W9A1 & 2

Pamela Paul’s article was published in 2010. At the time, she wrote that book trailers are “fast becoming an essential component of online marketing”. Five years later, book trailers can be found on YouTube and on publishers’ websites, but they are hardly essential to anything, even to online marketing campaigns. She mentioned book trailers awards called Moby givens by the Melville House Publisher, but they do not even exist anymore. 2012 seems to be the last year they were awarded. Our present does not look the way she predicted it.

The Nina Metz’s article was published two later years, in 2012. I think that year was especially bad for the book trailers, because, contrary to Pamela Paul, she did not have anything good to write about them. They were “cheap, schlocky, boring, lackluster, unimaginative”. Even the name “book trailer” is not good not enough for her. I think things have changed a little bit since. First, the quality of book trailers is a little bit better nowadays. They are more professional and visually more attractive. However, I agreed with Metz that reading is an act of “imaginative personalization”. For example, I was very disappointed by the book trailer of Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Not only because the quality and originality was incredibly low, but also because the characters did not look the way I imagined them. Imagination is deeply personal, and reading activates the imagination in a subjective matter. Movie trailers give you a peak of what you will see on screen, but I rather have an idea about a book instead of a visual representation.

Personally, I think book trailers will become more and more present around us, but it will take some times. Time to achieve and develop the art of book trailers. A good book cover is not a simple representation of one character or the setting of a story. It’s something more subtle and more appealing (one can think of classics like Catch 22, Catching in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, etc.). I think book trailers should follow the same path, and create a distinct aesthetic. Is book trailer useful for readers’ advisory? Yes and no. Yes, if they follow the wrong path and continue to represent the story like a movie adaptation will do. Instead a reading a summary of the book, we could watch the book trailer. No, if book trailers become an art on its own and not a simple representation of the story. In this case, book trailers are useless for reader’s advisory but they can be a good marketing tool. Good marketing is not always selling the product directly, but it sells a world and an idea surrounding the product.