How much does a book trailer cost?

A book trailer costs anywhere from nothing to more than $20,000. Making one yourself in a template editor is free with a watermark, or about $9 to $29 a month. Hiring an author-services company for a stock-footage trailer runs about $250 to $2,000. A live-action production with actors costs $3,000 to $25,000 or more. An animated trailer made from your own pages in Nima's Long-form Video is made on a monthly plan metered in minutes of film, from as low as $10 per finished minute, and the first trailer is free.

Your first trailer is free.

Last updated 8 October 2026

The price bands

Those bands come from prices published by the people who sell trailers. For stock-footage trailers: BooksGoSocial lists $250 to $750 and $550 to $1,950, Authors Broadcast $395 to $995, and the production company Film 14 $600 to $1,750. For live action, Film 14 gives $7,500 to $25,000 and more, and The Author Central $3,000 to $15,000 or more. Beverly Boy Productions puts professional trailers at $1,000 to $10,000 per finished minute. Kindlepreneur sums the market up as $100 to over $5,000 depending on the scale of production. Template editors with book trailer pages charge by subscription: Veed from $9 a month billed yearly, Biteable $15 a month billed yearly, Kapwing $16 a month billed yearly. All of these were read on 1 October 2026 and will move.

What an animated trailer costs in Long-form Video

Films are made on a monthly plan metered in minutes of finished film: two, ten or a hundred minutes a month, with one, two or five rounds of notes on each film. Extra minutes are $10 each and never expire. That works out from as low as $10 per finished minute; the plans and their current prices are on the pricing page. Film length follows the text at about 150 words a minute with the narrator on.

Two things are free: the reading, in which Nima maps your scenes, cast and places before you pay anything, and one trailer per account, 15 to 20 seconds, fully animated with voices and music.

What changes the price

• Length. It is what the minutes are spent on. A 60-second trailer is about 150 words of your text.
• The narrator. With the narrator on, every word is read and the film is longer. With the narrator off, only the dialogue is heard and the same scene runs shorter.
• Notes are included. You can leave as many notes as you like in each review round.
• Extras. A title card, your own artwork or your own voice are arranged on request, at hello@nima.mov.

What you should get for the money, from anyone

Whoever makes your trailer, ask the same questions before you pay. Are these my characters or stock actors? Do I approve the look before the final version? How many rounds of changes are included? Do I get a widescreen file and a vertical one? Who holds the licence for the music?

In Long-form Video the answers are: your characters, drawn from your text; you approve the look, the cast, the voices and a full draft; one to five review rounds on the draft, by plan, with unlimited notes in each; widescreen and vertical files; and music can be added.

Is a book trailer worth it?

Book trailers earned a mixed reputation, and it helps to know why. The one reader survey we could find is from 2012: the author Debbie Ridpath Ohi asked 104 readers, and 46% said a trailer had influenced a purchase they were already weighing. Kindlepreneur describes the trailers of those years as "pretty ineffective and costly". They were stock-footage slideshows that cost hundreds of dollars and sat on a web page.

What has changed since is where readers find books. Publishers Weekly reported that about 59 million print book sales in 2024 could be tied to BookTok-related influencers or content, according to Circana BookScan. Short video is where the attention is.

So the question has changed too. A trailer can now be a scene from your own book, with your own characters speaking, made for little or nothing and posted where readers already are. Make one, post it, and let the numbers tell you what your readers respond to.