Monetizing Audiobooks on YouTube

Hello, everybody, and welcome to my class, Audiobooks on YouTube, How to Monetize Your Books. And I'm just going to dive in because I have a ton of slides. I'm a fanatic of making all kinds of slides for presentations, so I have lots of them. So I'm just going to dive in, and if you have no audiobooks, I want you to know it's fine. I will talk about some other things you can do on YouTube, but the focus of this presentation is audiobooks on YouTube. Also, one more caveat, if you have audiobooks that you have done through ACX and RoyaltyShare, you will probably need to buy out some kind of contract with the person that you RoyaltyShare with before you are able to put your audiobooks on YouTube. So you'll have to contact through ACX the other person that you did the RoyaltyShare with and figure out how to get out of that contract. So let's talk about why YouTube. Let's explore what we can do with YouTube. The number one reason why I like putting my audiobooks up on YouTube is, and you may not be able to see the small numbers on here, but this is my most... popular audiobook on YouTube. It has 786,000 views on it. It was uploaded almost two years ago, and that's how many views it has. And if you look at the six books that are on there, all six of them have more than 100,000 views. This for me is number one reason why I have my things up on YouTube, because I want more people to notice my name, to become fans of my work, and to listen to my books. Why did Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter bring in 41 million dollars? Number one, he had tons of fans. Number two, his fans trust him, so he was giving them good books. Number three, they they shouted, take my money. And he wrote these books secretly, and he didn't even tell them what they were about. He just said, I wrote four secret books. Here's a Kickstarter. And people were like, give me these books. And they take my money. So this is what I want to create with my brand. When I put my books up on YouTube, I get comments like this. What was supposed to make me fall asleep kept me up all night. I absolutely loved this book. The second one says, I'm your fan now, Victorine. The third one says, wow, yes, this was such a good story. The fourth one at the end says, by far you are one of my favorite authors. That is what we want to see. And this one just makes my heart go pitter-patter. Victorine Eliske, I'm going to binge this entire series, then buy all five of the books for my bookshelf. I'm like, oh, yes, this is exactly what I want, right? This is what I want to create. Even with giving away something for free to your viewers, you can get them sucked into your world, and you can make them want more from you. Another reason why I really like YouTube is I over the past two years I've made $46,000 just on ad revenue and other small perks like People can give you extra money and we'll talk about that later, but forty six thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at Also, the potential for YouTube is massive. Mr. Beast ranked the highest paid YouTube person ever, estimated at $54 million earned in 2021. So the potential here is massive. There are 2.7 billion registered YouTube users. Compare this to Amazon, which is our big mammoth of a site that brings us in money. Amazon has 310 million registered users. So this is a much bigger audience than what we can get through Amazon. Also, the analytics are amazing. I'll show you some of the things that you can see in the background on your dashboard on YouTube. You can see the top geographies of where people are that they're listening to your stories. You can see age and gender. You can see when your viewers are on YouTube. You can see channels your audience is watching, and it skipped one slide. Content your audience watches. You can see other videos that they're watching. And you can see the top earning content on your own channel. So you can see I have one runaway video that has earned me most, you know, $13,000. But then I have other videos under that that have earned several thousand dollars each as well. And so this gives you great information about what people are wanting from you on YouTube. I can also see key moments for audience retention. These are the percentage of people that are still watching at 30 seconds in. 88%, 86%, 85%. So I can learn from that, from what I'm doing on these videos. How viewers are finding your videos. What they're browsing and suggested videos and YouTube searching and things like that. So 20% of my people that find my videos are going on YouTube and just searching. for something and they find my videos that way. I can also see what they're searching which is super helpful to me. So a lot of people search audiobook, audiobooks in full, things like that. But the thing down here you can see the billionaire's accidental bride. That is not one of my titles but if I want to utilize that I can go into my videos and say if you liked the billionaire's accidental bride Then check out my video. And now I've got some keywords and I am upping that result in the search. So all of this data and more is available on YouTube. So I want you to just think about this. What if you made YouTube your primary focus? What if you said, this is how I'm going to earn my money and then all the other avenues that I have for earning money is extra? Now I know Some of you may have direct stores and you're making a lot more money than $46,000, which is fine. Maybe that's your primary focus. But YouTube can also be a supplemental income for people who are doing that. So your number one fight on Amazon is visibility. What I really like on YouTube is you can see that spike of when I first put all my audio books up. And I'll talk about that. I had 14 audio books just sitting there. and that's when I started putting them up. And so I got a nice spike from putting them up once every three days. But once I ran out of content, and it just kind of slowly went down a little, but it stayed nice and steady. And I make about $2,000 a month steady over this past two years, which is wonderful income just for putting them up on YouTube. And you're going to ask me how much I spent on ads. I spent $0 on ads for that. This is all just generated from YouTube's suggesting my videos. So how do you monetize? You need to meet the minimum requirements, and I'll give you that in a minute. You need to follow the rules, and you need to post one video at least every six months. So that can be some YouTube shorts. It can be you getting on and talking about your next book that you're writing. You don't have to write a book every six months, but you do need to post something every six months. Now, the minimum requirements, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. I was able to get that within 30 days of uploading my audiobooks, but I did have, like I said, 14 audiobooks just sitting there that had already been produced, was already on Audible, and I had to upload them. had that just ready to go. And so that's what I did. And I published one every three to five days for that first 30 days. And that's what really got my channel going. I did this because my son is a YouTuber. And he said, Mom, this is what you need to do. You need to be publishing something every three to four days and be consistent with it. And I'm like, great, I have 14 books. Then what do I do after that? But I did it. I said I'm just going to put them all up within that first 30 days and see what happens. And by the time I got monetized, I was making $250 a day just from putting up my audio books. So YouTube likes those consistent posts. Now, after that, I ran out of content. I was like, great, what do I do? So I started looking at my books that hadn't been made into audio. I looked at some of my short stories that I had that haven't been made into audio, and I started posting some of that content. And I'll talk about how I did that in a minute. I had better luck posting full audio books on my channel. I know some authors are posting chapters at a time or pieces of their book at a time. I tried that with an entire book. I said, all right, my new book has come out. I just got the audio. I'm going to put one chapter up a day. And it'll take over a month to get all that content up, but I'm going to get great, you know, subscribers and great views because I'm putting something up every day for an entire span of time. It backfired on me because I would put one chapter up and it would get 300 views and I'm like, great, 300 people listened to my chapter. Then I would put the second chapter up and it got 12 views. And I'm like, all right. Either I totally didn't hook those 300 people, or I just got people clicking on it, and then they went off to do something else and didn't actually follow through. And so that would happen throughout the entire thing. So chapter 14 got 350 views, and I was like, great. And then chapter 15, we get 12. And I'm like, okay, people are not doing what I want them to do, which is listen to the entire thing. And so I found, I eventually deleted all of those and put the full audio book up. And once I did that, it did much, much better for me. That's just my own personal experience. I did talk to another author who was putting up like serial type pieces. His was a serial and he was doing really well on audio, just putting up pieces of his serialized novel like that. And so if you write for Vela and you write maybe more in a serialized fashion, that might work better for you. But it just didn't work for me for my chapters. So what you need to do is teach YouTube who would like your videos. So shout about your most popular video to your fans on social media. And I focused on that one accidentally married that was doing really well, and I wanted that one to get the most views because it was doing really well. I focused on the one that was great for me. And I sent it out to all my fans on social media. I linked to it in my newsletter, and I did newsletter swaps with other authors. I do a lot of newsletter swaps with authors and some authors give me just their YouTube overall channel link for their overall channel and I see way more clicks when I send out a specific book for people. So I would strongly suggest that you find your your strong book and do newsletter swaps for that one book and if people like it they're gonna go and look for your other things on your channel. If you don't have a large backlist of audiobooks, don't stress. There are other things you can put up on YouTube to gain traction. I know several people putting up YouTube Shorts and gaining a lot of traction from YouTube Shorts, even if they only have two or three audiobooks up. But what I would do when you start, even if you only have like five audiobooks, I would do the one every three days and just put them all up at once, even though you're going to run out of content. and then find other content to put up because that's what really got my traction. And I would think it was like probably the fourth video that I put up that got me a lot of traction after those, you know, hitting those once every three days. And so even if you have just a few, I would suggest doing it and putting them all up and then trying to gain your traction with other things like YouTube Shorts and other things like that. So I'll tell you, when I ran out of content, that was right when I got monetized. And I was like, okay, I have some novellas, I have some short stories. It was right around Christmas time. It was beginning of December. And so I took all my Christmas content and I used an AI voice to create an audio book. The program I used was MicMonster, the pro version, because you need the pro version in order to monetize it. And this is one of the books that I put up. It's called Cupcakes and Kisses and it's like 11,000 words, something like that. And it was used in an anthology and it was since taken out of that anthology and I had the rights to it. And so I used MicMonster Pro and put it up there. And it's been up for two years and it's made me $600 in those two years it's been up. And if anybody told you you would get paid $600 for an 11,000 word short, I'd be like, yes. sign me up. You know, any magazine that would pay that for that would be a great opportunity. So that's just extra money that I'm earning for that. I paid a one-time fee for my Monster Pro, but now they charge like this subscription thing. So for, and I just recently went on there to look it up and it was three months for $39. So it's really not bad, especially if you, you know, take the time to make all of your shorts into audiobooks right away, then you can you know unsubscribe and then you have all of them made into audio for you. There are other alternatives. Google Play makes AI audio as well and Revoicer is another one I've heard that is really popular with authors. Or you can also just read your book on YouTube. Nathan Lowell, this is this will date me because this was quite a few years ago. When ebooks were just starting out, he created massive success by reading his own novel and giving it away free on a podcast. And he became a six-figure author very quickly when people were listening to the podcast and really getting into his story. So this is something you can easily do on YouTube. I did talk with a consultant about YouTube because I wanted to ask about my channel and make sure I wasn't demonetized and we'll talk about that later. So I asked the consultant, what's the best thing to put on YouTube? And they said, you need to put you on YouTube. Let your fans get to know you. Tell your story. Why you started writing. Share your writing process. Share your beliefs, your hopes, and your dreams. Because as soon as someone gets really invested in your story... What do they do? They want to know more about you, the author. They want to know why you created that world, what inspired you, things like that. You can post extra information. You can read deleted scenes from one of your popular books or write an extra scene and read that. Share background information on a character. Talk about upcoming books that you're working on. These are all things you can put up on YouTube to create more content for yourself. So how to make the actual videos. The program that I use is Premiere Pro because I have the Adobe Creative Suite but it's kind of a technical program it's a little hard to learn so I wouldn't totally recommend that if you don't have the Adobe Creative Suite. Another one that's popular is DaVinci Resolve or iMovie. Both of those I've heard people using successfully with to make their YouTube videos. So you may be asking yourself, what do you put on the video, Victorine? All right, so I'll show you what I have on my video for my post most popular book. Do not be Victorine and do this. This is just my book cover with a black background. This was a really bad idea, but this is the one that took off. But when I first started putting up my books, I wasn't doing anything creative or, and it's really embarrassing because I'm a graphic designer. So I wasn't doing anything really well designed, which after thinking about it, that was really dumb. But this is my latest video that I put up, and so I designed it much better. I just did this in book brush. And so, yes, I would recommend this much more than just plopping up your cover. Make it look nice. Put on some headphones to make it look like an audio book so at first glance people know what they're looking at. And in big letters, I have free audiobook that's really recommended. You can also make a little moving video. I'll show you a couple of them that I've made. Let's see if this will play it. Yeah. So this one just rains and has a little lightning in the background. And it's just a looping video that goes over and over and over again while the book is read. Here's another one that I did. It does little snowflakes. I don't even know if you can see it because they're tiny. But I used motion leap on my iPad to do those looping videos They are fun and great and I would recommend doing that if you can but I will give you a warning it will make your Book video really large a large file So what I recommend doing is change the video target bitrate to one or less when you are creating at the end process when you're processing that video and making it into an MP4. So this is a screenshot of Premiere Pro. If you're using another program, you probably have something similar in the settings to create that. What that does is it makes the video quality of it, the visual quality of it, not so great. But if you make it one or just a little bit less than that, It's nobody's going to be able to tell and nobody's really watching your video for the visuals anyway. They're listening to the story right at least they should be. So this is what I did to make my video file small enough to go up on YouTube because if you try and upload a video file that's too big on YouTube it'll just hiccup on you and then it'll be like forever and I had an author tell me my video has been uploading to YouTube for 24 hours, Victorine, what should I do? And I'm like Yeah, you gave it an aneurysm, so just delete it and start another one. So one more thing you want to do is follow the rules of YouTube. This QR code will get you to a page that gives you all of the links to all of the different rules that you need to follow. If you just search on Google YouTube monetization policies, you will find this page as well. You definitely want to read over and make sure you're following. You want to follow the YouTube's community guidelines. You want to follow the terms of service. Google Adsense program policies and I'll just go over the highlights the most important bits for you but community guidelines spam and deceptive practices so you want to be sure you're following this and you don't try and get any fake engagement so sometimes people get really excited about their YouTube channel and they're like okay I really want to get to that 1,000 subscribers so I'm going to have You know, maybe buy this package on Fiverr and have somebody give me a thousand subscribers. Well, that can be kind of shady and you may get a bunch of bots subscribing and it may trigger something in YouTube's community guidelines that you're using deceptive practices. So you don't want to do that. So yes, trade newsletters. Yes, try and get your author friends to subscribe and things like that. Don't try and do anything that may mean you're getting a bunch of bots on there because that's bad. Also, sensitive content, and we'll go over that in a minute, or violent and dangerous content. So what you cannot monetize on YouTube, sexual content. Now, if you have a steamy book or if you have sexual content in your book, what I would recommend is just as you're making that video, just chop out those bits. and put it up without those bits and say, if you want the full book, just buy the audio, or go over to my Patreon, and you can get the full book over there. So I did have an author friend who just went ahead and put up her full book anyway, and she did get her entire channel banned from YouTube. They took the whole thing down, and she can't make any other channels because of the sexual content. So they do follow that rule. pretty strictly. Now that doesn't mean you can't go out on YouTube right now and listen to sexual content on there, but they're not monetized. That's the thing. So if you want to monetize and make money off of it, they're pretty strict on that because they're selling advertisement to these other people, these other companies, and they want to keep these other companies happy, right? So that's why that rule is there. Graphic violence. Now this one, I don't know how lenient they are with a book because you're not actually showing graphic. Violence on screen. So, you know in a murder mystery there's gonna be some murder So I would say if it's really gratuitous then maybe cut some parts out of your book But I wouldn't worry horribly amount of if you have a dead body in a scene. I wouldn't worry too much about that Vulgar language again. This is a sliding scale some channels You can you can find there's vulgar language in it and they allow it other channels. They don't so kind of up to you on how you want to take that and where you want to go with that. If it were me, I would just cut it all out of my book. And then I would say, get the full book here. Hate speech, that kind of speaks for itself. You shouldn't be putting that in your books anyway. All right. Demonetization. This is a thing on YouTube. And I was scared about this because I put my books up on YouTube not knowing anything about demonetization. And as soon as I got monetized and I started telling other authors, hey, my channel just got monetized, I'm making all this money. Somebody said, oh, well, someone else did that and then they got demonetized and they took away all their income. And I went, oh, no, I can't have that. So I went and did a bunch of research on it. What I found out is most of the time when they're going to demonetize your channel, it is because of the reused content policy. What this means is they have found out that your audiobook was on Audible or somewhere else first, and they're just going to assume that you pirated that copy and put it up on YouTube. So they think you're using someone else's content without their permission. So really what they want to do is make sure that you are not a pirate and that you are not trying to make money off of someone else's hard work. which is actually good for us, right? We don't want other people making money off of our hard work. So we need to prove to them that we are the author and this is the content that I own. So if you get demonetized, and I did, I got demonetized, and then I went through all the steps and I got re-monetized 48 hours later, and they also did not turn my ads off when I was demonetized, so I got paid for those 48 hours that I was off. quote-unquote offline because they didn't turn off my ads and so I was still making money. But if you get demonetized, you want to read the appeal information and follow the instructions to the letter. So they will tell you exactly what they want from you and you need to follow that. They will tell you how long the video needs to be made and you're going to create a video. So just sit down in front of your computer and click the record button and just talk to the computer. They want your URL channel right up front so you can just say your URL. channel or if you have editing software you can just put it up on screen for them and then you make your case you you tell them that your content is not reused that you are the author you own the copyright and you tell them how you made the video because they want to know how you made the video and tell them you paid the narrator and that you own that copyright to that audiobook and that it is not owned by a publisher it is not owned by anybody else You want to prove that you are the person. So what I did immediately when I got demonetized is I went and updated all my author photos on my website on Amazon. So it looked like me. So when I sent in my video they could easily see okay this is the author. Now I know if you use a pen name and you don't want your photo associated with that then you're gonna have to maybe get creative. show them your Amazon dashboard where your books are attributed to you, and show them maybe your ACX dashboard where they can see, ah, these audio books actually belong to this person. The number one way to prove that you own the content on YouTube is to put it up on YouTube first. So if you put it up on YouTube before you publish it, to Audible and all of those other places, then they don't even bother you because they can see, ah, this was up on YouTube a day before it was up on ACX and Findaway Voices and all of those places. So they're not even going to demonetize you. Before you upload any videos, I would suggest you search for your name and your videos and take and send out take down notices for all pirated copies of your audiobooks because if you have had audiobooks out there they probably are on youtube with pirated copies they're probably not monetized because they can't prove they own that but they're probably there so number two update your author photos if you can if you're not a secret pen name do that so you look like you And then number three, record a short clip explaining why you are putting up your audiobooks on YouTube and publish that to YouTube so they can see, ah, this is the author. They're explaining why they're putting their audiobooks up on YouTube for free so that people can enjoy them. So my pen name is Angel Adams, and I made sure it was on my website and connected to me as the author. If you have a secret pen name, you can't do that, but like I said, just show your author dashboard where all your pen names are, and then the people can see that you are the author. I also linked to YouTube on my website, and it said, like free books, click here to get them on YouTube, so that the people checking this out could see, ah, the author put this up. I can see they're linking to this on their website. So number one, point to your website in your video when you tell them you are the author. Here's my website. Point to your Amazon author page. Point to any author videos that you've done on YouTube to prove that you are the person who wrote those books. And show your author dashboard, your ACX dashboard, or your website dashboard. If your appeal is denied, and I have talked to several authors that had an appeal and they were denied. It's okay, you can re-appeal. They want you to be putting content up there that they can put ads on. That's how they make money. They are just trying to be really careful and not monetizing anything that they can get in trouble for later on. So they want to make sure that you really are the person who owns that content. So if your appeal is denied, you can appeal again. You may have to wait 30 days. So if you're repeatedly denied, they sometimes say, no, wait 30 days. and then appeal again. Read the rules carefully to see if there's anything that you missed when you do your appeal again and definitely address the reason why you were denied. If your appeal says something else other than reused content, address that issue and so you can tell them why you are appealing and why it is okay for you to monetize this content. Alright, here are some extra tips. There is a thing called Super Thanks on YouTube. Anybody watching your videos can send you extra money just as a thank you. It's great. But you have to turn it on. So once you get monetized, you want to go into the back end and find, under monetization, find the Super Thanks button and turn that on so that people can send you money. Because who doesn't want free money? All right, commenting, the more comments you get, the better it is. So comment back to everybody who comments you on your videos. YouTube will show your videos more if there's more engagement. If you get negative comments on there, just delete them. It's super easy and it's awesome because they don't even know you deleted their comment and it doesn't inform them. They can't even, they, when they go, they can still see their comment, but no one else can see it. And so it's like super secret that you're deleting this and you're not going to make them mad or anything like that. But it's really awesome that you have the power to go in and get rid of those stinky comments because we can't do that on Amazon. We have these reviews that we hate, but we have to just grin and bear it. But here we can just delete them and it's wonderful. And you can also go under the settings under automated filters and you can filter certain words. So if you have certain people coming in and posting things over and over again, you can filter out certain words so that it automatically just doesn't even show up on your channel, which is great. Don't be afraid to try new things. Try some YouTube shorts, some Instagram reels. Put up your TikTok videos on YouTube. Share what makes you unique. Share writing tips, but... If you want to do that, what I would suggest is do it on a separate channel. You can just create an author channel for authors because you don't want to confuse your audience. If you start sharing writing tips on your audiobook channel where you want readers, authors are going to start going over there, and then they're going to start showing your videos to authors, and it's going to muddy up the system. Now, for genres, if you write in several genres, I have put all my genres up on one channel and I have not found it to be bad. People listen to all of them. So I have found it's not like Amazon where you can confuse that algorithm. My people on YouTube have been listening to all of my content. So you don't have to create a separate channel for every pen name that you have, but I would create a new channel if you're going to do author tips and things like that. So I spoke with this consultant again and they said you need to understand your target audience. You need to ask yourself these questions. Who is this person? What do they want? Why can't they have what they want? What's at stake if they don't get it? These sound so familiar, don't they? This is Seamus Lee Pilford from Tim Schmoyer's Video Creators. He has some really great YouTube videos out there. So if you want to go and search. Tim Schmoyer and video creators. You can find some great how-to videos and helpful videos to figure out what content you could put on your channel besides your audiobooks. So this person is at point A. They want to get to point B, but they don't know the path to get there. They could need something educational, like my computer won't send this email. Or maybe they're bored and need entertainment. So that's where we probably fall into. They have a three-hour layover with nothing to do. So what you need to do is create a value proposition. Finish this sentence. Subscribe to my channel because. Don't answer with just what you do, but why you do it. This pulls in that emotion. Figure out what your audience wants and give it to them. So put up content that fulfills that want from your target audience. I have just a few minutes. I'm going to talk about Patreon for just a second. Patreon, what is it? It's a website that allows fans to support artists in an ongoing basis. You can set up to be paid monthly or per creation. In exchange, fans get special content, VP treatment, or anything else that you set up. So people on YouTube often use Patreon to supplement their income. So... People who watch a lot of YouTube videos are very used to YouTube creators saying, support me over here on Patreon. That's something that people are used to. So you can pull in some extra money that way. Content you can give on Patreon, commercial free audio books, exclusive Patreon content, maybe short stories or novellas or background info on stories, personalized messages, content for authors, classes, writing tips. maybe early access to books or stories or audio books. The benefits of Patreon, there's no upfront costs to you. You set the tiers and the benefits, and there's more freedom to post your content, so you don't have that restriction of no sexual content or, you know, bad language or anything like that. And YouTube viewers are very used to going over to Patreon to support their creators. You can connect with super fans. who love your work and they're willing to give you a few dollars a month in order for you to create more. Patreon costs. The Lite version is 5% commission. You get a hosted creator page. You get Patreon communication tools and Patreon workshops. The Pro version, which is what I have, is an 8% commission, so you only pay them when you get paid. You get everything in Lite and you get membership tiers. You get analytics and insights. You get special offers and promo tool. You get creator-led workshops, unlimited app integrations, and priority customer support. And then the premium is a 12% commission. You get everything in pro, and you get dedicated partner manager and merch for membership and team accounts. So this is my website. I'm sorry, this is my email. Feel free to email me if you have any extra questions. I will say that I am giving away one month free of the Writing Gals Academy. which is a collection of videos that we have collected over the years from our conferences that we give. It's videos on all kinds of topics like marketing and business things and I'm giving away one month free. After that it's only $9.95 a month for the Reading Gals Academy. So if you're interested email me and say I'm interested in the one month free and I'll give you a code and you can go over there and check it out. Thank you for coming to my talk and we have seven minutes for questions. Hi, thanks. That was fantastic. Just a quick one. With ads, I'll take it your money is coming in from advertising. Yes. When do those ads click in? Because surely if they keep coming in during the actual audio book, people are going to get really fed up. Yes. How do you work that? So you have the ability to put the ads where you want. It is called mid-roll ads. And you can go in and you can say, I want them, and I put them in between every chapter because I'm giving them a whole audio book for free. And if they're getting it for free, then I want some ad revenue from it. So I put it in between every chapter. But you can go in and say where you want those ads, even if you want to spread them out farther than that, then you can. Thank you. Yes. All right, we have some questions from the viewers at home. First one we've got is, are your YouTube books on other storefronts, and if so, are they paid or free? They are on other storefronts and they are paid, yes. All right, next one. Looking at YouTube analytics, what percentage of viewers actually listen to a book until the end? Oh, that's a great question. I should have looked that up right before I gave this presentation. There is a drop-off. When you see the graph of people viewing yours, there's this peak of people who clicked on it and there's a drop-off. But then the... then it's really steady. And I want to say it's somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of people actually listen to the whole thing. All right. Another one, I write thrillers. What's an example of forbidden graphic violence? Can I have a fight scene? I'm sure you can have a fight scene. Yeah. I don't know an example because it's kind of ambiguous what they say in their rules. So I don't have any examples. But in my books, there's sweet romance. And so there's not a lot of violence in there. But, you know, I. I have the book that I have, I'm writing Paranormal. There's people get shot and killed in that one. And nothing's been, you know, pulled for content for that. So I don't think it's a huge deal because you're just reading it. You're not showing it on screen. So I think they would probably allow quite a bit. Alright, if I have a current YouTube channel on a different topic with a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours Can I change the channel name delete the old content and just keep it going? I say yes, because what I did when I started mine is I had a really old channel It didn't have very many subscribers But I had a really old channel with just random junk on there And I just deleted all that out there and started putting my audio books up and so it worked just fine for me to delete what was on there and start new. And so I'd say yeah. All right, just a couple more things here. When you say point to, do you mean in the description of the YouTube video of the audio book file or are you shooting a video where you say, you know, you attach something to the files? When I was pointing to like the videos, like the websites and things, I would say if, That's if you get demonetized, right, and you're trying to appeal. Okay. Yeah. So I would put it up on the screen, your actual website on the screen, and say this is my website. You can go look at that and put the URL up there so they can see it. And last one I've got for you. Have you experimented with uploading audio books in multiple languages? If so, is it better to have all the languages on one channel or separate channels? I have not experimented with that. So that's a great question, but unfortunately I don't know the answer to that one. Okay, great. Good questions. And you kind of, one of her questions touched on the question that I was going to ask about resurrecting your views, because I did what you did. I posted a bunch of shorts, and I got a nice kickstart from the shorts, and then, like, I waited a month and posted another one, and no views. And I know you were saying you posted your 14 once every three days. Yes. And I was wondering, you know, like, for somebody like me who's got an old channel, How do you resurrect the views when you go back and you post your, now you want to go back and you want to post your 10 books over 5 days? Do you need to start a new channel to get the algorithm boost from being? So I didn't, my channel was really dead, I mean like dead dead. I think I had like 10 subscribers and it was no views, you know, over years. So it was a really old channel. And so I would just start posting them. And send people to your channel with like newsletter swaps and announcing, hey, I have a free book and be all excited about it. You can make TikTok videos about it and get traffic there. And I think that will help you. Awesome. Thank you so much. So it sounds like you've had some pretty amazing success just right out of the gate uploading your work. So I'm wondering how how well did those books sell? Already, like what kind of built-in audience did you have for those books before you were able to get that level of success by uploading on YouTube? That's a great question because I did have a level of success before I did any audio books on YouTube. So I had about 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter. You know, my books had sold pretty well traditionally in the e-book world. And so, yeah, my very first book that I ever wrote hit the New York Times bestseller list. So I did have some success before I put it up on YouTube. Real quick question about the demographics or about the analytics. Do you get demographic information about the viewers? I'm sorry. It was hard to hear. Sorry. A real quick question about the analytics information. Do you get demographic information about the viewers? Only by country. Okay, so no age, sex. Yeah, you can get age and sex. Yes, you do get that. Okay. But I haven't seen anything like specifically where people live, just countries. Right, right. Okay. And then the other question I had, when you're doing an appeal of being demonetized, I'm in a non-ACX royalty share agreement with my author or with my narrator on a number of books. Do I need to like invite him to participate in that video to make sure that they understand that we're both on board? That would be a good idea. Yeah, that would be a good idea to get some kind of contract with that person in order to show them, yes, I do have the full rights then. Okay, great. Thank you. Yes. We have about 35 seconds. Any suggested length that you think a full book gets more views or less views? So mine are all about five hours. But, you know, I had shorts that I put up there, those short stories I put up there. That did really well for me too. So I don't, I don't need, I don't specifically think that it's like, like with books, the longer ones tend to do much better and the short stories don't do as well on, on Amazon. I haven't found that to be true on YouTube because even a short story can, can take up to an hour to read, you know, so that's a decent video on YouTube. Real quick, I have books with a couple F-words in them and others swearing. Should I remove those, just wipe them out or censor them? Or is a couple fine? If it were me, I would just censor them because it's not a lot of work for you and it's a lot easier than getting your channel demonetized and having to deal with all that. Thank you. Yeah. Very quickly, does Audible and other platforms have exclusivity? Are they going to get upset at you? for putting stuff on YouTube? How does that? Only if you're in the exclusive contract with Audible. You can get out of that by just emailing them. I think you have to be in for a certain amount of time, but then you can just email them and say, I wanna get out of the exclusive contract, and they will let you out of that, and then you're fine. Thank you guys so much for coming.

Also, one more caveat, if you have audiobooks that you have done through ACX and RoyaltyShare, you will probably need to buy out some kind of contract with the person that you RoyaltyShare with before you are able to put your audiobooks on YouTube. So you'll have to contact through ACX the other person that you did the RoyaltyShare with and figure out how to get out of that contract. So let's talk about why YouTube. Let's explore what we can do with YouTube. The number one reason why I like putting my audiobooks up on YouTube is, and you may not be able to see the small numbers on here, but this is my most...

popular audiobook on YouTube. It has 786,000 views on it. It was uploaded almost two years ago, and that's how many views it has. And if you look at the six books that are on there, all six of them have more than 100,000 views.

This for me is number one reason why I have my things up on YouTube, because I want more people to notice my name, to become fans of my work, and to listen to my books. Why did Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter bring in 41 million dollars? Number one, he had tons of fans. Number two, his fans trust him, so he was giving them good books.

Number three, they they shouted, take my money. And he wrote these books secretly, and he didn't even tell them what they were about. He just said, I wrote four secret books.

Here's a Kickstarter. And people were like, give me these books. And they take my money.

So this is what I want to create with my brand. When I put my books up on YouTube, I get comments like this. What was supposed to make me fall asleep kept me up all night.

I absolutely loved this book. The second one says, I'm your fan now, Victorine. The third one says, wow, yes, this was such a good story. The fourth one at the end says, by far you are one of my favorite authors.

That is what we want to see. And this one just makes my heart go pitter-patter. Victorine Eliske, I'm going to binge this entire series, then buy all five of the books for my bookshelf. I'm like, oh, yes, this is exactly what I want, right? This is what I want to create.

Even with giving away something for free to your viewers, you can get them sucked into your world, and you can make them want more from you. Another reason why I really like YouTube is I over the past two years I've made $46,000 just on ad revenue and other small perks like People can give you extra money and we'll talk about that later, but forty six thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at Also, the potential for YouTube is massive. Mr. Beast ranked the highest paid YouTube person ever, estimated at $54 million earned in 2021. So the potential here is massive.

There are 2.7 billion registered YouTube users. Compare this to Amazon, which is our big mammoth of a site that brings us in money. Amazon has 310 million registered users. So this is a much bigger audience than what we can get through Amazon. Also, the analytics are amazing.

I'll show you some of the things that you can see in the background on your dashboard on YouTube. You can see the top geographies of where people are that they're listening to your stories. You can see age and gender. You can see when your viewers are on YouTube. You can see channels your audience is watching, and it skipped one slide.

Content your audience watches. You can see other videos that they're watching. And you can see the top earning content on your own channel. So you can see I have one runaway video that has earned me most, you know, $13,000.

But then I have other videos under that that have earned several thousand dollars each as well. And so this gives you great information about what people are wanting from you on YouTube. I can also see key moments for audience retention.

These are the percentage of people that are still watching at 30 seconds in. 88%, 86%, 85%. So I can learn from that, from what I'm doing on these videos. How viewers are finding your videos.

What they're browsing and suggested videos and YouTube searching and things like that. So 20% of my people that find my videos are going on YouTube and just searching. for something and they find my videos that way. I can also see what they're searching which is super helpful to me. So a lot of people search audiobook, audiobooks in full, things like that.

But the thing down here you can see the billionaire's accidental bride. That is not one of my titles but if I want to utilize that I can go into my videos and say if you liked the billionaire's accidental bride Then check out my video. And now I've got some keywords and I am upping that result in the search.

So all of this data and more is available on YouTube. So I want you to just think about this. What if you made YouTube your primary focus?

What if you said, this is how I'm going to earn my money and then all the other avenues that I have for earning money is extra? Now I know Some of you may have direct stores and you're making a lot more money than $46,000, which is fine. Maybe that's your primary focus. But YouTube can also be a supplemental income for people who are doing that. So your number one fight on Amazon is visibility.

What I really like on YouTube is you can see that spike of when I first put all my audio books up. And I'll talk about that. I had 14 audio books just sitting there.

and that's when I started putting them up. And so I got a nice spike from putting them up once every three days. But once I ran out of content, and it just kind of slowly went down a little, but it stayed nice and steady.

And I make about $2,000 a month steady over this past two years, which is wonderful income just for putting them up on YouTube. And you're going to ask me how much I spent on ads. I spent $0 on ads for that.

This is all just generated from YouTube's suggesting my videos. So how do you monetize? You need to meet the minimum requirements, and I'll give you that in a minute.

You need to follow the rules, and you need to post one video at least every six months. So that can be some YouTube shorts. It can be you getting on and talking about your next book that you're writing.

You don't have to write a book every six months, but you do need to post something every six months. Now, the minimum requirements, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. I was able to get that within 30 days of uploading my audiobooks, but I did have, like I said, 14 audiobooks just sitting there that had already been produced, was already on Audible, and I had to upload them. had that just ready to go. And so that's what I did.

And I published one every three to five days for that first 30 days. And that's what really got my channel going. I did this because my son is a YouTuber. And he said, Mom, this is what you need to do.

You need to be publishing something every three to four days and be consistent with it. And I'm like, great, I have 14 books. Then what do I do after that?

But I did it. I said I'm just going to put them all up within that first 30 days and see what happens. And by the time I got monetized, I was making $250 a day just from putting up my audio books.

So YouTube likes those consistent posts. Now, after that, I ran out of content. I was like, great, what do I do? So I started looking at my books that hadn't been made into audio.

I looked at some of my short stories that I had that haven't been made into audio, and I started posting some of that content. And I'll talk about how I did that in a minute. I had better luck posting full audio books on my channel.

I know some authors are posting chapters at a time or pieces of their book at a time. I tried that with an entire book. I said, all right, my new book has come out. I just got the audio.

I'm going to put one chapter up a day. And it'll take over a month to get all that content up, but I'm going to get great, you know, subscribers and great views because I'm putting something up every day for an entire span of time. It backfired on me because I would put one chapter up and it would get 300 views and I'm like, great, 300 people listened to my chapter.

Then I would put the second chapter up and it got 12 views. And I'm like, all right. Either I totally didn't hook those 300 people, or I just got people clicking on it, and then they went off to do something else and didn't actually follow through.

And so that would happen throughout the entire thing. So chapter 14 got 350 views, and I was like, great. And then chapter 15, we get 12. And I'm like, okay, people are not doing what I want them to do, which is listen to the entire thing. And so I found, I eventually deleted all of those and put the full audio book up. And once I did that, it did much, much better for me.

That's just my own personal experience. I did talk to another author who was putting up like serial type pieces. His was a serial and he was doing really well on audio, just putting up pieces of his serialized novel like that. And so if you write for Vela and you write maybe more in a serialized fashion, that might work better for you. But it just didn't work for me for my chapters.

So what you need to do is teach YouTube who would like your videos. So shout about your most popular video to your fans on social media. And I focused on that one accidentally married that was doing really well, and I wanted that one to get the most views because it was doing really well. I focused on the one that was great for me.

And I sent it out to all my fans on social media. I linked to it in my newsletter, and I did newsletter swaps with other authors. I do a lot of newsletter swaps with authors and some authors give me just their YouTube overall channel link for their overall channel and I see way more clicks when I send out a specific book for people.

So I would strongly suggest that you find your your strong book and do newsletter swaps for that one book and if people like it they're gonna go and look for your other things on your channel. If you don't have a large backlist of audiobooks, don't stress. There are other things you can put up on YouTube to gain traction.

I know several people putting up YouTube Shorts and gaining a lot of traction from YouTube Shorts, even if they only have two or three audiobooks up. But what I would do when you start, even if you only have like five audiobooks, I would do the one every three days and just put them all up at once, even though you're going to run out of content. and then find other content to put up because that's what really got my traction. And I would think it was like probably the fourth video that I put up that got me a lot of traction after those, you know, hitting those once every three days. And so even if you have just a few, I would suggest doing it and putting them all up and then trying to gain your traction with other things like YouTube Shorts and other things like that.

So I'll tell you, when I ran out of content, that was right when I got monetized. And I was like, okay, I have some novellas, I have some short stories. It was right around Christmas time. It was beginning of December.

And so I took all my Christmas content and I used an AI voice to create an audio book. The program I used was MicMonster, the pro version, because you need the pro version in order to monetize it. And this is one of the books that I put up.

It's called Cupcakes and Kisses and it's like 11,000 words, something like that. And it was used in an anthology and it was since taken out of that anthology and I had the rights to it. And so I used MicMonster Pro and put it up there.

And it's been up for two years and it's made me $600 in those two years it's been up. And if anybody told you you would get paid $600 for an 11,000 word short, I'd be like, yes. sign me up. You know, any magazine that would pay that for that would be a great opportunity. So that's just extra money that I'm earning for that.

I paid a one-time fee for my Monster Pro, but now they charge like this subscription thing. So for, and I just recently went on there to look it up and it was three months for $39. So it's really not bad, especially if you, you know, take the time to make all of your shorts into audiobooks right away, then you can you know unsubscribe and then you have all of them made into audio for you.

There are other alternatives. Google Play makes AI audio as well and Revoicer is another one I've heard that is really popular with authors. Or you can also just read your book on YouTube.

Nathan Lowell, this is this will date me because this was quite a few years ago. When ebooks were just starting out, he created massive success by reading his own novel and giving it away free on a podcast. And he became a six-figure author very quickly when people were listening to the podcast and really getting into his story. So this is something you can easily do on YouTube.

I did talk with a consultant about YouTube because I wanted to ask about my channel and make sure I wasn't demonetized and we'll talk about that later. So I asked the consultant, what's the best thing to put on YouTube? And they said, you need to put you on YouTube. Let your fans get to know you. Tell your story.

Why you started writing. Share your writing process. Share your beliefs, your hopes, and your dreams. Because as soon as someone gets really invested in your story... What do they do?

They want to know more about you, the author. They want to know why you created that world, what inspired you, things like that. You can post extra information. You can read deleted scenes from one of your popular books or write an extra scene and read that.

Share background information on a character. Talk about upcoming books that you're working on. These are all things you can put up on YouTube to create more content for yourself.

So how to make the actual videos. The program that I use is Premiere Pro because I have the Adobe Creative Suite but it's kind of a technical program it's a little hard to learn so I wouldn't totally recommend that if you don't have the Adobe Creative Suite. Another one that's popular is DaVinci Resolve or iMovie.

Both of those I've heard people using successfully with to make their YouTube videos. So you may be asking yourself, what do you put on the video, Victorine? All right, so I'll show you what I have on my video for my post most popular book.

Do not be Victorine and do this. This is just my book cover with a black background. This was a really bad idea, but this is the one that took off.

But when I first started putting up my books, I wasn't doing anything creative or, and it's really embarrassing because I'm a graphic designer. So I wasn't doing anything really well designed, which after thinking about it, that was really dumb. But this is my latest video that I put up, and so I designed it much better. I just did this in book brush.

And so, yes, I would recommend this much more than just plopping up your cover. Make it look nice. Put on some headphones to make it look like an audio book so at first glance people know what they're looking at. And in big letters, I have free audiobook that's really recommended. You can also make a little moving video.

I'll show you a couple of them that I've made. Let's see if this will play it. Yeah.

So this one just rains and has a little lightning in the background. And it's just a looping video that goes over and over and over again while the book is read. Here's another one that I did.

It does little snowflakes. I don't even know if you can see it because they're tiny. But I used motion leap on my iPad to do those looping videos They are fun and great and I would recommend doing that if you can but I will give you a warning it will make your Book video really large a large file So what I recommend doing is change the video target bitrate to one or less when you are creating at the end process when you're processing that video and making it into an MP4. So this is a screenshot of Premiere Pro.

If you're using another program, you probably have something similar in the settings to create that. What that does is it makes the video quality of it, the visual quality of it, not so great. But if you make it one or just a little bit less than that, It's nobody's going to be able to tell and nobody's really watching your video for the visuals anyway.

They're listening to the story right at least they should be. So this is what I did to make my video file small enough to go up on YouTube because if you try and upload a video file that's too big on YouTube it'll just hiccup on you and then it'll be like forever and I had an author tell me my video has been uploading to YouTube for 24 hours, Victorine, what should I do? And I'm like Yeah, you gave it an aneurysm, so just delete it and start another one.

So one more thing you want to do is follow the rules of YouTube. This QR code will get you to a page that gives you all of the links to all of the different rules that you need to follow. If you just search on Google YouTube monetization policies, you will find this page as well. You definitely want to read over and make sure you're following. You want to follow the YouTube's community guidelines.

You want to follow the terms of service. Google Adsense program policies and I'll just go over the highlights the most important bits for you but community guidelines spam and deceptive practices so you want to be sure you're following this and you don't try and get any fake engagement so sometimes people get really excited about their YouTube channel and they're like okay I really want to get to that 1,000 subscribers so I'm going to have You know, maybe buy this package on Fiverr and have somebody give me a thousand subscribers. Well, that can be kind of shady and you may get a bunch of bots subscribing and it may trigger something in YouTube's community guidelines that you're using deceptive practices. So you don't want to do that. So yes, trade newsletters.

Yes, try and get your author friends to subscribe and things like that. Don't try and do anything that may mean you're getting a bunch of bots on there because that's bad. Also, sensitive content, and we'll go over that in a minute, or violent and dangerous content.

So what you cannot monetize on YouTube, sexual content. Now, if you have a steamy book or if you have sexual content in your book, what I would recommend is just as you're making that video, just chop out those bits. and put it up without those bits and say, if you want the full book, just buy the audio, or go over to my Patreon, and you can get the full book over there. So I did have an author friend who just went ahead and put up her full book anyway, and she did get her entire channel banned from YouTube. They took the whole thing down, and she can't make any other channels because of the sexual content.

So they do follow that rule. pretty strictly. Now that doesn't mean you can't go out on YouTube right now and listen to sexual content on there, but they're not monetized. That's the thing. So if you want to monetize and make money off of it, they're pretty strict on that because they're selling advertisement to these other people, these other companies, and they want to keep these other companies happy, right?

So that's why that rule is there. Graphic violence. Now this one, I don't know how lenient they are with a book because you're not actually showing graphic. Violence on screen.

So, you know in a murder mystery there's gonna be some murder So I would say if it's really gratuitous then maybe cut some parts out of your book But I wouldn't worry horribly amount of if you have a dead body in a scene. I wouldn't worry too much about that Vulgar language again. This is a sliding scale some channels You can you can find there's vulgar language in it and they allow it other channels. They don't so kind of up to you on how you want to take that and where you want to go with that.

If it were me, I would just cut it all out of my book. And then I would say, get the full book here. Hate speech, that kind of speaks for itself. You shouldn't be putting that in your books anyway.

All right. Demonetization. This is a thing on YouTube. And I was scared about this because I put my books up on YouTube not knowing anything about demonetization. And as soon as I got monetized and I started telling other authors, hey, my channel just got monetized, I'm making all this money.

Somebody said, oh, well, someone else did that and then they got demonetized and they took away all their income. And I went, oh, no, I can't have that. So I went and did a bunch of research on it.

What I found out is most of the time when they're going to demonetize your channel, it is because of the reused content policy. What this means is they have found out that your audiobook was on Audible or somewhere else first, and they're just going to assume that you pirated that copy and put it up on YouTube. So they think you're using someone else's content without their permission.

So really what they want to do is make sure that you are not a pirate and that you are not trying to make money off of someone else's hard work. which is actually good for us, right? We don't want other people making money off of our hard work. So we need to prove to them that we are the author and this is the content that I own. So if you get demonetized, and I did, I got demonetized, and then I went through all the steps and I got re-monetized 48 hours later, and they also did not turn my ads off when I was demonetized, so I got paid for those 48 hours that I was off.

quote-unquote offline because they didn't turn off my ads and so I was still making money. But if you get demonetized, you want to read the appeal information and follow the instructions to the letter. So they will tell you exactly what they want from you and you need to follow that. They will tell you how long the video needs to be made and you're going to create a video.

So just sit down in front of your computer and click the record button and just talk to the computer. They want your URL channel right up front so you can just say your URL. channel or if you have editing software you can just put it up on screen for them and then you make your case you you tell them that your content is not reused that you are the author you own the copyright and you tell them how you made the video because they want to know how you made the video and tell them you paid the narrator and that you own that copyright to that audiobook and that it is not owned by a publisher it is not owned by anybody else You want to prove that you are the person. So what I did immediately when I got demonetized is I went and updated all my author photos on my website on Amazon. So it looked like me.

So when I sent in my video they could easily see okay this is the author. Now I know if you use a pen name and you don't want your photo associated with that then you're gonna have to maybe get creative. show them your Amazon dashboard where your books are attributed to you, and show them maybe your ACX dashboard where they can see, ah, these audio books actually belong to this person. The number one way to prove that you own the content on YouTube is to put it up on YouTube first.

So if you put it up on YouTube before you publish it, to Audible and all of those other places, then they don't even bother you because they can see, ah, this was up on YouTube a day before it was up on ACX and Findaway Voices and all of those places. So they're not even going to demonetize you. Before you upload any videos, I would suggest you search for your name and your videos and take and send out take down notices for all pirated copies of your audiobooks because if you have had audiobooks out there they probably are on youtube with pirated copies they're probably not monetized because they can't prove they own that but they're probably there so number two update your author photos if you can if you're not a secret pen name do that so you look like you And then number three, record a short clip explaining why you are putting up your audiobooks on YouTube and publish that to YouTube so they can see, ah, this is the author. They're explaining why they're putting their audiobooks up on YouTube for free so that people can enjoy them. So my pen name is Angel Adams, and I made sure it was on my website and connected to me as the author.

If you have a secret pen name, you can't do that, but like I said, just show your author dashboard where all your pen names are, and then the people can see that you are the author. I also linked to YouTube on my website, and it said, like free books, click here to get them on YouTube, so that the people checking this out could see, ah, the author put this up. I can see they're linking to this on their website. So number one, point to your website in your video when you tell them you are the author.

Here's my website. Point to your Amazon author page. Point to any author videos that you've done on YouTube to prove that you are the person who wrote those books.

And show your author dashboard, your ACX dashboard, or your website dashboard. If your appeal is denied, and I have talked to several authors that had an appeal and they were denied. It's okay, you can re-appeal. They want you to be putting content up there that they can put ads on.

That's how they make money. They are just trying to be really careful and not monetizing anything that they can get in trouble for later on. So they want to make sure that you really are the person who owns that content.

So if your appeal is denied, you can appeal again. You may have to wait 30 days. So if you're repeatedly denied, they sometimes say, no, wait 30 days.

and then appeal again. Read the rules carefully to see if there's anything that you missed when you do your appeal again and definitely address the reason why you were denied. If your appeal says something else other than reused content, address that issue and so you can tell them why you are appealing and why it is okay for you to monetize this content. Alright, here are some extra tips. There is a thing called Super Thanks on YouTube.

Anybody watching your videos can send you extra money just as a thank you. It's great. But you have to turn it on.

So once you get monetized, you want to go into the back end and find, under monetization, find the Super Thanks button and turn that on so that people can send you money. Because who doesn't want free money? All right, commenting, the more comments you get, the better it is.

So comment back to everybody who comments you on your videos. YouTube will show your videos more if there's more engagement. If you get negative comments on there, just delete them. It's super easy and it's awesome because they don't even know you deleted their comment and it doesn't inform them. They can't even, they, when they go, they can still see their comment, but no one else can see it.

And so it's like super secret that you're deleting this and you're not going to make them mad or anything like that. But it's really awesome that you have the power to go in and get rid of those stinky comments because we can't do that on Amazon. We have these reviews that we hate, but we have to just grin and bear it.

But here we can just delete them and it's wonderful. And you can also go under the settings under automated filters and you can filter certain words. So if you have certain people coming in and posting things over and over again, you can filter out certain words so that it automatically just doesn't even show up on your channel, which is great.

Don't be afraid to try new things. Try some YouTube shorts, some Instagram reels. Put up your TikTok videos on YouTube. Share what makes you unique.

Share writing tips, but... If you want to do that, what I would suggest is do it on a separate channel. You can just create an author channel for authors because you don't want to confuse your audience.

If you start sharing writing tips on your audiobook channel where you want readers, authors are going to start going over there, and then they're going to start showing your videos to authors, and it's going to muddy up the system. Now, for genres, if you write in several genres, I have put all my genres up on one channel and I have not found it to be bad. People listen to all of them.

So I have found it's not like Amazon where you can confuse that algorithm. My people on YouTube have been listening to all of my content. So you don't have to create a separate channel for every pen name that you have, but I would create a new channel if you're going to do author tips and things like that.

So I spoke with this consultant again and they said you need to understand your target audience. You need to ask yourself these questions. Who is this person?

What do they want? Why can't they have what they want? What's at stake if they don't get it? These sound so familiar, don't they?

This is Seamus Lee Pilford from Tim Schmoyer's Video Creators. He has some really great YouTube videos out there. So if you want to go and search.

Tim Schmoyer and video creators. You can find some great how-to videos and helpful videos to figure out what content you could put on your channel besides your audiobooks. So this person is at point A. They want to get to point B, but they don't know the path to get there. They could need something educational, like my computer won't send this email.

Or maybe they're bored and need entertainment. So that's where we probably fall into. They have a three-hour layover with nothing to do.

So what you need to do is create a value proposition. Finish this sentence. Subscribe to my channel because. Don't answer with just what you do, but why you do it. This pulls in that emotion.

Figure out what your audience wants and give it to them. So put up content that fulfills that want from your target audience. I have just a few minutes. I'm going to talk about Patreon for just a second.

Patreon, what is it? It's a website that allows fans to support artists in an ongoing basis. You can set up to be paid monthly or per creation. In exchange, fans get special content, VP treatment, or anything else that you set up.

So people on YouTube often use Patreon to supplement their income. So... People who watch a lot of YouTube videos are very used to YouTube creators saying, support me over here on Patreon. That's something that people are used to. So you can pull in some extra money that way.

Content you can give on Patreon, commercial free audio books, exclusive Patreon content, maybe short stories or novellas or background info on stories, personalized messages, content for authors, classes, writing tips. maybe early access to books or stories or audio books. The benefits of Patreon, there's no upfront costs to you.

You set the tiers and the benefits, and there's more freedom to post your content, so you don't have that restriction of no sexual content or, you know, bad language or anything like that. And YouTube viewers are very used to going over to Patreon to support their creators. You can connect with super fans. who love your work and they're willing to give you a few dollars a month in order for you to create more. Patreon costs.

The Lite version is 5% commission. You get a hosted creator page. You get Patreon communication tools and Patreon workshops.

The Pro version, which is what I have, is an 8% commission, so you only pay them when you get paid. You get everything in Lite and you get membership tiers. You get analytics and insights. You get special offers and promo tool. You get creator-led workshops, unlimited app integrations, and priority customer support.

And then the premium is a 12% commission. You get everything in pro, and you get dedicated partner manager and merch for membership and team accounts. So this is my website. I'm sorry, this is my email.

Feel free to email me if you have any extra questions. I will say that I am giving away one month free of the Writing Gals Academy. which is a collection of videos that we have collected over the years from our conferences that we give.

It's videos on all kinds of topics like marketing and business things and I'm giving away one month free. After that it's only $9.95 a month for the Reading Gals Academy. So if you're interested email me and say I'm interested in the one month free and I'll give you a code and you can go over there and check it out. Thank you for coming to my talk and we have seven minutes for questions. Hi, thanks.

That was fantastic. Just a quick one. With ads, I'll take it your money is coming in from advertising. Yes. When do those ads click in?

Because surely if they keep coming in during the actual audio book, people are going to get really fed up. Yes. How do you work that? So you have the ability to put the ads where you want.

It is called mid-roll ads. And you can go in and you can say, I want them, and I put them in between every chapter because I'm giving them a whole audio book for free. And if they're getting it for free, then I want some ad revenue from it.

So I put it in between every chapter. But you can go in and say where you want those ads, even if you want to spread them out farther than that, then you can. Thank you.

Yes. All right, we have some questions from the viewers at home. First one we've got is, are your YouTube books on other storefronts, and if so, are they paid or free?

They are on other storefronts and they are paid, yes. All right, next one. Looking at YouTube analytics, what percentage of viewers actually listen to a book until the end? Oh, that's a great question.

I should have looked that up right before I gave this presentation. There is a drop-off. When you see the graph of people viewing yours, there's this peak of people who clicked on it and there's a drop-off.

But then the... then it's really steady. And I want to say it's somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of people actually listen to the whole thing. All right.

Another one, I write thrillers. What's an example of forbidden graphic violence? Can I have a fight scene? I'm sure you can have a fight scene.

Yeah. I don't know an example because it's kind of ambiguous what they say in their rules. So I don't have any examples. But in my books, there's sweet romance. And so there's not a lot of violence in there.

But, you know, I. I have the book that I have, I'm writing Paranormal. There's people get shot and killed in that one.

And nothing's been, you know, pulled for content for that. So I don't think it's a huge deal because you're just reading it. You're not showing it on screen.

So I think they would probably allow quite a bit. Alright, if I have a current YouTube channel on a different topic with a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours Can I change the channel name delete the old content and just keep it going? I say yes, because what I did when I started mine is I had a really old channel It didn't have very many subscribers But I had a really old channel with just random junk on there And I just deleted all that out there and started putting my audio books up and so it worked just fine for me to delete what was on there and start new. And so I'd say yeah. All right, just a couple more things here.

When you say point to, do you mean in the description of the YouTube video of the audio book file or are you shooting a video where you say, you know, you attach something to the files? When I was pointing to like the videos, like the websites and things, I would say if, That's if you get demonetized, right, and you're trying to appeal. Okay. Yeah. So I would put it up on the screen, your actual website on the screen, and say this is my website.

You can go look at that and put the URL up there so they can see it. And last one I've got for you. Have you experimented with uploading audio books in multiple languages?

If so, is it better to have all the languages on one channel or separate channels? I have not experimented with that. So that's a great question, but unfortunately I don't know the answer to that one. Okay, great. Good questions.

And you kind of, one of her questions touched on the question that I was going to ask about resurrecting your views, because I did what you did. I posted a bunch of shorts, and I got a nice kickstart from the shorts, and then, like, I waited a month and posted another one, and no views. And I know you were saying you posted your 14 once every three days.

Yes. And I was wondering, you know, like, for somebody like me who's got an old channel, How do you resurrect the views when you go back and you post your, now you want to go back and you want to post your 10 books over 5 days? Do you need to start a new channel to get the algorithm boost from being?

So I didn't, my channel was really dead, I mean like dead dead. I think I had like 10 subscribers and it was no views, you know, over years. So it was a really old channel. And so I would just start posting them.

And send people to your channel with like newsletter swaps and announcing, hey, I have a free book and be all excited about it. You can make TikTok videos about it and get traffic there. And I think that will help you. Awesome.

Thank you so much. So it sounds like you've had some pretty amazing success just right out of the gate uploading your work. So I'm wondering how how well did those books sell?

Already, like what kind of built-in audience did you have for those books before you were able to get that level of success by uploading on YouTube? That's a great question because I did have a level of success before I did any audio books on YouTube. So I had about 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter. You know, my books had sold pretty well traditionally in the e-book world. And so, yeah, my very first book that I ever wrote hit the New York Times bestseller list.

So I did have some success before I put it up on YouTube. Real quick question about the demographics or about the analytics. Do you get demographic information about the viewers? I'm sorry. It was hard to hear.

Sorry. A real quick question about the analytics information. Do you get demographic information about the viewers? Only by country. Okay, so no age, sex.

Yeah, you can get age and sex. Yes, you do get that. Okay.

But I haven't seen anything like specifically where people live, just countries. Right, right. Okay. And then the other question I had, when you're doing an appeal of being demonetized, I'm in a non-ACX royalty share agreement with my author or with my narrator on a number of books. Do I need to like invite him to participate in that video to make sure that they understand that we're both on board?

That would be a good idea. Yeah, that would be a good idea to get some kind of contract with that person in order to show them, yes, I do have the full rights then. Okay, great. Thank you.

Yes. We have about 35 seconds. Any suggested length that you think a full book gets more views or less views?

So mine are all about five hours. But, you know, I had shorts that I put up there, those short stories I put up there. That did really well for me too. So I don't, I don't need, I don't specifically think that it's like, like with books, the longer ones tend to do much better and the short stories don't do as well on, on Amazon. I haven't found that to be true on YouTube because even a short story can, can take up to an hour to read, you know, so that's a decent video on YouTube.

Real quick, I have books with a couple F-words in them and others swearing. Should I remove those, just wipe them out or censor them? Or is a couple fine?

If it were me, I would just censor them because it's not a lot of work for you and it's a lot easier than getting your channel demonetized and having to deal with all that. Thank you. Yeah.

Very quickly, does Audible and other platforms have exclusivity? Are they going to get upset at you? for putting stuff on YouTube? How does that? Only if you're in the exclusive contract with Audible.

You can get out of that by just emailing them. I think you have to be in for a certain amount of time, but then you can just email them and say, I wanna get out of the exclusive contract, and they will let you out of that, and then you're fine. Thank you guys so much for coming.

Transcript for:Monetizing Audiobooks on YouTube

Transcript for:
Monetizing Audiobooks on YouTube