Why Vlog?

An intro to SFF author Abby Goldsmith, and why she chose to talk to a camera despite feeling uncomfortable about it.

AG Vlog Ep01 Transcript

Hi, my name is Abby goldsmith. Welcome to my blog/podcast.

This is an experiment for me. I've never done anything like this before. I'm not entirely used to talking to a camera in the solitude of my house. It's a little bit awkward.

So you may be wondering why am I doing this. Well, I've thought about just blogging, and it's true I feel more comfortable typing at a computer than speaking to a camera, but a lot of authors do that. I like media. I like going on YouTube. I like podcasts; listening to them. And I figured, well, I'll give this a shot. I can talk for three minutes without a script, which is what I'm doing right now.

A new topic every week, that's my plan. And for me, this will be less work than a blog. A little bit more nerve-wracking ... well, quite a lot more nerve-wracking. But I would like to try to just reach people in different way.

I already have a YouTube show, Aspiring Writers, and I plan to continue that. I took it on a very long hiatus for about a year. I'm going to be starting that back up pretty soon, and I'm thinking this will just be a great supplement for my blog. I could talk about writing for hours and hours to friends. Anyone who knows me in person knows that I can go off on any topic. So I think I'll enjoy this, once I get a little more used to talking to a camera.

You may wonder: why am I even trying to market things at all? Well, I'm very new to marketing I would like to just write books; that's my main passion. However, after a lot of research, it seems like even debut authors that have a major publisher behind them tend to not get a very large marketing push from the publisher. So there's a lot of ... it looks to be, just from from many authors I've been following, whose careers I've been following, that marketing is something that we need to learn.

It's one thing to write a great book, it's quite another thing to reach people with it. So yeah, from what I've seen, all the indie authors I've seen become successful in the last two years, they're good at marketing. They may not be any more comfortable in front of a camera than I am. They've found ways to reach readers, and that's what I'm learning how to do.

So I'm probably going to be talking about some risky topics that I wouldn't even want to blog about. I'm thinking that talking about them, you can see my face and body language and tone, and maybe taking on some controversial topics this way will be are a little bit less "stirring up the pot" than doing it on a blog and the written word.

I'm already over time. I'm planning to keep each of these to three minutes and that's it. My topic today was simply "why I'm doing this." So hopefully that answers that question.

Feel free to reach me on social media. On Twitter I'm @Abbyland, and I'm on Pinterest. Of course you can just Google my name, Abby Goldsmith, and find me, and I'm on YouTube and everywhere else.

Thanks for joining me!