BMB Week 9: Book Trailers

Assignment 1

I watched a few book trailers on YouTube and noticed that the production values are widely varied, from semi-professional short productions to videos that look like the dumb ones I made in high school with my friends. I suppose that because multimedia is pervasive today, book trailers are a good way to reach people who browse YouTube and blogs at work or home. I find it kind of funny that books are being advertised by movies, and that the book-to-movie conversion rate is very high. I guess it speaks to our lack of time nowadays, where people may be able to spend 2 or 3 hours on a movie, but not the days to a week to devote to a book.

I do like that some of the trailers don't take themselves seriously. The Packing for Mars one, and one I found for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters were very well done and quite funny to boot. I'm sure they were heavily backed by their publishers and their creative teams. Others that I watched were more independent-film-styled and were sometime too serious to make me interested in reading the book.

Assignment 2

I think that book trailers are successful in promoting their book if they have the certain "magic ingredients" to go "viral" on the Internet. I'm still trying to figure out what makes a video go viral, but I think the trailers I mentioned above have or had a good chance. The other trailers that look like home movies I think are less successful, and that's supported by the lower umber of views on YouTube. As far as using them in RA, if the customer has the time or interest to watch them, I think book trailers would be useful in setting up the plot and tone of a book, and introducing some of the characters. I know that at a busy Info desk, I wouldn't have the time to watch whole trailers with customers, though perhaps setting them up on a computer and referring them to YouTube would be useful to them.

I once had a customer approach me at the Info Desk and tell me about the book he had published and asked about adding it to the collection. I told him the procedure and that I'm not the person who makes those decisions, and he insisted I watch the trailer for his book. The book was nonfiction and the trailer was quite interesting.

Assignment 3

I enjoyed this training a lot! The lessons about appeal factors were new to me and very informative. I think the weekly topics were well chosen and built upon previous ones. None of the assignments were too difficult, though some were very time-consuming, which is why I'm finishing so late. I would have strongly preferred that the BMB blog was accessible from home; I know many of my colleagues feel the same way. I think BCPL could have saved a lot of printer paper if we didn't have to print out each assignment to take home. My supervisors were also very gracious to schedule time for BMB blogging. Thanks!