Publishers have a lot of information about what their readership is looking for.  This information is used by publishing companies, Hollywood studios, and just about anyone who is in the business of delivering entertainment to consumers.  For this reason alone, it is important for writers to have a basic idea about what audiences look for.

Note, I’m not suggesting that writers chase the latest trends in the best-sellers list.  By the time most writers complete a new work, what’s exciting and hot will have become yesterday’s forgotten idea.

Instead, I’m suggesting that understanding the basic demographic data around people’s consumption of stories can be helpful in defining who the audience we are writing for is.

Every writer should hold an ideal audience member in their minds eye as they write and write to please that person.  If the audience we want to write for is children, then we should have a child in mind as we write.  If we write for a teen or young adult audience, we should keep a specific teen in mind.  To do this, it is helpful to know what different audiences are looking for.

Children Under 5 – 7

Children under five look for wonder (100%), humor (96%), and mild horror (92%).  They respond almost universally to fantasy and science fiction and want to be amazed by fairies and gnomes and intelligent talking fungi and rocket ships.  They want to laugh (often in fairly unsophisticated ways) and will chuckly at anything surprising.  And, they also enjoy scary stories – if the scares are very mild.

Older Children under 12

Older kids look for adventure.  By the time they are five, boys are looking for adventure and by seven, girls are also.  Stories of exploration, competition, survival, etc. are sought out.  The setting can be any place or any time, but adventure is requisite.

Teens

At about age 12, boys and girls seem to differentiate in their tastes.  Boys remain focused on adventure (96%) and wonder (96%) – in roughly equal amounts – enjoying fantasy and action stories.  Somewhere between the age of 12 and 16 many girls move away from adventure stories and develop a taste for romance (without losing their taste for wonder).  Material that has the broadest appeal tends to include fantasy and romance.

Twenty-Somethings

By their twenties, women are primarily interested in romance and consume romance novels, films, etc. almost exclusively.  Men focus their attention on thrillers, primarily, enjoying suspense, tension, and action.

Midlife and Up

Women primarily seek out drama and mystery in their forties.  Men still enjoy thrillers, but by their fifties are almost indistinguishable from female consumers in their taste for drama and mystery.

A note on Settings

Audiences desire an experience that takes them far away from their day to day lives.  As a result, authors face a key choice when picking the setting.  Audiences want a uniquely interesting setting to explore.  Pick a setting, even one that is familiar, that will reveal something unique to the audience.  Try to avoid clichés.

Conclusion

When we know who our target audience is (who we wish to attract to our stories) we need to write the kind of story that audience is looking for.  Publishers will also tell you that it’s a good idea to make your protagonist match your audience.  If you are writing for a female teenage market, then you are likely to attract a larger audience by writing a female teenage protagonist in a fantasy or romance story.  If you are writing a story that is meant to appeal to an older demographic (in their fifties) you would be well advised to write both a male and female protagonist of middle age engaged in a drama or mystery.  While girls will engage with a story that has a male protagonist, boys are far less likely to engage with a story that has a female protagonist.

Alternatively, write the story you want to write, but be aware of the audience to whom it might appeal.  Some early thought about who the audience for your work is, will save much time in helping you find and connect to that audience efficiently in your marketing efforts.

Copyright Philip Craig Robotham © 2022 

The post Understanding What an Audience Wants appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

TRANSCRIPTS

A Little-Known Secret of Podcast Marketing Success that Audio Dramatists could easily be Implementing (but Rarely Do).

NB: Actually, in the twelve months since I wrote this article, the number of audio dramas providing transcripts to accompany their shows has increased dramatically – a great thing in my view.

WHY PROVIDE TRANSCRIPTS?

Back before the internet was a thing, archivists, librarians, and other information retrieval specialists regularly used transcripts to help navigate, sort, store, and retrieve content. Today transcripts fulfil the same function in the digital realm by making content more accessible, searchable, shareable, and digestible.

Transcripts make a podcast vastly more discoverable and accessible to search-engines.

Podcasts are meant to be heard and this is their great strength. Music, sound effects, and dialog, all combine to create a great auditory theatre experience. But none of these sounds are “searchable” by Google or any of the other search engines. Search engines rely on (digitally) written words. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but if we want our podcasts to be indexed and ranked by search engines then we have to provide words to accompany the link to the audio. And the most search-engine-friendly approach we can take is to post a transcript of the content online with our audio.

I would not be surprised at all to discover that part of Lauren Shippen’s success with The Bright Sessions (apart from the stellar writing and acting etc.) comes, in part, from the fact that all her episodes are accompanied by a web-page transcript that boosts the discoverability of the show in search engines such as Google.

In 2011, This American Life decided to transcribe all their episodes. This show began in 1995 so that was a major project. They then analysed the effects of adding transcripts to podcasts. Over a 27-month period they used Google Analytics to record the number of unique visitors and page views. They saw an increase of 6.28% in the number of unique visitors finding their content through online searches and gained a 3.89% increase in links back to their website and its content along with measurably higher engagement (visitors were staying on, and exploring, their site for longer periods of time).

Transcripts also provide a solid anchor for backlinks (an important factor in determining your search engine ranking).

Transcripts aren’t a particularly saleable commodity. As a script-writer, I have lamented more than once about the fact that people don’t read scripts (despite all the benefits that accrue from the practice). There’s no point putting our scripts up for sale behind a pay-wall and jealously guarding them in this way. The market we might attract by selling our scripts is worth far less to us than the boost in discoverability we can achieve by having transcripts available to search-engines on our websites.

Transcripts are amazingly useful to journalists, fans, and reviewers. The transcript is an automatic source of quotes that can be mined to fill out the promotional pieces journalists and reviewers want to write about our shows and they also provide great fodder for fan-based word of mouth… but only if the transcripts exist and can be accessed.

Transcripts provide a space to deliver extra value to your sponsors. If you include the text of your promotions and advertiser copy in the transcript as well, then you have found a way to give your advertiser extra exposure and a better return on their investment in your show.

Transcripts increase the accessibility of the podcast for disabled audience members. I’ve written before about how grateful (as a person with a hearing impairment) I am when an audio drama supplies transcripts to accompany their recordings. Deaf people aren’t, contrary to popular belief, necessarily excluded from enjoying audio drama. I am completely deaf in one ear but my other is mostly okay. Nonetheless, if the occasional word or part of a word falls into the frequency range that I can’t hear (or if the background sound-bed is a little louder than I can process), it is a huge help to have a transcript I can follow along with. Likewise, non-native speakers, people who are getting older and find it harder to follow rapid-fire conversations, and people who have auditory processing difficulties can still enjoy the production. Dark Adventure Radio Theatre have always made transcripts available with their recordings and, as a result, have kept me as a loyal repeat customer since their very first production.

I personally find it far more disability-friendly for a show to charge for the recordings and make the scripts available for free than for the show to make the recordings free and hide the scripts behind a paywall as special bonus content available to their paying supporters. While producers have every right (and a great need) to generate revenue from every stream available to them, people with disabilities can be forgiven for feeling they are inadvertently being asked to pay extra to get full access to assistive content (by which I mean material like transcripts) that will give them full access to an experience that more able-bodied people get for free. Again, I want to underline the fact that, despite this, I fully support a producers right to monetize any part of their intellectual property that they choose in any fashion they choose.

OBJECTIONS

There are some legitimate objections to be raised that we should also take into account. The protection of intellectual property is a significant issue in this day and age. By releasing transcripts to the world, we increase the chances that someone will come along and try to rip us off – producing our content or attempting to sell it. I suspect that most of us vastly overestimate the commercial interest the wider community has in scripts, but there is no doubt that, even where we carefully copyright our content, this is a risk.

It is also true that shows which have numerous writers and which license the scripts they have produced may have difficulty getting clearance to make the transcripts public. It needs to be acknowledged that not every show is going to want to, or be able to, make transcripts available. But there are also a large number of shows where the producer/writer is the same person who owns the website and who, as the person who has produced the scripts, is able to release them with minimal effort. Take a look at the website for the Bright Sessions to see a great example of how this has been done with simplicity and elegance.

But there is one mistaken idea that I would like to re-emphasize as part of this little article before I finish. Some folks might be thinking that releasing transcripts of the show for free represents lost revenue in terms of what they could be making from script sales. I get that, and, of course, it is every producers right to determine what and whether they will give away part or all of their content. That said, those of us who have tried to sell scripts to the public can attest to how tiny that “market” is and how much more valuable web-traffic is overall. And even if you do release transcripts on your site, you can still attempt to sell the scripts in a nice, bound, dead tree version, if you wish. For those of us who enjoy scripts as a source of reading pleasure, the presence of free online scripts (I can say from experience) is no deterrent to buying them in a nicely organised, bound or e-book form. There is a strong commercial argument to be made for releasing transcripts on the website of a podcast that indicates the increased traffic is far more valuable than the tiny amount of sales revenue that might be generated.

CONCLUSION

The provision of transcripts on a website alongside the recordings of the show increases the discoverability and ranking of a podcast with search engines, provides anchors for back-links, gives journalists and reviewers (and even fans) a handy source of quotes to assist in promoting the show, provides an extra location for your sponsors message to be highlighted, and increases the accessibility of the content to people with disabilities.

There are a lot of reasons why this is a significant boon to our promotion and marketing, and not many reasons for holding back (especially if we have already produced the scripts as part of the production process in the first place). It really wouldn’t take much for us to import this particular technique for improving our ROI from the wider podcasting sphere and put it to work in audio drama.

It’s something to think about, anyway.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any thoughts regarding transcripts? I’d be very interested to hear from you. Why not comment below?

The post The Mysterious Audience-Growing Power of Transcripts appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.

I’m thinking about marketing again, this time specifically about the importance of well-chosen titles.

How Consumers Choose

Have you thought about how we decide on the audio dramas that we are going to listen to? I’ve got no hard data on this, but I’m willing to bet most of us use a very similar method (and one that belies the idea that “we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”.

My own process with regard to choosing audio drama is not all that different to book or film shopping.

First I look for a genre. “I’m in the mood for some sci-fi” or “some horror” or “some urban-fantasy” or whatever.

Then I look for a name I trust. “Narada Theatre Company produced this story”, or “it was written by Tony Sarrechia” (or Jack Ward or Pete Lutz or Mike Murphy or Gregg Taylor or any of several dozen others), or “it’s a Decoder Ring Theatre production” (or a production by Colonial Radio Theatre, or Broken Sea, or Habit Forming Films) etc. And yes, those are the names I personally respond to when I’m looking for something to listen to.

Next I’m often attracted by some cover art and, of course, THE TITLE. The title needs to grab my attention enough to make me consider giving the story a listen.

Of course, if nothing grabs me immediately I might decide to check out an unknown name (that has caught my attention through it’s art and title etc.).

When I’m looking for a book I check genre, producer’s/writer’s name, cover-art , title (roughly in that order). And if I still need convincing then I read the blurb.

Then, if I need further convincing, I’ll read any testimonials.

Finally, I’ll crack open the cover and check out the table of contents and perhaps even read the opening page or two. In audio drama this equates to looking at the list of episode titles and listening to a sample.

For a long time, I’ve been underestimating the importance of the title as a hook.

The Importance of the Gaps Between Content

As an unknown writer, I’ve got to attract the limited attention people are willing to give.

And, as an unknown writer, I’ve made peace with the fact that my material will only be examined after people have looked for the trusted name-brand writers and producers currently operating in the audio drama space and go “well, I’ve just finished listening to all of Narada Radio Theatre’s current backlog, I wonder what else I can check out?”. That’s fine.

An unknown is always going to be the next choice when folks can’t find what they are looking for right away. Horror writer’s who aren’t Stephen King depend upon the gaps between his releases in order to sell. They rely on the customer saying “Stephen King hasn’t put out a new book yet and I’ve read all the others, I wonder what else I can try?”

It’s the nature of the animal, that unknowns get the leavings of those who are better known… but they become a name in their own right when they can attract the eye of consumers who are, in that moment, looking for something new to try.

And there are always folks on the lookout for something new (in their chosen genre). Therein lies a very encouraging truth.

The Title Matters

One of the most important keys to grabbing the attention of those who are, because it is the right psychological moment, looking to try something new, is the title.

A great deal of the marketing advice I have been reading lately deals with the importance of gaining attention. If potential customers and audience members pass over, ignore, or otherwise miss what we’ve got on offer… well, then all they will do is remain potential customers and potential audience members and we’ll never see any growth.

According to most marketers the purpose of a title is to gain attention and get people to read the next sentence.

And the next sentence (and the sentence that follows etc.) exists to get the reader to the call to action.

And the call to action exists to turn the prospective customer or audience member into an actual customer or audience member.

If we ignore the importance of our titles then we ignore one of the chief tools available to us for building an audience.

So what makes a compelling title?

Firstly, compelling titles grab attention. They want the passer-by to notice them. They have personality. And they shout. As such they are surprising, or emotional, or familiar, or intriguing, or all of the above.

Secondly, they are easy to remember. They need to stick in the memory while the prospect is glancing around at the other titles nearby and as they talk to friends about what they are reading or listening to. If the title doesn’t stay in the memory it won’t be in the running when the prospect goes to make their final decision. Good titles often create a picture in the memory for just this reason. If you can picture it easily you can remember it. They are also relatively short.

Thirdly, they are informative. Good titles communicate. They let the prospect know what the story is about and invite them to read or listen. They have a specific target audience in mind and emphasise their uniqueness (make the story stand out from the crowd).

Finally, they are easy to say and non-embarrassing, again, so that they can be passed around via word of mouth. We want people to notice, remember and share my title with others.

An example of a title that succeeds wonderfully at this is “We’re alive – a zombie podcast”. To be honest, I didn’t like this title at first, though I enjoyed the show a great deal. But, I have since come to realise, it does everything a title should – and it does it well.

It demands attention. It is literally a shout, a cry both desperate and triumphant, and it arouses curiosity. It implies a threat that the characters have survived. It makes us curious to know what that threat is/was and how it was overcome.

It’s memorable. It is short, and carries a tonne of emotional freight and this makes it memorable. It’s not the most visual of titles, but it succeeds in being memorable nonetheless.

It communicates. You know the story is about survival just by reading it. And – part of the real genius of the title – it has a tagline that situates the story in its genre. We know it is about zombies from the outset. The audience is identified in the title (and its tagline). The story is for those who like survival stories (specifically survival horror within the zombie apocalypse genre).

Lastly, the title is easy to say and talk about with others.

Episode and Chapter Titles

And what about the episode titles? In my view, the episode titles in “We’re Alive” are some of the best in the biz. They remind me of the evocative titles that J.M. Straczynski gave to his Babylon 5 episodes. A quick glance at We’re Alive’s episode titles reveals titles like “Blood, Sweat and Fears”, “Where do you go when you go to Sleep?”, “The Road to Living Death”, “Separate Dying Embers”, “Mark of the Beast”, “The Harder they Fall”, “Last Dying Breath”, “Red Winter”, “Scorched Earth”, “Eye of the Storm”, “Chasing Ghosts”, “The Darkness Ahead”, and “Distorted Truths”. The titles in the episode-listing draw me in and make me want to listen.

All in all, show and episode titles should be created to draw an audience in. A well-designed title is a key feature of audience building – the delivery mechanism of our first invitation to our prospective audience members to give us their valuable time. As such we shouldn’t underestimate their importance or cut corners on the thought that should be given to them.

This article is © copyright 2018 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.

So, do you have any tips regarding titles? I’d be very interested to hear from you.

The post Crafting Compelling Titles appeared first on Host Your Own Old Time Radio Drama.