Authors on YouTube Are Lying to You

The algorithms on our various social platforms have an uncanny ability to detect what we want—or need—to see. In my case, YouTube seems to have detected my frustration with the AuthorTube creators I follow and has adjusted itself accordingly.

Flexing its superhuman powers of prediction, the algorithm served me a collection of videos from a smaller channel I’d never heard of, The Unwanted Bookclub. One of these videos perfectly captured what I’d been feeling over the last several months:

AuthorTube Creators create content to sell books, not to improve writing.

The video perfectly juxtaposed several popular creators, many of whom I follow, showing the common themes in their videos, the repetition, and, most damningly, took a gander at the books these creators have written. The results… were not inspiring.

"The thing that killed it for me… was the prose," said The Greener Side of Sam, another small creator who focuses on actual writing rather than sales. Having read The Savior’s Champion by popular YouTuber Jenne Moreci, she agreed with Nicole from The Unwanted Bookclub that the writing itself was subpar.

Jenna had succeeded in getting sales through her video platform and her genuinely sparkling personality. But the reviews attest that even among its target readers, the book falls flat. As you’ll see in the video, Jenna isn’t the only author giving advice on the internet who falls victim to the focus on sales over quality.

In the modern book-selling landscape, there is no correlation between book sales and writing quality

A quick look in YouTube’s search results will reveal that the most popular and most searched-for writing videos are the ones that promise tips and tricks to 1) write fast and 2) become a bestseller. Finding a video that addresses writing quality in the title takes some serious scrolling. And let’s be honest, who goes past the first page of results?

Digging a little deeper into the internet, there is a self-publishing group on Facebook called 20 Books to 50k, comprised of self-pub authors of varying degrees of success. The most successful members pump out several books a year, most often in romance, and the quality is middling at best.

A speaker at their convention in Vegas this year readily admitted he doesn’t use editors, beta readers, or even a critique partner. His writing model can be feasibly described as pump and dump, yet his shifter erotica sells. Very well.

As I’ve spent the better part of this first month of 2022 staring at the dreaded blank page, agonizing over every word of my next book, I can’t help but feel disheartened. And based on the videos YouTube has so helpfully sent my way recently, I see I’m not the only one.

Do You Have to Choose Between Sales and Quality?

Of course not. Andy Wier’s work, including The Martian, is fantastically-written scifi, and his books, quite rightfully, have been selling like hotcakes. But Andy sent his work to his email list for free, for years, before being signed to a publisher and making it big. When I first heard that, my impatient heart sank.

But now, as I look at the poorly-written shlock that’s clogging up Amazon bestseller lists, I’m actually more in favor of that model. Any focused on quality first, then moved on to the issue of racking up sales.

Everyone has their own plan when it comes to writing. Maybe for you, it is your entire income and you don’t have the luxury of writing what you love. You have to write to market or you can’t make rent. I have no criticism for you.

But for me, writing is not (or ever will be, most likely) my primary source of income. So I have the luxury of time, of working on the quality of my writing before I send it out into the world. And if my next book sells similarly to the last five, I will at least be able to rest in the knowledge that it’s good. It’s well-written and I’m proud of it.

Better that than sell larger numbers of a book I’m embarrassed to have my name on.

My question for you is, what has your experience in self-publishing been? Do you write to market or just whatever strikes your fancy? I’d love to hear your stories.