Emily Craven's brilliant idea for indie-published authors

I recently connected with Barbara Strickland and had a look around, and a read of, her blog Amorina Rose and the world of writing. There's useful stuff there, and I recommend the site; one link for example lead me to Emily Craven's e-Book Revolution blog, which again has lots and lots of useful information for Indie and self-publishers.

One item for example, happened just as I was discovering the world of book tubers, and found me in an especially receptive frame of mind. So, with that little intro, here is me explaining Emily's brilliant idea, from my point of view:

And just to highlight what people say about video, after I uploaded that to Youtube and shared it to Facebook and so on, I got more comments on the video at Facebook than I've received to any of the drier blog articles here. Which in my mind reinforces the idea that video is more engaging. It reinforced something which Lama Jabr of Xana Publishing & Marketing pointed out in one of her workshops: that Amazon make it easy for authors to include some videos on their Amazon author page.

I think video and text serve very different ends, though there can be a large overlap in the middle (depending on the content, naturally), and each has their pros and cons, but certainly for many kinds of communication, video is far more engaging.

Oh, I should probably add a tip, courtesy of film maker and copywriter Tim Lea (who I met at Book Expo Australia 2015): Google (the Youtube part) and Facebook are very much at war for mindshare in the video space (see his blog: "The Bloody Battle between Facebook and YouTube Part 2"). I think he had figures showing that more video was watched on Facebook than Youtube this year (though he observed that the picture is more complicated than that).

Anyway, Tim Lea's tip, if you want to maximise your brownie points with Facebook and Youtube, is to upload your video directly to each, independently. Don't just upload to Youtube and then link to it from FB: FB won't reward you for doing that. That was just one tip in an interesting talk he presented on some commercial opportunities for writers, related to video. He points out that if the video has dialogue, then it's probably going to benefit from having a writer involved! He shared his presentation with me, and I've made it available here:

(Incidentally, I found how to embed the PDF from here: How to Embed a PDF or Other Document Files in Blogger post. If you see advice where the html code ends with "view?usp=sharing", replace that by "preview" if you want it to work!)