We are talking about how to create a media trailer for a book, which is designed to attract potential readers. In the previous posts, I described my own experience creating a trailer for my recent book, The Scientist Videographer. I explained that you need to study other book trailers (step one), identify the central message you wish to convey and elements from your book to include in the trailer (step two), and visualize and acquire the media to use in your trailer (step three).

In this post, I describe the fourth and final step, which is to compile your material and produce the trailer with a movie-editing application. You may be thinking at this point that movie editing is too technically challenging. To create my book trailer, I used the desktop version of iMovie and built the trailer from scratch. However, I will show you a really easy way to create a book trailer using iMovie for mobile devices. This application has an option for creating movie trailers, but it can be modified to make a book trailer. iMovie has templates and instructions that make it super easy to combine your video, still images, and text to produce a professional-looking trailer. iMovie does most of the work; all you have to do is drop your media into placeholders and then render the video. I used my iPad for the demonstration, but you can use an iPhone to shoot and edit your book trailer.

As you will see, I walk you through the iMovie 2013 app (for iOS) and show you how to create a book trailer. (be sure to select the HD version and full-screen for best viewing):

As you saw, the iMovie app is easy to navigate, and the movie-trailer templates provide a structure to guide you. You should be able to find one to fit your book type. If you don’t like any of the trailer templates, you can still use the basic movie editor in iMovie 2013 to create a book trailer from scratch, as I did. In fact, with this app, you can create several trailers for your book, each emphasizing a different aspect of the book or targeting different readerships. If you are working on a series of books, it would be easy to produce multiple trailers to advertise each one. There are a lot of possibilities once you learn the basics of movie editing.

If you want to learn more about planning, shooting, editing, and sharing videos to promote your work, check out my book, The Scientist Videographer (it’s not just for scientists).