Friday Five: Book Trailers

Movie trailers work to immediately capture your attention, get you interested, and make you want to see the movie as soon as it premieres.  Usually they accomplish this by showing you the best or the few good parts of the film, set it against dramatic music, and have that guy with the epitome of a narrator voice narrating.

Librarians try to accomplish the same thing when they "book talk" books, but typically don't have the special effects.  It's hard to show all the best parts of a book because they don't function like movies, which is why people always argue that the books are better than their movie counterparts.  So we have to be more crafty in our approach.  But then some clever genius realized that he could make trailers for books, with actors acting out particular scenes or a narrator discussing the premise of the book with dramatic music in the background. We still book talk, but these come in handy when we aren't around or we want to appeal to a certain crowd. 

These trailers are typically effective for the young adult crowd, as their books tend to be more plot-based and invite dramatic portrayals.  A lot of libraries actually use book trailers as a contest program; asking teenagers to film their own book trailer for a particular book.

Here are some examples of book trailers:

1. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2. The Maze Runner

3. Divergent

4. The Night Circus

5. The Graveyard Book

6. Bonus: The Hunger Games with Beanie Babies. (okay, not actually a book trailer, but it hits the points of the Hunger Games...with Beanie Babies.  Haymitch is my favorite.)