Harnessing AI for Book Promotion Videos

I’ve been working to create book promotional videos for all my novels, and to date, I’ve created two. One for My Brother’s Keeper and the other for Event Horizon. Both are out on YouTube and can watcher by clicking Here for Event Horizon and Here for My Brother’s Keeper.

But that still leaves three books to create them for.

Now, I could do what I did with both of the others and take a low tech approach (It worked beautifully for them).

But, hey. When you make your living using hi speed computers and networks, why not leverage technology.

I know AI has gotten a bad rap, but it is a tool. And if you don’t have the money to go out and hire a movie production team, you do the best you can.

So, several months ago, I set out to start harnessing the image portions of it. I’ve created all my covers using AI, now I’m working to bring them to life.

So, I started work on learning to add motion to an image. The thing with doing this is you get pretty much what you ask for.

Back in the old days, we had a term for this when requesting data from a computer called GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out). That’s very true of AI. It will give you what you ask for rather than what you want. So what you get at the end of the day, might not be what you think you wanted.

So, that said, I took the cover of The Cross and the Badge and started running it through some AI software to give it motion. This is a “free” tool, and while it could have been better, it’s a start.

So, here’s the image I started with.

It shows Will standing on a hill top next to a large rugged looking, wooden cross (that actually exists up above the small placita of Mogote)

He’s just gotten home from the Gulf War, is new with the Sheriff’s office as their first detective in almost a hundred years, and is looking out trying to decide what to do next.

And here’s the video. It’s only a 3 second thing, and what I want to have happen is this: “Man walks in from off camera and up next to the cross. We never see his face. He reaches out and touches the cross and then turns to stand next to it. He looks out over the landscape. His head moves occasionally”. What I’m aiming for is a 30 second piece of film. Since this is free, I get 100 credits a day towards the project. I need 720 to do it the way I want. That means by Sunday or Monday, I should be able to shoot the whole thing.

I’ll probably spring for the $10.00 a month for get the “No watermark version.”