Bug Books: Joey Paul Online: Authortube: Five Years On

Monday, 1 March 2021

Authortube: Five Years On

AUTHORTUBE: FIVE YEARS ON

I started on youtube in January of 2016. I spent a year making videos that I have since removed from the platform because they are so freaking terrible and cringe worthy! I started out making a lot of mistakes, something I've talked about before (piece found here) and in the past two years or so, I've only just started to see real channel growth. I don't know whether in five years time I will be a much bigger channel or not because to be honest, I'm kinda happy in my little niche of the community.

But things have changed. I've gone from four videos a month to at least one a week, I've upgraded my camera, my mic, have plans to do vlogs on the channel every month as an added bonus and have made friends and found many other channels that I will always watch. I have made some more mistakes, and have also been part of some amazing collabs that have helped boost me and my channel, and it's weird to think that's it's only been five years because it feels like so much longer.

When I started on Authortube, I thought I was a booktube channel because I didn't know Authortube existed. It took me about a year or so to work out what I was, and then I started to do things a bit differently. I have released about eight books, maybe ten, in my time on Authortube, and I couldn't be happier about reaching new readers, finding other writers and authors, some of whom have become close friends. I couldn't be happier to be part of that community, but for those of you who are wondering about joining, or wondering what I would change if I could go back five years, here's the bits and pieces for you.

WHAT I WOULD CHANGE

#1 THUMBNAILS
These were my biggest mistake, and because, for some reason, I didn't know the actual sizes that were needed, they didn't always fit the video. They were amateur and not at all pleasing to the eye. They made it clear that I didn't know what I was doing, and I'm so glad I learned this lesson pretty early on.

#2 MIC/SOUND
I didn't know for a long time that with my oxygen machine in the background, the webcam mic I was using wasn't great. It took someone else pointing it out for me to pull my old professional mic out of storage and set it up on my desk for ease of use. This made a huge change to the quality of my videos, and I also made sure that the background music was down very low so as not to interfere with the volume of the video.

#3 SCRIPTING
When I first started, I didn't script my videos, and it really showed. I started doing scripts about six months in, and why those first videos were still a little stiff, I have gotten better at ready from the script and still doing a good video.

#4 EDITING
I didn't have the first clue about editing. I used the default Windows one and it sucked at getting what I wanted. It wasn't until I upgraded that I got better at that, and even then for a while it still wasn't great. I wish I could've done more research for editing programs and how to use them. While I know what I'm doing now, I didn't back then.

#5 LIGHTING
I didn't always make sure that I had good lighting, and I didn't always have a set schedule as to when to record. Because of that it was sometimes a quick thing, that then got edited badly and thrown up on youtube. I did better with this when I bought a special bulb for my office and started to record first thing in the morning to allow for less sunlight in my office.

So those are the things I wish I could change. There are others, like I wish I'd done better at looking better on camera, but that's more a personal thing than anything else. If you're looking to start on youtube, and you wanna know what not to do, these should also give you some idea of how to avoid making the same mistakes I made back in 2016.

Good luck!

Any questions? Lemme know in the comments!