Book Trailers and Teaser Concepts

Good Ideas are Only the Beginning

Marketing concepts are much more than just clever ideas. Your goal, by the end of your book teaser, is to inspire readers and motivate them to take further action, to buy your book, right now, not later. Later is too late because people not only have short attention spans, they have short-term memory, especially these days since consumers are bombarded with advertising, 360,  24/7. 

Although, that’s why advertisers repeat their ads so many times. People need to see them more than once. They need to process all the information until they understand what you’re communicating, and then they need to take action―they must react to your message. What is your message? Your message must be simple and direct. It must entertain, inform, compel, build curiosity, inspire, and motivate readers into wanting your wonderful product―your book.

Your book teaser must break through all the advertising clutter, and that doesn’t mean that you’ll need big, noisy explosions or fancy special effects. You need to trigger your reader’s emotions and reach them on an emotional level, pushing all the right buttons along the way, and believe me, there are many buying buttons you need to push.

But these buttons are not negative buttons. They are positive buttons, filled not with fear, but with hope, exciting news, and great expectations. What are you selling? A book, yes, but its contents serve a greater purpose. A meaningful statement about the world and how readers process their world through your story to enhance their lives. People don’t just collect books, they buy into the experience your book offers. It is that particular experience you must tap into, distill, and bottle up. It is that essence you must tease out and present in its most curious form, so that readers who come across your ad, your book teaser, are immediately taken by everything it has to offer. What does it offer?

Does it offer a rare insight into the mind of a serial killer? Does it offer a glimpse into the distant future, or someone’s dubious past? Does it arouse the reader’s curiosity and leave them wanting more? It should and it must, if you want your book teaser to succeed in generating sales for your book.

Speaking of serial killers, you hopefully saw and remember the movie, Silence of the Lambs. What a curious title, isn’t it? What do lambs have to do with a serial killer? On its surface, nothing, but dig deeper and you’ll find the hook to this incredible story, and how the serial killer uses that bit of information: detective Starling’s fear of slaughtered lambs on the farm where she grew up. It’s the killer’s ace in the hole to weaken her defenses.

Suddenly, this story has depth and meaning to readers. It’s not just another gory movie, it is a very unusual psychological thriller. This story works on many levels and has multiple layers of meaning. There’s a lot of gold for readers to mine here. That makes it fascinating to watch and unforgettable. Your book teaser must accomplish the same thing, but it must do so in seconds. Not so easy to do.

In order for you to tease out the hook in your story, and play it out in such a way that readers feel the need to find out more, or they’ll die of curiosity, you must act quickly. You must strike like a cobra and infuse your readers, not with venom, but with desire. The magical desire button. The desire to want something so bad, they will go through the process of learning more about it, and go through all the impulsive  steps in the shopping cart purchasing process.

The good news, desire is an easy emotion to evoke. All it takes is an intriguing and urgent presentation of any universal emotion, such as love, jealousy, apprehension, happiness, etc., and the triggers are pulled. These are the buttons you need to push at every turn.  And in turn, a reader’s desire to satisfy their wants, their curiosity, propels them to keep pushing more shopping cart buttons―all the way to the most important button of all, the PLACE YOUR ORDER Button.

Search your story high and low for its crux, a hook, its meaning, and capitalize on those emotional hot buttons by pushing all of them in 60 seconds or less. 

It’s a killer combination that can’t miss.