I am a self published writer (my friend and I co-authored an eBook this year “Reclaim Sex After Birth”) and this seems to be our next progression – into creating videos for YouTube.

As Peter so rightly points out – unless you are on the best selling list, it is still a huge slog, lots of woman hours at the computer and on the internet, to self promote yourself.

My friend and I decided to build our own website from scratch (something we’re both thankful for now that’s its almost finished), so we were spared the monetary expense of that, but not everyone has the time nor the nouse to be able to do that for themselves. And after all – writers want to write, they dont want to be out there promoting themselves. Don’t we all wish that there was someone out there that could do it for us – or we earnt enough to pay someone else to do it. The average Aussie writer earnt $10,000 last year (and I can only wish to have earnt that much). While an online presence is a must – there are many brilliant and unsigned writers out there, that still have difficulties in driving traffic to their blogs.

Video will be an interesting foray for us – as our information is for an niche market. I see that video can help build rapport with people, and help to establish a personalised presence on the net, but it still comes back to the same old – unless people know that you exist, no one is going to watch your YouTube contributions.

Much to muse on!
http://reclaimsexafterbirth.com

Thanks for this post, and Ben for the comment about 1 Percenters. Most authors I’ve encountered, on or off the internet, have their own blogs or some other online vehicle for doing their own promoting, or “self-mediating,” as you put it, Jon. The long-standing issue of publishers simply being unable to promote all of their authors effectively in brick-and-mortar bookstores–for a variety of reasons–may have translated into a certain reluctance to vigorously provide content for readers and support for authors.

A post last June on Publishingtalk (“Do You Have Carving Anxiety?“) described what seemed an effective and creative content contribution by Simon & Schuster to the YouTube community to promote last year’s edition of the Joy of Cooking. What stops other publishers from doing such for their authors? Even if one only markets the big names, such an involvement in a tech trend or mainstay builds consumer interest in the company.

I know of at least one major publisher, that, in a packet it sends to its authors, explains how to make a blog, promote on the internet, etc.. Yet none of this information is anything one couldn’t obtain by doing a bit of research on Google. (Or on any FAQ provided by blog tools.) Even armed with such information, one isn’t necessarily better off than before: an author recently told me she had to shell out a couple thousand dollars of her own money to have someone build an inviting website for her, money her publisher would or could not reimburse. What makes video content different from standard web content? And while one can easily find videos of Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, or even Cormac McCarthy, lesser-known authors tend to have the same difficulty getting noticed online as they do on the shelf (especially if they are new to this facet of the internet). Beneath the question of how publishers facilitate their authors’ self-mediation lurks a smaller but perhaps more insistent inquiry into whether the ease and efficacy of internet video production will do anything that the other methods of self-mediation, online and offline, don’t do for the author who hasn’t broken traditional bestseller lists. (That is, the majority of them.) The video-viewing trend does present tremendous opportunities for authors and publishers both, but I wonder if “unfacilitated” self-mediation will decrease by any significant amount for most.