They call it Book Tube

What am I not doing? My actual job. The thing that I get hired for. I am not helping a client with a paper by either editing or writing it. Instead I just discovered that I can use my phone for videos and upload them on youtube. So this past week, you can go to the Cannibal Teddy channel on youtube and find dozens of minute long videos of the sidewalk as I walk along.

But I don't think that's going to make me money. Actually very little is going to make me money but holy shit, I am sick of term papers. I need more money.

Anyhow, I don't like my voice. So what the hell am I doing thinking of actually trying to make a youtube channel that will eventually make money (right now I cannot guarantee that the 14 views on the one video were not just me). And so I have two options (in my head, until something better comes along)

1. Reading Public Domain Poetry as the images show people getting killed
2. Book Reviews - I mean it's 2019 and I'm going to review every book I read this year anyhow. Might as well review the books that I read.

And review the books that I don't read. But I tried to do that already and I couldn't say much about the books that I couldn't finish beyond being bored with them. I mean there was the odd book that shit out an infodump in the first paragraph but mostly, I was just bored with these books. The characters were nothing and the story wasn't going anywhere.

That would get repetitive.

One thing about the book review channels is that a lot of them involve women (according to one of these reviewers the ratio is 40 women to every 1 man on these things) talking about how they do their videos. A lot of stuff about tags and sponsorship will be noted.

Apparently there's also a community.

Of course, if I want to review books it would not be current books. I don't get ARCs anymore. I have some ARCs from Amazon Vine but those are old.

No clue if that would work out.

Also timlieder.com - finally got my own damn website.

testing this thing

One of the problems of having a Wordpress and a patreon blog is that i'm going to have to cross post everything manually. Of course, Patreon is really selling the blogs and the secret blogs. But I really need to put it all together.

Of course, another thing I could do would be a channel where I read old blog posts and point out some really shitty attitudes based on misogyny, racism, transphobia, etc.

Maybe Book Tube is not for me

I'm looking at those "Book Tube" videos and they are all so damn chipper. And seriously, there is not a chance in hell that I'm going to review most of the books that they are reviewing. Hate to be that guy but I know a lot of these people. I remember the contempt I felt for a guy live tweeting the Academy Awards at his apartment and saying that he would not say anything mean about the boring best song because he wanted to get into this industry and shit talking about his contemporaries is a bad idea. They weren't his contemporaries really but he was still worried (so if you want to know why R. Kelly and the rest could get away with it, know that the entertainment industry is even more stuck on the "don't say anything about anyone" track than the most obnoxious Chofetz Chaim fan.

Anyhow, I can't really talk about many new books because I know too many writers. I am a writer. And there are two things that bother me -
1. Horrible people who write great books (less problematic unless they are alive - currently I'm loving Burr by Gore Vidal - it's so good. He's so shitty).

2. Really sweet people who write books that I hate.

Note the qualification on that last one. Jay Lake helped me out a great deal when I was starting out Dybbuk Press and he didn't have to answer any of my questions. I hated his books. I thought he was a great guy but I'm not going to be going on some Book Tube either lying about his books or saying how much I hate them.

That feels safe because he's not alive and won't get his feelings hurt, but I still feel bad about it.

Also I don't really want to get into the whole extra stuff that goes on - the book hauls, the book shelves, the fan gushing over modern authors who follow the tubes, the advice on how to make a book tube (ok I watched those).

Of course, this is all academic as I don't have the time, equipment or skills to make videos like that yet. So right now I'm like I was back in my 20s, an unpublished author sending shit out to markets that were rejecting it fast while feeling a little weird talking shit about books that I hated because damnit, at least Piers Anthony could finish a fucking book.