How Short Videos and Live Conversations Have Become Useful Growth Tools

I'm looking forward to another great week of helping writers succeed

Hello Friends!

When I was in school I wanted to be a cartoonist. This was back in the era of the Sunday morning comics and that seemed like the best thing in the world to me. I used to sit in my classes and doodle in my notebooks. This annoyed the teachers even though I always got my work done and got good grades.

When I became a father, I realized how good kids are at listening even if they’re apparently engaged in some other task. I found this out after reading a chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my girls one evening. They were playing on the floor as I was reading and it didn’t seem like they were listening to me. It kind of annoyed me at the time.

The next day we watched the film version of the book. We watched the one starring Gene Wilder. At the point where they get on the boat, my eldest daughter goes, “That’s not right.”

“What isn’t?” I asked.

“The boat is blue. Last night when you read the chapter it said the boat was red.”

Little clues like that have come up time and time again. In the end, I learned that I was the one in the wrong for getting frustrated when my kids didn’t seem to be listening.

My daughter told me yesterday how a student teacher once got mad at her for doodling during class. “Me? Can you believe it!” my daughter said.

Well, she’s right. Learning to doodle is a useful skill. It’s nice for these articles and it’s nice for a mental break when you can’t look at a digital screen any longer. Speaking of art, I still need to schedule a live talk with

Karen Marie Shelton

about it. I meant to do that last week, but the week got away from me.

I’ve been doing a lot of lives on Substack. I love them, but they’re also exhausting me. It really is cool to track down all the wonderful people I’ve met over the internet and have a conversation. When you start talking to your fellow writers, you see how much brain power is actually out there. It makes it frustrating to recognize how often uneducated and uninspiring people are allowed to dominate the media.

We need to do better.

In case you missed them, here are my lives from last week:

• Discussion about Medium with

  Dana DuBois
  and
  Patrick B. Stewart

• Discussion about Immigration with

  Arturo Dominguez

• Pathways to publishing with

  Libbie Grant

• Movies with

  Ben Ulansey

I’m going to try to do fewer lives, but I already have three scheduled.

• How to move to another country with

  Elizabeth Silleck La Rue
  on Wednesday, May 21st at 10AM CST.

• Patreon as a publishing tool with Reid Faylor on Wednesday, May 21st at 7PM CST.

• Movies with Ben Ulansey on Thursday, May 22nd, 1PM CST.

Also, let me know in the comments if you want me to offer another zoom meeting for paid subscribers. I haven’t done one of those in a while, so I’m curious to hear if there’s interest.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with short videos.

Zuri Stevens

said she liked them, so I thought I’d mention them here. Here’s one:

I’ve been posting these to places like Notes and Blue Sky.

Peter William Murphy

suggested I should also post them to YouTube. My idea has been to just try and carve out a little representation for a calm and reasonable perspective. It seems like the media only shows videos of irrational people screaming. When I was growing up we had Mr. Rodgers. We need a political version of Mr. Rodgers.

For those of you who are interested, I’ve been editing these videos on Riverside. The tool lets you edit off the transcript rather than a confusing sound wave, so that’s convenient. It does take a second for the video to load up, so don’t think it’s not working just because you’re looking at a blank screen for a moment.

Riverside also has some animation features that are kind of funny. For videos less than a minute long, you can make yourself look like a baby (I like how it kept the sunglasses and hat):

Or a Panda:

I took this short video of the birds in the nest over the garage:

Riverside has a feature where you can animate the subject of the video like a muppet. So I thought it might be cool to get some baby birds that looked like muppets. So, I loaded it into the feature.

Here’s what I got:

That is kind of awesome though :).

I’ve been shooting those videos when I’m out for a walk with the dog. Usually the editing only takes a few minutes and it’s something I can do at the end of the day when I’m tired from all the writing.

I think it’s a useful growth tool. It’s fun to think of new ways to get exposure on other social media sites. People tend to stop and look at a video for a second as they’re scrolling through memes and text. It’s a good way to get more visibility, and I’m still in the growth phase of this newsletter.

Thanks to all of you for subscribing, if you can make the jump to paid subscriber at any sponsorship level that’s a huge help! I’ve got a lot planned for you already this week, and there are sure to be some surprises.

One of my articles got a huge amount of traffic recently, and the divide between rural and urban America is one of the main themes I’m going to continue to explore:

As always, thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow!

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