Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

This was a difficult post to begin, mostly because it was difficult to decide what to include and how it should be articulated. This final post on BookTubers was intended to discuss how they affected our writing. I had some ideas earlier in the week but I lost those threads. In the end it came down to remembering that there were real things that changed once we found this corner of YouTube. And there were real changes and improvements offered.

One of the first and simplest ways that I was able to improve was simple reminder tutorials in grammar. I always “dun reel goodest” with grammar back in high school, so I’m not horrible. That being said, it was nice to get some refreshers in not just punctuation, but in sentence structure, active voice rather than passive voice, and other finer points. In addition, I learned a few new tricks on sentence and paragraph presentation, dialogue tags, and other newer writing tips. So now I can writed wiff da bestest of dem.

Another way that BookTuber videos helped us in our writing was to actually put terminology to many of the concepts Clevenger and I had discussed. We were actually able to put our story ideas into terms of tropes and other writing concepts. It gave us a language to refine our ideas with one another, and to test what we felt would or would not work in the modern writing market. We learned a lot about finding our “writing voice” and refining how we were writing, not just what we were writing.

In addition to learning new concepts and terminology, we learned to have a bit more confidence in our own capabilities. As mentioned in some of our other posts, much of what Clevenger and I found in many of the “new writer” videos were concepts and rules we had already incorporated in our writing, either by discussing them with one another, or already included because they seemed common sense to us, with or without discussion. We quickly learned that while we may not be experts, we were closer to the top tier of newbie, unpublished writers. This was definitely a confidence boost.

Finally, we learned a good bit about book industry expectations and publication guidelines. We were able to learn a good bit about what would be required to have a book traditionally published, tips and tricks to have better odds at succeeding with self publication, and the pros and cons of each. A great example was that at first we assumed that having a four book series would be a boon going into traditional publication, but we quickly found out that typically a publication house would only take the first book, see how it sells, and only then decide whether they would want the other three. If they did not, we could be left with no control over our own series. This is just one example of one of the publication tricks we learned.

So there you go. Overall we learned quite a bit from BookTuber videos, in addition to being entertained by some pretty great people. So get out there and see what you can learn on your favorite hobbies. You never know what you can stumble across, and you might be surprised to find out, not just what you didn’t know, but what you already knew! So next week look forward to a new topic, and look for Clevenger’s thoughts on wrapping up BookTubers. Until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham