Time to swallow a bitter pill: book trailers don’t get much attention on YouTube. Can optimization help solve this problem?
On the topic of improving YouTube SEO, social media marketing guides such as Wordstream or Hootsuite normally recommend integrating two or more keywords naturally into video descriptions. This makes sense, you may be thinking, but given that a book’s only relevant keywords seem to be its title and author’s name, how does this advice help you to promote your book trailer more widely? Wouldn’t YouTube’s algorithm only recommend book trailers to people who are already searching for the book?
Even if you are asking this question, keep reading. This post will discuss two ways to use maximize keywords to improve a book trailer’s view count.
To investigate current practices of YouTube book marketers, I randomly selected 30 book-promoting videos from playlists found on the channels of Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Hachette, and I compiled the descriptions. In the process of looking for common tendencies, I noticed that most of the descriptions put book titles in all caps, and used a number of synonyms to describe both the book (e.g. “thriller”) and the author (e.g., “author and poet”). I then counted each instance of all three variables across my list and compared my numbers to the numbers of views each video got.
I found that 80% of the descriptions put the book title in all caps. However, this turned out not to be a large contributing factor; as noted by Jane Williams of the Houston Chronicle, algorithms don’t actually take capitalization into account.
Interestingly, the synonyms did play a legitimate part. I found that 83% the video descriptions used at least one synonym for the book titles and for the authors in the descriptions, and a third used two or more. Interestingly, videos with two or more author synonyms gained the greatest average views, while videos with only one book synonyms seemed to perform the best in that category.
Overall, my findings show that book publishers can potentially increase the views of their book trailers by trying some of the following strategies:
- Use at least two or three author synonyms. Even simply writing “author” before the name helps. If you can include “bestseller” or other accolades, all the better.
- Use book synonyms somewhat sparingly (i.e., it’s best to stick to one). Some book videos gain attention through reputation alone, whereas others may attract more views from the use of impactful synonyms like “thriller.”
Since every book is different, optimizing book trailers like this is tricky. These tips should at least help you experiment. It’s all about getting the book and author recognized by the algorithm and pointing specific demographics to the books they would most enjoy.