The days of judging a book by its cover are drawing to a close. Publishers have finally tapped into the MTV generation, and now it is possible to make your literary choices in advance online by watching a sequence of rapid-fire images accompanied by a thumping score, big flashing words and, if you're lucky, a deep-voiced American talking about 'one man' and 'his quest to find meaning in a world gone mad'. Yes: there are now trailers for books and soon, according to Steve Osgoode, director of online marketing at HarperCollins Canada, they will be everywhere.
Turning literature into moving pictures is a risky business. So how does one go about representing a 400-page tome with delicate themes and complex characterisation in a 40-second video?
'It's a challenge,' admits Osgoode, who launched HarperCollins's internet-based 'book trailer' programme earlier in the year. 'Trailers work better for some titles than others, books that have really powerful and broad images associated with them.'
It is true that most of the book trailers so far are trying to sell titles such as Dark Destiny and Wild Rain - many of them produced by the American company Circle of Seven. But Osgoode's division has broken new ground by trailering high-profile works such as scientist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, one of the biggest literary debuts of the year.
'We wanted to capture the spirit of Londonstani without imposing the look of characters or anything like that on the reader. We weren't looking to create a cinematic version of the book.' The trailer consists of vibrant images of west London cut to a drum'n'bass soundtrack, and is clearly directed at an audience unfamiliar with the gritty streets of Hounslow. 'Gautam was delighted with it,' says Osgoode. 'Book orders all round have increased dramatically just based on the trailers.' They can be downloaded, and are also being tested out on cable TV and in Toronto cinemas.
Author Patrick Neate is sceptical. 'It's a noble effort but I'm not convinced it will work. Showing the Londonstani trailer in the cinema is OK, but on the internet it's slow to load and doesn't seem very well distributed. The thing that interests me more is what this says about publishing and the digital world. The book industry is always a decade behind. This seems to be a case of people saying, "There must be something we can do with the internet, so what is it?"'
If a trailer were made for one of Neate's novels, he says he'd question whether the marketing money could have been spent better elsewhere - buying table space in a bookshop, for instance. 'I'm sure something big is going to happen with publishing and the internet, but this ain't it.'
Ian McEwan is more positive. 'I haven't seen a book trailer yet but it doesn't surprise me that they exist. If someone made a trailer for one of my books with intelligence and honesty and wit, I'd have no objection.'
'I think I speak for all writers,' adds Malcolm Gladwell, 'when I say that I am delighted by marketing efforts of any sort.'
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