https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmC99FUIBaw&feature=youtu.be
Yep, I’ve stumbled on a new way to market books, but first, you have to try to understand that the #shorts are what make this world go around at the moment.
#shorts get the crowd, get plenty of views, far more than ordinary landscape videos, and surely more than the over-sixty-seconds group of videos, which is most of them.
The other thing that #shorts does for you is attract a random crowd, which is, believe me, far better than a targeted crowd when it comes to book marketing. You never know who your readers might suddenly be.
It’s not just that #shorts are short. They are also very vertical, and that means that they are ideal for the mobile cellphone.
That translates into “more views”, and that’s what you need, not views in the dozens, but views in the MILLIONS, in order to generate a few hundred actual downloads.
Remember that you can’t create a thumbnail to help get the clicks — you have a choice of one out of three offered to you by youtube, but that’s it, so keep that in mind when you make shorts — keep all the frames looking good and hope for the best.
Of course, with books, the whole screen is going to be taken up with just the book cover, if you follow my plan — or you can feature yourself as a talking head and then focus in on the book in sharescreen mode, going in and out of it, as it were.
Make tons of shorts, tons — keep up the pressure, in order to sell more books. You’ll never run out of ebook buyers, not in this global environment.
Downloads beat mailing actual books out, and the cost of shipping alone should encourage the download over the shipped hard-copy book.
Here’s what I’m doing to make this happen:
- FIND the webpage with the book you want to sell. Increase the size as much as possible, using “control + wheel”, meaning the wheel on your mouse. Adjust the position of the image as necessary to capture the whole thing on the screen. It’s going to be off to the side or something, but don’t let that worry you. We’ll handle it later, in the editor.
- INVOKE ZOOM and start recording immediately.
- SHARE SCREEN using the book page url.
- GET your cursor out of the way, put it off to the right.
- SPEAK the review into your mike, over the image of the book.
- STOP the share on ZOOM.
- STOP the recording on ZOOM.
- STOP the ZOOM meeting and wait for the video to be translated into an MP4.
- RENAME the MP4 and save it to another drive.
- INVOKE your Open Shot video editor and bring in the file.
- PUT the file into the video slot and edit it down to where you want it.
- PUT the cursor at “start” and shape and size the video with your side tools, as you have been shown in #shorts workshops. If you need help, ask for it.
- SAVE to disk, and upload it to youtube, and that’s it. You now have a book promo in place and possibly attracting enough attention to generate a few sales, which is more than zero.
That’s the whole plan, and it works, and I can prove it. I haven’t had views and action on my youtube channels for years now, and I still don’t, at least not on my regular videos, but now that I’m putting up #shorts, I’m really getting thousands of views and my stats have shot almost straight up from where they’ve been for ten years or more.
Sample Review:
“Hi, everyone. This is [Your Name Here], with a review of [book title] by [author] published by gateways books and tapes dot com. It sells for [price of book] and is [number of pages] pages long. You can get it on amazon, but if you want the ebook, download it at gateways books and tapes dot com and save some money.
I rate this book five star, and highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed. That web address once again, gateways books and tapes dot com.”
Now, that’s the general principle, the gist of what he said, as it were. You can and should make modifications and adjustments depending on the nature of the book you’re promoting and how long you want the promotion to be, but under no conditions will it be longer than a maximum of 60 seconds.
Not a second longer, or it won’t qualify as a short, and you don’t want that to happen. You want your book promotion to end up on the #shorts shelf, where it has the potential to attract literally MILLIONS of viewers.
Of course, the chances are pretty much the same as they are for YOU to win the lottery, win a sweepstakes, win a jackpot or win a free expense-paid vacation for four to a luxury hotel on a tropical island.
About zero.
But I can guarantee that if you make the effort, you can make the grade. Try it, you’ll like it. Making these teensy-weensy videos is FUN and totally challenging.
There’s no room for error in a 15 or 60 second video. You’ll soon see what I mean. And it’s not just the video itself, it’s the title and the imaging and the sound and the … well, you know what I mean — there’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.
Well, that’s the gist of it for the moment, I’m off to do some more book promotions. I hope you hunt them up on ejgoldguru, where I’m hanging most of them. Some are also up on gorby’s #shorts channel, if you can find it — I’m told it’s not easy to find. Try google.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby