I LOVE making book trailers. Photography has always been one of my passions, and I have built up my own photo library over the years so that I can draw on my own work to create trailers for my books. It’s great not to have to worry about copyrighted photos and all that stuff. But sometimes, it’s really frustrating, because most of my photos have some kind of nature theme going on, and that doesn’t always fit. Also, I can’t ever use people in my trailers. So I have to come up with images that “suggest” what I want to show. Usually I come close, but sometimes my long suffering editor just politely clears her throat and shakes her head. (Well, sometimes shes’s a little more direct. Ahem.)
Anyway, I live in Vermont where it’s winter most of the time, so coming up with snow shots wasn’t hard. All the snowy photos are from right around our house, including the brook video in the beginning. The door with the sign is our front door. (Yes, I dug out colored pencils and made the sign.) The fireworks shot is from last New Year’s Eve in downtown Burlington, as is the shot of the lights on Church Street. The rope on the pillow, well, I’m not going to go into details about that. Suffice it to say I had a lot of trouble coming up with an image to get that idea across. Likewise, I took a lot of photos of drinks and bottles to suggest a bar. The shot of the traffic on the road in the sunset is one I took on my way to dropping my daughter off for college in Massachusetts a few years ago. And the “stormy coast of Maine” is actually in New Hampshire, just across the Maine border. But I liked the video so much I lied a little. All the other ocean photos are in Maine, I promise. Most of the photos were taken in the past year with the same camera for consistency (I use an iPhone 7– yeah, I cringe a little to say that since I was born and raised on single lens reflex cameras and I know my way around in a darkroom, and for a while I had published more photos than books. But damn, my phone does a nice job and it’s always in my pocket.)
So that’s the scoop on the trailer. I’ve also just finished the one for the reprint of Notice and I’m working on the one for Flights of Dragons. So stay tuned for more!
Watch the trailer HERE