PAPERWALLAH. Advertising our wares

Lately, I have been thinking about book trailers.

You may roll your eyes, and mutter, Jonathan Franzen-style, about your profound discomfort with having to use moving images to promote the printed word. “To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place,” he says in the Freedom promo video. “The world of books is the quiet alternative — an ever more desperately needed alternative.” (Who else would make a book trailer about being reluctant to make a book trailer?) You may nod in commiseration — yes, it’s come to this, the publishing industry falling in forlorn compliance with the laws of a YouTube world. Yet, as we all agree, the job of publishers is placing books in people’s hands. And as Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review , says, “We’ve been advertising our wares in silly ways since putting a dirty picture on the cover of a Faulkner book.” True. In the early 20th century, printed ads were all the rage. From the downright inappropriate — a reprint of Kipling’s Kim prompted one that termed India an “Orient treasure-trove”— to the sweetly earnest — a 1926 newspaper clipping for The Sun Also Rises claimed “that with this book Mr Hemingway’s sun will also rise.”

It seems only natural that book promotion (like everything else) would move into digital space. As Franzen grudgingly admits, in the same breath he uses to state his “profound discomfort,” it “makes eminently good sense to be recording little videos like this.” Of course, he wouldn’t be happy to know that this has been going on as far back as 1986. A video for Wildwood , a novel by ‘Southern Gothic’ writer John Farris may just be the first ever made, complete with terrifically awful CGI, gigantic shoulder pads, and electrocuted hairstyles. (One must watch it, if for nothing else, the spectacle of a dainty slippered foot transforming into a tiger paw.)

Yet perhaps it might be more customary to start with the question: ‘what is a book trailer?’ As self-explanatory as that might sound, a quick Google search will tell you that there seem to be no designated ‘standards’ for book promos. Take length, for example. Videos may range from 30-second quickies, like Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys featuring a dancing skeletal marionette, to lengthy documentary-style projects, such as Naomi Klein’s trailer for Shock Doctrine . Nothing like movie trailers, where you can hold certain predictable expectations that are usually met. While book trailers may escape dogmatic definitions, the worst usually spring from an overlap between the two genres. Perfectly decent efforts have been ruined by ‘Voice of God’ voiceovers, while four-minute epic dramas try to sell you the plot. TC Boyle’s The Women , for example. It’s alleged that some book trailers inherently remove the element of the imaginative process and potentially cheapen the medium by suggesting a sort of inadequacy. This is Exhibit A.

The other category of book trailers, one that Rachel Arons, author of The Awkward Art of Book Trailers for The New Yorker , seems to favour, is the kind in which the author embarks on a postmodernist metaphysical pitch. The kind in which they oh-so-cleverly insert themselves in the trailer. Either in an apparently hilarious reversal of roles (author John Wray interviews actor Zach Galifianakis, who is portraying — wait for it — author John Wray) or they hatch heinously elaborate plots to make what I call the ‘non book trailer’. BJ Novak’s One More Thing , for example, set up as a faux French movie, or actor Aasif Mandvi ‘rallying’ his mates to be in his promo video. This last also features another (American?) book trailer trend — the ‘oh, look at my many celebrity friends’ promos. You might argue that Mandvi’s involvement in showbiz justifies his star-studded soirée. Yet there’s Russian-American satirist Gary Shteyngart, who Arons calls “the leading book-trailer auteur of our time”. His mini-movies parody the absurdities and humiliations of authorly self-promotion (yes, funny), but with the help of… James Franco, Rashida Jones, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Alex Karpovsky, and even Jonathan Franzen. Who could possibly compete with promos like that? Especially if all you have at your disposal is stock footage, bad sound effects, and text-presentation flourishes reminiscent of PowerPoint.

One can’t help but feel that while these visual forays make for highly entertaining after-lunch distraction, something ultimately has been lost: the book itself. I find that I’m drawn to book trailers that focus on text, interplaying that with fittingly captivating imagery. Ones that shun the awful Voice of God in favour of an author’s own voice reading their own work. Excerpts from Zadie Smith’s NW , for example, populate stills of bustling Camden Town. Blackbirds and Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig arranges words at creative angles to accentuate the writing’s cadence. My absolute favourite, though, would be the Italian Einaudi’s trailer for Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage . Sparse line drawings melt and merge, accompanied by a measured voiceover and excellent use of sound. It made me want to read the book even though I haven’t picked up a Murakami in years. That, surely, is a book trailer’s simplest, highest accolade.

( Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse. )

Follow her on Twitter >@janicepariat