If you’re up on the latest trends like I pretend to be, you’ll know that YouTube is a social platform that has quickly turned your average kids into celebrities. Thousands of people make videos on anything from their day-to-day lives (called vlogs), advice videos, cooking how-to’s, and more. What caught my attention, however, is a growing number of individuals who call themselves “booktubers,” meaning they make videos on YouTube about books.
These vloggers make a number of videos, from book hauls, to reviews, to comedic sketches acting out their favorite book scenes. Their enthusiasm for reading is infectious to watch, and for an author, it makes me excited to know that people still love reading books as much as I love writing them.
Some of these vloggers make a living off of their videos and the brands they’ve developed based on them. Some become authors themselves. They speak at conferences and have huge followings of teens all over the world. While everyone seems to have an opinion about whether or not being a YouTuber is an actual career or a glorified hobby, I think bringing books and reading onto this platform is immensely important to the literary community.
Those of us who write books are always going to try to find ways to get them into the hands of our ideal reader. And these days, if you’re a children’s or YA author, your ideal reader is most likely watching YouTube. If the people they look up to are enthusiastic about reading, chances are the kids watching the videos are going to feel enthusiastic about it too.
Check out some of these videos from my favorite BookTubers below, and share them with others! The more we support BookTube, the better chance we have at raising a generation who still loves reading.
Megan Olivier
Ariel Bissett
Jesse The Reader
PolandbananasBOOKS