Trying My Hand at YouTube

People keep telling me I have a voice for narration. I’m no judge, so I’ll leave it to you. Here are three YouTube videos I have made recently. These are experiments and I welcome all feedback and advice.

The first is a book trailer for The Wistful and the Good.

I’ll freely admit that book trailers are a foreign concept to me, and I don’t really know what to do with this one now I have created it. Do any of you watch book trailers? Any advice?

The next is me narrating the first chapter of The Wistful and the Good. I learned a lot about recording and video editing making this, and what I learned most of all is that I have so much more to learn. It’s a fun project, though. I know there is a large market for audiobooks, though I think I need to practice a bit more to get my narration up to that standard. But I don’t listen to audiobooks, so I don’t have a real idea if something like this is going to be of interest. What do you think?

I wasn’t sure how much benefit there is to the viewer in watching me read, especially as I can’t read and make eye contact at the same time, so I decided to try a different approach. I’d been having a debate with someone on the Historical Novel Society Facebook group about whether historical novels should have footnotes explaining or justifying the history presented in the story. I took the nay side in that debate, but it got me thinking about a way to add some visual interest to a book narration. The result is here:

Does this seem like a good idea? Would you watch something like this?

Also, I tightened up my narration in the first version of the video by taking out all the pauses. In the second, I left many of them in, resulting in a more relaxed pace of narration. Do you prefer one over the other?

I’m also thinking about doing video versions of some (all?) of my newsletter posts. It would seem particularly appropriate for the Anomalous Now series (which I am planning to get on with in the coming months). Any thoughts on that?

Finally, a couple of requests.

• Please like my videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and ring the notification bell. All creators are slaves to the algorithms these days, so please do feed the bots. Thanks.

• And speaking of feeding the bots. If you have read and enjoyed any of my books, please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Every review helps.

Thank you!