Hypable was on set for the Bloodlines trailer shoot for Richelle Mead’s highly anticipated novel The Fiery Heart.
The Fiery Heart book trailers star Daisy Masterman and Nic Wheeler as Sydney Sage and Adrian Ivashkov, who you can see in the 13 behind-the-scenes photos we recently released.
The Fiery Heart is the fourth novel in Richelle Mead’s Bloodlines series. Hypable was lucky enough to score an advanced copy, and you can check out our spoiler free review for all of the details.
Book trailers have become bigger productions in recent years, and The Fiery Heart will have six separate trailers prior to the book’s November 19 release.
The first book trailer will be released on October 7 at 7pm ET in America, or October 8 at 10am Eastern DST in Australia. Each of the six trailers will be released at this time, one a week for the next six weeks.
This year, the team at Penguin Australia also filmed a set of reaction GIFs with the two lead actors, which fans will be able to use once they have read the new book. We can certainly see those being put to good use on Tumblr. The first GIF was released this week.
Why the big deal? It’s not a film, it’s just a book
Over the past few years, book trailers have become steadily bigger productions. In the past, it was relatively common for a book trailer to involve some text quotes superimposed over a stock photo that the publicist thought was relevant to the book.
Those types of trailers have faded away in recent years, because fans have demanded more. Book trailers now range from the animated, to those filmed with actors but without dialogue, and full theatrical productions like on Bloodlines.
We asked Penguin Young Readers marketing manager Felicity Vallence why Penguin Teen Australia went to all this effort. “We’re as passionate about both the Vampire Academy and Bloodlines series as the fans, sometimes even more so. From the initial word trailers and the amazing response we received, we were always looking at ways to take the trailers to the next level and reward the fan enthusiasm.”
Vallence, who supervised the production of the trailers, added “the books are so visually dynamic, and one of the amazing strengths of Richelle’s writing, is she can really set a scene that you can easily imagine as a movie or TV show – so we took this idea and ran with it. Having a cast actually create some of Richelle Mead’s epic scenes, seemed like a perfect way to bring the VA/Bloodlines world to life.”
There’s always the danger when casting trailers like this for there to be backlash from the fans. As observed by Daisy Masterman, “it’s hard to try to live up to the expectations of everyone’s imagination because everyone is going to have different ideas of how their image from the book should be brought to life.” Nic Wheeler agreed, saying his portrayal of Adrian was based on “not only what I expect, it’s what other people expect too.”
So yes, the trailers are a publicity strategy. But they are also a reward for a hugely dedicated and motivated fan base. We all get excited about TV show trailers, and film trailers – so what is wrong with getting excited for a book trailer? As with everything, we have to wait for the final product to make our final decision, but a little anticipation along the way never hurt anybody.
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