Let's talk about book trailers. As an indie writer, I'm always trying to develop ways to market myself on the cheap. Let's face it, in order to get noticed anymore, you have to pay to play. I do where I can but find that I often spend more than I make, so I am happy to cut corners when possible. I've seen a few book trailers and thought I'd take a crack at it-put those old television 101 skills to use from my college days. I ended up downloading HD Movie Maker Pro. It was either free or cost very little. I don't actually remember. Then, I went to Pixabay and looked over various images that I thought would fit the look of my mini-movie. Even though the site says FREE, I always asked permission and everyone was very accommodating. For good measure, I included a little shout out page at the end of the trailer to anyone who gave me their permission. I played around with the images, adding my own special touches. For my first book release, the Promise, I used music built into the program (free). It fit so nicely that I didn't bother looking anywhere else.
For Underwood and Thorn Apple, I used Purple Planet and bought the distribution rights to the song used. That cost was around 8.00. After that, I played around in Movie Maker. It's pretty easy to navigate, and you can use their effects and their music manipulation tools to fade in and fade out your background music. Once the movie is made and saved, it is easy to upload to just about any platform. I have mine on Amazon to accompany my books and Instagram as well. Of course, there are other great sites such as Vimeo, but you will pay a bit more for a snazzy trailer. Below are the movie trailers. Hope you enjoy them. And, remember, you can get all my books on Amazon for Kindle or print.
The Promise
Underwood
Thorn Apple