Curating Youtube (with my Topic)

My original idea for my topic was to look at "the person behind the content" and how they decide where to put their ideas from all the digital tools and outlets there are online (how does someone pick between uploading a video straight to a blog verses putting it on YouTube or Vimeo, what makes it different for one person, etc). This idea has kind of morphed now into authors on the internet. I suppose my thesis is that authors can no longer be successful (or at least it is very difficult to get successful) without putting themselves out there in the digital world to get exposure. Using YouTube, I've found out a lot about what successful authors think about the written word becoming a digital phenomenon.

First I searched "authors on youtube" and found the channel Meet Our Authors. They don't have very many views on their videos, but they are still videos on authors doing readings and explaining their works. Ironically, one of their videos is "Captain Ahab vs The Wind." Spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with writing or Moby Dick.

I then scrolled down just a bit more to find the channel Talks at Google. One of their tags is author's@google so I pulled up a different window and searched that tag as well. There are videos on authors talking directly about digital culture, like Tom Standage. There are authors just talking about their works and themselves. Either way, these authors are taking advantage of YouTube, as well as other digital sources available online. The authors@google has a blog, the project Talks at Google as a twitter account and this post talks about the Google Talks project and the authors that have featured there, as well as links to free audiobooks by those authors (another way authors are getting out there - audiobooks!).

So there's a lot to look at and research. I have lots of videos to watch by the authors themselves and I'll have to comb through to find the videos directly talking about putting their work out there in the digital world and how they feel about it, but I've gotten more info than I thought I actually would using YouTube as a curation tool.

Do you guys know of any authors that have utilized the internet to connect with their readers or get their work out there?