I’m still not up to speed on book trailers—maybe because I don’t quite understand their purpose, or maybe simply because I’m too lazy to investigate. But here’s a good place to start: in anticipation of a forthcoming memoir, poet Sandra Beasley started thinking about book trailers, which led her to decide to learn how to animate some of her poems. The process as she describes it feels doable, and the results (now on YouTube) are admirable.
As Sandra notes, “Why do this? These videos will never supplant the poems themselves. I don't expect to monetize them. Enjambment tends to get lost, unfortunately, which means in some ways you have to compromise the poem to make this work.
“But anything that gets your poems to a ‘slightly’ different audience than before intrigues me. It's the same reason we put poems on buses and subway cars--and in that spirit, try to choose poems that translate to a public and attention-span-challenged space.”
Start here with Part 1 of Sandra’s posts (links to subsequent posts are at the end of Part 1; Part 2 is where you can read the nitty-gritty about how to put together your own video).
And be sure to check out Sandra’s poem “Vocation” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-qd5OnTR3s&feature=player_embedded