4: Book Trailers as a Digital Genre

"trailers aren't just for movies anymore" written on spines of booksThe book trailer is a digital genre that developed from book covers and movie trailers, and is used as a form of visual advertisement for books. Professor Rasmus Grøn defines the book trailer as “based on a medial discrepancy, where a literary (i.e. written) source text is represented through an audiovisual transposition” (Grøn 91). Book trailers are used to hook or tease the audience with pieces of information about the book in the hopes that the audience will go out and buy it.

This genre is so interesting because it can be used both in the professional and the amateur sense. It can be used by authors and publishers strictly as a form of advertisement, or it can be used by fans as a creative outlet. I find this aspect of the genre really cool because almost anyone can access the genre and add to its content by creating a book trailer.

The most challenging thing about this assignment so far had been finding sources that are credible. Many of the sources I found initially were blogs or student presentations. It took a lot of reading of these less credible sources to eventually find the academic papers I am using, most of which I found in the sources for the blogs and projects I initially read. Regardless, this assignment has been fairly easy for me to research because I really enjoy book trailers. I find them very interesting, and sometimes I watch trailers that appear on my Facebook feed or YouTube account and end up buying a book because of its trailer.

Creating a digital genre wiki for book trailers is making me more and more aware that I can potentially use book trailers in my other classes. This could include looking to see if any books I am reading in other classes have a book trailer that I could watch to get some background information or an overview of what I will eventually read. It could also be relevant to my creative writing classes, because I could potentially create a book trailer for my own creative works to promote them.

In Among The Audience, Lunsford and Ede state that “Much has changed in the teaching of writing and the technologies of communication” (Lunsford and Ede). I think book trailers are a great example of this new form of communication. Just as other genres may invoke a response from the audience through comments or likes, book trailers, if effective, will cause the audience to respond by further researching the book and possibly buying it. Similar to Vivian, I found that the development of technology and the internet has helped book trailers become a new form of communication among readers and writers in a community, just as memes have in their respective community. Sharing book trailers may very well become the faster, digital version of a traditional book club. Although book trailers create a more indirect form of communication than other genres, I believe they are still effective. The creator of the book trailer communicates what the book is about and attempts to pitch it, and the audience responds by buying the book.

Word Count: 521

Works Cited:

Lunsford, Andrea A. and Lisa Ede. “’Among the Audience’: On Audience in an Age of New            Literacies.” 1-32. Web. 16 Feb. 2018.

Grøn, Rasmus. “Literary Experience and the Book Trailer as Intermedial Paratext.” Sound Effects, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 91–104., www.soundeffects.dk/article/view/20330.