I’ve been experimenting with Windows Movie Maker again and created a book trailer for my mini-collection of short stories, Rocky Road. It’s not exactly Spielberg, but it gets the message across!

It’s easy to make your own simple book trailer. With Movie Maker, I combined some free clip art (the turtle at the beginning) from Microsoft Office with a movie my daughter made on my phone while we were driving home from the beach! Then I added the picture of my book cover at the end. The background music I got from http://www.freemusicarchive.org

Movie Maker is free, and it’s easy to use. You just click on the icons/buttons to add video or photos, background music, and captions for your “scenes.” Then you can choose different transitions between each scene — for example, my turtle photo fades in gradually, and the cover picture at the end “pans” out slowly. That way, I kept the images moving, rather than having clunky jerks and stops between the still photos and the moving video.

If you’re interested in making your own book trailer, try downloading Movie Maker and experimenting with some videos and photos you already have on your computer. Add some background music, and try out different features to see how it works!