Eric Hammel and I have been having a discussion in private that might be useful for others in this space to see and participate in. With his permission, I’ve pulled out some of the salient themes and reproduced them here. These are not the complete messages but specific points we’ve been discussing.
Eric has a back catalog of over 30 titles, some of which have been in print for a long time. He’d like to use podcasting to create a new revenue stream to augment his print business and asked me what I thought of that.
My opinion is that monetizing podcasts is difficult. (Actually, I think it’s impossible.) I’ve seen several people try to do it on regular podcasts – with varying degrees of success. I’ve never seen anybody that tried it with a book. (I’m sure somebody has tried it – I just don’t know who they might be or how well it worked.)
With this information Eric – quite reasonably – asks why do it? There’s a cost involved in making a podcast – time, equipment, and voice talent (if you hire a reader). So given the cost, if you can’t charge for it, why do it?
My opinion is that podcasting elevates your work out of the background noise of text. Sure there are tens of thousands of podcasts but there are hundreds of thousands of books. More than that, I think that the total number of “podcast books” is a tiny fraction of the podcast spectrum – even accounting for such efforts as Librivox. What that means is that a needle in a haystack of text becomes a radio tower on the plains of podcasting.
The downside is that the pool of potential listeners is likely smaller than the pool of likely readers, but being visible to a potential audience of tens of thousands has a value that is – at least in theory – higher than the value of being practically invisible to a potential audience of hundreds of thousands. Keep in mind that there are millions of hungry mp3 players in the world and not all of them are being used to destroy the hearing of the next generation of youth.
To address Eric’s question more directly, I believe that the value of podcasting is in building an audience. Unless you’re JK or Stephen or Stephanie, you always need to be building an audience for your work. The more people who know – and like – your work, the more likely it is that they’ll buy it. The fear is that by giving the book away in audio formats, an author/publisher cannibalizes print sales. That experiment has been run many times over the last three years, and not one of the instances has shown this fear to be founded. More, in each case, providing the podcast helped to drive sales of print.
What’s the thinking? Do the old models of monetization hold in the new media spaces?
