Tag: book trailer video

Making a Book Trailer with Windows Movie Maker – Step #2 Adding Music

books-moviesLast month’s article was a tutorial on how to make a video trailer with Windows Movie Maker (WMM). Today we will cover adding music to and finalizing your video.

Lots of sites offer royalty-free music (and images) that you can use for your video trailer. You can find out more about these on the Indies Unlimited Video Trailer resource page. I used Incompetech to download royalty free music for my six book trailers. Kevin MacLeod has done an excellent job structuring that site to help find the type of music you are looking for. You can easily play music there before downloading. Once you click on the download, it places the music on your computer. Kevin doesn’t charge for the music, but donations are certainly appreciated!

Go to your project by opening Windows MovieMaker. You should see the screen below for a project in process. Continue reading “Making a Book Trailer with Windows Movie Maker – Step #2 Adding Music”

Video Trailer Nuts and Bolts

Movie Clapper BoardMany people are intimidated by the thought of making video trailers for their books. I used to be. Then Carol Wyer taught me how to use Animoto, and I became a video trailer-making junkie.

A lot of people just take their book’s description, type it into frames, and then show those as a slideshow with music. That really isn’t going to draw the interest that could be garnered by this visual media.

You need very little to make an effective book trailer video. And, depending upon what platform(s) you use to create your video, everything you need may be at your fingertips. Here are a few tips I use which you may find helpful: Continue reading “Video Trailer Nuts and Bolts”

Free Resources for Writers

FreeSelf-publishing involves so much more than simply writing a book. Whether you contract with various experts for help or go it alone, once you make the decision to self-publish you’re responsible for graphic design, accounting, marketing, formatting, and so much more. A person could go broke wearing all those hats.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post outlining several places to obtain free music and photographs under a Creative Commons license. Today, I want to introduce a few more sites that offer free resources for writers. As always, it’s good practice to give proper attribution even if the site doesn’t require it. See the aforementioned post on ways to do this. Continue reading “Free Resources for Writers”

Licensing Music for Book Trailers

Lord Russ and the Aloha SteamtrainYou just turned on the radio and heard the PERFECT song for your book trailer. Should you:

A) Stalk Beyoncé after a concert and ask her for permission to use it;

B) Use it without permission, because no one will find out until your book becomes a bestseller, at which point Beyoncé should be thanking you; or

C) Sing it yourself so you don’t have to worry about licensing — and because your mom says you’re as good as Beyoncé, anyway.

The correct answer is none of the above. At least in the United States, if you are going to link music to video, you need synchronization licenses both from the record label that owns rights to the recording AND from the songwriter(s)/publishing company(ies) that own rights to the music and lyrics. Even if you perform it yourself and don’t need the sound recording, you still need the sync license from the latter because the composition is copyrighted. BMI.com provides a good summary of the different types of music copyrights at http://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights. Continue reading “Licensing Music for Book Trailers”