From the get go, eBook trailers were a fascination to me for obvious reasons. Anybody who has been heavily into painting, photography and sculptures is going to find trailers a natural extension-- not only to view other people's but to create their own. I loved all the imagery I could potentially find to depict parts of a story. It has been more like playing than work.
The problem is trailers need to also be thought of as marketing tools. It's fine to play with them, and I still enjoy creating the longer ones as kind of a love song to my stories; but they are an advertisement-- pure and simple. They are for the reader with the intention of letting them know what your book is about. It's great when people enjoy them as purely an art but their basic purpose (and there are many kinds of trailers beyond movie and book) is to sell or promote something.
A trailer is about images but more than that it is about energy. The first task then for the creator of a trailer (which often is a paid professional) is to find the energy of what the trailer is to promote. The creator has to know that or their trailer will fall flat.
I didn't fully understand this when I began creating them. I have come to believe it's not so much about what happens in the story, not even the main points, but what will the reader feel and with what will they be left when they read the last word? A trailer has the goal of answering that question.
So in creating trailers for the last contemporary which is not yet out (but will be by the end of June), I got back into recreating them for the eBooks already out where their trailers were too long or missed the mark.
Here's the shorter, more snappy version for my Kindle eBook-- Moon Dust.
For those who hate YouTube (something that is beyond my understanding as to why that would be), I also put the trailer on Picasa at Moon Dust
