Video content is an excellent way for authors to reach new audiences, who frequent platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Vimeo. Book trailers, narrated videos, and reels of writing advice have become an incredibly useful way to market yourself. Here’s how to reach more readers.
Why Make Video Content?
Video reaches broad audiences, across multiple platforms where written content alone wouldn’t reach them. Book trailers, narrated stories, and writing advice add depth to your online personality (and marketing plan). It puts the multi in multimedia and expands your potential fanbase.
Do you scroll through YouTube (Shorts) or Facebook (Reels) for entertainment sometimes, rather than reading a story or article?
Viewers become fans.
The Potential Costs Compared
Upwork lists potential editors at $15 to $20 per hour, whereas Direct Images says professional editors can range between $75 to $150 per hour. Hiring video editors can be expensive.
However, video creation can also be DIY with practice. Learn editing techniques via courses (like Udemy, Alison, or YouTube), and tinker with editing tools.
If you lack patience and time, pay a professional; otherwise, learn how.
Using Basic Editing Tools
Editing tools allow authors to add basic effects (fade-ins, scene transitions, overlays, and voice-overs), as well as splicing scenes together. That’s the basics of creating video, whether you’re making a trailer or reading one of your stories into a USB-microphone.
Mobile editing tools are powerful, and for Android or iPhone there’s YouCut, Capcut, and Filmora. For for PC, there’s OpenShot, Kdenlive and Shotcut.
Your first attempt at it might not be a Spielberg-style gem, but you keep at it and get better just like writing.
Using Video
Webcams and smartphones (with addition like a USB-microphone) are base recording essentials. Sometimes you might also want to overlay someone else’s music, video, or images as part of your content.
For copyright purposes, source third-party multimedia from libraries with fair-use licenses from sites like Creative Commons, Pexels, and Shutterstock. Infringing content gets issued with takedown notices, and this is how you avoid the issue.
Video Hosting Platforms
Video hosting platforms are where audiences see your content, usually based on direct input, searches, or their suggestions (like marketing the tag “author” or “horror” to a user who searches both). YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook are three large video platforms with astronomical reach: start there.
Videos can be longer or made for bite-sized consumption in the Shorts or Feeds reels. Many influencers create shorter versions of a video, uploading to both timelines — and again broadening their potential video creation’s reach.
What Authors Could Create
Audiovisual content engages differently than written work and allows authors exploration into a whole new way to make things. If someone types your name into YouTube and finds nothing, you’re losing a potential audience member that you could have hooked into your channel!
What do you make? The answer is anything you want, and whatever you think viewers might enjoy. It’s a trial-and-error process, and the best gauge is making something that you yourself would find cool.
Author Martin Steyn created this book trailer for NB Publishers’ horror collection, which I was also featured in. The South African News created narrated content from my popular articles.
Also popular are narrated stories (and yes, you can hire voice-over artists online at Fiverr or Upwork), parodies, or writing advice in visual form.
Video is versatile, and audiovisual content has become a way to extend what’s written down. With some time and patience, authors can use video to reach their following and boost their reach.
About the Author: Alex J. Coyne is a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo, and the weird. Sometimes, he co-writes with others.
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