on The Book Designer:

Whether you’re choosing to go the self publishing route or the traditional publishing route, you’re going to end up doing a lot of your own marketing. Sometimes, writers can get a little offended at the business side of this job—it’s art, after all, and writers tend to view books as particularly sacred objects.

I’m not here to dispute any of that, but I will say this: writing is an industry (one of the oldest, in fact) and a business. If you want to write full-time, you have to sell copies, and if you want to sell copies, you’ll either need to get supremely, ridiculously lucky, or you’ll need to get pretty good at marketing. This is going to mean using all the tools at your disposal.

In this article, I’m going to explain what book trailers are. We’ll talk about how to make a book trailer, what makes a great book trailer, and how you can use your book trailer effectively in your marketing plan.

You may already be familiar with needing a social media presence, placing Facebook ads, and making a mailing list. But there’s one more thing writers can use that’s a little outside the box: book trailers. Trailers aren’t just for movies!