Free Book Promotion Resources for Authors: Book Trailers

Make Your Own Book Trailer for Free…or Almost Free

Everyone loves short videos. They don’t take long to watch, even at work, and they’re easy to share on social media and then talk about.  Book trailers are one of the most effective ways to promote your book online, but they can be expensive to make and many self-published authors are confused about where to start. Below, a short video with the 6 “must haves” for book trailers.

Resources for Getting Started

If you have a PC, chances are you have Movie Maker already installed on your computer. Or download it here. There is no Mac version, but Iskysoft makes something similar Macs for $49.95. You can download it here.

 Online Options

There are several free and low cost online options for creating a book trailer. We’ve assembled a few here:

Images

You cannot use any photo you find on the web for a commercial book trailer.  Technically, you could be sued.  You can use your own, you can search royalty free collections, or you can use low-cost photos from sites like Canva, which allows you to purchase their stock photos for $1.00 each.  They also have a huge collection of free images and dozens of templates with great design ideas.

 

Video

There are several sites for free and low cost video. StockVideoforFree has a limited collection, but it IS free. The largest is Pond 5, where you can search using dozens of parameters like subject, length and elements included in the video.  Most of their clips are about $40, and there are some clips that seem tailor made for book trailers:

Need more inspiration? Take a look at some of the best recent book trailers here. They’re not all expensively made, but they’re all creative and effective.