Week 9: Book Trailers and Summary

Assignment 1:

Interesting articles about Book Trailers.

 Assignment 2:

Book trailers do not work for me personally. In fact, I usually avoid them. I recently watched a trailer for a terrific new teen novel, Fat Angie. I’m glad I didn’t watch it BEFORE I read it. I already had the characters in my head, what they looked like, how they sounded, dressed, etc. I don’t want to be swayed by someone else’s idea of a book’s cast. For that, I’d watch a book’s movie adaptation.

 At most, I may watch a book trailer for a title I’ve already read to find out more about the author. Or in the case of Gary Shteyngart or Mary Roach, I’d tune in for comedy-value alone.

However….book trailers DO work for some readers.

According to the NYT article, book trailers can work, especially among teen readers. When doing a basic search for book trailers, I noticed that the vast majority were for YA titles. They seem to be an effective marketing tool for certain demographics (and maybe certain types of books). I can see them being an effective online RA tool for teen readers. Perhaps a few hot new book trailers for upcoming YA titles could be embedded on our website or promoted through our Teen Facebook page.

Assignment 3

The Teen component was most helpful to me. I read Teen novels, but I don’t actively follow sites specifically devoted to Teen lit. I also enjoyed learning about the “New Adult” phenomenon.

The various subgenre websites were interesting. I like learning about what motivates readers to gravitate toward certain genres.

I would welcome something like this that would exclusively focus on children’s books.