Small promotional films or ‘shorts’ have proven to be highly useful tools for the modern indie writer/self-publisher in that they reach the ever-growing YouTube audience with brief, image-laden sound bytes of what you sell, what it’s about, where to find it and (usually) for how much. The best part of this aspect of eBook marketing is that one can conceptualize, write, compile, format and publish one’s own video ads, spending nothing but your time. The process sounds like it would demand quite a bit of said time and energy (it does) but the result is worth the effort. Take a couple courses on Lynda and you’ll see just how much consumers pay attention to multimedia ads over print ads/text sidebar ads.
This last week my husband and I busied ourselves in just such an endeavor. We’ve had Flash ‘shorts’ online for some time for two of our eTitles, but after a year those films appeared a bit outdated. The idea of slogging through another, tedious Flash build did not appeal to either of us (no slam against Flash or the Flash fans out there intended) so we searched around for video editing software that harbored “swift” properties in both compilation and formatting. After browsing through numerous software reviews we tried a free program that came with Windows 7 on our laptop, Live Movie Maker. Paired with Audacity (another free program) we were able to whip up three short eBook ads for upload directly to YouTube & Facebook in less than a day, each with a custom audio track and all the fade-in, fade-out frame animation that we were looking for. All the ‘shorts’ fall into that unofficial 1-2 minute maximum time in order to retain the relatively-low online consumer attention span.
The most time-consuming part of creating the videos was choosing the right music; we found copyright-free and royalty-free music for two of them fairly quickly, once we knew what we wanted. However, the third ‘short’ for our historical fiction novel On the Way to America proved difficult to find music for. The book’s theme has an Irish overtone, and all the music we came across was played by folks either still living or was yet under copyright protection. Taking a chance, I emailed the band members of New Time Ensemble who play a song I was particularly fond of, the Drowsy Man’s Hornpipe. The music is somber and sweet all at once, invoking a scene in the mind of Ireland’s green shores and the prospect of leaving them, a vision which precisely fits my book. In the email I asked for permission to use the music in my eBook ‘short’ and attached a version of what it the finished product would look like, which included a brief overlay in the film of the band’s name and the song title. Three hours later, to my surprise, a representative of the band returned my email with cheerful permission to use their song and wished me luck with my book. To my husband’s mystification I danced around the living room rug with the laptop quoting the Mad Hatter before breaking the good news. Though not entirely ‘free’, per say, limited brand placement in exchange for the limited use of copyright-protected music still cost no money out of pocket.
Other programs may work just as well for self-publishers (or better… live links in the video proved impossible) but “free” is still hard to beat. Just after three days live sales have already picked up on both our website and in the Kindle Store. The simpler ads seem to be the most popular; oddly the paying customer don’t leave comments on the YouTube ‘shorts’ but instead emailed us with praise for our music selections, and questions on the name’s of the pieces used.
In the coming weeks we will be using both free programs again to record a free chapter of our books in audio-book style ads also uploaded to YouTube & Facebook, taking care to stay under the pivotal 15 minute limit.
Good tips there!
s/per say/per se/.
Heh… am not surprised people would rather ask questions by email than on Youtube. You probably should also not expect (any productive) comments on Youtube, unless people who’ve _already_ read the book are coming across it.
You say “ads”, but I’m not sure that’s a good description. Particularly when you compare it to “print adds / sidebar text ads” – you’re not paying anyone else to show it on their websites / tv channels, right? “Trailer” might be a better word – I think it’s what Greg Egan uses for his vids. “viral” would be the obnoxious buzzword du jour, but at least it’s honest about the difference.