Craft

How I’m Turning Articles into Vertical Videos to Reach More People

The weekly workflow helps me squeeze more juice out of each story.

Converting articles to videos in a stylish way helps me reach more people. All images from the author

Writing my first book has made me change my tune about social media.

For years, I resisted marketing on social media. It seemed too saturated, too competitive, and too superficial. It required way too much production, only to have Zuckerberg or one of his minions flip a switch and turn the algorithm on its head. (Or worse, another Moo Deng — baby hippos are stiff competition.)

But then, last year, I closed on my first book deal with HarperCollins. The book is done (yay) and comes out this December. And these days, when it comes to books, audience is everything. Book publishers and authors have a symbiotic relationship: Authors can plug into a publisher’s resources and distribution engines, and publishers can plug into an author’s existing pool of followers and fans.

We now also have to grapple with AI, which has led to a fire hose of crappy content cluttering up our feeds. This tsunami of machine-generated posts has led me to revisit social media and video, because there’s less skepticism that videos might be fake, especially if you’re the one in the video. (This might change later as AI evolves.) For now, video…