There are countless opportunities on YouTube for authors to reach new audiences through content focused on the "business behind writing" and personal life updates. Discover how authors can start building their YouTube strategy and reach their audiences.
YouTube offers great opportunities for authors to promote their books. Explore some of the best practices below!
There are many opportunities on YouTube for authors to get to know their audiences and build a community of readers that support their writing and creativity. Talking about the business side of writing is a great starting place for authors who want to cultivate a presence on YouTube– put on your favorite shirt, grab your nearest book, and start recording to meet your readers on YouTube.
You’ve spent months, perhaps years, crafting a book that is now ready to be in the hands of your readers. Among your many options for marketing and promoting, you may have considered starting an author YouTube channel. There are lots of benefits to be found as authors build a presence on the platform, particularly considering that it’s the second-largest search engine and second-most-used social platform, right after Facebook. YouTube offers writers more exposure, better engagement, and increased readership, all on a platform that is free to use. Bringing your stories and your author brand to life through YouTube content will ultimately help you to connect to new readers. Many authors don’t know where to start with creating a YouTube channel; Read this article to discover the best practices for authors on YouTube.
Methods
There are countless ways to approach content creation on YouTube for authors; in order to determine what kinds of content are currently most effective, I selected three successful authors on YouTube—Brandon Sanderson, Alexa Donne, and The Creative Penn—and evaluated the engagement for each of their 10 most recent videos. I developed a codebook (see codebook below) to categorize their content by topic. To ensure the reliability of the codebook, both I and an independent coder categorized the list of 30 data points, resulting in a highly reliable Cohen’s kappa score of 0.828.
Codebook
Results
I found that content focused on “the business side of writing” and recorded podcast episodes/audiobook chapters made up more than half of the data and consistently received over 10% engagement. Honorable mention topics include updates on the author’s personal life, sneak peeks for upcoming publications, fandom canon reveals and even random videos discussing things like the author’s favorite video games.
So What?
While preparing a YouTube content strategy for their new channel, authors should consider these topics as things that their audiences may find interesting. This group of consumers is seeking two primary things: insight into the work behind writing, and updates on the personal life of the author.