By now, my preference for book trailers that actually show something happening—any kind of motion as opposed to static slideshows—should be sufficiently well-documented. I like this two-minute promotional video for Scott Heim's new novel, We Disappear, because it does a great job of setting an atmosphere: I've got just enough of an inkling about what's going on that I'm genuinely interested in learning more. "I've been wanting to make something like this for a while," Heim writes on his blog. "After a couple of potential collaborations fell through—collaborations with folks who know more about creating this sort of thing—I finally took the advice from the excellent Joseph [Gordon-Levitt] to just do it myself."

I'd like to be just as enthusiastic about the trailer for L.A. Outlaws (QuickTime file); in principle, the idea of T. Jefferson Parker driving around Los Angeles in a yellow convertible sports car, telling you about the inspiration for his latest novel, ought to work. But, OMG, I had to put the video on pause and wait several minutes before I was ready to take anything after that theme music seriously... and I think, too, just as a purely visual strategy, trying to combine footage of Parker sitting in a parked car, driving around in a car, and sitting in a studio is ineffective; some of his speeches could easily (especially considering that he went with a professional studio) have been converted to narration over additional driver's-eye footage of the city setting. Or, you might suggest, show us the characters instead of just telling us about them—although I'm not 100% sold on that one; if only because I'm not sure authors should necessarily want readers to have a concrete visual image of the story's hero, dislodging the version they'd created in their imaginations or maybe preventing one from forming...