Empty Calories vs. Sustainable Nourishment: How I Overdid It With YouTube Shorts

Sometimes you just have to fail.

Like, hands down, face-in-the-dirt, spiral-into-existential-malaise, total abject failure.

Sometimes you just have to fail before you realize that everything you were doing prior to said failure was a complete and utter waste of time.

It started with YouTube Shorts -- that infernal, 60-second video platform/genre/format YouTube rolled out to compete with TikTok. Earlier this year, YouTube finally started monetizing Shorts, and -- with their aggressive push to steal TikTok’s thunder -- it felt like a sensible move to cash in on the platform. 

So I did.

For two months, I added Shorts to my already active creative schedule. I was as smart about it as I could be. I did my research and learned about what worked and didn’t and how the Shorts algorithm functioned. I came up with a simple strategy that seemed to be supported by YouTube’s own pitch for Shorts: I extracted promotional snippets from my short stories and chapters, developed a visual style that included original waveforms and promotional animations, and basically set things up to funnel traffic over to my long-form audiobooks and audiobook shorts.

I did this for about 2 months and produced 18 shorts. Not all of them were promo/snippets -- after a bit, I was inspired by the restrictions of the format and started crafting dedicated 60-second short stories.

And despite the overall tone of this post, I really enjoyed my “original” shorts. They were the perfect synthesis of my creative process -- a clever, compressed script, interesting typography, and lovingly-crafted voiceover and sound design.

Seriously, I’m pretty proud of some of those Shorts.

Which is why it’s such a fucking shame I can’t do anything with them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember that “already active creative schedule” I mentioned?

Let’s back up to the start of the year, where I set my goal for “who I wanted to be” in 2023, which actually began toward the end of 2022. I had started producing my first audiobook and was enthusiastically getting sucked into the process of audio engineering and performance. I was motivated (and compelled) by a simple premise: no one (that I knew of) was self-publishing original fiction audiobooks on YouTube.

It was a simple formula. Kindle Direct Publishing has proven that anyone can self-publish a book. Worse, KDP also proved that the quality of writing typically didn’t matter much -- especially now, with how utterly dense the digital detritus is across the Kindle shelves.

So we start with writing. Anyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. All those fish swimming in the self-publishing pool? Well, when we adjust for the quality of writing, that school gets a little bit smaller.

Now how many of those decent writers have the means to produce an audiobook?

Yeah ... the school of fish just got a little smaller, still.

But let’s take it one step further: you’ve either got the wherewithal to produce the audiobook yourself or you pay someone to produce it. Either way, like all publishing endeavors, most authors’ goals are to make money. Got a new audiobook? You’d be crazy if you didn’timmediately put it up for sale on Audible.

Hi! My name is Krumbine, and I am 100% batshit.

That school of fish gets impossibly narrow when you look at decent writers with the wherewithal to produce an audiobook and who aspire to launch it on YouTube. This suggests, logically, there’s very littleoriginal audiobook competition on YouTube. And compared to all that digital detritus over on Kindle, suddenly YouTube as a self-publishing destination becomes very compelling.

For 2023, my goal was to focus on what I already enjoyed: producing audiobooks and posting them on YouTube, rebuilding my YouTube channel, and setting myself up for long-term success.

Here’s what that looked like on a day-to-day basis:

I was actively recording my 40-chapter, 80K-word novel “Don’t Be a Monster, Dick!” while aggressively trying to edit chapters as I went.

My first audiobook -- my gritty superhero, alt-right punch-‘em-up, “Punched, Drunk, and All Out of F*cks!” -- had launched as a single video, but I wanted to see how it would fair as individual chapters in a YouTube podcast. So I broke it up into 30 separate videos and started reposting it. Along with the video exports, this also involved generating unique thumbnails, titles, and descriptions for 30 new videos.

Since I was refocusing my longtime Krumbine YouTube channel on audiobooks, I crafted a new positioning/messaging video, new audiobook shorts, and video essays (one of which has been sitting half-completed for months now).

To say the very least, the first half of 2023 has been busy. And all of that happened concurrently with a full-time job in corporate creative, where I was running a gauntlet developing and producing a series of videos that would turn out to be the pinnacle of my professional creative career.

Oh, yeah, I was also pivoting from daily walks to a daily 10-mile bicycle ride.

And then I got really crazy, setting an aspirational goal of writing at least 500 words daily about ... literally, anything.

So that’s what I was doing when I rolled YouTube Shorts into my creative schedule.

And that was how I sent myself plunging into an existential malaise -- because I didn’t just roll Shorts into my schedule ... I was 100% sucked into the soulless churn of short-form, empty calorie content.

Time, as it turns out, is quite a limited resource. And the more time I spent on YouTube Shorts, the less time I had for the things I actually wanted to do -- the very thing that truly satisfied my creative itch.

So ... I went a little crazy. And not in the good way. I burned out. I wanted to throw all my creative efforts into the trash and do nothing but binge 11 seasons of Shameless while compulsively ordering Uber Eats.

The churn of that empty calorie short-form content made me lose sight of why I do what I do: I enjoy the process, and the process soothes my brain. Success would be (will be?) great, but it will only ever come after a long-term commitment to that process.

In other words, I’m not here for the Shorts because I’m too busy working the long game.

There are other practical problems with YouTube shorts -- especially in the context of my creative schedule. Besides being the absolute wrong audience for long-form audiobooks (“Please, sir, stop ADD-scrolling the Shorts feed and listen to my 6-hour audiobook”), Shorts have an obviously short shelf-life. This is the antithesis of YouTube and my own creative work -- art should exist, be searchable, and ready to be unearthed when people are prepared for it. My mini-viral LEGO animation was a nothing-burger for years before it blew up. Shorts may never genuinely have that opportunity!

Another fundamental problem I have with Shorts, especially as I was crafting original stories for the format: I can’t embed them in a meaningful way, which means I can’t really talk about them (or share them) on my own website without reproducing the whole video as a “regular” YouTube video.

Finally, the biggest sin of my two months and 18 video Shorts experience: views didn’t convert, and the channel didn’t grow. So I was wasting time, getting distracted from what I really wanted to do, and getting absolutely nothing out of it.

YouTube Shorts are empty calories and don’t provide anywhere near the kind of creative nourishment long-form content does. This applies to the creator and the consumer. This has always been at the core of my creative philosophy and why I enjoy writing books ... so I kind of hate myself for getting sucked into YouTube’s hype machine.

But ... today I’m good.

I’ve refocused. I’ve “niched down,” as they say, and reimagined how I package and present my audio content on YouTube -- this is to help me stay focused in the long run, as well as help find and connect with an audience that shares in my “nourishing content” values.

And I got lucky, too. I didn’t slip too far down the Shorts rabbit hole, and it still positioned me to come up with my TubeBooks audiobook channel.

Better still: somehow -- someway -- I landed the domain name YouTubeBooks.com. So if you want to see a clear example of niching down, scroll through my main site and then compare it to what I’ve put together for YouTubeBooks.com.

Yes ... I’m now running two websites, two YouTube channels, and writing/producing content across four locations (five, including the day job!) ... but somehow -- someway -- I feel more focused, motivated, and invigorated than ever before.

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