Six Months Of YouTube Audiobooks: Lessons Learned

It’s good to try new things as an indie author – sometimes you find something that works (1st book free, Facebook ads, etc.), and sometimes you find something that doesn’t work, but you learn some useful information anyway.

My experience with YouTube and audiobooks definitely falls into the latter category.

Way back at the start of 2021, I heard a podcast with indie author Lindsay Buroker where she described uploading her audiobooks to YouTube. (You can listen to a later interview on the topic here.) She received enough subscribers to get into the YouTube Partners Program, which meant she could monetize her audiobooks with ads.

I was both intrigued and horrified by the idea. Intrigued, because audiobooks are difficult to sell and the prospect of another sales channel for them is always exciting, and I don’t have any problem with the idea of ad-supported audiobooks.

Horrified, because my overall impression of YouTube was extremely negative. Like, if I had chosen five statements to describe my overall opinion of YouTube, I would have picked 1.) piracy, 2.) morons recording semi-criminal (or actually criminal) activities for views, 3.) conspiracy cranks, 4.) ruthless exploitation of video creators, and 5.) factually incorrect videos on every topic known to man. Or, to put it another way, my frank opinion at the start of 2021 was that YouTube was another milestone on Western Civilization’s gradual journey to the world of Idiocracy and Harrison Bergeron.

But! By contrast, Google Play Books (another division of the same parent company) is excellent. Google Play Books has been moving from strength to strength and improvement to improvement over the last two years, and if you’re a self-published author who isn’t in Kindle Unlimited, it is a very good idea to have your books on Google Play Books.

With that in mind, maybe my opinion of YouTube was out of date – perhaps the platform had improved. Perhaps my age (the first computer I ever used was a Commodore VIC20), general cynicism, and overall dislike of video had prejudiced me against YouTube unfairly.

Anyway, to get into the YouTube Partners Program and achieve monetization, you need 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers. I decided to give it a go. I figured out how to use iMovie to convert an audiobook into a YouTube-suitable video file, and after some technical missteps, I was ready.

On February 16th, 2021, I uploaded the audiobook of CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP.

Two minutes later, the first comment on the video was a link offering pirated software.

I probably should have taken it as an omen.

But, the comment was clearly automated spam and didn’t reappear after I deleted it, and the watch hours started to rise quickly. Encouraged by this, I uploaded the remaining two CLOAK GAMES audiobooks to YouTube, and then started on the GHOSTS books.

Results came swiftly. By March 10th, I passed 4,000 watch hours, and subscribers came more slowly but nonetheless steadily. I reached 100 on March 12th, 500 on March 31st, and hit the magic 1,000 mark on April 27th. (At this point I had about 275,000 watch hours.) Pleased with this result, I applied for the YouTube Partner Program, and was promptly rejected on May 4th.

The rejection stated my channel “used someone else’s content without permission.” This was initially baffling because I had complete rights to every audiobook I posted on YouTube – I paid for the production and they weren’t exclusive to Audible, which meant I was in the legal clear to sell and post them wherever I wanted. But I had also set my podcast (The Pulp Writer Show) to upload automatically to my YouTube channel as well. Perhaps YouTube’s algorithms were unable to discern that I had the rights to both the audiobooks and the podcast.

YouTube makes you wait 30 days between applications to the Partner Program. So I deleted my podcast from YouTube and put a reminder on my calendar for June 4th to reapply for the program. June 4th rolled around, and I reapplied, with only the audiobooks in my channel.

The rejection came less than an hour later, with the exact same message, even though I owned the rights to all the audiobook content on the channel.

Increasingly curious, I started to do some research, wondering if I could find a customer service rep to speak with to explain the situation. At Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Google Books, if something goes wrong, you can talk to an actual human. Granted, it might take a couple of days to talk to an actual human, and you might need to talk to several people to get an answer, but the problem will most probably get fixed eventually. I soon discovered that YouTube’s support is legendarily bad, and the only way to (potentially) get a response from anyone at YouTube is to tweet at the @TeamYouTube account. (A company with $20 billion in annual revenue only offering support through a Twitter account is not an encouraging sign.)

Anyway, I did tweet at the @TeamYouTube account in the first week of June, and received a response – for the Partner Program, YouTube only wants exclusive content that has been created exclusively for YouTube. Stuff that is available elsewhere (such as audiobooks) is not welcome for monetization.

At this point, I had too much else on my plate to think about YouTube any longer – DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN was taking up all my mental space, and there was a lot of stuff going on in Real Life that needed attention. So I stopped thinking about YouTube for a while and ignored it do other things.

But I was reminded of it on August 2nd, when I saw a tweet from Lindsay Buroker (you’ll remember the podcast at the start of 2021 that started the whole thing) that her audiobooks had been kicked out of the Partners Program for the same reason mine had never been able to get in. That is an absolutely baffling decision, given that audiobooks easily generate hundreds of thousands of listening hours and just as many potential ad impressions. YouTube is basically an ad serving business, and given all of YouTube’s many, many, many well-publicized problems with copyright, piracy, and criminal content, you’d think a copyright holder who actually wants to put her fantasy fiction audiobooks on the platform and serve ads on them would be welcome, but apparently not. The business logic behind such a decision is so irrational as to be utterly nonexistent.

Anyway, it reminded me I needed to make a decision about YouTube, so I deleted all the audiobooks except for CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP and CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. I regularly make the first ebooks in a series free, so why not the first audiobooks? Though I might change my mind and take even those last two audiobooks off YouTube entirely.

So that was my six month adventure with YouTube audiobooks.

Did it work? No. However, I was out nothing but some time, I made a little extra money (see below), a few thousand people got to listen to the GHOSTS audiobooks who would not have otherwise, and additional knowledge was acquired, which is always useful. Additionally, valuable lessons were learned:

1.) My initial negative impression of YouTube was in fact entirely accurate. This was gratifying on a personal level, and perhaps worth the entire exercise. 🙂

2.) From the perspective of content creators, YouTube is a highly dysfunctional and unreliable platform. Every other ebook/audiobook publication platform I’ve ever used seems like a well-oiled engine by comparison.

3.) I did get a boost in audiobook sales for the first 30 days or so after I posted an audiobook. I figured that if 10,000 people listen to the free audiobook, and 1% of them go on to buy it, that might be more than would have bought it otherwise. So a viable strategy might be to temporarily post an audiobook with sales links in the description for 30 days, and then delete it once the window is up.

4.) That said, I’m not going to bother with that. YouTube is too much of a hassle. It’s great for viewers, but if you’re an audio/video creator of any kind, YouTube is not a good choice. Like, you could put up some sampler content (like I’m doing right now with CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP and CHILD OF THE GHOSTS), but I would strongly recommend against making it your main focus in any way.

5.) There is definitely a potential market for ad-supported audiobooks.

In an interview the CEO of StoryTel (an audiobook subscription platform) said there isn’t a market for ad-supported audiobooks. I think he’s mistaken – the ease of which full-length audiobooks on YouTube can accumulate watch hours is shocking. And if you think about, until the rise of the Internet nearly all radio and TV was free to the listener and viewer while being ad supported.

I suppose there’s a potential business opportunity here – an audiobook store that offers things in tiers. A free, ad-supported tier with an ad after every chapter of the audiobook. Then a monthly subscription tier for ad-free listening and maybe the option to buy MP3 files directly, with perhaps physical CDs and DVDs for sale.

The business might do quite well.

Unless, of course, it is bought by YouTube. 🙂

-JM