Book Trailer and Promotional Video Styles - many different ways you can promote your book product or service using Video

Hello!
This post is about various video styles that can help you understand what type of promotional video or book trailer you'd like for your own book, product or service.

I post some book trailers here as well:  http://pinterest.com/petralovesbats/book-trailers

The most basic style of video in my opinion is where only one image is displayed throughout the entire video, and a voiceover is heard [or texts are displayed in case of no voiceover and music is added].  If you, the business owner or author, are going to record the voiceover yourself, make sure you have a good quality microphone, and the ability to edit the audio, using audio editing software such as Audacity.  You will want to remove any extra breaths, throat-clearing, and other things that happen to occur when one is trying to record their voice and nothing else!

Here is a perfect example:




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Beneath this text is Book Trailer or Promotional Video Style I - In this video, slides [powerpoint converted to JPG files] and images are used, along with transitions and animations, using wlmm (windows live movie maker).  My audio voiceover is added, and synchronized, to the text displayed in the video. Any powerpoint presentation could easily be converted into a video [without its animations however]. If you have presentations you'd like to upload as videos to youtube this is one way you can do it.




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This video style below, Style II, uses nothing but powerpoint slides, converted as JPGs. A voiceover is added and synchronized to the slides.  A shorter version can be made, by condensing texts displayed, playing  music instead of a voiceover, and using images interspersed.  If you pay close attention, you will see how each slide transitions into the next.  If you pay close attention you will notice some of the slides move a bit, either closer to 'you' or in some other fashion.  Most of the slides in this video are not animated in any way, and most of the slides do use transitions [again, using the wlmm platform]:




In Style III, text slides are created, and the text can be animated in certain ways.  The most popular to use are black background with white text, and white background with black text.  Transitions are used between text slides, voiceover can be added or not, and music is added.  For videos without voiceover, more text generally must be displayed, and each text slide should be set to a normal 'reading speed'.  For videos with a voiceover, all texts can be displayed and synchronized OR some texts [usually the most important parts of the voiceover script] can be used.  In this video, the only images used are book cover images- so I call this a 'text-heavy, image-light' video:



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In Style IV, the focus is on synching the text slides displayed, to the voiceover. It is still mostly created  with text slides, but here I use a white background and black text:



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In Style V, all or most of the items used are video clips [rather than images or slides]; a voiceover is added and synched to the text.  Animated video backgrounds can also be used, and text added over, called 'captions':



Style V using animated video backgrounds [I use various animated video backgrounds depending on the content and colour scheme needed by client]:



Style VI is created utilizing a template: an animated video theme 'template'.  These are best for videos that have lots of images, and only short sentences of text to display.  I create wedding, baby, pet, birthday and promotional videos with these. I choose a template based on the content / product  / service being promoted.  For example, for wedding, lovers, couples, I use the 'rose petals' theme quite a bit. That seems to be the favourite.  Here are three different animated themes:




I usually use this template when someone wants a nice 'anything goes' [as far as how the images move about, and as far as how the background of the video moves/appears] promotional video:



'rose petals' animated theme used for a wedding video:




I hope this post gets you overly enthusiastic about making your own promotional videos, personal videos and or book trailers.  You will want to always give a 'call to action' at the end of your promo or book trailer video:

include your name
business name
URL
any special offers / limited time offers

title of book
author name
formats available [books]
sites to purchase at

I am adding new software to a new laptop so that I can make even more powerful and attention-getting videos!



If you have any questions feel free to contact me,

cheers

Petra Ortiz
http://petralovesbats.ws 
http://amazon.com/author/petra 

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