If you’re a writer, struggling, emerging, or already successful, and you have not started a video marketing campaign yet, you should be prepared to launch one in the next thirty days. Why?
If you produce information, its a tough world out there. Humans produce more information in two days than in the history of the planet before 2004.* Think about that for a moment. Let it circle around your mind in that “how big is the universe?” kind of way. Let yourself be overtaken by it. Let it give you a chill. And… let it scare you too. Especially if you’re still doing things the way you were back in 2004. Close your eyes if that helps. Then come back here.
I’m not saying that you should view everything being produced today as your competition. Every great book, article, blog, or poem I read adds to my life, and adds to my own craft in immeasurable ways. However, if you want to grow your audience, and if you are producing great content (in whatever medium and genre you’ve chosen) you need to understand that all of this stuff being produced is competing with your work in a limited bandwidth. That bandwidth is the time each person has to absorb a small fraction of the information being produced.
Competition is okay.
First, most of the content being produced, by a large margin, is crap. And that’s okay because… well… some of it is mine, and some of it is yours too.
Second, as much as the information being produced is increasing, your potential worldwide audience is increasing too.
Third, the tools you need to make an impact on your potential audience have never been as easy to access and use as they are today.
Writers need to be more creative, more adventurous, more cunning than ever before. Your potential audience is not always going to be in the mood to invest a day to read a new book, or even to invest ten minutes in reading a blog post. But they may feel like spending a minute to watch a video. Or read a tweet, or look at a picture, or visit a Facebook profile…. The point is that you need to be there to capture their curiosity, their attention, and then their interest, when that moment comes.
I posted my first video on the internet back in 2004. It was horrible, but it was the best I could achieve with the tools I had at the time. And I met several people because of it, whom I would not have met otherwise. They found me, my books, and my website because of that one crappy video.
Today, technology is cheaper and much better than it has ever been before. I’d like you to take fifty seconds to watch this video I made for my upcoming novel, The Tanglewood Murders:
This video took about eight hours to make, and is the third version. While I did use Photoshop for the images, you don’t need Photoshop to make a video like this. I used GarageBand for the sound, my camera for the video, and iMovie to put all the pieces together. These three components were all on my MacBook when I bought it. No additional software needed.
Certainly it is not as good as the professional video Dave Fleet put online a few weeks ago. But it is certainly better than anything I could have achieved solo ten years ago.
So my point to you is this: If you have a book, why have you not made a video marketing trailer for it? If you have written a poem, why have you not made a video, reading your poem? If you’re a screenwriter, why have you not put at least few minutes of a storyboard onto video? If you write a blog, why haven’t you included at least one video marketing your blog, letting people see your face, or hearing your voice, to promote your website?
Here is the video I was talking about, by the way. I love it to pieces.
And by the way, like this video says, it would take 28 years, without sleep, to watch the videos uploaded to YouTube this week. Think about that. There might be something to this video marketing fad after all…
*Source Thornley Falls Communications (The folks who created that fantastic video.)
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{ 5 comments }
Well said Mr Weedmark but it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t respond with a caveat.
I empathize with the point you are trying to make but don’t you feel writers who are trying to grow their audience outside of their writing may ultimately diminish the quality of their writing?
I’d agree with that concern, John, if we were talking about changing the content rather than just exposing more people (hopefully!) to content that has already been created. If someone writes the Great American Screenplay, but never prints out a copy and leaves it on her hard drive, that’s a loss to everyone, the writer included. If she mails out one copy to one producer, it could go somewhere but the odds are still unlikely. On the other end of the scale, she could raise the money herself, make the film, get it to Sundance… and the odds of it becoming a hit are a lot greater. What I’m suggesting is between those two extremes, but most importantly, that more people knowing what you do is better than no one knowing at all.
Point taken. However, if I knew none of my work would ever be published, I’d still need to write as it is ultimately for me.
Yeah, I hear you there.
That’s very right. Writers need to be more creative, more adventurous, and more cunning than ever before. Your potential audience is not always going to be in the mood to invest a day to read a new book, or even to invest ten minutes in reading a blog post. But they may feel like spending a minute to watch a video.
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