Creating book trailers for YA fiction anthology TOMO

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my short stories appears in the just-released YA fiction anthology, TOMO: Friendship Through Fiction (Stone Bridge Press, Mar/2012). Proceeds will benefit teens affected by the 2011 Japan quake/tsunami.

I created two book trailers to help promote the anthology. The editor, Holly Thompson, helped me collect the materials I needed.

Here’s the shorter trailer (37 seconds):

and here’s the longer trailer (1 minute, 20 seconds):

I used iMovie to create both. For the first, I used music that came with the iMovie software. Holly provided the music for the second trailer. I used Photoshop CS5 to create some of the background and compilation images.

I can already see places for improvement, but I only had a short time to put the trailer together and have very limited experience with book trailers. Learned a lot during the process! Like the importance of figuring out the purpose of book trailer before I start working on it, and to identify the target audience.

I never assume that people are going to be patient enough to watch through the entire trailer, so I purposely put the essential book info at the beginning of each trailer. At first, I worked on a trailer that was mainly focused on the disaster in Japan but then realized that people would assume most of the stories were going to be depressing or about the quake and tsunami (and they aren’t!).

So I decided to put more of an emphasis on the people behind the project, especially editor Holly Thompson.

Anyway, I hope you like the trailers! Please do share them, and consider supporting the project by buying the book. You can find out more info about TOMO at:

http://tomoanthology.blogspot.com/