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Self-publishing: YouTube communities contributing to success in the publishing world

 By Ravneet Bajwa

 

The word “publishing” is often associated with the idea that an author has their work printed by a company that disseminates the work to a large audience for a monetary exchange.  In reality, publishin now means so much more than the traditional notion of struggling for acceptance, working with an agent and doing a book tour for promoting your work. In 2018, publishing refers to the traditional publishing business, but also to a variety of self-publishing practices. Self-publishing practices include blogging online, video blogging (also known as “vlogging”) on YouTube and other social media platforms, as well as writing books and simply publicizing them yourself. The options are limitless now that the internet, social media and useful tools and resources are widely available worldwide.

My chapter in Moving through the Grey focuses on how self-publishing on YouTube can help an author develop a fan base for authors. I look at a case study done by Christopher Cayari on a musician and how he achieved his goals through the use of YouTube vlogging. I then conducted my own case study of a YouTube vlogger who has written and self-published two novels.

In Cayari's academic article, The Youtube Effect: How YouTube has Provided New Ways to Consume, Create, and Share Music, he conducts a case study on a young musician, Wade Johnston, and found that Johnston began posting cover songs on his YouTube channel. Before long, through fans sharing and commenting on his videos, he had a fan base of thousands. Later he was noticed and was responded to by one of his musicians, and finally, was asked to open a musical show for a band. Through his expanding fan base that he built through YouTube self-publishing, Wade was able to achieve success. 

The case study that I did on my own was on a YouTube vlogger, Jenna Moreci. With hundreds of vlogs on YouTube, her fan base exceeds 123, 000 people. Although Moreci comes from a business background, and worked as an accountant, she found her way to pursue her childhood dream of being a writer. She wrote a book and decided to self-publish it - it is now available through Amazon and her website (Moreci, 2017).  Moreci uses YouTube to communicate with her fan base and advertises her work, talks about the self-publishing process, why she chose to self-publish versus going with a publishing house, how she writes, and so on. With her first novel being a success, she has written a second novel now, is self-publishing once again, and is very close to releasing it. 

Based on the success of both of these case studies, you can see how vlogging on YouTube can enable a content creator to cultivate a huge fan base, which can then lead to significant opportunities, growths and successes in the self-publishing world as well as other fields such as music. 

 

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