I’d say I’m a little fish in a big pond, but I’m more like a tadpole in a vast ocean. Marketing my novel, when it comes out in three weeks, will be interesting with my minuscule following on social media. That’s okay, though. I never had the impression my book would be a best seller. In any case, I do need to up my marketing skills just a bit to gain a little traction.

Instead of mastering TikTok dances or begging for retweets, I dove into something more my speed: a book trailer. Yes, it took all day, and yes, I neglected everything else that I should have been doing to play with this, but it was a really fun little project.

I decided to focus on the first couple of chapters of my book so I found some images that fit (or asked Grok to create them for me). A woman in front of a volcano, a family on foot with a cart and donkey, a ship, and an image of tenements in the early 1900s NYC worked perfectly. Black and white images seemed the most appropriate for this.

Titles for each slide and dramatic music needed to be added. There were a couple of different software products I tried to use to put it all together but ended up using something called DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci and I had a brief standoff, but I won (sort of).

The last slide was a color image of my proof copies, overlaid with the text “Coming April 25!” Once it was complete, I uploaded it to Instagram, Twitter/X, and Facebook. Well I’m not on Facebook but my husband is so yeah, that’s where it went. There was my little book trailer–out to all 100 of my followers!

Of course once it was posted, I started thinking that most people probably wouldn’t even watch the 30 second trailer to the end and they would entirely miss the whole point of it, that my book was coming out on April 25th. Ah, well, at least I had fun.