Teacher-Authors: What’s Happening on my Writer’s Blog

A lot of teacher-authors read my WordDreams blog. In this monthly column, I share a popular post with you on my teacher education blog, Ask a Tech Teacher. If you are subscribed to WordDreams, you’ve probably already read this!

I’ve used PowerPoint for all of my book trailers so far, following excellent directions from Diana Peach (see link under PowerPoint), but I want to change up the look in the last book of the trilogy, Dawn of Humanity so, I’m hunting for easy-to-use alternatives. Here are three I’m considering:

• Canva
• PowerPoint
• Windows’ organic video editor

In the brief discussions below, I include how-to steps and examples of work completed with them. The YouTube video in Canva and Windows is from one of my go-to tech ed voices, Richard Byrnes.

Note: I didn’t include popular options like iMovie and Animoto because they are familiar to most.

Some elements you see (like the images and music) may be part of the Canva Pro fee-based option

Here’s my latest trailer–for Natural Selection, to be published late October 2022–made in Canva:

PowerPoint is a great way to create a book trailer. I could go through all the steps, but fellow Indie author, Diana Peach, does it much better. Here are her step-by-step directions:

https://mythsofthemirror.com/2019/09/10/book-trailers-with-powerpoint/

Here’s the trailer I made for Against All Odds, using PowerPoint:

This is Windows replacement for the old Windows Movie Maker. I haven’t used it recently because options like PowerPoint and Canva are so much simply for a ludite like me!

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More options I found when I researched this article that you might be interested in:

• Adobe Spark
• Fiverr

If you aren’t yet to the point of selecting a recording tool, maybe wondering whether a book trailer is a good idea and how to organize one if it was, here’s a good short video from Reedsy:

What do you use for book trailers? I’d love to hear what works for you.

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Man vs. Nature saga, the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers, and the acclaimed Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is also the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, blog webmaster, an Amazon Vine Voice, and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. Look for her next prehistoric fiction, Natural Selection, Summer 2022