2016 Goodreads Choice Book Awards-Did You See the Book Trailers?

Book Trailers!

I’ve written about them before, including those trailers I published for my grandfather’s books, as well as one I created for Jean Grainger, an Irish author. Ms. Grainger published “So Much Owed – An Irish World War 2 Story” on December 1, 2013. I enjoyed the book so much that I felt compelled to create a short book trailer, which I uploaded to YouTube on March 6, 2017.

Given that I’m a member of the Book Trailer Group on Goodreads, I keep bumping up against book trailers; fascinated with most. Some amateur trailers are amazing good, some professionally produced piss-poor. But everyone sees a trailer, whether movie or book, in their own eyes. So I got to wondering about the 2016 Goodreads Choice Book Awards. How many winners had book trailers?

The Goodreads Choice Awards are “the only major book awards decided by readers.” As I mentioned in a previous post, there were over 3.5 million votes gathered from three voting rounds for 20 categories. Winners were announced the end of December.

How many of these whoppingly popular books had accompanying book trailers? Were they necessary for the success of the book? Probably not. Just a quick recap for the Best Fiction category–nominees garnered 237,844 votes. The Best Fiction category winner with over 30,000 of those votes was Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty. Her “official” book trailer was published…

Just a few days ago

It is 16 seconds long posted by Flatiron. An interesting note: There are all kinds of book review videos for her widely successful novel, one of which published on the day the book was released in July 2016. She’s had two (YouTube posted) video interviews discussing the success of the book and the original source idea for the plot.

The Mystery & Thriller category winner (again with total votes over 238k), hands down with over 43K of those votes, was End of Watch by Stephen King, UK book trailer – Hodder & Stoughton.

The unofficial demise of the Historical Fiction category was greatly exaggerated when The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead knocked his book out of the ballpark. Not a debut writer, he’d been hanging on to his notes about this story for over six years before he felt capable of sorting his thoughts into a coherent best-seller. And as most of you know, became an Oprah’s Book Club pick (74 picks by 2016). There are videos posted of her interview with Mr. Whitehead, as well as others, and numerous book reviewers posted their videos. An audio excerpt is posted on YouTube, but if he had an “official” book trailer, I could not find it. There were many “fan made” book trailers for the runaway best-seller.

Speaking of “fan made:” I never realized that the little “appreciation” or “book review” video I created for So Much Owed was considered a “fan made” book trailer.

Coming in on the same train, the Romance category winner, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover with over 59k votes; “fan made” book trailer (*All credits to the owners of the clips, song and to our very own blogger/ video master, Jellie Ann Agulto. *) , and…

Best Horror category winner, The Fireman by Joe Hill, Hackette Australia Books and LOTS of fan made trailers.

There are non-fiction Choice category winners, of course. I did not search for book trailers, as it appears the above was overwhelmingly sufficient to make my point. Do you normally check reviews prior to purchase? Have you taken it one step further and looked for book trailers? You can be sure if you have an interest in a book, there is a trailer out there somewhere for it and a picture (video) is worth a 1,000 words (review). Were you one of those choice award voter numbers? How many books on the Choice Awards list did you read? ©2017 Virginia Williams

Author: Rosepoint Publishing

I am the granddaughter of Patrick John "Stanley McShane" Rose whose books including "Cocos Island Treasure" I've recently published. My time is now spent in reading, reviewing, and writing bookish articles. I'm looking forward to sharing this social media odyssey with you! View all posts by Rosepoint Publishing