I've resisted book trailers for a long time. I thought they were ineffective and most of the ones I had seen were poorly made. I may have seen the light.
I come from a graphic design background and spent ten years working in the visual effects industry. I had the skills to put together a book trailer but kept putting it off. Finally I decided to do it. I mean, how hard could it be?
It's hard. Even with my skills, it was hard. Getting everything under thirty seconds was a challenge and I'm a control freak! But it was important for me to do that since I would be using the trailer in ads on Facebook. Any video longer than thirty seconds doesn't loop on Facebook. If the video is less than thirty seconds, it will loop until it has played for a total of ninety seconds. That's a definite incentive to make videos short and snappy!
I used a combination of video and stills, with music purchased from a stock music site. I put it all together with DaVinci Resolve, an extremely capable video editor (with a learning curve.) DaVinci Resolve gave me all the control I craved. It took longer than I expected it to but I wanted to get it as polished as possible. What do you think?
(By the way, it's a square video so that it could play on either Facebook or Instagram.)