DEBORAH RANEY is at work on her eighteenth novel. Her books have won the RITA Award, the HOLT Medallion, National Readers’ Choice Award, ACFW Book of the Year, and the Silver Angel from Excellence in Media. Deborah is a two-time Christy Award finalist, and her first novel, A Vow to Cherish, inspired the World Wide Pictures film of the same title. Her newest books are the Clayburn Novels from Howard/Simon & Schuster.

Deb serves on the advisory board of American Christian Fiction Writers. She and her husband, Ken, have four children and enjoy small-town life in Kansas.

Yesterday's Embers

In April 2008, when my husband and I attended the Gideon Media Arts Conference and Film Festival in North Carolina, I was just beginning to hear a lot about Book Trailers. They were popping up with regularity on novelists’ Web sites, and my husband kept saying that I needed one to promote my new series with Howard/Simon & Schuster, the Clayburn Novels. At the Gideon conference, we met movie producer Cecil Stokes and learned about his Tentmakers Entertainment. One of Cecil’s productions, A Man Named Pearl, was a featured film at the Gideon, and Ken and I became big fans of Cecil’s work.

I was thrilled (and more than a little intimidated!) when, a month later, Cecil showed up as a student in my class on Writing Women’s Fiction at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. I got a chance to visit with Cecil during that week, and he revealed that he was working on a new project, BookPreviews, a company that would make Book Trailers for novelists. Cecil has a hugely generous heart, so he offered to do a trailer for my newest Clayburn novel, Yesterday’s Embers, as a way to build his portfolio for prospective clients.

With my trailer, Cecil tried something a little different from most Book Trailers. He used animation with paper cut-outs and various fonts. I think both the style and the music he chose to accompany the book preview fit my dramatic, issues-oriented women’s fiction stories quite well.

At the end of the video, we showed the covers for all three of the Clayburn novels so readers would be able to see the entire series together. Now that the third (and probably final) book is out, we’re seeing sales pick up for the first two titles again––a nice perk of writing a series.

Besides placing the video trailer on my Web site book page, we also posted it on YouTube and on my Facebook and ShoutLife pages. There’s really no way to measure how the trailer has affected overall sales, but I’ve received a lot of compliments on it and feel it’s another great way to promote my books.