Four reasons to do a read aloud on YouTube

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Four reasons to do a read aloud on YouTube


Have you done a Read Aloud of your book as yet? This can be something quite challenging for many introverted authors, but it’s a great thing to do. Here we share four great reasons to do a read aloud – and one big reason not to!

A Read Aloud Shares Your Vision of Your Book

Book readings have been used for a very long time to promote books. And there’s a simple reason for that. When you read your book aloud, you read it exactly how you see it on the page. Your passion and innate knowledge of the book will come through and hopefully inspire your viewers to become readers.

The Informal Tone Of YouTube

You may feel some pressure to release a “perfect”, technologically advanced, audio perfect, version. But the good news is that you don’t need to do that. Most YouTube videos are very casual, very low tech and very personal. Which is great news for indie authors.

I was very very nervous when I did our first reading (included in this article). And then, I had several direct and positive comments about how great it was. I think we are always hardest on ourselves. Remember, done is better than perfect. So have a crack and get a recording up there.

Video Trumps for Reach At All Times

As indie authors we must use all the marketing tools available at our disposal, especially those that involve little cost. Video has been consistently shown to have the best reach across all the social channels, trumping imagery and memes. So having a personal reading of your book available to be used at any time across all your channels is a great piece of marketing to have in your arsenal.

Digital Books Make It So Easy

Digital books and video conferencing tools make recording a read aloud of your book so easy. Forget trying to thumb through a paperback or hardback and hold it up to the screen. Instead you can use your kindle or ePub version and share your screen. Easy! And you don’t even have to show your face.

For more information on how I used Zoom and Kindle to create my read alouds – see my YouTube video.

When You Should Not Do A Read Aloud on YouTube

Make no mistake, a YouTube channel is another social media outlet to manage. If you don’t have an interest in making videos and don’t have a YouTube channel, think before starting one. Or if you only have one book and no plans for others in the near future, think before starting one.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t have a read aloud of your book on YouTube. Instead of creating your own YouTube channel, find a friendly indie author/publisher to host your video on their channel. You can then still share this link in your emails, embed it on your website and get most of the benefits of having it there, without maintaining a channel yourself. Conveniently, Old Mate Media has (reasonably new) YouTube channel, so do reach out if you would like to pop a read a loud of your book up there.

Where To Next

After learning all about our efforts on YouTube, do go and check out our recent #AskKate videos on our YouTube channel. You can also see all of our free indie author guides to help you in your publishing journey. The best way to get these as we release them is to sign up to our author newsletter or stay in touch via one of our social channels. As well as YouTube you can find us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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