youtube secrets book review

YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer

Sean cannell.

196 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 25, 2018

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YouTube Secrets Review | Why Every YouTuber Should Read This Book

by Nate McCallister

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Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the products and services mentioned on this website pay affiliate commissions to the creators at no cost to you. Thank you for your support!

September 28, 2021 in YouTube

I've written about the massive amount of money people are making selling books on Amazon. That has a dark side to it, unfortunately. It means that a lot of people crank out subpar books on topics they know little about just to make a couple bucks.

There are less than a handful of books on Amazon I trust that teach how to grow a lucrative YouTube channel and the best one of them all is YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influence by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis.

Who Should Read YouTube Secrets?

This book has value no matter where you are in your video influencer journey. Beginner, intermediate or advanced YouTubers should read this. Hell, even mega YouTube stars like PewdiePie could benefit from reading this book.

I considered myself an intermediate YouTuber when I picked this book up in May.

Although there were parts early on that I already knew, the book was filled with things I didn't know. It was also good to hear the things I had heard before again. Let's be honest, it can take a few times for the common sense advice to actually register and be implemented!

Why You Should Read YouTube Secrets

Reason #1: Extremely qualified authors!

Unlike several other books on the topic, YouTube Secrets is written by two guys who practice everything they preach.

Both of these guys are thriving in niches that are EXTREMELY competitive.

Benji Travis has 369,000+ subscribers on his channel that covers topics of passion for him: food, family and business.

S ean Cannell's channel Think Media is closing in on 1 million subscribers (currently sits at 911,000+). He covers tech tips and ways to grow your brand on social media (including YouTube).

Their book sales are a drop in the bucket compared to the massive earning potential they've built on YouTube.

Oh, and they're also just really nice guys! Benji Travis earns a seven-figure income but also has raised almost $2 million for charity.

Reason #2: The Book is Entertaining AND Isn't Filled with Fluff.

I can't stand when a book is filled with lengthy stories or useless information that are just filler content. I don't want a bunch of words, I want actionable advice!

Every page in this book serves one purpose: to help you become a better video influencer.

Reason #3: It's 200X Cheaper Than a Course and Probably More Valuable

I paid $1997 for a course called JumpCut Academy. It was awesome, but as far as "bang for my buck," YouTube Secrets packed much more.

Reason #4: 100% White Hat and Ethical Tactics

Benji and Shawn make it clear that being a video influencer isn't just a money grab. I really appreciated that they didn't share some of the strategies that "work," but are gray hat or borderline scammy.

Reason #5: Comprehensive

YouTube Secrets is broken into two sections: The 7 C's and then Tactics. The first section shows you how to set a great base for your YouTube channel and the second section teaches you some more actionable tactics you can start to implement.

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YouTube Secrets Summary by Chapter and 7 Key Takeaways YouTube Secrets Summary : Every Chapter & Key Takeaway Explained --> YouTube Secrets Summary 📖 7 Rules, Tricks & Strategies --> YouTube Secrets Summary 📕 7 lessons that changed my life--> YouTube Secrets Summary: 7 Best Lessons from Sean Cannell and Benji Travis -->

Quick Summary

YouTube Secrets is a must-read if you want to start a YouTube channel to make money. Sean and Benji—the creators of multiple popular channels—help you unlock the YouTube algorithm, explain how to grow a channel from zero, and share many methods for making income. (Hint: Expect hard work!)

Key Takeaways

🚀 1. Just Start: Take courageous action and begin your YouTube journey despite feeling judged, awkward, or alone

🔍 2. focus on one passion: a narrow niche focus helps your channel gain a loyal audience much faster, 🎉 3. your first 1,000 fans: cultivate your community through valuable content and genuine engagement, 💰 4. monetize your videos: 10 proven ways to make passive income, even with a smaller youtube channel, 🔁 5. consistency is key: show up with a new video every week, by keeping things simple.

🎥 6. Creating the 'Perfect' Video: "Hacking" the YouTube algorithm to get maximum views in less time

🚀 7. Scaling Up Your Channel: Leveraging advanced techniques and business building for even more growth

Reviews Summary

YouTube Secrets is rated 4.6 on Amazon and 4.1 on Goodreads .

Positive reviews say: Very helpful and informative — Understand how YouTube works — Motivational push to get started

Criticism: Missing advanced strategies and recent updates — The author's YouTube channel contains more information

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Want to start a YouTube channel for fun and profit? Then you’re in the right place! There may be no better introduction to the world of YouTube marketing than this book. And here you’ll read a fast-paced, detailed summary of the best lessons in it!

Many of us remember YouTube as that website you could go to watch funny cat videos. Well, times have changed! Today it represents one of the greatest opportunities for making an impact and an income online. The investing company SignalFire estimates there are already over one million YouTubers making a six-figure income.

Creators are the new founders. —SignalFire

Right away, this book tackles some top questions many of us may have like:

Is it too late to get started? Nope, YouTube is a greater opportunity than ever. Right now it’s the dominant social media platform, with over 80% of U.S. adults using it daily. And it’s still growing, so there are plenty of hungry audiences still available for us to serve!
Do you need a fancy camera? Nope, many of the most popular YouTubers got started with their smartphones—and you can too!
What if you’re not a Hollywood actor? No acting skills required, you just need to be passionate and excited about a specific topic , whether that is cooking, beauty, technology, fitness, faith, movies, etc.

About the authors

Sean Cannell was making a six-figure income as a tech YouTuber for years, before starting his current multi-million dollar video education company. Now he is CEO of Think Media and host of the Think Media Podcast.

Benji Travis has created YouTube channels that have received over 1 billion views over the last 10 years. They include a popular cooking channel, as well as a family vlog channel with his wife.

Sean and Benji were both full-time YouTubers when they teamed to to write this book. But they wanted to test their ideas again starting from zero, so they created the channel Video Influencers that now has 660,000 subscribers. (Hey, maybe what they teach really works!)

You know that scary feeling of diving into the unknown? That worry of “what if something bad happens?” Yeah, that feeling is real. And guess what? There’s really no way around it besides tacking our fears head-on. Just get started anyway , say Sean and Benji. While that may sound too simplistic, let’s unpack it.

Fear of what people will think? The internet is a place full of all kinds of people, both wonderful and unkind. We have to accept that some hate comments are inevitable, no matter what we are doing. Even if we’re saving homeless kittens.
Feel awkward in front of the camera? Every beginner YouTuber tends to feel a little weird when recording their first videos. Don’t believe me? Look up some of your favourite creators and find their earliest videos. That awkwardness only goes away over time with repetitions, once you have experience after publishing many videos.
Feel alone or unsupported? Family and friends often won’t understand your goals, so it can be helpful to find a supportive community of people with likeminded goals, even if that is just an online group in the beginning.

Find your why. To help maintain courage in the face of our fears, it’s important to keep our reason why at the top of our minds. Why do you want to create a YouTube channel? Write down those reasons and review them whenever you’re feeling discouraged or unmotivated.

Some of your reasons may be related to personal goals, like making a certain income, sharing your passion, perhaps quitting your job. Other goals may be other-centred, like you want to connect with other people who share your passion and create videos that others find valuable or entertaining.

The slogan “Just Do It” comes from Nike, the #1 sports clothing brand in the world. Well, if you’re looking for inspiration to jump into your entrepreneurial journey, one of my favourites is the book “Shoe Dog,” which tells the life story of the founder of Nike.

Phil Knight was just a skinny college kid who loved running, but he had a “crazy idea” in college, to sell Japanese-made shoes in America. As a naive young person, basically still a kid, he flew to Japan and made a deal with a shoe company, not really knowing what he was doing. Then he flew back to the U.S. and started selling shoes from the back trunk of his car. Eventually that grew into Nike, the enormous brand we all know today.

To other ambitious young people, Phil says it’s always best to “start before you’re ready,” because if we try to work out all the details beforehand, then we’ll feel too intimidated and probably give up on our dreams. As a scared young man, he told himself, “Let everyone else call your idea crazy… just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”

Read more in our summary of Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

It’s completely normal to feel negative emotions before starting a YouTube channel. Fear of being judged and unsupported, or feelings of awkwardness or nervousness in front of the camera. The important thing is to “Just do it,” just get started because that is how the fears will slowly evaporate.

If we feel fear and nervousness before starting a YouTube channel, "YouTube Secrets" suggests that we .

Wait until fear subsides.

Practice meditation.

Just start; fears will diminish.

Improve video skills first.

Ever found yourself stuck at the beginning of your YouTube journey, watching other creators growing their channels, and asking yourself “What’s the perfect channel idea for me?” Well, then this section will help you find the right direction! The first thing you should know is that starting a successful YouTube channel is NOT about chasing every trend or trying to appeal to everyone…

Success on YouTube comes down to this simple formula: Pick a topic that aligns with your passion, your skills, and what the market wants.

Have you ever heard of the Japanese word Ikigai?

Some believe that people in Japan live longer and healthier than others because they have found their “ikigai”—which means having “a reason for being.” It is about having a purpose, a passion, or a powerful reason for getting up in the morning. We feel happier and probably live longer when we can do what we love, around people we love.

In the bestselling book Ikigai, the authors say we can determine our unique Ikigai by asking ourselves these three questions and seeing where our answers overlap:

What do you love?
What can you be great at?
What will the market pay you for?

3. Market wants

There need to be enough people out there in the world/marketplace that want to hear about the topic. If you see somebody else already doing what you want to do, that’s not a reason to feel discouraged, but actually a great sign! It’s the best proof you can get that there are people interested in watching that kind of content! You just need to put your unique spin on the topic.

One great way to stand out from similar existing channels and gain traction faster is by NARROWING down your topic. Most of us think we’ll grow faster by going wider, but on the internet it’s the opposite—a narrow niche focus almost always wins, especially when you’re starting out. If other channels are already talking about “video games” then you could focus on “Nintendo video games” or even better “Super Mario video games.”

When it comes to online business and passive income, one teacher that I’ve been studying from for YEARS is Pat Flynn, host of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. His first online business was selling study guides for a specific exam that architect students needed to pass. Then he created a small empire, helping people launch their online businesses through courses, books, and plugins.

However, in the past couple years, Pat Flynn has created his most profitable project ever—a YouTube channel on Pokemon card collecting called “Deep Pocket Monsters”! He started it as a side project, partly because his kids also love Pokemon. But then something unexpected happened. The channel blew up to almost 700,000 subscribers and TENS of thousands of dollars per month!

That story really proves that in the world of the internet, passion trumps everything. And often the more narrow your focus is, the quicker you can gain traction online. The world of Pokemon card collecting looks completely incomprehensible to those outside of it—grown men spending thousands of dollars collecting colourful little pieces of cardboard. But as Pat Flynn himself wrote in his online business book Will It Fly?: “The truth is if you don’t have a passion for what you are doing, your energy will eventually fizzle out.”

Read more in our summary of Will It Fly? by Pat Flynn (coming in the future)

Build your YouTube channel around a passion—something you can feel enthusiastic about months and years into the future. This is how you can maintain motivation and succeed, because it is “a marathon, not a sprint.” Also, pick something you can be good at and there is a proven market for.

To maintain your motivation and enthusiasm, build your YouTube channel around a .

Popular trend

Personal passion

What seems profitable

Viral content

Dream of turning a YouTube channel into your full-time income someday? Then here’s some good news: you probably don’t need to have millions of subscribers or become the next Mr. Beast. In fact, your golden number may just be 1,000. That is to say, you may just need 1,000 true fans to build a sustainable, full-time income stream.

This idea comes from the investor and futurist Kevin Kelly, who wrote a famous essay called “1,000 True Fans.” Let’s break it down…

The simple math is that a creator could earn $100,000 per year income, if they have just 1,000 dedicated fans, each willing to contribute $100 per year.

Okay, that is still not exactly easy, but Kevin Kelly argues that for most people it is far more achievable than trying to get millions of followers. As an example, the biggest fans of a music artist are more than willing to spend $100 per year on event tickets, t-shirts, posters, etc. We’ll talk all about effective monetization methods in the next section…

Let’s talk about how to nurture those 1,000 true fans:

a) Clarify your unique value proposition

Every successful YouTube channel offers some kind of value, the reason why people come back to watching it again and again, such as: entertainment, education, inspiration, information, etc. Many of the most popular channels offer a combination of these, like combining education with funny jokes and memes. This forms the core value or reason why someone will come watch your channel and become a subscriber.

b) Set expectations with your brand identity

Why do most people subscribe to a YouTube channel? Because they just really enjoyed a video from that channel and want to see more like it in the future. So if you want to build subscribers faster, make sure people know what to expect from your channel going forward.

This is where a clear brand name can be so helpful. Think of it like TV channels—people know if they want history they go to The History Channel, while if they want sports they go to ESPN. A good example is Sean and Benji’s own channel, “Video Influencers” or the health-related channel “Nerd Fitness.”

But remember, while a catchy brand name is good, there is also power in using a personal brand , or your own name for your channel. Many popular creators go that route.

c) Encourage audience engagement

Finally, to build your 1,000 true fans faster, you must cultivate community engagement and interaction. Here are some key ideas:

Ask for comments. At the end of each video, ask your viewers to answer a specific question. Reply to each comment that you’re able to, because interaction fosters loyalty.
Cross-promote your other social media. When someone follow you on other platforms, they become a more dedicated fan, whether that is Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
Nudge them to subscribe. The largest creators ask people to subscribe every single video. That may sound unnecessary, but clearly it’s the strategy that works! To avoid sounding like we are begging, you can say something like “Subscribe so you don’t miss out on future videos about xyz!”

One of the best books I’ve read about online business is Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson . His most important idea is that instead of building traditional websites, we should build sales funnels (also called marketing funnels).

What’s the difference? Simply put, a sales funnel has one single aim for each page, whether that is getting our visitor to click a specific link, sign up to our newsletter, or click that “add to cart” button. Every page contains a clear “call to action” telling them exactly what to do next. Brunson writes, “One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that ‘a confused mind always says no.”

Learn more about making money online in our summary of Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson

To make a full-time income, we may only need 1,000 true fans. To get there, we should clarify what type of value we will offer our audience (entertainment, education, etc.), then set expectations with a consistent brand, and actively encourage engagement by directly asking for comments and subscriptions in every single video.

For a successful YouTube channel, identify the type of to offer your audience.

Advertising

Once we’re starting to get some views, how do we turn that into actual cash? Great news, you don’t need to be a mega-star with millions of subscribers to start making money. With the right strategies, even a relatively small channel can bring in a decent revenue stream.

Here’s a very quick overview of the 10 monetization methods discussed in YouTube Secrets :

Adsense: Think of this as getting paid directly by YouTube, for allowing them to put ads on your videos. In many ways, this is the simplest and easiest way to start making money—to turn on this feature for your channel, you just need to hit 1,000 subscribers and a certain number of watched hours. But here’s the catch: you can expect to make about $2 per 1,000 views, so you’d need a whopping 1 million views monthly to make $2,000 per month. So, this strategy’s best for channels aiming to get tons of views, like those related to entertainment, comedy, news, vlogs, etc.
Affiliate marketing: You can make sales commissions online, by sending people to purchase products at e-commerce websites. Typically, you’ll sign up to be an affiliate on a company’s website, such as Amazon, then they’ll provide you unique links. When people click those links under your videos, the company will know those customers came from you and reward you a sales commission, usually 1-10% depending on the type of product. Even with a smaller audience, you can make a significant amount of money, especially if your YouTube channel discusses specific products, like if it’s related to tech, beauty, fashion, finance, reviews, etc.
Your own product or service: While it takes more upfront work to create your own products to sell, this is often where the real money is, especially if your channel isn’t reaching millions of people. You can sell anything from physical products like t-shirts and mugs (YouTube now integrates directly with platforms like Teespring and Amazon Merch). Or you can sell digital products like courses, ebooks, etc. Even higher priced services like coaching and consulting.
Free product trade: Believe it or not, some companies are willing to send you their products for free, in exchange for a review or promotion on your channel. In essence, you’re trading your influence for goods. As they say, “a penny saved is a penny earned.”
Generating leads: If you have an existing business, you can use YouTube as another way of getting leads and customers. Just think of what questions or topics that your potential customers would be searching for, then make videos addressing those topics. The co-author Benji built his local real estate business to 100 property deals per year, using this exact strategy.
Crowdfunding: This is the most direct approach, asking your audience for funding. With YouTubers, the most popular way is using Patreon, which is built for ongoing monthly support through memberships. But you can also launch specific projects with sites like KickStarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe.
Events: You can organize events to connect in-person with your community. This includes everything from live performances by music artists to professional industry events. The author Sean Cannell organizes “Grow With Video Live” every year in Las Vegas, though during COVID it became a digital event.
Brand sponsorships: This is also called a “brand deal,” getting paid to talk about a product in your videos. Instead of waiting for companies to notice you, you can take the initiative: reach out directly, use a middle agent, or find opportunities on marketplaces like AspireIQ. A massive subscriber count isn’t always necessary, especially if there is a close match between your audience and their product. For example, Heather Torres created a homeschooling channel with just 2,500 subscribers and was able to sign a partnership agreement with a company selling homeschooling curriculums to parents.
Licensed content: Your video footage could be perfect for someone else’s purpose—think travel vloggers licensing their beautiful clips to tourism boards. The simplest way is to go the stock video route, uploading your best footage to websites where you’ll earn a fee if someone decides to use it in their project.
Speaking engagements: Depending on your channel topic, you may begin receiving opportunities to speak landing in your inbox, as a side effect of building your personal brand and authority. Sean Cannell speaks many times per year at events on video marketing, not only earning thousands of dollars but also valuable networking opportunities.

Another must-read book for online business enthusiasts is “The Millionaire Fastlane” by MJ DeMarco. After trying numerous get-rich-quick schemes that didn’t work, DeMarco struck gold by setting up a limousine rental website—an idea he got while working as a limo driver. In his book, he shows us how to spot solid business ideas and avoid falling for fake ones.

A central idea of his is “The Profit Equation”: profit = scale x magnitude. To achieve remarkable profits, you can either influence a vast audience (scale), make a profound impact (magnitude), or ideally, both.

Take Mr. Beast, who entertains millions for a quick thrill—that’s scale. A heart surgeon, on the other hand, deeply affects a few by saving lives—that’s magnitude. Then there’s Elon Musk, selling $50,000 electric cars to millions—that’s harnessing both scale and magnitude, and that is why he is the world’s wealthiest man.

Read more in our summary of The Millionaire Fastlane

As a YouTube creator, there are many ways that you can get paid. Some of the best methods include: getting paid for ads, recommending products for a commission, selling your own items, teaming up with companies, and even speaking at events.

One popular way that YouTube creators make money is by , where they make a sales commission for recommending products from other companies like Amazon.

Livestreaming

Affiliate marketing

Crowdfunding

Did you ever notice that your favourite YouTubers seem to come out with one or two new videos every week? That’s no coincidence. If someone wants to succeed on YouTube, one new video per week is probably the minimum you should aim for, advise Sean and Benji.

There are many powerful benefits to consistently uploading new videos:

You’ll improve your skills. Just like any craft, the more you do it, the better you get. Take each new video as an opportunity to refine, experiment, and evolve. Just take a look at the earliest videos of your favourite YouTubers and you may be shocked at how amateur they look! That’s the power of tiny 1% improvements, repeated over and over again.
You’ll build a relationship with your viewers. Just as in real life, the more often that people see your face and hear your voice, the more they will feel connected to you. They will begin to know, like and trust you, almost like their real life friends.
Increase your odds of going viral. Consider each upload you make as buying a lottery ticket. The more tickets you have, the higher your chances of hitting the jackpot. It’s almost impossible to predict which one of your videos will “make it,” but by showing up each week, you maximize your odds.

Now I can almost hear some of you out there saying “But how do I keep up?” It’s no easy task, especially if you’re also balancing other responsibilities like work, study, family, etc. But here are some helpful tips, courtesy of Sean and Benji:

Plan ahead. Draft an upload schedule and stick to it. Again, they advocate for at least one new video per week. The productivity teacher Brian Tracy offers a valuable tip that can help: Do your hardest task first thing in the morning—a strategy he calls “eating that frog!”
Produce videos in batches. This is a brilliant idea. It’s kind of like meal prepping, but for content. Sean often films multiple videos in one long session, swapping his shirt to make the videos look different. They also record like a dozen podcast interviews during conferences, when many experts are available in that one location, giving them months’ worth of content.
Simplify, simplify, simplify. We can often become overwhelmed believing that every video needs to be very well produced. But YouTube is often more about the connection between viewer and creator. Record some simple videos in one take, just talking into your smartphone camera, answering common questions. Or do a live video, allowing your viewers to chat with you in real time.

In The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he describes how most creative people feel something called The Resistance—it’s an internal force that opposes our desire to create and pursue our calling. So, what’s the solution? We need to recognize that feeling of Resistance is not us, and sit down to work anyway, even if we don’t feel like it in the beginning, because that’s what Professionals do.

Read more in our summary of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

A major secret to YouTube success is that consistency is key, that means uploading at least one new video per week. To do that more easily, make sure you schedule your video creation time, batch produce multiple videos at one time, and remember that simple videos are fine.

Benji and Travis recommend delivering at least to your audience.

1 new video per day

2 new videos per week

1 new video per month

1 new video per week

🎥 6. Creating the ‘Perfect’ Video: “Hacking” the YouTube algorithm to get maximum views in less time

So you want to “crush it” and “dominate” on YouTube? (To use the influencer way of speaking. 😆) Then you’ll need to understand the YouTube algorithm. Don’t worry, this is simpler than it sounds.

The YouTube algorithm is all about keeping viewers hooked on the platform. The longer they watch, the more ads YouTube can show, meaning more revenue for them.

Your mission? Have viewers click on and stick with your videos. Do that, and YouTube’s algorithm will boost your content. Here’s how—pay close attention to these metrics in your YouTube Studio dashboard:

Clickthrough Rate: The percentage of people who click on your video, primarily influenced by your title and thumbnail. Make them irresistible, and YouTube will push your video higher on recommendations.
Average View Time: This shows how captivating your video is. Longer watch times mean more ads shown and a signal to YouTube that your content isn’t just flashy clickbait.
Average Views Per Viewer: If a viewer binges multiple of your videos in a row, it’s a high-five from YouTube indicating you’re on the right track.

So here are the most important ingredients of your video:

Start with your title and thumbnail. Many top creators spend hours thinking of compelling ideas for their titles and thumbnails before filming anything. (So they don’t waste days making a video nobody wants to watch!) Analyze popular videos in your niche to find common patterns. For example, if your main competitors’ top videos spotlight their face, try doing that too.
Hook/capture their attention immediately. Those first few seconds are crucial. To keep viewers engaged, plan your first sentence carefully, add some quick cuts, or give a teaser of what’s coming up later. Avoid the beginner’s mistake of a long rambling introduction about yourself. (Pro tip: One of the best copywriting formulas I ever learned is to open with a “benefit + curiosity” hook. Like, “Have you ever wondered why do Japanese people live longer and stay thin?”)
Polish your core content. Experiment with different video lengths to find what works for you, from 5 minutes long to 1 hour or more. Mix in secondary footage, add humour, music, and sound effects. With every video, aim for a 1% improvement in on-camera confidence.
End quickly. Once your core content finishes, people tend to stop watching, so end quickly. Guide viewers to another one of your videos with the feature called “end cards.”

Over 100 years ago, a legendary marketer named Claude Hopkins wrote an awesome book called Scientific Advertising . While he was writing newspaper ads back then, his tips continue to be surprisingly relevant today, for advertisers or content creators.

For example, Hopkins always spent 80% of his effort on writing the best headline possible, because he knew if the headline didn’t get the right reader’s attention, then the rest of the words wouldn’t matter!

Another great tip: always visualize one individual person in front of you and speak to them directly, not to a fuzzy mass of people—that works for writing or speaking on camera.

Learn more in our summary of Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins

To succeed on YouTube, you must play to its algorithm that prioritizes click-through rates, viewer retention, and viewer loyalty. Perfect your video creation by starting with captivating video titles and thumbnails, delivering a powerful hook, engaging core content, and wrapping up quickly with recommended videos.

What will HURT your chances in the YouTube algorithm?

Quick, engaging video cuts

A long rambling introduction

A compelling thumbnail

A benefit-driven headline

Finally, want to skyrocket your channel’s reach? In this final lesson, I’ll provide a brief overview of many topics covered in the final chapters of YouTube Secrets:

Optimize for video search. YouTube isn’t just a video platform, many people are not aware that it’s also the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. So if you want sustainable growth in views and subscribers, it’s essential to optimize your content for search. Start by identifying what users are searching for by looking at the pop-up predictions in YouTube’s search bar. You can also do more precise keyword research using tools—the authors recommend VidIQ.com. Make sure your video title and description match what people are actually searching for, and your video content truly answers their question or need.
Collaborate strategically. Collaborating with other creators is the “fastest way to grow” your channel, say Sean and Benji, aside from having a video go viral. Start by finding other creators whose topic or audience overlaps with yours, using a spreadsheet to keep track of your outreach. If they don’t reply, try again every 3 to 6 months because people are simply busy. Even if you have a smaller channel, they may agree to an interview or joint video, because it helps them create another piece of content faster or is an opportunity to promote their new book, project, etc.

Harness trends and holidays. You can get a quick boost in views by tapping into cultural trends and holidays—which are kind of like trends that repeat every year. If you want to take advantage of a new trend, then you’ll need to move fast because they can be over quickly—think of the Harlem Shake or fidget spinners, which were all the rage until everybody forgot about them. To capitalize on holidays, begin planning a couple months in advance. A couple good examples: a cooking channel could feature a recipe for Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day, while a tech channel could feature gift ideas for Christmas or Father’s Day.
Beware of social media. Before, Sean and Benji thought social media was essential, but now their opinion has changed, and they believe it’s often a huge distraction for new creators. They recommend we focus our energy deeply on YouTube, instead of spreading ourselves thin across many different social media platforms. In the future, you may be able to hire a team like Gary Vaynerchuk, to transform each one of your videos into multiple shorter videos, images and posts for all kinds of platforms. That brings us to…
Building your team. Pretty much every very successful YouTube creator they know has some kind of team, so it’s something you’ll probably want to think about in the future as well. Even starting really small, hiring someone just 5 hours per week for part-time assistance, can make a significant difference. You can find freelancers on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, or by looking nearby. Like Sean found an intern in his church that wanted to learn how to do video editing, that is now one of his core staff members.
Adapting to new features. Even after 16 years, YouTube continues to evolve rapidly, with new opportunities constantly emerging with features like short video, live streaming, stories, and the community tab. These authors agree with Gary Vee, who says we should spend 80% of our time doubling down on what’s working, and 20% on experimentation. The biggest new opportunity is vertical short videos, a trend popularized by TikTok and now embraced by Instagram and YouTube. But while creating them might seem easier—sometimes directly from your phone—don’t mistake this for a shortcut to success. Top-performing YouTube Shorts creators prioritize both consistency and quality, often uploading as frequently as five times daily!

To scale up your channel, embrace a range of strategies. From optimizing your videos for what people are actively searching for, to collaborating with other creators, to harnessing the excitement generated by trends and holidays. Eventually you’ll want to experiment with new YouTube features like Shorts, build a team, and expand to other social media platforms—but don’t get distracted too soon!

To ensure sustainable YouTube growth, it's crucial to optimize your content for .

Video search

Social media trends

Maximum clicks

Begin Your YouTube Journey Today. Don’t wait for the perfect moment; it will never come. Sign up for a free YouTube account and upload a simple introduction video. Remember, the goal is progress, not perfection. Face those fears of judgment and awkwardness head-on by hitting “publish”.
Optimize One Video. For your next upload, narrow your focus on a specific passion. Take notes on a few videos about your passion that are popular. Get inspired by their ideas, titles, and thumbnail design to create your own original video.
Set a Consistent Schedule. Mark your calendar for a consistent day and time each week when you’ll upload your content. This not only trains your audience to anticipate your videos, but also instills discipline in your content creation process.

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YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video I PDF

Title	YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video I
Author
Publisher
Category
Released Date	2022-05-12
Language	English
Format	EPUB
Pages	259
Total Downloads	464
Total Views	1,501
Rating

YouTube has changed our world—from how we view video to how we connect and market—opening a new entrepreneurial landscape to ambitious individuals. Millions of people generate six to seven figures annually from online video content. And, with the right roadmap, you too could be en route to real influence and income. In the NEW and EXPANDED edition of YouTube Secrets, online video experts Sean Cannell and Benji Travis draw on almost two decades of experience as well as interviews with more than two hundred top creators to give you a step-by-step YouTube success playbook. You'll learn The seven essential ingredients for a profitable channel New strategies for getting views and subscribers Ten ways to make money on YouTube And much more Whether you're a beginner or a veteran, this book will show you how to use YouTube to build a following, create a lucrative business, and make a massive impact in people's lives....

Chapter List (25 chapters):

Chapter 1: YouTube Secrets
Chapter 2: Spread the Word and Win a Free Coaching Session!
Chapter 3: Preface
Chapter 4: Introduction
Chapter 5: Part One: Strategy: The Seven Cs
Chapter 6: 1. Courage: Ignite Passion and Transcend Fear
Chapter 7: 2. Clarity: Start with the End in Mind
Chapter 8: 3. Channel: Building a Home for Your Content
Chapter 9: 4. Content: Create Lasting Impact
Chapter 10: 5. Community: Engage with Your Audience
Chapter 11: 6. Cash: Monetize Your Content
Chapter 12: 7. Consistency: Hustle Your Way to Success
Chapter 13: Part Two: Tactics
Chapter 14: 8. The Perfect Video Recipe
Chapter 15: 9. Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Chapter 16: 10. Discoverability: Attract Your Ideal Audience on Autopilot
Chapter 17: 11. Collaboration: Grow Your Audience Exponentially
Chapter 18: 12. Trends and Tentpoles: Conspire with the Culture
Chapter 19: 13. Team: Scale Your Vision
Chapter 20: 14. Think Differently: Crush Conventionality
Chapter 21: 15. New YouTube Features
Chapter 22: Conclusion
Chapter 23: Appendix
Chapter 24: Acknowledgments
Chapter 25: About the Authors

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YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video I

YouTube Playbook Secrets 2021 $15,000 Per Month Guide To making Money Online As An Video Influencer, Practical Guide To Growing Your Channel And Social Media Marketing

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Publications

Youtube secrets.

YouTube Secrets is a success playbook that helps you grow a following and make money with the power of video. In this book , YouTube sensations and bestselling authors Sean Cannell and Benji Travis teaches you the ultimate game plan to take your YouTube channel from slow and dormant to accelerated and engaged. YouTube Secrets contains premium and updated YouTube growth tips for creators, business owners, digital entrepreneurs, and influencers. The authors break down the exact framework you need to take a leap of faith, convert your vision into a YouTube channel, and build a community that brings in the revenue. Whether you’re a beginner or a veteran, this book will show you how to use YouTube to build a following, create a lucrative business , and make a massive impact in people’s lives.

Topics Discussed

Associated people, child publications.

YOUTUBE SECRETS WILL TEACH YOU:

The seven-ingredient recipe to building a successful YouTube channel

How to leverage and manage social media in your YouTube strategy to expedite your growth

The latest YouTube updates you need to know in order to skyrocket your videos

Foolproof video ideas to get you started on the right path to becoming a YouTuber

The tactics that Sean and Benji have used to create six-figure channels and go full-time with YouTube

BOOK REVIEWS

"Buy the book ! I promise if you are doing YouTube [you need] YouTube Secrets ."

— Gary Vaynerchuk , Chairman of VaynerX , CEO of VaynerMedia, New York Times Best Selling Author

"[Sean's] book is phenomenal... Even though YouTube changes all the time , so much of [the content in your book ] is evergreen. These principles are very consistent."

—Chalene Johnson , 8-figure entrepreneur, New York Times Best Selling Author

"[Sean and Benji] have helped me the most in terms of...how to create videos that are engaging and how to utilize a lot of the mechanics of YouTube."

—Pat Flynn , founder of Smart Passive Income, multi-podcast host , best-selling author

"The #1 reason you should read this book is because you can trust Sean and Benji. They're honest and they have integrity which I think is rare in YouTube."

—Michael Stelzner , founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World, author

"I like to call this book the 'YouTube Bible' because everything you need to know about YouTube is inside of this book ."

—Nolan Molt , YouTube Expert and Content Creator

The information contained herein is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. It is not designed to meet your personal financial situation - we are not investment advisors nor do we give personalized investment advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the publisher and are subject to change without notice. It may become outdated an there is no obligation to update any such information.

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A subreddit for creators in the YouTube Partner Program, with advice and discussion on content creation, monetization and marketing strategy. If you're not a member of the program, please check out other subreddits like /r/YouTubers & /r/NewTubers

I read the book ”Youtube Secrets” so you don’t have to

First I thought: ”Really? A book about Youtube secrets with 1700 primarly 5 star reviews?” First I was intruiged picking up this book. I’ve been making videos for 12 years now and I certainly haven’t figured out any Youtube ”secrets”. After reading this entire book with the hope of getting just one great takeaway. It was clear that the author hadn’t figured out any secrets either, because there are no ”secrets”.

”Start collaborating to grow your audience exponentially” This will only works if you collaborate with Logal paul. Then you will have a bunch of Logan paul followers that ruins your click through rate on all your future uploads because guess what, it’s Logan Paul fans not yours. I have never heard anyone having actual great results with collabs and certainly not exponential growth.

”Engage with your audience” Ok I did not expect this one weird trick that will 10x my growth. What’s the next advice? ”make videos?” (I mean yeah it kind of was but framed differently) You get it. It’s nothing groundbreaking on any chapter.

It was just the same regurgitated Youtube guru information that is starting to become more like common sense to even the newest creators on the platform. I wouldn’t be so harsh if it wasn’t for the title though. My takeway if I really need to force it, is that I will never again buy a book directly related to Youtube.

Actually, let me know what you’re experience with youtube books are maybe it’s to early to give up

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Self-made millionaire Adam Stott shares his secrets in new book

An Essex self-made millionaire has used his own life and business challenges to share the secrets to his success in a brand-new book.

Essex, England, United Kingdom - August 29, 2024 —

Adam Stott, Founder of Big Business Events , is now one of the UK’s leading speakers on business, entrepreneurship, branding, and coaching. Essex born and bred, the 41-year-old spent his early career in job roles at KFC, Powerhouse and Ford before becoming a millionaire by the age of 30.

In the book, he talks frankly about his childhood, which went from comfortable to difficult in the blink of an eye, and how this shaped his life and eventually drove him on to success and financial rewards.

Adam has personally sold more than £50m of products and services online. He is one of the UK’s leading experts on business marketing, sales, and branding, specialising in monetising social media with an ethos of Start, Grow, Scale.

He is an official member of The Forbes Coaches Council, has been featured on the Channel 5 programme 'Rich House, Poor House' and has appeared as a panellist on TV programmes such as Jeremy Vine and on Talk TV. Adam also has a hugely popular podcast called Business Growth Secrets , which now has more than 300 episodes.

Now, Adam has decided to share the secrets behind how he built his business and fortune in his new book, Millionaire Success Secrets . The book chronicles Adam’s life, experiences, and lessons and how they apply to his career and businesses so that all entrepreneurs, business owners, and aspiring business moguls can implement them and grow their own organisations.

Adam said: “If I had been given this as a gift at the age of 19 when I worked in the highly competitive and sometimes overwhelming sales team at Ford, I’d have known exactly where my life was heading and exactly what to do at every turn to become the millionaire I was so desperate to be.

“That's not just some ego-boosting throwaway statement - I know there are so many people in unplanned, overwhelming or difficult situations who would succeed with a book like this as their guide, so I’m making it available for as many people as possible.”

Adam’s company, Big Business Events, is the UK’s fastest-growing business members’ network. It hosts training and networking events nationwide to help entrepreneurs at all stages of their business journey.

The first 500 people to buy the book can send their purchase receipt to [email protected] to claim more than £500 in business-boosting bonuses, including the chance to work with Adam and his team.

Adam added: “Millionaire Success Secrets is not just full of the strategies usually reserved for my high-level membership communities. It lays bare the challenges in my life that shaped me and my business principles.

“If you want an established seven-figure entrepreneur, who has undoubtedly made mistakes along the way, to finally tell you how they got to where they are - this book is for you.”

Millionaire Success Secrets is now available to order on Amazon .

About the company: Business growth expert Adam Stott is currently one of the UK’s leading speakers on business, entrepreneurship, branding, and coaching. An award-winning entrepreneur, international business, and wealth coach, he is one of the UK’s leading experts on monetising Social Media.

Contact Info: Name: Caroline Walker Email: Send Email Organization: Big Business Events Website: https://adamstott.com/

Release ID: 89139806

Should any errors, concerns, or inconsistencies arise from the content provided in this press release that require attention or if a press release needs to be taken down, we kindly request that you immediately contact us at [email protected] (it is important to note that this email is the authorized channel for such matters, sending multiple emails to multiple addresses does not necessarily help expedite your request). Our efficient team will be at your disposal for timely assistance within 8 hours – taking necessary measures to rectify identified issues or providing guidance on the removal process. We prioritize delivering accurate and reliable information.

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This cover image released by Mulholland shows "Swallow the Ghost" by Eugenie Montague. (Mulholland via AP)

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As the last official month of summer, you best believe we’re all about the beach reads. And, of course, other new and hot releases that fell into our laps this month.

From Reese’s Book Club picks to some from Rory Gilmore’s reading challenge (yes, it’s that time again), I’ve been on the lookout for unique titles and some of the most seasonal releases to rest and relax poolside.

As someone who has been avidly reading each day and producing monthly book roundups since January, this month’s selection was one of the most unique. Above all else, they are titles to consider — some of which are approved by the Amazon Books team.

RELATED : Best July books, ranked and reviewed

Ahead, find the best titles read this month, with review notes for each. While hardcover and paperback editions are nice, there’s nothing like listening with audible , so it’s worth signing up for a membership .

“Swiped” by L.M. Chilton

Goodreads rating : 3.56/5 stars

About the book : “Swiped” by L.M. Chilton is a gripping thriller about a woman’s search for her missing sister that unravels into a dark exploration of deception, obsession, and hidden agendas.

With a fun cover and an even more engaging plot, “Swiped” by L.M. Chilton is a novel that kept me on my toes. If you love books about relationship drama, you’ll love this one.

“This novel, described as if ‘Bridget Jones found herself in a Scream film’ is in fact more darkly hilarious than Bridget’s mishaps, which is to say it does for internet dating what Bridget did for husband-hunting–except with a lot more murder,” Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Books Editor, shared. “Half a dozen of them, to be exact. And a whole lot of red herrings, grimly funny disastrous date recaps, and a crashed ice cream truck.”

Buy on Hardcover | Buy on Kindle

“All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster

Goodreads rating : 3.27/5 stars

About the book : “All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster is a heartfelt novel about a woman confronting her past and rediscovering herself and her family while grappling with love, loss and the complexities of time.

Set in The Hamptons and filled with some classic-leaning flair, “All the Summers in Between” by Brooke Lea Foster is one of the best books of summer that makes you think.

“The Wedding People” by Alison Espach

Goodreads rating : 4.27/5 stars

About the book : “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach is a sharp, insightful novel that delves into the intricacies of relationships and personal growth through the lens of a couple navigating the highs and lows of wedding planning and its impact on their lives.

Trigger warning: mentions of suicide. Otherwise, “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach is a thoughtfully written and beautifully written novel unlike anything I’ve read before. Plus, its serene summertime setting is spectacular.

“This is one of the most candid, resonant, hilarious novels I’ve read about how chance encounters can lead to the most surprising outcomes,” Abby Abell, Amazon Books Editor, told the New York Post. “It takes a scalpel to the expectations we place on ourselves and celebrates how freeing it is to let them go.”

“A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner

Goodreads rating : 3.50/5 stars

About the book : “A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner is a captivating story about a woman who returns to her family’s beach house, where she confronts old secrets and discovers the power of love, family and self-reinvention.

Pleasant and fit for the lover of slow reads, the “A Novel Summer” by Jamie Brenner hails from one of my favorite authors and is sure to bring back all the nostalgia.

Buy on Hardcover | Buy on Paperback | Buy on Kindle

“The Fiancé Dilemma” by Elena Armas

Goodreads rating : 3.79/5 stars

About the book : “The Fiancé Dilemma” by Elena Armas is a charming romantic comedy about a woman who, facing a family crisis, recruits a charming but reluctant fake fiancé, leading to unexpected romance and self-discovery.

From the author who brought us the top-rated “ The Spanish Love Deception ,” this rom-com is both magical, witty and will keep you on your toes. It was one of my favorite reads this month, at that.

Elena Armas deftly and delightfully delivers on some of my favorite romance tropes–fake engagement, slow burn, he falls first,” Abell noted. “It is sweet and sexy and so much fun. A perfect romance to close out the summer.”

Buy on Paperback | Buy on Kindle

“Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent

About the book : “Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent is a delightful and witty novel about a woman who, after a string of personal and professional setbacks, embarks on a journey of self-discovery and culinary adventure while navigating complicated relationships and finding her own path.

If you’re a foodie and love vivid detail in writing, “Just One Taste” by Lizzy Dent is the book for you. You’ll fall in love with the characters, most of all.

“Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews

Goodreads rating : 3.71/5 stars

About the book : “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews is a fun and engaging romantic comedy about a feisty chef and a charming food critic whose rivalry turns into unexpected romance as they navigate the competitive world of cooking shows and personal ambitions.

Fit for the foodie (again), “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews is a pleasurable read that’s filled with suspense, romance and a little bit of everything.

“By Any Other Name” by Jodi Piccoult

Goodreads rating : 4.17/5 stars

About the book : “By Any Other Name” by Jodi Piccoult” delves into the complexities of identity and self-acceptance through the story of a woman grappling with her cultural heritage and personal transformation.

“With intriguing, well-researched details, Picoult brings genuine depth — and love — to her characters and their narratives, playing with perception to make a point without overplaying her hand,” Seira Wilson, Amazon Books Editor, said. “This remarkable novel is an awakening, entertaining story to share.”

“House of Glass” by Sarah Pekkanen

Goodreads rating : 4.01/5 stars

About the book : “House of Glass” by Sarah Pekkanen is a gripping novel that delves into the secrets and lies within a seemingly perfect family as they unravel in the wake of a mysterious death.

“This is a tense, slow-burn of a thriller,” Cronin said. “If you enjoy the agony of rising suspense and second-guessing your own amateur sleuthing, this thriller delivers a chef’s kiss of shivers and secrets.”

“The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory ” by Thomas Fuller

About the book : “The Boys of Riverside” by Thomas Fuller is a poignant exploration of the lives of young men in a small town, focusing on their struggles and aspirations as they navigate personal and societal challenges.

“When I read The Boys of Riverside, I was taken back in time to when I first saw ‘Remember the Titans’ at the cinema,” Ben Grange, Amazon Books Editor, said. “This is one of the best books I’ve read all year; ultimately, it’s an inspiring story that will speak to sports fans, deaf communities, allies and more.”

“We Burn Daylight” by Bret Anthony Johnston

Goodreads rating : 3.98/5 stars

“This novel is perfect for fans of Emma Cline’s ‘ The Girls ‘ and Chris Whitaker’s ‘ We Begin at the End ‘ and ‘ All the Colors of the Dark ,'” Cronin recommended. “‘We Burn Daylight’ is a page-turner that will make your stomach dip and roll with anticipation and fear for what happens to two young kids in 1993, who are inextricably linked to a cult leader who stockpiles weapons. This is a lightning bolt of a read that, once you finish, you’ll want to begin again to understand just how seamlessly Johnston links all the pieces together.”

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The Rings of Power Is Still The Lord of the Rings in Name Only

It’s almost impressive how amazon’s extraordinarily expensive series, now in its second season, amounts to so little..

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power always had a tough act to follow. Drawing from one of the most revered novels of the 20 th century—or, rather, 130 pages appended to it —and beholden to Peter Jackson’s film adaptation, Season 1 of the Amazon series met with a generally positive if wary response for its approach to the Second Age of Middle-earth. Now in its sophomore season, The Rings of Power is strangely placed. Where Jackson, and animator Ralph Bakshi before him, created a visual and tonal taxonomy that captured the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story and yet also felt unique, The Rings of Power has thus far struggled to reproduce the magic of what has come before, while also failing to carve out a space of its own.

Drawing from a host of oral tradition and mythmaking—particularly Old English, Germanic, and Scandinavian mythology—Tolkien spent decades developing his Middle-earth lore, lending The Lord of the Rings not just a rich history but a sense of familiarity. Whether it’s in the absurd heroism of the Táin Bó Cúailnge , the inset myths and histories of Beowulf , or the almost hackneyed high style of the Prose and Poetic Eddas , one can find echoes of a motive history that Tolkien fashioned to drive his characters. Borrowing from these sources, he built a world in which people, place, and past feel connected. Characters don’t just change; the world changes them and changes with them, as does the language around them. All this adds up to a genuine narrative depth.

It’s a broader tone that Jackson captured in the Lord of the Rings trilogy: that sweeping, operatic romance backed by a deep past. But although Tolkien brought a world of myth into his Middle-earth sagas, Jackson tapped into a history of visual media. Most apparent—especially watching The Fellowship of the Ring —is the influence of horror. Think of the Ringwraith edging toward the Hobbits as they cower beneath a tree root, Bilbo’s sudden transformation upon seeing the Ring again, and even the frequent jump-scare reveals of the Eye of Sauron throughout. If Jackson captured the high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings , he made it his own by heightening the horror that already simmered beneath each scene.

That identity feels all the more important as The Rings of Power is unable to grasp it. This isn’t necessarily a failing in and of itself; after all, we don’t require a rehashing of Jackson’s style for a successful addition to the Tolkien-verse. But the depth of emotion and motivation that Tolkien wrote, and that Jackson echoed, is notably lacking here. The history that drove Tolkien’s narrative and heightened Jackson’s dread is gone, taking the romantic heroism with it.

Go back to those classic myths and you’re assailed by a rousing absurdity as heroes contend with the gods, slay hundreds of foes without breaking a sweat, or hew whole forests in single strokes of an axe. Tolkien lets these ideas reverberate in moments like Théoden, King of Rohan, blowing a war horn with such gusto that it shatters; his daughter Éowyn striking down the Witch-king of Angmar; or the Fellowship holding back a horde of goblins in Moria. In contrast, The Rings of Power drags these more awesome moments into the ordinary. Gone is the operatic scope, the lofty heroism, and the sense of profound peril. Instead, we’re subjected to disappointingly tamer episodes like Isildur (Maxim Baldry) looking for his horse, past Sauron (Jack Lowden) being slime for a bit, or Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) continuing to be a bit horny for the Dark Lord (post-slime, Charlie Vickers). We get little sense that we’re watching something profound unfold, that these are mythic heroes—many of whom have already come through the great First Age battle known as the War of Wrath—who will one day overthrow Sauron. It doesn’t feel humanizing so much as shallow, taking the grand scope of The Lord of the Rings and explaining it into oblivion.

This is perhaps a symptom of having to fashion a series from a fraction of this specific history; Amazon does not have the rights to The Silmarillion , in which Tolkien elucidates the history of the Second Age in more detail. It’s worth noting, too, that for all its faults The Rings of Power remains an undeniably beautiful production. It’s a marvel of set design, costuming, and hair and makeup that echoes the craftwork that made Jackson’s cinematic world seem so real—and that felt so lacking in the rushed production of the Hobbit movies .

In lieu of being able to create a powerful story, it’s here that The Rings of Power might have salvaged a bit of depth through at least some environmental history and storytelling. Yet, although they’re gorgeous, don’t all those clothes feel very new? All that armor strangely clean? Contrast this with Aragorn’s ragged ranger gear in The Fellowship of the Ring , which communicates the long years Viggo Mortensen’s character has spent in the wilderness, and it becomes even harder to find a holistic cohesion in The Rings of Power that could even vaguely be construed as identity. The exquisite look of the series is arguably the best thing about it, but it simultaneously epitomizes how sanitized it feels compared with what has come before—how it seems less a sincere adaptation than the result of a streaming production line.

Perhaps the real test of The Rings of Power will be how it depicts the Siege of Eregion, which takes place at Celebrimbor’s (Charles Edwards) forge. Though a relatively short battle, this pivotal skirmish will be stretched over three episodes as a showpiece for Season 2. It’ll be curious to see how it compares, for instance, with the Battle of Dagorlad, where the Last Alliance led by Elendil and Gil-galad overthrew Sauron. In a few minutes in The Fellowship of the Ring , that battle felt profound and affecting for the broader narrative, yet one suspects that the Siege of Eregion will be much the same as the rest of The Rings of Power : elongated to near irrelevance or, as Bilbo says, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

I have a lot of sympathy for those working hard on The Rings of Power . Forced to draw on a minuscule part of Tolkien’s world in The Lord of the Rings ’ appendices, built from a limited vision of its showrunners, this extraordinarily expensive endeavor ultimately amounts to so little on-screen. Still, as much as The Rings of Power wants to be The Lord of the Rings , I can’t help but think it is in name only. I can’t shake the sensation that, as we compare it with what has come before—and sense that the temptation is to lump it in with Jackson’s Hobbit movies as lackluster adaptations—it cleaves far closer to Amazon’s similarly flat fantasy series The Wheel of Time than anything Tolkien created.

In that sense, the show has become less an adaptation of Tolkien than a vague reflection of The Lord of the Rings ’ monumental influence on all fantasy that has followed it. The result is so generic, so devoid of history, that the enormous world of both Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Jackson’s films has been made so small.

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Can painting 64 Yoginis unlock the secrets of the Divine Feminine?

Whispers of the unseen by s. beena unnikrishnan is a personal journey of discovery through art, challenging traditional ideas of spirituality and time..

Published : Aug 26, 2024 20:33 IST - 6 MINS READ

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Built in the 9th century, and “discovered” in 1953, the Chausath Yogini Temple in Hirapur, Odisha is unique because it has no male deity. The Yoginis serve as grama devatis (village goddesses), protecting the locals. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes what is not perceived in the business-as-usual patterns becomes accessible in another way. It is perhaps apt that the title of a book on a personal pilgrimage of discovery and connection to the 64 Yoginis is a synaesthesia— Whispers of the Unseen . And it is apt that the book documents the author S. Beena Unnikrishnan’s journey not so much as a pilgrimage on the road as it is inwards—in a room, in her own home, through the intimate medium of paint.

The book tells us that in the great war against Mahishasura, eight demi-divine beings called Ashta Matrikas emerged from the body of Goddess Durga. From each Matrika, a further eight yoginis sprung forth, making for a total of chausath yogini (64 Yoginis).

Whispers of the Unseen: The Quest for Sixty-Four Yoginis

Price: rs.449.

Dr Bibek Debroy writes in the foreword that there aren’t many written texts on the yoginis and secrecy shrouds the practice. This makes the author’s work remarkable. The book is not a technical treatise; it dwells on the author’s evolving relationship with the Divine Feminine through the painting of the Yoginis.

Bhakti-based pathway

The pathway is not rule-based; instead, it is bhakti-based. The sequence of the paintings follows a reference list but the author deviates, at times, for a different Goddess to show up on the canvas. The forms are also not always true to the original sculptures in the Hirapur Chausath Yogini temple. It is as she sensed the Goddess. A Yogini Kumari becomes the beloved Bala Tripura Sundari, the nine-year-old divine daughter of Sri Lalitha Tripura Sundari. A Yogini Kamayani becomes Trishna, the daughter of Kama Deva, and Yogini Vikatana transforms as Goddess Katyayani.

A conversation with Time

The book also reflects on the notion of Time. In one chapter, the author describes the documentary as her conversation with Time. She shares that, for her, Bhairava, represents Time. Through the book, we find the anchoring place of Bhairava in initiating and sustaining the journey. Given that Kali and Bhairavi are the feminine versions of Time, the book appears to be an interpretation of the author’s stochastic relationship with the Yoginis. She is called to this project through a set of unforeseen events; she stumble-discovers her way through the project—sometimes being on the road, sometimes staying in silence for days in her room. Each turn is an intersection of the wild-unpredictable of the cosmos with the regular-steady of life. And in that sense, ardhanareeshwara becomes a dance of different forms of time.

The content of the book is laid out in tight chronological order, which prevents a reader from choosing to read at random. In one sense, this ensures due respect for the tradition and events in which this pilgrimage is ensconced. In another, the book evolves with the chronological reading.

Also Read | Tracing the evolution of Durga through a museum collection

The constant foregrounding of the author’s thoughts can be a distraction and could have been balanced with vivid environmental descriptions. For example, a description of the rooms in which the Yoginis were painted would have been lovely.

In an oral tradition, there is an ecology within which narratives of miracle and magic are held with care. Audiences join into such narratives through shared contexts. The relationship of Krishnan Potti and the author’s family influenced the events that led to the Yogini project. A printed book, however, shows up in the market shorn of those relationships. It is imperative to find other ways for the readers to be in a relationship of integrity with the content.

The personal pilgrimage recounted in the book is founded on bhakti—a calling from beyond to stay the path. Not a tick mark on a bucket list. One hopes that the call will also reach the readers.

Bhavana Nissima is a Lightweaver.

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Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space?

The pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for bookstores. Exactly how good is a little hard to measure. For all sorts of reasons, the data on book sales, bookstores, and most things bookish are notoriously inexact. Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book.

If I self-publish a book and sell it on my Web site, is that a real book? And am I a bookstore? If we think that, to be “real,” a book must have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), we are faced with the fact that the ISBN of a hardcover book is different from the ISBNs of the paperback, audio, and digital editions of the same book. Are these all counted separately? The Bible is a book. So are “Pickleball for Dummies,” “Spanking Zelda,” “Pat the Bunny,” and “The Big Book of Sudoku.” When we ask how many Americans read books, are those the kinds of books we have in mind?

According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

The explanation for the second bump, however, is not so obvious. Before COVID , physical bookstores seemed to be pretty high on the endangered-species list. Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business. Yet, somehow, the bookstore outlived the pandemic. Why? Two new books, Evan Friss’s “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore” (Viking) and “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading” (Little, Brown), compiled by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, suggest a few reasons.

Neither book is quite as advertised. “The Bookshop” is not a comprehensive history of bookselling. It’s a series of thirteen mini-profiles of notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his printing shop in the early eighteenth century to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s brick-and-mortar stores today. Friss does not get very deep into the economic nitty-gritty of the business. He is mainly interested in capturing the bookstore vibe.

James Patterson is, yes, James Patterson , one of the best-selling authors ever. (Matt Eversmann, a former Army Ranger, was a central character in Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” and is a best-selling author himself.) When the pandemic started, Patterson launched a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, to help such businesses survive. He pledged half a million dollars, and, with the support of the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, the campaign ended up raising $1,239,595 from more than eighteen hundred donors.

Patterson and Eversmann’s “Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians” is being promoted with the line “Their stories are better than the bestsellers.” Better than “Spanking Zelda”? I don’t think so. Readers hoping for scandalous revelations will have to be satisfied with heartfelt testimonials from some sixty or so North American bookstore people and librarians, who talk about how they got their jobs and why they love them. A number of them have nice things to say about James Patterson, as well they should. Still, the situation these books are addressing is a very old one.

The United States has had a bookstore problem since before the nation’s founding. There have never been enough. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, books were sold mostly by printers, like Franklin , whose store was in Philadelphia, or publishers, such as Ticknor & Fields, which operated the Old Corner Bookstore, in Boston. (Ticknor & Fields later became part of Houghton Mifflin.) Because there were few places for customers to get books, some entrepreneurs figured out ways to get books to them. There was a book barge on the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century, for example, and there were book caravans—vehicles outfitted to display books for sale—until well into the twentieth century.

Even after the distribution of books improved, it was not easy to get your hands on new ones unless you lived in a major city or a college town. In 1939, about a hundred and eighty million books were produced, in one estimate, but only twenty-eight hundred stores sold them. Books were also sold in gift shops that stocked a few titles or department stores that offered discounted books as a loss leader to attract a tonier class of customer.

Americans could buy books by mail directly from publishers, and they could subscribe to book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, or its rival, the Literary Guild, founded in 1927 and once owned by Doubleday. (Those clubs still exist. They print their own editions, which they sell for well below the publisher’s retail price.) But most people had no way to browse new books.

One reason for the distribution problem is that each book is a unique good. It is handcrafted by a writer and a postproduction team of editors and designers. Even in 1939, there were too many new titles for a small shop to stock—an estimated 10,640, and that doesn’t include perennial sellers, like Bibles and dictionaries, or classics.

And, unless you are a “just looking for something to read on the beach” kind of customer, there are usually no acceptable substitutes. When you go to a supermarket, the store may carry two brands of milk or ten. It doesn’t matter. You just want milk. But book buying doesn’t work that way. You want the book you want. If the choice was between doing without and mailing a check to a publisher in New York City (publishers, stupidly, did not have warehouses in the middle of the country), many people probably chose to do without. This was not a sensible way to run a business.

The problem got bigger after the Second World War, when, thanks in part to a huge increase in the number of college students, who had to buy books for their courses, and the relaxation of obscenity laws, which made books more attractive to grownups, the publishing industry boomed. In 1950, eleven thousand new titles appeared, according to Publishers Weekly ; in 1970, the number was thirty-six thousand, a threefold increase. Local bookshops tended to be low-margin affairs. They couldn’t afford the rent for large retail spaces, and the load of new books was too heavy for them to carry. Publishers needed more places where people could shop for their product. The market responded with the chain store.

The first major bookstore chains were B. Dalton, which opened a store in 1966 and by 1978 had outlets in forty-three states, and Waldenbooks, which began in the nineteen-thirties as a book-rental company, opened its first retail store in 1962, and by 1981 had seven hundred and thirty-five outlets. Chain stores were big spaces. They could carry many titles, and they were usually embedded in department stores and malls. Like supermarkets, they were basically self-service. Their staff were generally not trained to make reading recommendations. But the chains offered two things the independent-bookstore ecosystem lacked: convenience and inventory. By 1982, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton made about twenty-four per cent of all book sales in the United States.

It was still not enough. The industry kept growing, and the chain stores gave way to the superstores. These were enormous freestanding retail spaces, averaging almost thirty-six thousand square feet and carrying a hundred and twenty-five thousand titles, plus other leisure goods, such as CDs and DVDs. The big players were Borders, which opened in 1971 and began to expand in the nineteen-eighties, and Barnes & Noble, an old New York store, situated on lower Fifth Avenue, which Leonard Riggio bought in 1971.

Riggio adopted the strategy of selling New York Times best-sellers at a forty-per-cent discount. He made the brand famous for these discounts, and people would travel out of their way to a Barnes & Noble store just for the savings. It was an aggressive move when best-sellers were what kept many small bookstores above water.

In 1987, Riggio bought B. Dalton, and by 1997 Barnes & Noble and Borders were selling forty-three per cent of all books in the United States. By then, more than sixty thousand titles were coming out every year. The largest Barnes & Noble store carried upward of two hundred thousand, many of them marked twenty or thirty per cent off the list price. It was not a business model that small independent bookshops could adopt. They had to make a decent margin on every sale.

This was around when the term “independent bookstore” gained force. It was plainly deployed as a rallying cry. It couldn’t have been that the owners of the local store didn’t care about their bottom lines. But the term signals an old-fashioned virtue, and the independents versus the superstores got cast as a David-and-Goliath struggle, a version of the family-farm-versus-agribusiness rivalry that had got a lot of attention in the nineteen-eighties.

The big-little bookstore battle was covered so extensively by the media, in fact, that a film about it, “You’ve Got Mail,” directed by Nora Ephron , was one of the biggest hits of 1998. (Amusingly, the movie, ostensibly a criticism of corporate overreach, made Rolling Stone’s list of “ Most Egregious Product Placements in Movie & TV History .” It is practically an advertisement for AOL, which would soon merge with Warner Bros., the film’s distributor.)

Meg Ryan’s character made out all right in “You’ve Got Mail,” but her store still closed. Nationally, the Davids were losing. After 1998, the mortality rate among independents shot up. By 2021, only about two thousand were still in business. The Goliaths were left to slug it out. In 2011, Riggio bought what was left of Borders, which had declared bankruptcy, and Barnes & Noble is now the only nationwide bookstore chain in the United States, with six hundred stores. (The original flagship store, on lower Fifth, which had become mainly a place for students to buy textbooks, closed in 2014.)

Still, the distribution problem was far from solved, because two hundred thousand books is nothing. Today, something like three million books are published every year, including self-published e-books that are available only on digital platforms. And the greater the number of books that come out and remain in print, the longer the publisher’s backlist. Developing a backlist is one of the ways publishers can afford to take gambles on big advances. No retail space can accommodate all that inventory.

This whole history explains why Amazon began, in 1995, as an online bookstore. Books were the only products it sold. Jeff Bezos must have looked at the publishing industry and judged it ripe for disruption—the classic tech move. Publishers had had two hundred years to figure out an efficient way of getting their products to consumers, and they were haggling over shelf placement (face out or spine?) and table space (front of the store or back?) in enormous stores where each book was competing for visibility with a hundred thousand other titles.

Amazon discounted books deeply from the start. It was happy to lose money, and its venture-capitalist backers didn’t mind, because they saw that what Bezos was investing in was a future in which people’s first instinct when they needed to buy something would be to go online. That future has arrived, and today Amazon is worth $1.8 trillion.

The company still discounts many titles, and you don’t have to go out of your way to take advantage of the savings. My office is across the street from Harvard Book Store, one of the best independent bookstores in the country for people like me. Even so, if I go there for a copy of “Middlemarch,” I’ll have to elbow my way through a gaggle of tourists to get to the literature section in the back, and there’s a chance that “Middlemarch” will be out of stock.

But I can order “Middlemarch” from Amazon in less than the two minutes it would take me to walk to the store. I will get a discount (currently thirteen per cent on a Penguin edition), and, if I have Amazon Prime (a sunk cost), the book will ship for free and appear in my mailbox tomorrow. Oh, and as long as I’m online, I’ll get a new grill brush, too. Harvard Book Store does not carry grill brushes.

Even though books make up a relatively small fraction of Amazon’s sales, they constitute more than half of all book purchases in the United States. Amazon is responsible for more than half of all e-book sales, and it dominates self-publishing with its Kindle Direct platform. (E-books are also a threat to the brick-and-mortar store, of course, though their sales peaked in 2013.) Most significant, Amazon offers something like thirty million different print titles. The company has deals with purveyors of used and remaindered books, who are linked to on the site. It owns AbeBooks, the leading site for rare and out-of-print books. And there are many other places online where you can buy books, including barnesandnoble.com. So why does the world need bookstores?

Both Friss’s book and Patterson and Eversmann’s book suggest some answers. One is the obvious benefit of being able to fondle the product. Printed books have, inescapably, a tactile dimension. They want to be held. “Browsing” online is just not the same experience. For that, you need non-virtual books in a non-virtual space.

The level of customer service is another benefit. Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” and “Products related to this item” can be useful, but these groupings work better for grill brushes than for books. Books are not just all cheaper or more expensive versions of the same thing.

You will probably soon be able to chat online about your book interests with a bot, but a bot is not a person with green hair, a tattoo, and a sense of humor who might have some offbeat suggestions for you. Salespeople today tend to be book lovers themselves (historically not always the case), and they can recommend a new book or help you find a book whose title you have forgotten. Amazon’s wisdom-of-crowds rating system and customer reviews aren’t quite substitutes for this individualized treatment. There is usually a reviewer who gives a book one star because of a delivery problem.

Then there is what the scholar Janice Radway, adapting Walter Benjamin, calls the “auratic” quality of physical books. People don’t regard books as ordinary commodities. Friss and the retailers in “The Secret Lives” see the small bookstore as a haven from commercialism, a place where books are not treated as mere merchandise.

Of course, selling books is as much a business as selling grill brushes. But the gross margins are small, and bookstore owners tend to be what the sociologist Laura Miller calls “reluctant capitalists.” The owners of Three Lives, in the West Village, which is Friss’s ideal bookstore, don’t like their business being referred to as a “store.” “Shop” is the preferred designation. In the West Village, that’s probably smart marketing.

This aura of anti-commercialism has a history. It dates from the mid-twentieth century, when publishers saw themselves in competition with Hollywood and television for Americans’ leisure time and dollars. They promoted their product as superior to mass entertainment—more refined, more edifying. They rethought the strategy when it became clear that readers like mass entertainment and dislike being taken for snobs. The industry also saw a gold mine in movie tie-ins. Still, the general sentiment that reading is somehow superior to viewing persists.

But using the number of books that the average American reads a year as a barometer of our civilization’s moral health, which people love to do, is kind of pointless. Many books are used, not read. You don’t “read” a cookbook or “Pickleball for Dummies.” And many books are bought to register the buyer’s approval of the message or the messenger. Current Times best-sellers include Kamala Harris ’s “The Truths We Hold” and J. D. Vance ’s “Hillbilly Elegy.” How many of the people who bought those books (and I wonder how much overlap there is) will actually read them? They won’t feel they need to. They have cast their ballots.

The chief rationale offered for brick-and-mortar bookstores today is that they are community-building spaces. That is how Friss describes the Three Lives bookstore—forgive me, shop —and it’s how almost all the store owners in “The Secret Lives” (and many of the librarians) explain what they do and why it gives them satisfaction. They are practitioners of bibliotherapy. They introduce people to books that will help them overcome grief or minister to confusions about life choices or personal identity.

And the stores are fashioned to be neighborhood gathering places, like park playgrounds. They welcome everyone—toddlers, oddballs, and professors. They schedule author appearances and other events, often hundreds of them a year. Regulars drop in to chat about books. With any luck, there is a café. Nowadays, this is as true of Barnes & Noble chain stores as it is of Three Lives. That is what it means to run a bookstore. The rewards are not just material. The bookstore survives by redefining itself.

This constitutes a major shift in the ethos of bookselling. Traditionally, owners of bookstores, and of used bookstores in particular, had a reputation for being surly (unlike librarians, who are trained to be helpful). That was certainly my experience when I began to frequent New York bookstores in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. It was true of the Shakespeare & Co. on lower Broadway and of the National Book Store, on Astor Place, both now long gone; it was even true of the Strand, near Union Square. One good thing about online stores is that they can’t see that you’re a penniless graduate student.

Still, for much of my life, I’ve been a haunter of bookstores. I have no interest in spending a lot of money on a book. I don’t collect books, and I can’t understand why anyone would pay extra for a first edition. I buy books I want to read. I like older and out-of-print books, as long as they’re readable and “like new.” So the key to a good bookstore, for me, is the curation. In this area of life, anyway, size doesn’t matter. I don’t want two hundred thousand titles to choose from. I want the staff to have selected, from the zillions that are out there, the kinds of books that interest me. Ideally, the store will stock a mix of new and used.

Friss doesn’t mention the famous “secret bookstore” Brazenhead Books , which was run out of a rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street by a character named Michael Seidenberg, who died in 2019. It was said to be like a night club. Cocktails were served, and people could hang out at all hours. There was no sign outside, since the store seems to have been legally unsanctioned. You had to know someone to know where it was.

I was never cool enough to be invited to a secret bookstore, but there were stores “just for me” in New York. One of them, which Friss mentions briefly, was Books & Co., which was founded in 1977. Its collection, all new books, seemed to be expressly curated for grad students in literature. Friss says that the store had an advisory board chaired by Susan Sontag , and few people have had their hand closer to the intellectual pulse than Susan Sontag. The founder and owner was Jeannette Watson, a granddaughter of the founder of I.B.M.

One unusual thing about Books & Co. was its location, 939 Madison Avenue, between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Streets, next to the old Whitney Museum. The Upper East Side isn’t where you would expect to sell a lot of Baudrillard, or all four volumes of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. But you could. I passed on the Heidegger; I did buy Robert Hughes ’s “Shock of the New” there, an inspirational book for me. Books & Co. was, surprisingly, not an unfriendly place. Or maybe I fit in better with the clientele there than elsewhere. St. Mark’s Bookshop, which opened in the East Village the same year, was the bomb thrower’s alternative.

Books & Co. had money problems almost from the start. Watson lost an opportunity to buy the building, which was purchased instead by the Whitney. When the lease expired, the museum doubled the rent. Watson tried to find ways to keep the store alive, but it closed in 1997. St. Mark’s hung in there until 2016. Today, 939 Madison is an Aquazzura, a luxury boutique chain with stores in Saint-Tropez, Paris, Milan, and Dubai. I think the best store in Manhattan currently for new books curated for artistic and literary tastes is 192 Books, in West Chelsea. In five years, it will probably be a Jimmy Choo.

Because bookstores don’t last. When I came to New York, the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Eighth and Fourteenth Streets was known as Book Row. In 1969, it had more than twenty bookstores and, according to the Times , more than three-quarters of a million volumes. The Strand began on Book Row and operates in its spirit, advertising a huge inventory. It claims to have eighteen miles of shelves. The store moved from Fourth Avenue to its present location, on Broadway and Twelfth Street, in 1956. In time, the owner, Fred Bass, wisely bought the building. The store is now a tourist attraction and gets a significant portion of its income from the sale of tote bags and T-shirts. It does make money. Bass used to live in Trump Tower.

I cruised Book Row when it, and the New York it belonged to, was on its last legs. A lot of those millions of books were worthless. When books are damaged, they should be thrown out. The Book Row stores were barns. They attracted buyers who enjoyed hunting for a needle in a haystack. The Strand does not carry damaged books, and there are always some needles in there. But it also has a ton of hay.

Art galleries played a big role in the development of modern art; bookshops played a lesser role in the history of modern literature. But there were some that mattered. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, is the best known. Beach published James Joyce ’s “Ulysses” in 1922—the only edition you could buy until 1934, after a judge ruled that the book was not obscene. (The store was shut down in 1941, when the Germans were in charge. The Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank today is no relation.) The closest American counterparts are City Lights, in San Francisco, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, which published (and still publishes) Allen Ginsberg ’s “Howl and Other Poems,” and the Gotham Book Mart.

The Gotham Book Mart was founded in 1920, by Frances Steloff. It moved around a bit but ended up at 41 West Forty-seventh. The location, even more incongruous than that of Books & Co., was in the diamond district. The Gotham’s clientele included Broadway theatre people. It was also popular with celebrated writers, housed a James Joyce Society, and was known, back in the day, as a place where you could buy banned books.

I was interested in modern poetry and eager to shop there, but by the time I showed up Steloff had sold the store (she was in her eighties and remained present; you could see her at a desk in the back), and it had lost its modernist glamour. The offerings were haphazardly chosen and indifferently displayed, and the vibe was hostile. I’m sure they had dealt with a lot of shoplifting. The store moved again, in 2004, and closed three years later.

I preferred to hang out in the Pomander, on West Ninety-fifth Street. The bookstore was founded in 1975 by a Colombian émigré, Carlos Goez, and it featured British and American literature and philosophy—my kind of collection. Goez sold the Pomander in 1986 (he died soon after), and the store briefly relocated to 107th Street and West End Avenue, two blocks from my apartment. Although the inventory was still attractive, there was less turnover, and the store eventually closed.

But curation is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything. Learn from Aquazzura and Jimmy Choo: go boutique. The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold. Romance is among Amazon’s most popular genres, and, according to the Times , the number of bookstores dedicated to it recently rose from two to more than twenty. The stores’ names are not coy: the Ripped Bodice, in Brooklyn and Culver City; Steamy Lit, in Deerfield Beach, Florida; Blush Bookstore, in Wichita. You can fondle the product all you want, and the staff will be eager to assist you. ♦

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Fiction by Jamaica Kincaid: “ Girl .”

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DOES IT SUCK?
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YouTube Secrets Review
Every page in this book serves one purpose: to help you become a better video influencer. Reason #3: It's 200X Cheaper Than a Course and Probably More Valuable. I paid $1997 for a course called JumpCut Academy. It was awesome, but as far as "bang for my buck," YouTube Secrets packed much more. Reason #4: 100% White Hat and Ethical Tactics.
Youtube Secrets Book Review
In this video, I will review Youtube Secrets by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis and give tips on how to succeed on Youtube.Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/...
YouTube Secrets Book Review
YouTube Secrets Book Review: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer by Sean Cannell & Benji Travis | Amazon Link...
YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and
Whether you're a beginner or a veteran, this book will show you how to use YouTube to build a following, create a lucrative business, and make a massive impact in people's lives. "1133109948" YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer
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The book sets a pathway and prepares your mentality for the YouTube journey. It's definitely worth reading. Yet, the book title is misleading. There seems no "secrets" in it. Everything in the book is quite common sense and/or spotted somewhere on the net. It is not "ultimate guide" neither, since some crucial chapters eg.
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Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. ... 5.0 out of 5 stars YouTube secret book. Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2024.
YouTube Secrets Summary by Chapter and 7 Key Takeaways
YouTube Secrets is rated 4.6 on Amazon and 4.1 on Goodreads. Positive reviews say: Very helpful and informative — Understand how YouTube works — Motivational push to get started. Criticism: Missing advanced strategies and recent updates — The author's YouTube channel contains more information
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.
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YouTube has changed our world—from how we view video to how we connect and market—opening a new entrepreneurial landscape to ambitious individuals. Millions of people generate six to seven figures annually from online video content. And, with the right roadmap, you too could be en route to real influence and income. In the NEW and EXPANDED edition of YouTube Secrets, online video experts ...
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YouTube Secrets is a success playbook that helps you grow a following and make money with the power of video. In this book, YouTube sensations and bestselling authors Sean Cannell and Benji Travis teaches you the ultimate game plan to take your YouTube channel from slow and dormant to accelerated and engaged. YouTube Secrets contains premium and updated YouTube growth tips for creators ...
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The Best Books of 2024 (So Far) Explore All Lists. 5 1. Home 1; Books 2; ... In the NEW and EXPANDED edition of YouTube Secrets, online video experts Sean Cannell and Benji Travis draw on almost two decades of experience as well as interviews with more than two hundred top creators to give you a step-by-step YouTube success playbook ...
I read the book "Youtube Secrets" so you don't have to
First I was intruiged picking up this book. I've been making videos for 12 years now and I certainly haven't figured out any Youtube "secrets". After reading this entire book with the hope of getting just one great takeaway. It was clear that the author hadn't figured out any secrets either, because there are no "secrets".
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In this YouTube Book review I show you the best selling book to grow your YT channel. YouTube Secrets by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis. YouTube Secrets: htt...
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Book Review: "Youtube Secrets 2 Books in 1: $15,000 per Month Guide to Make Money as a Video Influencer, Build Your Audience, SEO and Algorithm Hacks" by Jason P Smith In online video content ...
Self-made millionaire Adam Stott shares his secrets in new book
An Essex self-made millionaire has used his own life and business challenges to share the secrets to his success in a brand-new book. Essex, England, United Kingdom - August 29, 2024 —
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for YouTube Secrets: ... 4.0 out of 5 stars Good Book Lacking "YouTube Secrets" Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2024. Verified Purchase. Overall YouTube Secrets was a good read, however I found this book to be somewhat a promotional item for the authors. It continues to reference ...
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If you need help with the Public File, call (713) 778-4745. At KPRC, we are committed to informing and delighting our audience. In our commitment to covering our communities with innovation and ...
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"Swiped" by L.M. Chilton Amazon. Goodreads rating: 3.56/5 stars. About the book: "Swiped" by L.M. Chilton is a gripping thriller about a woman's search for her missing sister that ...
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Women, wine and two wars - the secret life of Robert Bruce Lockhart From defying Bolsheviks in Russia to bedding princesses in Malaya, the hero of James Crossland's book Rogue Agent was quite ...
YouTube Secrets (Book Review)
🛑 YouTube Secrets (Book Review) 🛑Today I'm gonna be reviewing YouTube Secrets, the latest book by the guys who run "Video Influencers" YouTube channel.Here...
Amazon's Lord of the Rings Show Can't Do What the Books and the Films Did
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power always had a tough act to follow. Drawing from one of the most revered novels of the 20 th century—or, rather, 130 pages appended to it—and beholden ...
YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and
Overall YouTube Secrets was a good read, however I found this book to be somewhat a promotional item for the authors. It continues to reference their YouTube channel vs utilizing more outside sources. This book is more about how great the authors are and their experience versus techniques that a wider audience could utilize.
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Sometimes what is not perceived in the business-as-usual patterns becomes accessible in another way. It is perhaps apt that the title of a book on a personal pilgrimage of discovery and connection to the 64 Yoginis is a synaesthesia—Whispers of the Unseen.And it is apt that the book documents the author S. Beena Unnikrishnan's journey not so much as a pilgrimage on the road as it is ...
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We're fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us! ... Unlock the secrets to video production success with Jeremiah Johnson! In this 2024 guide, discover top tips and strategies to elevate your video production skills. ... Youtube-height 1080 Youtube-id nKl71wOezdE Youtube-n-entries 20 Youtube-playlist Tampa Bay ...
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YouTube Secrets:Paperback - https://amzn.to/2yF83cPKindle- https://amzn.to/2NJ9tszIn this video i do a quick book review on the new Youtube Secrets book by S...