You’ve Made a Book Trailer – Now What? | Book Marketing

Book trailers can be a fantastic marketing tool to showcase your book. They are most popular for genre fiction such as romance, historical fiction, young adult fiction, thrillers and mysteries, fantasy and sci-fi or books that contain a visual element like photography or coffee table books. But they can be a useful tool or piece of content for a wide variety of books.

Not only are they a fun way to jazz up your website, social media and other aspects of your online presence; a good book trailer can grab a reader’s attention, and get media interested. Having a book trailer in your arsenal of content you can offer to bloggers or other online media, particularly for a blog tour, can increase the success of book publicity efforts.

So, how can you make sure your book trailer is working for your book marketing strategy? Here’s a list of ways to use a book trailer.

• Pitch the press coverage of a “book trailer release” or “exclusive first look” at your book trailer – this is a great way to kick off a blog tour!
• When coming up with collateral you can offer bloggers  they can use right away – a giveaway, a guest post, a Q&A, or an excerpt – a book trailer can be another piece of content you have at the ready.
• Send out a dedicated email to your newsletter subscribers about the book trailer release, make it a fun event and ask them to share on social media.
• Post it on:
  • Your website
  • Your Amazon author page
  • Your Goodreads page
• Share on social media – repeatedly, but not too often or in exactly the same way.
• If your book is distributed to indie booksellers, Shelf Awareness has a “Book Trailer of the Day” feature to which you can submit your trailer.
• Do outreach to BookTubers, book reviewers on YouTube, and ask them to link to your trailer when reviewing your book.
• Include it in future queries to literary agents or publishers.

By Andrea Kiliany Thatcher, Book Publicist and Marketing Manager