A grayscale video depicting the troubled relationship between a father and a son announces the book Half The Night Is Gone by Amitabha Bagchi. Shots of an animated goat, interweaved with scenes from a gloomy forest set against an eerily deadpan narration, introduce us to Perumal Murugan 's Poonachi or The Story of a Black Goat. With similar short videos for Benyamin's Jasmine Days, Shubhangi Swarup's Latitudes of Longing and Anuradha Roy's All the Lives We Never Lived, the JCB Literature Prize recently introduced the five shortlisted novels in its inaugural edition.
The concept of making trailers to promote the written word is a tactic that has recently gained traction, and reflects the shifting demands of the literary audience in today’s times.
Interestingly, book trailers have been around longer than most of us realise. Way back in 2010, Russian-American satirist Gary Shteyngart pioneered the comical book trailer genre with his self-parody promotional video of his book Super Sad True Love Story. The video featured a fictionalised, over-the-top Russian stereotyped version of himself, and a smattering of well-known personalities (including James Franco). 2010 was also the year in which the book trailer for Rules of Attraction was released, long before the idea had solidified into an actual concept. Pressing fast forward on the timeline would flit by trailers like Lily Alone by Jacqueline Williams, or One More Thing by B.J. Novak of The Office fame.
In India, however, book trailers as a whole are yet to pick up steam—Chetan Bhagat’s promo for his new release The Girl in Room 105 is the first Indian video of its kind to cross the 1 million views mark within a month. Amish Tripathi is another Indian author who makes extensive use of this method of promotion. The cinematic preview for his work Scion of Ikshvaku was released in 2015, amassing about 1.8 million views since then. As most of the Indian literary community know by now, Scion of Ikshvaku has gone on to become a critical and commercial success, bringing Indian tales to a market inundated with just about every other mythology-centred series.
The rise of such a phenomenon provides much food for thought about the future of the written word as a whole. Some lament the fact that the literary world has reached the stage where it has to rely on aping the movie industry to gain publicity. It may be seen as ironic by many that the static world of printed letters has now begun to be promoted by moving images. As Jonathan Franzen says in his delightfully meta book trailer (about not wanting to make a book trailer): “You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book … To me, the world of books is the quiet alternative—an ever more desperately needed alternative.”
To see the two spheres converging in this form may seem inevitable to some people, considering the age that we are in. The internet is crucial for getting the word out about anything under the sun, and more and more authors are realising the necessity of using social media to engage with their audience. Much of the wonder of books lay in the imaginative process that came with it—the sky was the limit when it came to visualising the situations described on the pages. Indeed, the extensive realm of fanfiction alone shows how much can be perceived when one reads between the lines of a book. Book trailers seem like intrusions into this secluded world, telling the readers what to see in their mind’s eye when visualising the words. Just like that, a little bit of the magic is gone.
Of course, one cannot remain a Luddite and stay in a corner manically grasping their hardbound copy and swearing off the internet altogether. New promotional methods come with the times, and acceptance is part and parcel of the evolving nature of the literary world. It was bound to happen, perhaps, but acknowledging that it is happening is still painful. You may take a moment to mourn. And then check out some of the cool book trailer links given below.
