give a potential reader a sense of the book. And this new view into book trailers made me wonder: would we choose books the same way we choose movies – from a two-minute glimpse? Would you rather go into Barnes & Noble and scan several short videos to make your selection? Or do you prefer to scan the New Release table and thumb through the pages in hand?

Much like the current political environment where the key slogan of the day is “You Decide,” you can decide for yourself by viewing the trailers above, or even the one created for Janeology – which is filled with water imagery, dark family secrets, hints at a black sheep legacy, all scored with music that vibrates on a background heartbeat until your neck hairs stand at attention. (Fortunate author that I am, this trailer was created by one of THE inventors of the novel trailer art form, Kam Wai Yu, who has been perfecting this art since the 1980s.)

And if you do view these trailers, I’d like to know what you think. Feel free to reply to this post or drop me a line at kharrin2003@yahoo.com.

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY, the story of one man’s attempt to understand his wife’s sudden descent into madness and murder.
www.karenharringtonbooks.com