Libraries, Prince Harry and Podcast Discoverability

Coming off a long weekend in Canada and I can feel summer in the air…?

For many listeners and audiences, summer marks a specific line in the sand in terms of behaviour.?

Our collective rhythms shift and become a little less predictable (which is why we don’t recommend launching a show in July or even early August).?

But just because summer habits change doesn’t mean listeners and audiences aren’t listening to podcasts.?

They are listening.?

They are just listening differently.?

Let’s spend some time today unlocking some new ways of thinking about how to have your show found by listeners who want to hear you….and of course, as typical, I’m going to use an unlikely analogy…?

Sometimes, the best way to understand something new is to look at something really old.?

And when it comes to podcast discoverability, listening behaviour and the summer time slump, I’d like to shift our gaze from the pod-verse to the old school world of books… in fact, dear reader let’s go to…?

The library.?

My family visits the big central library in Halifax at least once a month.?

Not only is it a stunning space filled with loads of things other than books, but it’s one of the most lush, free experiences we can have as a family (in a day and age when a simple trip to the movies costs a cool hundred bucks).?

In fact, we went to the library this past weekend on a rainy Saturday and this entire analogy dropped into me like a bolt of lightning.?

Consider (or recall from when you were in school).?

When you walk into the main area of any library, you’ll see a couple ‘forward facing’ shelves.?

Speed Reads - the books that are so new that the library literally can’t keep them on the shelves, so they are limited to a week-long borrowing period.?

These books are the exact same as a hot new podcast that’s just been launched.?

What’s happening here??

The book/show is experiencing a meteoric rise in readership/listening, likely due to incredibly well done publicity prior to the launch.?

Examples of this??

Prince Harry’s memoir Spare.?

It was so heavily promoted prior to hitting the shelves that when it did, most people knew all the juicy (err….Elizabeth Arden’ed?) bits. Sales still shot through the roof on Day 1, but I saw it on book exchange shelves within a month. It wasn’t a keeper.?

The Lesson??

Just because a book is on the Speed Read shelf doesn't mean it’s worthy of a Pulitzer or that it won’t quickly descend into the bowels of the Fiction shelves never to have its spine cracked again.?

A fast and quick release doesn’t equal a quality and enduring book (or podcast).

But being on that Speed Read shelf can definitely garner some intense visibility and enhance growth if the content is exceptional.?

The next shelf you’ll see??

Hot New Recommended Reads - these books likely have a publication date of less than a year old and are being put in front of you because people who read think you’d like them.

(Here’s a secret about me…my Gramma Chippy was a head librarian! AND I hold an MA, Journalism from Western that is technically a library science degree… weird, right?? So when it comes to how libraries, information and audience operate… I seeeeee things).?

Okay back to Recommended Reads.?

These books are usually selected based on a few parameters:?

• Authors who have already proven themselves worthy of being recommended - they have books that charted, hit the NYT bestseller list or garnered critical acclaim.?

• Borrowing habits of library users - what are people borrowing now? What’s trendy??

• Hidden gems the librarians seem to like - those lesser known, gorgeous books that actual people enjoy and want to tell you about.?

This is how the Podcast Recommendations on Apple, Spotify et al. work too.

If you’ve already got a hit show and you launch a new one? Your chances of being recommended skyrocket. This also goes for if your new show launches on a network that has a reputation for producing great content.?

If listeners are already listening to shows like yours, then your show is more likely to be recommended to them.?

Consider when the Black Lives Matter movement hit fever pitch in 2021. Search for all things related to systemic racism, historic patriarchy and micro-aggressions jumped dramatically…and podcasts related to all of these things started showing up more prominently on the Recommended Lists.?

*Deep breath*?

Dear reader, I know we want to believe the world is already run by robots and AI.?

But when it comes to podcasting, just like the library, there are actual humans in the background.?

Until recently, a literal person listened to your RSS feed in order to approve it being on Apple Podcasts.?

So it should come as no surprise that (in a totally secret and unverified way) people help to promote podcasts.?

This is a crap shoot and not something to try to figure out, but it definitely happens.

Your best option in this case is to always remember your show is for … humans.?

And finally … not a shelf, but a behaviour to consider…something I’ll geekily call:

The Dewey Decimal Advantage

Never did I ever think knowing the DD System would apply to podcasting and yet off I go to emblazon “Erin Trafford can make an analogy out of anything” on a T-Shirt.?

If you are unfamiliar, the Dewey Decimal System is the numeric catalogue used to sort books in a library.?

It’s how you know that Politics is found somewhere between 320 and 329 on the shelves and Zoology is at the 590 mark.

This might be going a bit into the stacks on this concept, but stick with me, because it demonstrates a very nuanced behaviour of both readers and listeners.?

Let’s say you walk into the library (podverse) and see a Recommended Read that appeals to you. Perhaps it’s a book about Canadian Depression-era Prime Minister R.B Bennett.?

You pick up the book and skim the Introduction (this is like listening to the podcast trailer and/or episode 1).?

You like what you see and hear and drop the book into your ‘keep pile’ (same as subscribing to the show).?

But before doing that, you check the DD number on the spine to see the R.B Bennett book is in the 320 section.?

So you head up the stairs to the stacks to the shelves labeled 320 and start to scan the books on the shelves.?

This is what happens when listeners like your show and start to look for similar, but different, shows.?

There you’ll find other biographies of Canadian Prime Ministers, and then as you flow through the stacks you’ll see books about specific laws, acts, Supreme Court decisions and eventually, when you reach 330, you’ll have left the land of Prime Ministers and Canada and be into the world of Economics.?

Avid and curious readers will discover new books this way.?

This is how I’ve searched and found hundreds of books over my years as a self-proclaimed bibliophile.?

And we must assume listeners - avid and curious - will engage in similar behaviour.

Scanning the ‘neighborhood’ for similar podcasts to expand their knowledge and pique interest, tracing their steps from one niche topic into an overflow and related topic.?

What I’ve described above is the process of neighborhooding your show - a concept coined by podcast research pioneer Dan Misener of Bumper…and one that SSN teaches in our programs.?

When you live in the right neighborhood and categorize your show alongside other similar shows, your content becomes more appealing and discoverable to people who want to find you amid the sea of other shows out there.?

So tell me Dear reader, how are you finding podcasts??

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Hello btw. I'm Erin Trafford.

I'm an award winning broadcaster, and I love the media business. I am currently the founder and CEO at Story Studio Network. Ask me about podcasts. Ask me about the future of news. Subscribe to my actual newsletter at?www.storystudionetwork.com/newsletter