Friday Guest: Sarah Allen

Before I introduce today's guest blogger, I am being interviewed over on Joanne Faries blog Word Splash - and then next Friday, she's popping here to be interviewed by me. I'd love you to come and see me on Joanne's blog, after you've read Sarah's post, of course!



And now, please welcome Sarah Allen to my blog. If you haven't visited Sarah's blog, From Sarah, With Joy, she's been experimenting recently with video poems and vlogging, so I invited her here to explain why.

YouTube for Writers

by Sarah Allen

So we all know that YouTube is this huge, monstrously popular thing. It has how many hits every day? How many hours of video uploaded every second?

Writing is not a visual medium, like art or video. But I think if we are completely serious about building a satisfying, successful, creative career, YouTube is a resource we cannot afford to miss out on.

There are two reasons why:

1. Creative output. YouTube is, simply put, another place to be creative. Absolutely ANYTHING you’re interested, you can use in conjunction with YouTube. Children’s books, poetry, gaming, cooking, gymnastics. All of it can be made into a video, and a pretty cool video too with only limited editing skills.

So be creative. I think people get intimidated and scared at the thought of making videos, but it doesn’t have to be scary at all. If you need help editing, find someone to teach you. If you don’t like being in front of the camera, put someone else in front of it. Just take a camera around with you to your kids dance competitions or your day at the zoo and find a creative way to make a video out of it.

2. Marketing. So basically the only more popular sites than YouTube are Facebook and Google. Again, not a resource to take lightly. Writers like John Green have a gigantisourus YouTube following, which feeds directly into book sales. We don’t have to do anything that serious, so don’t stress. But if we’re trying to catch fish, YouTube is a really, really big pond. Anything can help.

There are so many things you can do to reel in viewers and subscribers. Vlogging, gaming, cooking show, videopoetry, illustrate a childrens book and put it in video format. Be creative, be you. Then when you have a book come out, make a video letting your viewers know about it.

As with any marketing or creative project, keep this in mind: just do what you can, learn, work, don’t stress so much the fun goes away. Work at it a little at a time, and big things might happen. Especially with the decline in blogging, video is the new commons area. Find a way to make that work for you.

And besides, making videos really is fun

Sarah Allen

Bio:

Sarah Allen is a fangirl from Utah working on drafting her second novel, editing and submitting the first. She loves jazz, white chocolate and Colin Firth. Find more at her blog (http://fromsarahwithjoy.blogspot.com/) and YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/sarahthewriter1).