Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

There are lots of good things that have happened to me because I became a podcaster and blogger, but there is bad news too. Today I’ll talk about the dark side. Next time I’ll pull out the brag sheet.

I began podcasting because I wanted to build an audience for my book before it came out. It didn’t really work out that way. My book sales haven’t been great.

I also found that although I may have gained a large following in the podcast space, they don’t transfer very much to the blogging space.

When I podcast I am posting an audio file in MP3 format. Google doesn’t know audio in MP3 format from nothing. So although I had hundreds of episodes out in cyberspace I had no Google presence. To get that I had to start posting my transcripts, which meant I became a blogger.

I mentioned in an earlier post that blogging is interactive and that Google values your text as well as the text of people who comment on your blog. Because I’d built up thousands of listeners very few of my audience were sitting at a keyboard when they heard my episodes and so my blog comments were almost nonexistent. Many were listening as they commuted or while walking the dog.

People used to one medium don’t move easily to another. This shows in the book sales but another example is that I found when I was featured at Apple’s iTunes store it brought in thousands of new listeners, yet when I got on the front page of the Life section of USA Today it only brought in a few hundred.

Unlike many authors I wasn’t educated in the arts or English. I’m an electrical engineer. As a consequence I really need my spell-check, copy editor and friendly grammarian. Putting fresh text out there every day without another pair of eyes on it first, with an invitation for readers to comment means I get a fair number of public corrections. I try to accept them with grace.

Podcasting has been around long enough now that most people know what it is, or think they do. But that doesn’t mean that a majority yet actually listen to podcasts regularly. Becoming a podcast listener takes more commitment is some ways. You don’t have to have an iPod but many people don’t know that. Listeners have to dedicate time to listen, they can’t just run their eye over an article to decide if it’s worth spending time on.

To watch YouTube or read a blog all you need is a web browser but there isn’t really an equivalent defacto portal for podcasting the way there is for video in YouTube. Apple’s iTunes is the defacto portal for podcasts but it isn’t accessible by web browser, you have to download and install iTunes software and that’s another barrier to my audience.

Although I’ve started to try to make money directly on the blog and podcast through advertising, this revenue stream is still only a trickle .

Perhaps the biggest warning I can give about blogging or podcasting at a professional level is that it takes a lot of time.

So to recap:

• popularity online does not equal book sales
• popularity in podcast form does not equal popularity in blog form
• podcasts of themselves don’t attract Google
• podcast listeners don’t sit at their computers while listening so their feedback is reduced
• technology and perception issues block audiences in podcasting
• revenue models for podcasts and blogs are immature

Next post I’ll take a cheerier tone.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.