Jen A. Miller isn't exactly promoting her travel guide, The Jersey Shore: Atlantic City to Cape May, in this first installment of a video travelogue—oh, if only she had a copy of the book to hold up in one of those first segments! But the concept—taking the passionate authority that led you to write a book and putting it to work in another medium—is one that more nonfiction writers should keep in mind, especially those writers whose books are non-narrative and practical in nature.

Novelists can also take advantage of sheer force of personality when it comes to book trailers...

Irish novelist Marian Keyes appears to have been taking lessons from Meg Cabot in video presentation...

Keyes also finds comedy gold in sticking around after goodbyes and losing her passport; she also delivers a serious speech about her alcoholism.

These videos were uploaded to YouTube by William Morrow, and they may hint at the future of the HarperCollins digital studio and its plans to generate as many as 500 promotional videos annually. That future being a steady stream of two-camera setups on authors who stand in one spot, probably with a bunch of their books on shelves in the background. For some writers, that could work—it certainly seems to work for Keyes—but with such intensive production schedules, there's a real risk of slipping into a "house style" with diminishing returns.

(That said, if we ever do get to that future where Barnes & Noble and Borders have video monitors running throughout the store, Keyes's delivery is exactly the sort of simple but arresting material that could catch a browser's attention, in part because it doesn't require much in the way of visual enagement...)