Does anyone here have any tips/tricks for creating a book trailer for you tube. I considered hiring a company to do so, but I would REALLY rather not. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Check out what other authors have done for their book trailers.

Check out what Marvel comics, and other illustration oriented media do to promote new trends in their publishing.

Seeing what lengths people have pushed their projects to can inspire you to match, or best them.

I would recommend doing an illustrated, or animated trailer, unless you have access to HIGH quality filming techniques and actors. Check out still photo animations with evocative narration / text animation / music.

Poorly done, or even moderately skilled live action is much easier to spot than animation. It can be difficult enough to get your audience to tune to your trailer. Shooting something on your camera phone with dudes you found at the YMCA trying to act out a scene from your book is just begging to be skipped.

If you are not familiar with animation or producing live action video, you will want to hire someone who is to do it for you, or at least assist in bringing your ideas to life.

There is a lot of effort that goes into producing even short original videos and the learning curve itself will consume your first couple projects. If you are looking for results NOW, then you need someone with experience to help you.

This doesn't have to be terribly expensive. Try looking at a local college for a film or animation major to assist. You can pay them a pittance compared to normal production prices (baseline 100 dollars an hour) and get pretty good results.

If you do use a student, check with their teachers or other reliable sources to determine their work ethic.

Thank you that helps alot. I would have never thought of checking into college students, I think that is something I will certainly look into

You might want to check out YourBookTube.

I think johnson1010 has given you as good of advice as you'll get. The argument to use animation sounds solid. Cheap video will scare away your audience.

We just finished one... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRwiT7PVbo

There are some really cool ones out there though and we're hoping to continue to refine the process.

I would imagine the trailer would really depend on the type of book. For example, a sci-fi trailer would be entirely different than a tearjerker. If you have graphics for the book that's a big help. Otherwise you'll need quite a bit of text. Of course you'll probably need that anyways. Music or ambient noise is always important so that would be what I consider next. By any stretch ours is pretty basic, but it provides another mechanism with which to draw people to the book. Length is another factor... how long does it need to be or even should it be.

Our next venture will be incorporating flash animations, but again really basic... setting things to paths and letting them just move through, winding up at the end form/result.

James