One side effect of having a long countdown to release is the leisure to obsess about certain aspects of the book business. One thing I debated about long and hard was whether to make a book trailer. Concept  My first thought was an enthusiastic yes. I’d not only have a book, but a mini-movie! I became a trailer fanatic, watching still pictures float past while excerpts were read off-screen. Lines from the book materialized on screen while music played. Actors played out scenes, bits were animated, characters drawn. I started to envision the dancer in my novel moving in a way that caused a blur— Wait. If I wanted to use a visual, why a blur? That’s when I realized I didn’t want a real woman in my book trailer. Because my novel is on the theme of body image, I had skirted physical description of my protagonist. I wanted my readers to fill in that blank with an image that worked for them. Execution With filming a real dancer off the table, my first thought was to make the trai...

Today we welcome Lisa Gottfried to the Blood-Red Pencil. She shares her professional advice about book trailers and how you can make yours stand out from the crowd. I am dangerous in a bookstore. My husband and I have a deal that we will not step through those glass doors to literary heaven unless we have earned enough extra money ahead of time to pay for at last fifteen or twenty books in one visit. I am a serious book buyer. My general game plan goes something like this. Go to the genre I adore and stand amongst the shelves scanning for titles and covers that appeal to my interests. Zero in on a small section and start reading titles. Pull out a few that draw me in and read the jacketflaps or backcover synopses. What happens next is the part where I decide to buy or not. I flip open the book and read a few random pages. I decide right then and there whether I like the writing, the illustrations and the essence of the book. From there the book either comes with me or gets quickly plac...