Guest: Thomas Doane
1. The ‘Viral’ Element: Style/Content
The style of the trailer reflects the content of the book. Shteyngart’s book is a satire; therefore, his trailer is satirical. Obviously, this particular trailer is hilarious, which helped it to become a viral sensation. At 150,000 views, this is not exactly Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday,’ but it’s pretty damn good for a book trailer. I’m not going to go super in-depth into the math since these things are always highly variable, but if the conversion rate on views-to-sales was 5% then that would make this book a bestseller.
Which, in fact, it was. The book charted at Number 11 on the New York Times bestseller list the month it came out.
Obviously, not all of us write satires. The important thing is to match the style of your trailer with the content of your book. If you do this it will engage the audience you’re targeting.
But how do you disseminate your trailer to your target audience? That brings us to the next step in our dissection of Shteyngart’s trailer.
2. Use all media outlets.
This trailer went viral because it was disseminated across all available platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, blogs, PPC, email marketing, etc. It was on the publisher’s site. It was mentioned on Fresh Air. Not all of us get interviewed by Terry Gross but YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are available to everyone – for free! In some cases, you (or your agent) might want to hire someone to amplify and accelerate this process of dissemination across these mediums. Or you could invest some time into learning how to optimize this part of the process yourself.
There are plenty of materials teaching you how to most effectively use social media to promote yourself out here on the blogosphere. You get to choose your own level of engagement obviously, but the whole point of making a trailer is to leverage your impact across these platforms, so don’t neglect this step. More or less, you’re guaranteed to get out of it what you put into it, but you could get a whole lot more out of this step than you put into it.
You want your trailer to go ‘viral’ on some level—whether that means hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of views – and you will be scaled according to a few factors. One of those factors is your level of prior exposure/popularity. That may not be something you can control. But another factor is: How effectively are you using social media? That’s something you can control.
3. Interviews/Budget
Notice the trailer is packed with interviews. Interviews are cheap to shoot, easy to edit, effective, informative and engaging. That’s why. The convention grows out of common sense and is dictated by the generally small budgets we have available to shoot our book trailers.
It would be nice if we all had the budget to ‘engage’ our audience with exploding cars and supermodels. If we had that kind of money, maybe we wouldn’t be so concerned about pumping up our sales. Since we don’t have that kind of budget—and since exploding cars and supermodels are often completely superfluous to the books we’re promoting—interviews will have to do.
Choose great subjects, edit lovingly, and this part should go just fine.
4. Timing
Note that Shteyngart posted his trailer on YouTube July 7th when his book
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