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| Edited By: Pooja Salvi |Source: DNA |Updated: Oct 14, 2018, 06:36 AM IST
On a tight budget of Rs 5,000, the now popular author Ashwin Sanghi released the trailer for his debut book The Rozabal Line in 2008. “It was a time when YouTube was just picking up and people were spending time exploring the website,” he says. For him, YouTube proved to be a medium where it didn’t matter if you were an established author or a newbie – any kind of promotion helped.
But it wasn’t all that smooth for the author – on a shoestring budget, there weren’t too many resources at Sanghi’s disposal. “Back in 2008, I was an unknown author. I made the trailer myself on my iMac using raw footage and purchased soundtracks. Still, it worked for me. I’ve never believed a trailer is something that you can only do if you are a well-established author. It doesn’t really matter where you happen to be on the continuum,” he says, “What matters is where you take it.”
What with Sanghi’s trailer out, and it proving itself positive for the writer, publishing houses and writers chose to adapt this method, within a decade of Sanghi’s first book. His last book Keepers of the Kalachakra was not given to his readers without a little tease. “For Keepers..., the entire trailer was made professionally. Now comparing it to my debut in 2008, we are spending a lot more from our pockets today when production quality needs to be kept to top standards.”
Through the last ten years, several publishing houses have invested a considerable amount of money in promoting the fictional genres. From Amish Tripathi, who released trailers for his best-selling books The Scion of Ikshavaku, Sita – Warrior of Mithila and Immortals of Meluha (Shiva trilogy), to Sanghi himself promoting Chanakya’s Chant and The Krishna Key with trailers.
Just last month, Chetan Bhagat took it up a notch by putting out a completely “Bollywood-style trailer” for his upcoming book The Girl in Room 105, a book unlike the ones written by Bhagat earlier, is “not a love story”, instead is a thriller – perhaps his first; venturing into the genre. Directed by Mohit Suri and starring Vikrant Massey, it was released on September 3 on Bhagat’s Facebook page, which has a following on 6.4 million people.
In an age where social media makes or breaks a product, book trailers are just another tactic to capture for the attention of the consumer. “I do feel it may hold appeal for a certain aspiring crowd that binges on cinema and Netflix,” says Kanishka Gupta, literary agent, Writers’ Side, a literary agency and consultancy.
“In the mind of the viewer, who has options of not just a book but also movies and web series, there is no dearth of content. But in this world filled with too much communication, a trailer needs to stand out against those of movies and Web series,” adds author Amish Tripathi, on how you will get your new readers.
The time period of two months before the actual release of a book is the pre-order session. A pre-order incentive is a marketing strategy in which the publisher allows the consumer (its readers) to reserve a copy at the store prior to its release.
“Typically during this time,” says Sanghi, “trailers push online buying, urging the reader to pre-order the book.”
At the same time, he admits that there is no definite strategy to making a commercially successful book. “Through the last 11 years as a commercial fiction writer, if there is one thing I have learnt, is that there is no formula. The game will always remain a gamble: what may work for one book may not necessarily work for the other.”
Tripathi, who has released a trailer ahead of the release of all his books, concurs. “My books are all based in the epic space. So putting an introduction for the book in a visual format works for me: it gives readers a sense of the book. But, there is no standard marketing plan for anything,” he says. So a combination of two tactics (pre-orders and trailers) work well for authors such as Ashwin Sanghi and Amish Tripathi, whose books dabble in mythology and the thriller genre.
But trailers alone don’t decide the fate of a book. Other marketing tactics such as online advertisements and bookstore promotions need to work in alliance with each other. “A trailer doesn’t trump other kinds of promotions: the sales and the marketing plan need to work together. After the creative process of writing the book is completed, it is imperative that writers draw out a sales plan. If you’re a debutante author, your sales plan is going to be different from that of a best-selling author. Similarly, if you’re a celebrity venturing into literature for the first time, your objectives are going to differ from that of the debutante writer,” explains Tripathi, adding that the marketing plan can’t exist in isolation – it has to feed the sales plan.
When this writer phoned veteran author Shanta Gokhale to know her views about book trailers, “What’s that?! ...this is news to me” she exclaimed. Drawing a contrast, she says, “For my generation, our business was to write and a book was supposed to find its way to the reader. But I can see that the market is very competitive today and with a lot of people now writing, it is more important than ever to push a book,” she says. Even though such aggressive marketing is not something she has followed through, the author doesn’t mind if that is something required to push her next book. “If my publishers say that this is the route to take now, then of course, I will go along with them and do what is required.”
While authors have taken it upon themselves to promote their books by going a step further and creating their trailers as well, others like Gupta, believe these aren’t foolproof investments. “I think trailers don’t work at all. I am talking from the experience of having worked on more than 600 books,” he says.
“Trailers don’t get more than a couple 100 views and some handful of comments thanks to kind friends and family members. It almost never goes more than that unless you’re a known name,” he says. A publishing professional once told Gupta that trailers are useful only for celebrity authors, and then, primarily for brand building. In fact, she confessed, book trailers are frequently made just to keep authors happy.
Ravi Subramanian, author of best-selling books The Incredible Banker, Bankster, and Bankrupt among other, is hoping to encourage some new readers to pick his upcoming book titled Don’t Tell the Governor. The trailer for Don’t Tell... released on October 12, and perhaps why his trailer stands out above the rest today is because it is in Hindi – the first English language book to have a trailer in Hindi.
“The subtitles in the book are in English, while the voiceover is in Hindi. I think a majority of people who know how to converse in English, in India, know Hindi,” he says. But the idea behind releasing a Hindi trailer for an English language book is beyond that.
Don’t Tell the Governor has many things going on. According to the trailer, the book is based against the backdrop of demonetisation of 2016, the Panama Papers leak, a Bollywood starlet winning Big Survivor and a newly-appointed RBI governor. A line in the trailer has a news reporter in the background furiously saying, “Rs 500 aur Rs 1,000 ke note bandh kar diye gaye hai”. “Now imagine saying that in English,” Subramanian challenges. “Exactly! There is no connect. But in Hindi, it relates to not just the big belt of Hindi-language speaker and reader I’m hoping to woo, but also to the elite English language speaker because these subjects are relatable.”
“You have to look forward to building yourself a new audience, new readers.”
Subramanian agrees that book trailers are, at the end of the day, a desperate attempt by books publishers to compete with the digital market – a competition that affects book publishers.
Kanishka Gupta says that publishers are having a hard time selling books to readers. “All publishing, hard copies or E-versions or even audio books are having a difficult time being sold. E-versions make up just five per cent of the entire market,” he says, adding that this is the situation for fiction books.
Subramanian also admits that he has made some serious changes to his books in order to sell them more in the Internet age. “While I haven’t changed much around my writing style, which comes from a very personal space, I do map out the book differently,” he says. “Earlier, a book that used to have approximately 10-12 chapters, is now broken down to least 30 chapters.” A short attention span among youngsters is why he adds.
“A recent study conducted by Microsoft found that the average human attention span is down to eight seconds from 12 when it was originally measured in 2000. The study’s researchers also claim that the human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish, which is nine seconds,” says an article on Entrepreneur.com.
So what Subramanian does is “introduce a twist or a scandal towards the end of the already small chapter so the reader continues reading. Once you have him hooked and thrilled to read the book, he will keep coming back to it. So the whole journey from the trailer to acquiring the book, first chapter down, second then third and till the end is all a thrilling journey for him: an experience,” he says.
And this is the publishing industry’s evolution. “A writer must always evolve according to his readers: his usual readers and his new, potential readers,” states the author.
The potential is at the core of it all.
