This post is part of Rassak’s “YouTube Tuesdays Plus” featuring mini case studies of marketing videos (sometimes we look at other digital media too). New on Tuesdays. Don’t miss one, subscribe.
[author_bio avatar=”yes”] The book trailer as a marketing medium is likely here to stay—even though not everyone is a fan of using video to promote the written word:
What’s most sad about [trailers] is the whiff of defeat—the sense of a publishing industry in forlorn compliance with the laws of a YouTube world. – Rachel Arons in The New Yorker
I really liked this one for Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina published by Random House Kids. It’s a simple video—just the two authors talking. It’s very moving. To get a bit nitpicky, I was a little put off by the somewhat stodgy stack of books on a table next to the authors as they’re interviewed (it felt a bit too advertisingy) and it also seemed a bit weird to me that the ballerina was interviewed in her ballet (vs. street) clothes. But the power of the story and the emotion of the tellers made me forget those little annoyances quickly. Here’s a quick blurb from the video description:
The extraordinary memoir of Michaela DePrince, a young dancer who escaped war-torn Sierra Leone for the rarefied heights of American ballet. Michaela DePrince was known as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a “devil child” for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find a picture of a beautiful ballerina en pointe that would help change the course of her life.
P.S. I saw the video on the Facebook wall of Jennifer Storm Hilton, organizer of the Jamaica Reggae Ride which I did earlier in the year. She has another coming up in November and might have some spots—check it out if you’re interested.
