Joe Sullivan

Laura Miller over at Salon writes about why she feels book trailers on YouTube are silly here.

The first time I ever saw a book trailer was last spring for Monkeybicycle 6, and it was sort of silly, but intentionally silly, and that made it good. Since then, I’ve seen tons of authors reading their work on YouTube and promoting books this way.

I agree with Miller that sometimes it doesn’t work. But I don’t feel that books aren’t videos and videos just make us want more videos.

Frankly, I feel like any visual mention of something, if done reasonably well—whether a poster on the subway or a video on YouTube—always makes me want to investigate further. It could be about a book, a movie, an album, anything really.

It’s not easy to get books into people’s hands. We need to use every resource at our disposal.