You can find my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@m.l.humphrey
Right now it has three playlists:
Affinity Publisher Book Formatting Quick Takes Videos
This is a video reference library for when you want to do one specific thing in Affinity Publisher. It is not the video courses that are tied into the books I wrote on Affinity Publisher (which are all discussed here). These are short videos (less than two minutes each) meant to cover one very specific topic for those times when you just can’t remember how to do something.
Videos should be sorted alphabetically by main topic (image, master pages, etc.) but I’d recommend using search on this one because there are 89 videos I believe.
Excel Tips and Tricks Videos
These are short videos that are meant to provide a video demonstration of the tips and tricks presented in Excel Tips and Tricks. If you use Excel, I think it’s worth the thirty minutes to watch them because there are a few tips there that I didn’t know until recently that have been very helpful to me, not to mention some of the old classics like freeze panes and using a single apostrophe mark to keep Excel from turning an entry into a date.
M.H. Lee Short Stories
The final set of videos are the audiobooks of the M.H. Lee short stories I’ve recorded so far. There are six of them. Two are very short stories, the rest are about 45 minutes long. All speculative fiction of one sort or another. No explicit sex or violence but a few deal with challenging topics.
A few things to note.
The sound quality is going to vary between the different playlists, especially as I put up older content. Right now the M.H. Lee short stories and Excel Tips and Tricks videos were recorded in my current recording space with a high-quality microphone, but the Affinity Publisher ones were not. The main difference you’ll notice is probably the distance from the microphone in the older videos.
But all of these videos have closed captions on them, so if that’s an issue, just turn those on and turn off the sound. Also, especially for the Excel and Affinity videos, using closed captions will make sure that you catch any technical terminology. I do think I enunciate fairly well but when you’re not familiar with terms it’s hard to know what someone is saying.
That’s also why I don’t know when more videos will be loaded, because even when I was reading off of a script putting those closed captions on a video takes substantial time. And for the technical videos I think good closed captions are essential. I do not trust automated captions for those videos.
If you want to support this effort, please follow the channel. It’s my understanding that if I can hit 1,000 followers on there that I can apply to get a share of ad revenue from the channel, which would be nice. (But as someone who does not follow anything because I hate getting notifications in my in box I completely understand not wanting to do that.)
I expect that the next projects that will get loaded up there are some of the self-pub-related videos that I created years ago as well as the audiobook versions of Sell That Book and Data Analysis for Self-Publishers when those closed captions are ready to go.
If I see a lot of views on the Affinity Publisher videos, I still need to do a quick takes version for the ads and covers book, so that could be a future project. (And if I hit the point where I’m monetized on there I’ll likely add the video courses as well.)
I also do have the old videos I did for Excel for Beginners, etc. that may make it up there at some point.
Basically at this point I’ll see if the channel gets any traction whatsoever and what type of traction it gets and go from there.
As I say in the welcome video, right now I don’t expect you’ll see me on there a lot simply because makeup, lighting, etc. etc. is not where I care to put a lot of energy. But some of the projects I could do would require that so don’t hold me to that one.
Anyway, if YouTube is your thing, enjoy!
(Oh, and know that I have no clue what I’m doing there so I have probably done something wrong at this point. Feel free to drop a line and let me know what it is if you’re so inclined (mlhumphreywriter at gmail or comment below).)
M.L. Humphrey 
Great! I’m a newbie to Affinity Publisher and to your work just in time!
I have recently developed an interest in POD publishing. I’ve bought the Kindle versions of your Affinity Publishing formatting books, both fiction and non-fiction. I’m currently reading and practicing your fiction formatting one. I’ve now subscribed now to this YouTube channel. I hope you can get your numbers up as I’m loving the short takes.
I also bought your Affinity Publisher template. It’s really helping. Thank you.
I’m wondering: you seem to use Ingram Spark and my friend who needs me is tied to Lulu. I see your template is showing facing pages. The INDD template I downloaded from Lulu does not use facing pages. I’m guessing I’ll learn from you how to change that in AFPUB.
I’m all Mac all the time, but I have no probs with your mostly-PC focus. I have an extensive background in print production, focussing mostly on packaging–the most anal of production art. Almost all packaging on the planet is produced on Macs using AI.
Reading your book, I was surprised to learn you’ve had probs with all your fonts slowing you down. I share your passion for fonts. You might have discovered by now that there are excellent font management options–some are even free. If you’ve already gone that route, just ignore the next para.
I personally use FontExplorer X Pro. That’s because I often need to load/unload fonts from specific clients. It means I might have several versions of the same font from different clients and I can accurately activate and deactivate them according to which client I’m working for. And I can also deactivate my own fonts to keep everything slim and fast. Also, ML, with a font manager you can keep your fonts safe in a separate place… copying them to another folder from which you load to the font manager. That means that when a font gets corrupted (which they can do) you can just discard the bad one and recopy it from your protected (and backed-up) stash and reload it to the font manager.
Anyhow, thanks for making things clear for my first steps.
Your new fan, Bette Forester
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Thank you! And thanks for the tip on a font manager, I hadn’t thought about using one of those before.
As for the facing pages question, when I work in Affinity Publisher it’s with facing pages but when I export to PDF that’s when I change it over so there’s just one page at a time. If you want to work without facing pages in Affinity Publisher you can change that under File -> Document Setup. There’s a checkbox on the Layout tab.
Good luck with it and reach out if you have any other questions. Happy to help.
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Ha, that just proves I need to move forward with your book. Thanks. I do like working in reader’s spreads and I’m happy to learn I can specify single pages when I export to PDF.
I look forward to hearing about your font manager adventures. I had to switch when I upgraded my computer and the decision process took a while. I’m subscription-adverse but I don’t mind paying one time if the features suit me. I test-drove several options before I decided on FontExplorer X Pro.
Bette
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