When I began promoting Talion, I noticed book trailers were hot. I found dozens on You Tube, thirty-second or one minute ads with authors talking about their books or music and visuals to evoke the book’s atmosphere. I thought Talion deserved a trailer too. And I knew right away what it would be. In my novel, Conrad (Rad) Sanders, a serial killer, visits the grave of a victim to remember their night together. My trailer would be a sequence of cemetery shots with a voiceover reading the passage and creepy music playing in the background.

I looked online for a video artist to transform my idea into reality and found it would cost far more than my budget allowed. Disappointed, I knew I should forget the whole thing. But I couldn’t quite do it. The book trailer would be a highly dramatic and visual way to call attention to my novel, and I was proud of my concept. I hadn’t seen any trailers like the one I imagined for Talion. I decided to make it myself. Sure, I had zero experience in making videos. But my husband, Joe, a film professor, had taught filmmaking for years. He would show me how.

I already owned one essential piece of equipment, a Vado mini-cam that I’d bought on sale. It’s not much of a camera, but it does shoot high-def video. One lovely spring morning, I took it out to the local cemetery and shot footage for my book trailer. I rushed home, downloaded the shots onto my desktop, and asked Joe to look at them. I was mortified at what he saw. Surely my hands weren’t that shaky. I had to stop drinking so much coffee. And every single shot ended with a long and pointless pan, as though something off to the side kept drawing my attention.

“I suck,” I said.

“This shot is interesting,” Joe said, pointing to a tree shadow falling across a fresh grave. As for the others, he just shrugged. “If this is what you have, this is what you work with.”

No way, I thought grimly. I bought a small tripod and returned to the cemetery.

My second attempt at camerawork yielded more promising results, and I decided to plunge ahead and purchase editing software. This was the moment of commitment. So far I’d only spent a few bucks on the tripod. Now I was poised to lay out serious money. If I bought the software and never made the trailer, Joe would never let me forget it.

Joe laid down the rules. First, I had to make a storyboard laying out the shots of my book trailer and matching them to the voiceover narrative. Then I had to make a rough cut in Premier Pro. My trailer should be 60 seconds long precisely, Joe told me, like an ad on TV.

“But why?” I insisted. “You Tube doesn’t have rules about the length.”

“People get bored if it’s too long,” Joe said. “Besides, you got to work within a form. You got to have some artistic discipline.”

Okay, I understood that concept.

Working on my storyboard, I soon realized the passage from Talion would take longer than sixty seconds to read, so I shortened it. Then shortened it again. I began to see interesting relationships between the narrative and the images, which helped me to choose which shots to include and suggested how they might be arranged. I finished the storyboard and made the rough cut, trimming the shots and placing them in sequence in Premier Pro. Joe said the rough cut should run about 90 seconds. Mine ran close to three minutes. It was extra rough.

Watching it play on Premier Pro, I realized the string of images lacked coherence. I shuffled shots around – removing some, adding others – until my original storyboard was no more than a memory. I went back to the unused clips for more material and rediscovered all my reasons for not using them in the first place. I needed more. Finally, I drove to a tiny church cemetery in the country and shot the footage to complete my grand vision. After further tinkering and trimming, I had a rough cut that looked okay.