Daily Archives: March 9, 2016

Wanna Blab? by Kitty Bucholtz

Have you heard of Blab? Chances are you haven’t yet. It’s a fairly new social media video platform that is still in beta, but there are thousands of people using it already.

The idea is that you can do a live video chat with up to four people in video boxes (unlike Periscope, which only allows one camera, the one on your phone). It sometimes reminds me of the old TV game show Hollywood Squares. You can allow people to leave the video box and let someone else come in to change up the conversation, or you can “lock the chair” so that only the people you want to be on video are allowed.

You can schedule a blab in advance or you can hop on and start talking. You can even choose to record a blab, but you can’t pre-record it to make it available at a certain time. Like YouTube, anyone in the world can go find your recording (if you recorded it) on the site and watch it at any time, and anyone in the world can watch your live blab.

There’s even a chat box so people watching can contribute to the conversation. Viewers can also click on the hands icon at the bottom of each video square to “give props” to that speaker (like the hearts in Periscope give love). It’s connected to Twitter so you can log in with your Twitter ID, tweet about your blab while you’re doing it, and you can get more followers from inside Blab and send them a message that you’re now live.

The frosting on the cake? It’s easy!

Go to Blab to check it out. You’ll see dozens of people chatting live at any given time. The search bar isn’t the greatest, but you can search for people or recordings, and you can follow people so you’ll be informed when they’re live.

YA author Elena Dillon and I started a new live Blab show last month called Elena and Kitty Blabbing About Books. (Come “follow” us!) We’d been thinking about doing a podcast, but there is a real time commitment to making a good podcast. With Blab, we hit the record button, interview our author guest, hit the stop recording button, and in less than an hour Blab sends us a link to the recording to download to our computer and upload to our blog and/or YouTube channel. We also send the link to the author we interviewed so they can upload it to their sites as well.

We’ve done four episodes already, interviewing Tracy Reed, Alina K. Field, Debbie Decker, and Tracy Lydia Garner. Tonight’s guest is romantic suspense author Beth Yarnell. Click Beth’s name at 7pm Pacific time to watch the show!

Elena and Kitty Blabbing About Books is a weekly show interviewing a new author every Wednesday from 7pm to 8pm Pacific time. If you’re a published author and would like to know more about being interviewed on our show, please email us at blababoutbooks AT gmail DOT com.

And if you read fiction and like to hear authors talk about their books, join us each week! It’s lots of fun and you may find a new author to try.

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick, A Very Merry Superhero Wedding, and Unexpected Superhero are currently available on Amazon. The free short story “Superhero in Disguise” and the new short story “Welcome to Loon Lake” are available wherever ebooks are sold. You can find out about her courses on self-publishing, marketing, and time management for writers at her website Writer Entrepreneur Guides.