Book Trailers are a valuable and underused tool for engaging reluctant readers. Like Movie Trailers, Book Trailers are short audio visual previews of books. They are an exciting way to present a synopsis for a book.
Publishers often use them to tease readers and cultivate ‘buzz’ about new release novels that are highly anticipated. The idea of the Book Trailer has caught on rapidly and many Authors are seeking to have them made.
There are Professionals available for hire to do this. Paul at BOOKTEASE creates some truly stunning trailers and his site is well worth a visit to view examples of high quality trailers.
Some Authors make them themselves and some Authors will issue a challenge in the form of a competition to their readers to make a trailer. The massive response these authors receive is testimony to how comfortable with and how much young readers of this generation enjoy playing and working with the vast array of technological mediums available to them.
I have found the Book Trailer to be incredibly useful in helping me to ‘hook’ a reader. Especially useful for readers who have trouble visualizing whilst they read. I used Charlie Higson’s Book Trailer for his novel The Enemy’ to prepare the members of a Year 7 book club I facilitated last year. I showed them the trailer a week prior to giving them the book and they loved it. All of them viewed the trailer in excess of a dozen times and its effect in heightening their anticipation of the book’s arrival was astounding.
During the course of our book club meetings I asked the students if they had found the Trailer useful in terms of assisting them to visualize. They all agreed it had. Ideally, I would have loved asking the book club members to make their own Book Trailer for the title, thus further linking ICT with Literacy and increasing their comprehension of the story itself, but sadly we ran out of time.
I have created a YouTube account to provide a comprehensive list of links to Book Trailers, so that you as teachers might use them to inspire and engage readers under your care. You might like to use them to help students choose a ‘just right read’, find other books of interest in a particular genre, inspire ideas for writing or inspire them to make a book trailer for a favourite book of their own. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have your students making Book Trailers rather than always writing Book Reports?
Most all the Book Trailers featured here are for Young Adult titles so please do watch them and decide if they are appropriate for your students. I will be updating this page regularly so do check back in from time to time. Please feel free to leave a comment sharing your thoughts, ideas and student work 
The link to my YouTube account can be found HERE.
