Summary: Because he really likes to chase shiny pennies, Sean has been flogging himself for almost two years now about not using YouTube and video in general more to publicize his fiction. Don't worry, I told him during the course of the show that he was being a neurotic douchebag because it's not like he's been eating chips and sitting on the couch… he's been writing ten fucking books a week or something as well as about a zillion other things. But then I realized that despite Sean's neurosis, video really kind of is something we authors should all be doing more of. Brainstorming on how to trick Dave into doing it for us began. Johnny gets fat I started this one off by proudly announcing that thanks to the inspiration and motivation and masterminding that these weekly podcasts give me, I've just completed a new novella called Fat Vampire, about a man who is turned into a vampire while overweight and out of shape, and who consequently clashes with the chic, thin, stylish, washboard-abs-and-salon-hair vampire set. I wrote it in eleven days, and thanked the drive I get out of the podcasts (not to mention the spark of the idea itself) for making it happen -- something I hope the rest of you are feeling from listening to us. Fat Vampire will be available in a few weeks. Meet Paul Wolfe Paul Wolfe, who Sean has known for a while now but has kept from us for some reason, has had some serious video-related success with his website where he teaches people how to play bass guitar. He's got almost 9000 YouTube subscribers to a string of videos about (shockingly) how to play the bass, 2.8 million views, and -- most importantly to us -- has built a 12,000 person mailing list almost entirely from traffic he's gotten from YouTube. The trick with how Paul uses YouTube and his YouTube channel is that he doesn't want to build his YouTube audience. Once someone is on one of his videos, his goal is to immediately get them off of YouTube… and onto his website, where he can build that list, engage with them, and whatnot. Paul gave us a lot of tips for how to maximize what we get out of putting our podcasts on YouTube, the biggest of which was to break our hour-long videos into more consumable, much shorter videos which are laser-focused on a specific topic. Now, we're talking to authors about self-publishing here, but on our Better Off Undead podcast, we talk to our readers… and we put those videos up on YouTube too. So with our Better Off Undead videos as an example, the lessons that follow apply to all authors who are trying to talk to readers via video. (Side note: If you don't have a video podcast like we do, you could still just record videos like this as stand-alones rather than clipping them out of longer videos like we could.) So if we talk about Stephen King's The Stand for five minutes during the course of a show, Paul suggested doing this: 1. Break that five minutes of us talking about The Stand out into a separate five-minute video. 2. Title it "Stephen King's The Stand" or "Why The Stand is awesome" or whatever, because those are the kinds of things people might search for or watch if they found. 3. Write the description such that keywords people might search for about "Stephen King" and "The Stand" appear and will be found in a search. 4. In the video, point people back to our site and/or a full version of the video on our site. 5. Then, let people find the video by searching, come to our site, fall in love with us, join our lists, and so on. We also talked about a bunch of other strategies authors can use to build their audiences with video. If you want the raw scoop on how to do all of this, be sure to visit Paul's marketing blog at OneSpoonAtATime.com. To view the video version of this episode, go to: Self Publishing Podcast #22 - Using Video for Publicity, with Paul Wolfe
