Week Nine - Book Trailers

From reading up a bit on book trailers (I had never heard of them before), I get the distinct sense that they have increased in quality considerably since the medium was first introduced. That being said, I also had a hard time finding lots of adult book trailers from recent months and even years. The most popular book trailers on YouTube were all uploaded over a year ago, and the vast majority of articles and compilations I found dated from the late 2000s to the early 2010s (around the time our training blog was created, no?), and focused mostly on young adult books. This interested me, coming right from our exploration of teen fiction two weeks ago. I noticed, first, that almost every single one of the most viewed book trailers on YouTube were those posted by EpicReads, HarperCollins' YA site that I ragged on in an earlier assignment (whoops!). It isn't so surprising to me that YA fiction has more of an audience for book trailers, and neither am I surprised that children's book trailers still seem to be doing well (see sites like TeachingBooks.net and Book Trailers for Readers - particularly as school projects. Although they are a little more painful to watch, these amateur endeavors might, I think represent the niche that book trailers are most useful for. With the growing appeal of spending hours surfing YouTube, I feel like many children will be more willing to and excited about watching a video teaser for a book than listening to a librarian like me talk to him or her about it.

But if book trailers still seem to hold so much appeal for younger readers, why have they not caught on as well with adults? It certainly seem that the hype about adult book trailers has gone down in the last few years, so much so that I could hardly find anything to report from the past year or so. I had to go several pages into my Google search results to find more than a single article from this past year on adult book trailers - and many of them griped about how "Book Trailers are Ruining Everything"! One article in particular caught m attention; written for Slate this past February, it was one of the newest pieces I could find, and it asked the question "why are book trailers for literary fiction so self-loathing?"

The observation reminded me of a similar controversy that continually springs up in the art world, when artists (from Pablo Picasso to the British graffiti artist Banksy) seem to betray the integrity of their craft by "selling out" to consumer culture in order to make a profit. As with art, so with books: the "romantic view of literature," as the author of the Slate article puts it, leads us to imagine that "the artists crafting these books are...impervious to marketing strategies." "Creating a book trailer," on the other hand, "means acknowledging the financial dimension" of the literary industry, and those of us who love reading don't want to think of our books as no more than a product to be marketed and consumed.

But why should books be considered inviolable for advertising? The main focus of all the gripe I'm hearing about book trailers is that it is impossible to condense the complexities of a novel into a 2-to-3-minute video clip - but is that really the intent of a book trailer? Just like a movie trailer, a book trailer doesn't pretend to include all the complexities and intricacies of the book itself, but only to whet your appetite, to make you more likely to read it in its entirety. Although I'm not so sure that the appeal of adult book trailers has stood the test of time, I am certainly not opposed to well-made ones that effectively gain readership for quality authors - or even poorly-made ones, if they can do the same thing.