A book trailer can cost anything from $10 to over $5,000. The price depends less on length than on three things: whether the visuals are stock footage or made for your book, whether characters speak, and how much of the work a person does. These are the price bands we found when we surveyed the market in November 2026.
| Type | Typical price | What you usually get |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace gigs (Fiverr, Upwork) | $10–$150 | AI or stock clips with text and music. Spoken dialogue and consistent faces are usually not included. |
| Self-serve AI tools | $29–$49 per book, or $20–$250 a month | A video generated from your blurb in minutes. You do the directing. |
| Small studios | $175–$1,000 | A scripted trailer with stock or AI visuals, music and sometimes a narrator, with review checkpoints. |
| Publishing-house packages and agencies | $2,000–$5,000 | A custom trailer, sometimes with live-action clips, often bundled with other marketing. |
| Live action | $3,000–$30,000+ | Actors, crew and locations. Rare outside traditional publishing. |
What drives the price
- Characters that stay the same. Generating one beautiful shot is easy. Keeping the same face, hair and clothes across twenty shots takes casting work and many retakes.
- Spoken dialogue. A narrator is cheap. Several characters speaking lines with their lips in sync is the most expensive part of an AI trailer.
- Original music. Licensed tracks are common and fine. A score that follows the cut costs more.
- Formats. A single widescreen file is cheaper than separate vertical, square and short versions.
- Revisions. Check how many rounds are included and what counts as a round.
How much should you spend?
The 2025 Written Word Media survey of indie authors found an average marketing spend of $636 a month, with authors earning $1,000–$5,000 a month spending about $478. A trailer you use for a year of social posts and ads fits inside one or two months of that budget. If you earn less than $100 a month from books, a teaser or a do-it-yourself tool is the sensible start.
Questions to ask before you pay
- Will the characters look the same in every shot?
- Do characters speak, and are the lines from my book?
- Which files do I get, and in which shapes?
- How many rounds of changes, and what happens if I don't like the first cut?
- Can I use it in paid ads, and for how long?
Our own prices are on the pricing page: $99 for a teaser, $690 for a full trailer with dialogue, and $1,690 for two films.