Almost every page that answers this question is American, and prices a book trailer in dollars for a market with different rates, different VAT and different production costs. The few British results are either agencies that will not publish a number, or a blog post written in 2017. So here is the honest version, in pounds, for 2026.
The short answer
A professionally made book trailer in the UK costs £400 to £2,500. The spread is wide because two very different things are sold under the same name. Below about £150 you are almost always buying a template with your cover dropped into it. Above about £3,000 you are usually paying for an original shoot with actors, which very few books justify.
What the money actually buys, band by band
| Band | What you get | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| £20–£120 Template / gig sites | A stock template, your cover and blurb text dropped in, library music, usually 16:9 only. Often no commercial licence on the music. | Almost never. The output is recognisable as a template to anyone who has seen three of them, which includes most readers. |
| £400–£900 Licensed-footage trailer | Scripted and storyboarded, licensed stock footage or motion graphics cut to a brief, original or properly licensed score, professional voiceover, every aspect ratio, captions burnt in. | This is the band that suits the overwhelming majority of books. Ours start at £525. |
| £900–£2,500 Animation or part-shot | Custom 2D animation, illustrated sequences, or a half-day shoot with one or two performers. Longer storyboard phase, several revision rounds. | Children's books, illustrated non-fiction, and any book whose selling point is visual. |
| £3,000+ Original production | Full shoot, cast, crew, location, colour grade. | Rarely. A debut novel will not earn this back. It makes sense for an established author with a marketing budget behind a launch. |
The six things that move the price
1. Original footage versus licensed footage
This is the single biggest factor. Licensing a clip from a stock library costs £15–£60. Going out and filming the same shot costs a day rate for a camera operator, a location, and someone to grade it afterwards. For most books, well-chosen licensed footage cut properly is indistinguishable to the viewer and a tenth of the cost.
2. Animation
Animation is priced by the second, not by the minute, because every second is drawn. A 60-second fully animated trailer is genuinely four to six times the work of a 60-second footage-led one. Expect £900–£2,500. For children's books this is usually the right choice anyway — see our guide on animated trailers for children's books.
3. Voiceover
A professional VO artist charges £80–£250 for a trailer-length read with full buy-out. Cheap trailers either use synthetic speech, which most listeners now spot instantly, or no voice at all. Neither is automatically wrong — a text-and-music trailer can work very well — but it should be a creative decision, not a budget accident.
4. Music licensing
A commercial licence for a library track is £30–£200. An original score is £300–£900. The point that matters: if your trailer uses music without a commercial licence, YouTube, Meta and TikTok will all eventually flag it, and your trailer stops playing in exactly the places you put it. Ask any supplier, at any price, to confirm in writing that the licence covers paid advertising. Many do not.
5. How many cuts you need
One 16:9 trailer is no longer the deliverable. You need a landscape version for your Amazon listing and website, a square version for feeds, and three to five vertical 9:16 cuts for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, each testing a different opening hook. Suppliers who quote for the hero trailer alone and charge separately for cuts are usually the more expensive option once you add it up.
6. Revisions
Two rounds should be included. If revisions are charged per round from the start, assume the headline price is not the real price.
VAT, and what UK authors actually pay
UK suppliers over the VAT threshold must charge 20% VAT, so a £525 trailer is £630 to a private individual. If you are a VAT-registered business publishing a book as a marketing asset, you reclaim it. Overseas suppliers will not charge UK VAT, which makes them look cheaper than they are once you account for the licensing and revision risks above.
What we would tell you not to buy
Three honest warnings, because we would rather lose the sale than sell you something that does not work.
- Do not buy a trailer before the cover is finished. The cover appears in every frame of the end card and in the thumbnail. A trailer built around a weak cover advertises the weak cover to more people.
- Do not buy a 2-minute trailer. Median watch time on book trailers is measured in single-digit seconds. Thirty to sixty seconds is right; ninety is the outside limit.
- Do not buy a trailer at all if you have no plan to run it. A trailer sitting on a YouTube channel with eleven subscribers has cost you money and reached nobody. The trailer is the asset; the distribution is the work. If you have no budget for either paid promotion or consistent organic posting, spend the money on the cover instead.
How long it takes
Script and storyboard: three to five working days, and you approve it before anything is filmed or licensed. Edit: five to eight working days. Revisions: two rounds, three days each. A realistic end-to-end timeline is three weeks. Anyone promising 48 hours is working from a template.
What to ask before you pay anybody
- Does the quote include vertical 9:16 cuts, or only the landscape version?
- Is the music licence cleared for paid advertising as well as organic posting?
- How many revision rounds are included, and what is charged after that?
- Do I own the finished files outright, and can I see that in writing?
- Can I see three trailers you made for books in roughly my genre?
A supplier who answers all five plainly is usually worth paying. One who is vague about question two or four is not.