(the part where I share my epic fails so hopefully you won’t make the same mistakes)

I got a wild hair up my butt the other night (after watching a trailer for particularly interesting looking book) and thought that it would an absolutely FABULOUS idea for me to make a book trailer for In Plain Sight. I mean, how freaking cool would that be?!!!

I will fully admit that I was overly excited and totally didn’t think any of this through before I sent off the request to the random guy on FIVRR (who had the highest number of positive reviews). The first mistake, besides my failure to employ any sort of critical thinking skills, was choosing “expedited delivery” – meaning I wanted this bad boy in my hands within 24 hours. I mean, really this is what this person does, how hard could it be? (I know, I know… I’m an ass. It’s super freaking hard to do it right. But… EXCITEMENT!!!)

Bless his heart, he tried. And though I really wanted to be mad, as I watched the first video he sent me in a kind of horrified silence (the burning roses were particularly delightful… NOT), I realized almost instantly that it was entirely my fault. I mean, yeah, it was a total travesty, but at the same time, given the difficulty of what I was actually asking for, it was probably about the best he could do in less than a day. So being pissed wasn’t an option and I briefly considered just accepting the video as it was and writing the whole thing off as “lesson learned.” Because one of the things I finally realized – harsh light of day and all that – is that trying to come up with a video to accurately represent the Civil War era (in particular), along with the other elements of my story, on a minuscule budget (I’m cheap so sue me), all in less than 24 hours, is nearly impossible. So I’d totally set him up for failure. Oops, my bad.

However, I did have some revisions built into my “contact” (such that it was) so as a last-ditch, I contacted him and was like, ok, I’m so sorry but… ummm… that’s not really what I was looking for. I followed that with a laundry list of more specific feedback, and a few things that I probably should have included the first time I messaged him. What?! Pretty sure we’ve already established that it was late and I wasn’t thinking! XD Thankfully, he agreed to do some editing without adding any additional charges. Whew!

The finished product still isn’t necessarily near to an idealized version of what I might have wanted, though honestly, I think that would have been difficult to pull off even with a decent budget – short of actually making my own mini-movie, which obviously isn’t something I’m able to do at this time – but at least it does get the point across.

Anyway, let me know what you think of it.

The moral of the story though, is it’s definitely worth it to take the extra time to fully think through your projects before rushing to get them completed. No matter how excited you are, if you fail to cover all your bases in the beginning, odds are you will be disappointed in the end. 😉