I spend an inordinate - alright, completely ridiculous - amount of time watching movie trailers. The one certainty I've come away with is that the trailer is at best an imperfect way to sell a movie. After all, you're taking a product that is anywhere from 90 to 180 minutes long and trying to sell it in two to three minutes. That's a lot of slicing to do to try and get the movie's plot, key characters and some form of its essence into a cohesive structure that appeals to the audience.

So that imperfect device is now being used for something it's even less suited for - novels. Book publishers are creating online video spots for the latest novels hitting shelves. That sometimes leads to problems since good trailers feature dramatic elements like pounding music and overwrought descriptions. Some books don't exactly lend themselves to that type of pitch. The trailers are also being used on TV and in movie theaters. Some say that any additional marketing is a good thing but others wonder if that's money well spent. The complaint is that this is simply an easy and quick way for book marketers to use the internet. My concern is actually that if these sort of overly dramatic books wind up having the most successful ads then they will the only kind of books that get published. You know, like what's happening in movies.

[via GalleyCat]