How I Made Four Book Trailers With AI and No Sleep.

Let me tell you what making a book trailer actually looks like from the inside.

Not the finished version you see on the website. Not the polished cut with the dramatic music and the cinematic shots. The real version. The 2 a.m. version, where you're on your fourteenth attempt to get an AI to generate a character who looks the same in two consecutive scenes and instead you get a man with three hands and a horse with the face of a disappointed accountant.

That version.

Before AI tools existed, I looked into hiring a production company to create a three-minute trailer for one of my books. The quote came back at nearly $8,000. The timeline was eight months. After eight months and what felt like an eternal 2% completion rate, the project was scrapped entirely. Eight thousand dollars, eight months, and nothing to show for it except a lesson about what the traditional route actually costs independent creators.

Today, I have built four trailers and counting. Total spend? Roughly $1,000 across all of them. That is not a typo. A fraction of the original quote — and in this case, a fraction means spending one dollar for every eight you would have spent before. That is what AI has done for independent creators operating on real-world budgets.

But let me be honest about something the highlight reels never show you.

AI is extraordinary. AI is also absolutely not where it needs to be yet.

The tool stack I used across these trailers included Midjourney for image generation, Kling and Seedance 2.0 for video, Claude and ChatGPT for scripting and creative direction, CapCut for editing, and Photopea for image work. Each one is genuinely impressive on its own. Getting all of them to work together, in sequence, to tell a coherent visual story with consistent characters across scenes?

That is where the sleepless nights live.

The single hardest technical challenge was character and scene consistency. AI image generation does not automatically remember what your character looked like in the last frame. You are not directing a human actor who walks from one shot to the next looking like themselves. You are negotiating, prompt by prompt, trying to describe the same face, the same build, the same energy, across dozens of individual generations, hoping that this time the tool holds the thread. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you get someone who shares a vague spiritual resemblance to your character and has an entirely different jawline.

Then there is the editing. The sound design. The action sequences. The music timing. Each one its own discipline, each one something I had no formal training in, each one something I had to figure out in real time at hours of the night that should not legally exist.

In the process of making these trailers, I became, without anyone asking my permission or offering additional compensation, a writer, a movie director, a production assistant, a storyboard artist, a casting director, a cinematographer, a voice-over coordinator, a sound engineer, a music supervisor, a color grader, an editor, a visual effects coordinator, a continuity supervisor, a marketing strategist, a thumbnail designer, a render farm operator, a coffee runner, a person who talks to their laptop at 3 a.m. like it owes them money, and on at least three occasions, a licensed grief counselor for myself.

The coffee runner role, I will note, was the most consistent. The pay was terrible but the hours were the same as everything else, which is to say, all of them.

And yet.

When the final cut comes together — when the music hits the right moment, when a scene you spent six hours generating lands exactly the way you saw it in your head, when you press play and for the first time it feels like a real trailer for a real film — there is nothing quite like it. Not because it was easy. Because it wasn't. Because you built it anyway, with tools that weren't perfect, on a budget that wasn't generous, at hours that weren't reasonable, wearing hats that nobody issued you.

That is what independent creating actually looks like in 2026.

AI did not make it easy. It made it possible. And for a writer with a story worth telling and a budget that lives in the real world, possible is everything.

All four trailers are available to watch at www.troysbooksandtales.com.

Baekjeol Bulgul — Unbroken is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.