Yes, I finally gave into the pressure to produce a trailer, worked out how I would do a trailer for my book, researched it, and am mostly done (translated “waiting for someone else to email me something”).

Here is my recipe for creating a trailer:

• First, I downloaded Microsoft live Movie Maker for FREE. It’s part of Windows Live Essentials: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials?lc=1033 It was disgustingly easy to use and dummy-friendly. It was fun, and you just plunk everything in there with the “Insert photo” button. You can add effects and text and everything right there and export it in multiple formats.
• Then I spent hours and hours finding photos for my trailer. Literally. Hours and hours. These are the kind of hours and hours where you say, “Hey! How can it be 7:30 already?!!?” It is VERY important that you find royalty-free photos, unless you want to get sued or pay royalties.
• I came up with three sites where I got my photos: http://www.sxc.hu/ Has a selection of free and paid photos. For the free photos you must check and see below the pic whether the photographer wants credit or permission to use their photos. I just picked ones that wanted neither. The paid photos on SXC redirect you to istockphoto (below).
• http://www.dreamstime.com/ These are also paid and free photos, but the free ones are really free and don’t require that you check the photographer’s permissions. The paid photos are about the same price as istockphoto’s paid photos. Both sites require you to purchase points or a subscription to buy their photos. DON’T BE FOOLED. Each photo does NOT cost only one point.
• and http://www.istockphoto.com/ This is only paid photos. Their subscription is (at the time I wrote this) $18.99 for 12 points, which bought me 2 medium-sized photos and one large. The pics do NOT cost one point each, and two that I did not buy cost 30 points!!! If you can find them free, use those. Totally.
• I encountered a problem finding a picture of people fighting. All the stock photo of people fighting is cheesy ham shots of men in business suits punching at each other or boxers. I needed a brawl. http://ectopicleiron.blogspot.com/2011/01/fist-fight.html was where I found one, and after extensive searching with no clue as to where the pic came from, I decided to go for it. There were no other choices, really. If this is your blog and I’ve stolen your photo, please contact me for an apology and to let me know if I can use your photo for my trailer. When I tried to comment on the post and ask you that way, it said I wasn’t allowed.
• For music, I just emailed my dad, the composer with a Masters in music. (You should do that too. It’s really easy and cheap.) But if your dad isn’t a composer, you can contact mine: cdbarker@comcast.net . It won’t necessarily be so cheap for you, I’m afraid. Sorry!
• If you need free music immediately, you impatient thing, go to this beautiful site: http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/tips/freemusic.htm. I particularly liked their link, http://www.soundclick.com/business/license_list.cfm and found a song there in case Dad didn’t have anything. (But he did. Neener.) WARNING: there is a lot of kooky stuff on musopen. Don’t worry, though, your music isn’t one of the kooky ones, user of musopen who is reading this post. It’s all those other people’s music that is kooky.

And, really all the rest was tweaking the text and pictures and music and stuff (incredibly easy but time-consuming) with Movie Maker. As soon as it is ready, I’ll put it up here and you’ll see if you want to follow my recipe for a trailer or not…