Video Marketing for Authors – Part 1

I’ve suggested before that you must treat your writing and your books as a business to see the kind of success that makes your writing efforts worthwhile. So it makes sense to do what businesses do and look at the methods they use to promote their products.

According to statistics, 63% of businesses use video content in their marketing, and 87% of those businesses feel that it’s a critical marketing strategy. Social media users also prefer content in this form, as evidenced by the following statistics: one-third of online activity time is spent watching videos; 82% of Twitter users reportedly watch videos on there daily; 45% of Facebook users watch more than an hour of video a week. What’s more, social video reportedly generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined.

As an author, you should also incorporate video into your book marketing strategies and see whether this medium could help you sell more books.

The most obvious video book marketing strategy is creating a book trailer. Take a look at the following book trailer I created for Brian Finney’s novel, Money Matters to see an example:

A book trailer like this can be shared on your social media and can be shown on your author website. There’s even an option to upload book trailers to your Amazon and Goodreads profile pages. The shareable nature of videos makes it easy for others to spread the word about your book.

When hosting a book giveaway, what better way to get the word out there than creating a short clip? See an example of my creation below.

These are the product of carefully crafted book publicity campaigns and can be very effective tools. Make sure you get your interview recordings from the media or have your book publicist handle it. See how Graham Norton promoted his new book The Keeper.

Although we are in an age of digital and social communication, some authors still enjoy connecting with their readers in person. It is a good idea to record your readings and other appearances. These will serve you well later since you can share them with people who missed the event, as well as generate continued interest in your book. You can either post it as one long recording, like Irish author Sally Rooney did for her novel Normal People, or you can create multiple short excerpts of the reading and share them one by one.

Since the publication of his new book, The Terror of the Unforeseen, Henry Giroux has been interviewed on numerous podcasts; here’s an example. To see more of his recent appearances, please visit my book promotion case study.

The human attention span isn’t what it used to be, and most people lose interest halfway through long videos. On most social media platforms, 15- to 60-second snippets work best. Some platforms (such as Instagram) have a limit on video length. By creating short and concise clips, you pass on the vital information (such as your book’s title, your name or penname, where and in what format the book can be purchased, and so on) without rambling and boring your viewer. And keeping it short frees up time for you to create more content.

It’s easier to create a community of loyal followers and sell more books when you implement branding in your videos. This might mean using the same color scheme, fonts, similar images or graphics, and wording. It also means that you should add your website and social media handles to your videos, so viewers can easily find more of your content.

Most viewers decide whether a video is worth watching within the first 3 seconds, so it’s imperative to use a strong opening to drive engagement. Vibrant colors, intriguing music, and fast-paced openers tend to help with that. Your closing is also critical since it determines whether the potential reader clicks the buy/read more button or not. You can feature the cover of your book at the start and the end of your promotional videos, followed by a strong call to action, such as “Download it for free today!” For inspiration, look at what other authors are doing, but don’t forget to add your own spin to it.

All of these can help drive engagement and book sales. In our next post, I will look at ways of maximizing the reach of your videos. I will discuss platforms to upload the videos to, titles for them, writing descriptions that work well, and more.

~ Nanda