Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller has a piece called “Never coming to a screen near you: Why promoting books with movie-style trailers is a silly idea.” Here’s a snippet of her argument:

Alas, Web videos are even more numerous than books, and as with books, the vast majority of them go unwatched and uncelebrated. A few manage to command that most mysterious of all magical powers, word of mouth, and become sensations, but that kind of success is as impossible to force as an “Oprah” booking. In the meantime, an author’s energies have been funneled into a project that’s unlikely to yield many results.

Here is an example:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chqggKw_Ds&feature=player_embedded