The 2026 price map for book trailers

  • $50–$300 — template trailers. Your cover and interior art panned over stock music, often with animated text. This is a slideshow with production values. It exists, it's cheap, and readers can tell.
  • $300–$800 — premium templates and light animation. Better music, better pacing, perhaps your character cut out and moved across the frame. The ceiling here is that nothing is truly animated in your style.
  • $500–$1,500 — custom animated scenes. The newest tier, and for children's books the highest value-per-dollar: real motion built from your actual illustrations. A 15–30 second cinematic scene of your character — usable as a trailer, a Reel, and a school-visit opener — sits here. Ours is $697, delivered in 7–10 days in all three formats.
  • $3,000–$8,000 — full cinematic trailers. Multiple scenes, story arc, licensed or original music, real editing. Ours start at $4,997. This is launch-event and press-kit territory.
  • $10,000+ — traditional studio trailers. Broadcast craft at publisher prices.

What actually moves the price

Length matters less than authors expect; fidelity matters more. The cost drivers are: whether your actual illustration style is analysed and matched (vs. a house template), how many scenes are built, whether music is licensed or original, how many delivery formats you get, and how many human review passes happen before you see it. A 20-second trailer done faithfully costs more than a 60-second template — and outperforms it everywhere.

The ROI arithmetic nobody shows you

A trailer isn't a luxury purchase; it's a door-opener, and doors have measurable value. Author school visits commonly pay $300–600 per visit — so a $697 scene that helps you book two visits has paid for itself before a single extra book sells. Meanwhile the same file works every day on social media, where video is the difference between being scrolled past and being watched. Judge trailer spend against the rooms it gets you into, not against the price of the book.

Three traps, from watching authors get burned

  • The launch-burner: buying cheap, posting it at launch, and making the first impression of your book a template. You get one launch.
  • The rights trap: providers who keep ownership of the trailer made from your book. The finished film should be 100% yours, in writing, always. Ours is.
  • The length trap: paying extra for 90 seconds. Attention on every platform dies well before that. 15–30 seconds is the working range; everything longer is for your launch event, not your feed.

The zero-risk way to price it for YOUR book

Before spending anything, see your own character animated. We do a free preview from your existing illustrations within 24 hours — no cost, no call — precisely so authors can judge the real thing instead of a price list. If the preview doesn't make you feel something, keep your money. It usually does.