Marketing Monday - Katie Davis (part 1)

Katie Davis, author/illustrator of nine picture books, including Kindergarten Rocks!, I Hate to Go to Bed!, and Who Hops? uses podcasts and video to promote her books. Podcasts? Video? But that sounds so... hard!  Katie wrote up a terrific, two-part blog post about how to use YouTube to help promote your books. So check out her advice below, check out her webinars, and come back next week for more great information on this underused method of book marketing.

The following post was inspired and partly excerpted from her upcoming eBook, How to Promote Your Children's Book: Tips, Tricks, and Secrets to Create a Bestseller, available soon at http://www.katiedavis.com.



There are so many things we can do to market our books, and in the 15 years I’ve been in this business, I’ve learned a lot, but the thing that has been intriguing me most lately is using video. YouTube is yet another social media site, and let’s not forget, the second largest search engine out there. It’s important, and it can gain you fans and readers.

YouTube
Why should the cute babies, stupid cat burglers, and people doing things they shouldn’t (back to the stupid cat burglers) get all the attention? You can easily harness the power of this incredible social media site for the benefit of your business. It’s easy to forget that YouTube is yet another social media site, isn’t it? But that’s exactly what it is, as you can “friend” people and follow them, by subscribing to their channels.

There are a few ways to use YouTube to enhance your business. Remember, too, YouTube isn’t the only video site out there, though sometimes it certainly seems that way! In fact, on Teachertube I’ve had almost 20,000 views of my videos, which is tens of thousands more than on YouTube! But we’ll talk about the behemoth for this instance.

One great thing you can do on YouTube is to link to your other videos in YouTube. This will lead a viewer to your next video, or an update if you need to post that. Here is a video I’ve uploaded to YouTube which I also added “talking bubbles” to, which as anyone who has ever read any of my books knows, I rely on for communicating subtopics and tangential information. What could be better?

Power-invoking step-by-step process to enhance your videos on YouTube:

1. Log into your channel (read further to find out why you need to create your own channel).
2. Look at the “Video Owner Options.”
3. Hit “video annotations.”
4. See lower left where there is a speech bubble icon and two other icons. You can also add a note or a spotlight.
5. Type in your message. Select time within movie you want that message to start.
6. Preview.
7. Play around with the speech bubble “tail.”

Check out how I utilized the power of this enhancement here, but make sure to watch till the end for the insertion of the link, because that’s the way you can get more people to go to your channel! Here is a video of how I learned to do all this.

Another way to get people to subscribe to your channel is to add a little 5 second video clip to every movie you upload, showing how to subscribe to your channel. It’s like hypnosis – they see it in front of their eyes, and follow suit! Ever since I created mine and added it to just two videos (so far!) I’ve gotten a more steady stream of subscribers. Here is one short video I where I used this method.


Thanks, Katie! Lots of great how-to information! Next week: why you need to set up your own YouTube channel.

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Children’s author/illustrator Katie Davis has published nine books and appears monthly on the ABC affiliate show, Good Morning Connecticut, recommending great books for kids. She produces Brain Burps About Books, a podcast about kidlit, a blog and monthly newsletter. Katie has volunteered in a maximum security prison teaching Writing for Children and over the last dozen years has presented and keynoted at schools, writing, and educational conferences. This year she served as a Cybils judge and has also judged the Golden Kite, smartwriters.com, and Frontiers in Writing awards. Recently Katie was selected to be on the Advisory Board for the Brooke Jackman Foundation, a literacy-based charity.

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