A trailer might just be the best way to advertise a movie. Sure there is viral marketing, but that is slightly more esoteric. Then there's the option of slapping up posters everywhere, but all too often these just end up being slightly transparent Photoshop-jobs and the don't really give you a feeling of "watching" the movie.
No, there simply is no substitute for a trailer. Aside from a the odd case of a promotional clip this will be our earliest possible look at any given movie. If you haven't already heard, the trailer for "Star Wars Episode I" boosted the sales of any movie it was attached to. People would simply walk out of the theater after watching the trailer. That is how significant a trailer can be.
The music industry has a similar advantage - it's called radio. A medium that does not have the advantage of this is books. Not too many days ago, I even read a column in a major danish newspaper that claimed that the enormous focus on learning how to read is misplaced. Given that the average grown dane allegedly only reads for about a total of 15 minuts a day (and this being mostly newspapers). Thus the column claimed that the educational system should focus more on the subject of decoding sound and images, rather than plain text.
How valid I find this claim to be is not the subject of this post. What I would like to hightlight here is the fact that I have encountered a quite noticable example of the world of litterature adopting a trailer-like way of marketing itself.
Prior to the publishing of the danish edition of swedish author Lars Kepler's crime novel "Hypnotisøren" (eng: "The Hypnotist" - pictured above) all bookstores and certain supermarket chains were given "free reading samples" to distribute among their customers.
Now to be fair, the novel was already fairly hyped by pretty much any reviews you'd find, but what this offered was for the customer to go home and read the first three chapters of the book, and judgde whether or not it was worth it based on this.
In fact this is an even purer form of presentation than the trailer. Can you honestly say you've never seen a movie that made you think "They put all the good parts in the trailer"? Here you get the set-up and a handful of (albeit brief) character introductions.
If litterature really is on its way out. This might just be a step in the right direction. Though only a step. "Hypnotisøren" will, however many copies it sells, not really create awareness of a new genre. It is planted firmly in the genre of books that have the highest potential of being bestsellers anyway. This is what is with varying degrees of affection called "Airport litterature".
This is as such not a game changer for the publishing industry, in that it opens vast new markets. If that were the case, then the potential of this should stretch out into other genres as well. Time alone will tell whether the full potential of this will be tapped or if it will merely support what is already succesful.
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