We are on BookTube! Are you?
You can find the Florida Authors and Book Lovers YouTube Channel here.
Wondering what #BookTube is, and why you should be on there?
Whether or not you're on TikTok and whether or not you like being on TikTok, BookTube might just be for you.
I want to start out with saying that I am a BookTube novice, and I still have so much to learn.
I only have a few subscribers on my personal BookTube channel, and it makes it so much harder to find motivation to post. I feel your struggle.
That's why most of the tips below come from my experience with my family's farm/gardening channel The Dancing Treetops Family Farm YouTube Channel, where I post regularly because we actuslly have subscribers.
If you take nothing else from the tips below, know that the hardest thing about starting any YouTube channel is to get started.
What is BookTube?
- BookTube is YouTube for #Booklovers similar to BookTok and Bookstagram.
- Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world?
- This means that if you have an active BookTube account, it'll make you more visible online as an author or a booklover/book reviewer.
- BookTube is Google
- If you're on BookTube you have the potential to reach new readers and new book-loving friends, but you also have the potential to express your love for books in new and creative ways, and the audience is much more far reaching and diverse in ages, cultures, countries of origin, etc than any other more limiting social media channel.
The Florida Authors and Book Lovers channel does not have a big number of followers, in fact it only has 3....yes THREE followers, and it was created recently to 1) help spread the word about the Florida Authors I meet, and 2) to put the videos in a place where I can download them so they don't take up space on my phone or laptop.
With that being said, the last short I recently put up has gotten 500+ views, which is the same as many shorts on my family's gardening channel The Dancing Treetops Family Farm YouTube Channel that has more than 1000 subscribers.
Still, starting out is the hardest. Which is why my author channel only has a few videos.
Below are a few YouTube/BookTube tips based on our success with the gardening channel.
BookTube Tips
- Get started
- Find your niche
- Think about your readers/your viewers. What videos would you like to watch about books? Yes, you can do book reviews, but you can do so much more than that?
- Do you want to post educational content? Are you a historic fiction writer? Do you write about witches? Do you write non-fiction? Romance? Do you want it to be a book lover's diary?
- Check out other BookTubers and get inspired.
- Make an introductory video and tag it to the top of your page.
- Use the #booktube hashtag plus a few others relative to your niche. (Look at the caption of other booktubers for inspiration)
- Put links to your social media and books in your YouTube channel's profile.
- Subscribe to other booktubers, view their content, and leave relevant comments on it.
- Post when you want, but know that the more often you post, the happier the YouTube algorithm will be with your content. On our gardening channel, we've found that our sweetspot is 2 videos and 1 short a week.
- You can earn money from being on BookTube. But you need to build up your subscribers and the watch hours. So focus either on videos or shorts because the watch hours needed depends on what type you post. It just takes one or 2 videos to hit it big to reach your watch hours.
- After you post your video from your phone, go to your laptop to the YouTube Creator Studio. This is where you can find all the analytics about your audience, see your progress towards monetization, and add extras to your own content.
- Create a thumbnail for your videos. (We use the FREE Canva app and love it.
- In the YouTube Creator's studio, upload your thumbnail to your video (see our gardening videos for examples...we've left a few videos without thumbnails, and they are much less visible)
- In the YouTube Creator Studio, set your language AND add tags in the show more section under Thumbnail (these are different, but have similar use as hashtags. Tags help drive viewers to your content.
- Once you have a few videos up, add an end card to your videos in the YouTube Creator Studio. This means you try to direct your viewer's to watch other content on your Bookatube channel instead of YouTube just sending them elsewhere. You can set it to a specific video, or do as we do on the gardening channel, set it to "Best for user" and "latest video". See the end of one of our gardening videos for an example.
There's so much more to say about Booktube, but for now, I'm going to leave you with GET STARTED.
lf you are an existing BookTuber, please leave us any BookTuber tips below.
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