AI Book Trailer Generator
Turn your book into a 1080×1920 portrait MP4 trailer in minutes — sized for TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Pick Standard or Cinematic, then edit the AI's scene prompts until the trailer feels like your book.
Edit the AI's scene prompts & regenerate
These are the four prompts the AI used to draw your trailer. Tweak any of them and click Regenerate with my prompts to redraw — same token cost as a fresh generation.
What is an AI book trailer generator?
An AI book trailer generator turns the same handful of inputs that make up a book listing — title, author, cover, synopsis — into a short portrait video. No actors, no After Effects, no editing timeline. The AI picks four scenes that together arc through your story, generates the imagery, animates it, composes the music, and (optionally) narrates the opening line in a voice you choose. What used to be a $400 freelance gig is now a two-minute click.
Scrivibe's book trailer generator outputs a 1080×1920 portrait MP4 — the exact aspect ratio required by TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. There's no cropping, no letterboxing, and no exporting from another tool. You upload the file and you're live.
Why book trailers matter again in 2026
Book trailers were a quietly broken category for years — clunky 16:9 montages that nobody actually watched. Three things changed:
- Vertical video took over. TikTok, Reels, and Shorts pushed billions of viewers into a portrait-first habit. A book trailer that's 1080×1920 doesn't ask the algorithm for a favor — it fits.
- BookTok and Bookstagram became real bookstores. A 30-second portrait trailer routed through the right hashtag now sells more units than a $500 banner ad ever did.
- AI imagery caught up. Modern image and video models can draw a believable cinematic frame from a one-sentence prompt — which is exactly what a book trailer is, four times in a row.
TikTok surpassed 1 billion monthly active users in 2021 — a milestone the company confirmed in its own announcement — and the #BookTok hashtag has accumulated over 200 billion views according to TikTok For Business data.[1] Sprout Social's 2023 Social Media Benchmarks Report found that vertical video achieves a 3× higher completion rate than landscape video on mobile — the format difference alone determines whether most viewers finish the clip.[2]
A modern AI book trailer generator turns those three shifts into a workflow an indie author can run from a phone in their lunch break.
How Scrivibe's AI book trailer generator works
Describe your book
Title, author, genre, and a few sentences of synopsis. The more vivid the description, the more vivid the trailer.
Pick a quality tier
Standard renders the four scenes as still images animated with cinematic Ken Burns motion. Cinematic adds Runway Gen-4 video animation on top.
Optional: tune mood & audio
Pick a visual mood, color palette, music style, and (registered users) an AI voice. Skip this entirely to use genre-aware defaults.
Generate, edit, regenerate
Standard takes ~2 minutes; Cinematic ~5 minutes. After the first draft, edit any of the four scene prompts and regenerate until it's right.
Specifications
| Output | Dimensions | Length | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portrait MP4 trailer | 1080 × 1920 px (9:16) | ~40 seconds | H.264 MP4 |
| Background music | — | full clip, ducks under voiceover | AAC |
| AI voiceover (optional) | — | opening sentence of synopsis | OpenAI TTS |
The 9:16 aspect ratio matches the native upload spec for TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Stories, and Pinterest Idea Pins. Use the same file on all of them.
Standard vs Cinematic — which should I pick?
Standard is the right tier for almost every author starting out. Four AI-rendered scenes are animated with subtle Ken Burns motion, mixed against genre-matched music, and optionally narrated. The result reads as a polished publisher trailer at a fraction of the cost.
Cinematic additionally runs each scene through Runway Gen-4 Turbo, producing 4–5 seconds of true video motion per shot — drifting clouds, breathing portraits, ocean swell. It's the right tier for a launch trailer, a BookTok ad campaign, or any video that has to compete with TV-quality content. If Runway has a temporary outage we automatically fall back to Standard and refund the price difference.
Tips for a great book trailer prompt
1. Give the AI a frame, not a plot summary.
"A teenage girl stands at the edge of a foggy dock, holding a brass key" is worth ten lines of plot exposition. The AI is a camera; point it at something.
2. Name the season, time of day, and weather.
"A summer afternoon in a wheat field" and "a winter night in an empty cathedral" produce wildly different first scenes. These three words compress thousands of visual cues.
3. Pick the music mood deliberately.
The same imagery feels romantic with an emotional score and ominous with a dramatic one. The mood control matters as much as the visuals.
4. Edit the closing scene most aggressively.
The closing shot is what viewers actually remember — and it's where your title and author name overlay land. Spend extra time on Scene 4 in the editor.
5. Iterate.
Generate a draft. Look at all four scenes. Edit the one that's furthest off. Regenerate. Repeat. Three rounds usually gets you to a trailer you'd actually post.
Scrivibe vs. other writing and planning tools
Scrivibe is an end-to-end eBook and media generator — it takes a premise and outputs a finished EPUB (and, with this tool, a finished MP4 trailer). The tools below are excellent writing workflow products, but they help you write the book yourself. The distinction is: write your book vs. have your book written.
| Tool | Category | What it does | Key difference vs. Scrivibe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scrivener | Writing software | Manuscript organisation and drafting environment for long-form writing projects | No AI generation; you write every word. No EPUB or trailer export. |
| Sudowrite | AI writing assistant | Suggests next sentences, rewrites prose, and brainstorms ideas alongside an author | Assists sentence-by-sentence; no complete eBook generation or EPUB output |
| NovelCrafter | AI writing workspace | Integrates AI writing assistance into a fiction-focused drafting environment | Drafting assistant; no end-to-end book or trailer generation |
| WorldAnvil | World-building wiki | Tracks lore, characters, maps, timelines, and world-building notes | Planning and organisation only; no AI generation or book output |
| Campfire Write | Story planning software | Visual tools for character arcs, timelines, and scene structure | Planning only; no writing, no AI generation, no EPUB or trailer |
| Mythril.io | AI storytelling assistant | AI-assisted story drafting with chapter and scene management | Drafting assistance; prose drafts only, not downloadable eBooks or trailers |
| Plotdrive | Plot structure tool | Guides authors through story structures, beat sheets, and plot outlines | Plotting only; no content generation beyond structure templates |
| Write In a Click | AI content writer | Generates marketing copy, blog content, and general written content | General content generation; not structured for multi-chapter books or EPUB |
| Saga | AI creative writing platform | Collaborative AI-assisted creative writing with branching narrative support | Story exploration and drafting; no automated EPUB output or video trailers |
Frequently asked questions
Is this book trailer generator really free?
Yes. New visitors receive a starter token grant on Scrivibe. A Standard trailer costs 20,000 tokens and a Cinematic trailer costs 50,000 tokens. Most visitors can generate their first Standard trailer without entering a credit card.
What format does the trailer come out as?
Every trailer is a 1080×1920 portrait MP4, roughly 40 seconds long, with background music mixed in. The 9:16 aspect ratio fits TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Stories without cropping.
What's the difference between Standard and Cinematic?
Standard renders four AI scene images and animates them with cinematic Ken Burns motion. Cinematic additionally runs each scene through Runway Gen-4 Turbo for true motion video. If Runway fails mid-call we fall back to Standard and refund the price difference automatically.
Can I edit the AI's scene prompts?
Yes — that's a defining feature of this generator. After the first generation we expose all four scene prompts (establishing, mood, theme, closing) as editable textareas. Edit any of them and click Regenerate with my prompts to redraw the trailer with your custom direction.
Do I keep the rights to my AI book trailer?
Yes. You hold commercial rights to every trailer you generate. Use it on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon Author Central, your Goodreads page, and any author marketing channel.
Does the trailer include voiceover and music?
Music is included for every trailer (mood-matched to your genre, ducked under the voiceover at ~25% volume). Voiceover narration is available for registered users — pick one of six OpenAI voices and the AI narrates the first sentence of your synopsis.
How long does generation take?
Standard trailers are usually ready in 90 seconds to 3 minutes. Cinematic trailers (with Runway video animation) typically take 4 to 7 minutes depending on Runway's queue.
How is this different from a generic AI video tool?
Generic AI video tools output landscape clips at arbitrary lengths. Scrivibe is purpose-built for book marketing: every output is locked to the 1080×1920 portrait shape that vertical-video platforms reward, the four-scene structure is calibrated for ~40 seconds (the sweet spot for BookTok completion rates), and the closing scene reserves negative space for your title overlay.
Ready to write the book that goes with your trailer?
Scrivibe doesn't just generate trailers — it can write the entire book. Multi-chapter manuscripts, EPUB export, and Amazon-ready everything.
Generate a full eBook