Book trailers built for the feed, not the film festival

It depends entirely on which kind you buy, and most of the industry is quietly unhelpful about this.

A polished landscape trailer, on its own, rarely moves sales. It gets watched by people who already know about the book — your existing readers, your mailing list, people who have landed on your website. What it does well is credibility: it makes an Amazon listing look like a real publication rather than a document someone uploaded, and it gives journalists, event organisers and bookshop buyers something to look at.

Vertical, hook-led video is the part that actually reaches new readers. A nine-by-sixteen cut with a text hook in the first two seconds, watched muted, on a feed that shows it to people who have never heard of you — that is the format doing the work on BookTok and Reels. It is also cheaper to make and easier to test, because you can run five different hooks against the same footage and keep the one that holds attention.

So the honest recommendation is: buy both, weight the effort towards the vertical cuts, and judge the hero trailer on credibility rather than clicks. If your budget only stretches to one, take the vertical cuts.

And if you have no plan to post anything and no intention of running ads, a trailer is not your best next spend. A better cover or a professional edit will do more for a book that nobody is going to see move in a feed. We will tell you that on the call rather than after you have paid.

The hero trailer belongs on your Amazon A+ content module, on the homepage of your author website, in your press kit and on the screen behind you at events. It is the asset you send to anyone who asks what the book is about and does not have time to read the blurb.

The vertical cuts go on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels. Post them as organic content first, see which hook holds attention past three seconds, then put budget behind the one that does. This is the cheapest audience test in publishing.

The square cut is for feed posts and for Meta ads, where the taller format gets cropped in some placements. Still frames pulled from the edit become your carousel posts, your Goodreads banner and your email header, so you are not designing graphics separately.

Amazon Ads and Meta Ads both accept video in specific dimensions and lengths. We deliver to those specifications, so nothing needs re-cutting when you decide to run paid.

The synopsis voiceover. A calm voice explaining the plot over slow footage. It tells a viewer what happens instead of making them need to know, and it loses the feed in under two seconds. The hook is a question, a threat or a contradiction — not a summary.

Stock footage that fights the genre. Generic drone shots over a thriller, or corporate-looking b-roll over a memoir. Mismatched footage reads as cheap even when it was expensive, and it teaches the viewer to distrust the book.

No captions. The large majority of feed video is watched with the sound off. An uncaptioned trailer is a silent film with no title cards. Captions are burned in, not uploaded separately, because platform auto-captions get names and jargon wrong.

One aspect ratio. A 16:9 trailer posted to TikTok shows as a small letterboxed rectangle with dead space above and below, and the algorithm treats it accordingly. Each platform needs the shape it was built for.

Unlicensed music. The single most expensive mistake. A track lifted from a popular song gets the video muted, blocked or taken down, and repeated claims put your social accounts at risk. Every piece of music we use is commercially licensed for the platforms you will post on, and you get the paperwork.

You own the finished video outright and you keep it. There is no term limit, no per-platform restriction and no renewal invoice in twelve months.

Every component is licensed for commercial use, including paid advertising, which matters more than authors expect — many stock libraries license footage for organic posting but not for ads, and the distinction only surfaces when a campaign gets rejected.

We hand over a licensing summary listing every asset, its source and the scope of its licence, so if a platform ever raises a claim you have the documentation to answer it in one email.

Voice talent is engaged on a full buyout for the territories and platforms agreed in the brief, so a narrator cannot come back for a further fee when the book does well.