Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 2 Volume 8 | Page 37

W ORDS - TO - BE -R EAD ARE L OSING
G ROUND TO W ORDS - TO - BE -H EARD
A NEW STAGE OF DIGITAL CONTENT EVOLUTION
M IKE S HATZKIN
F OUNDER AND CEO OF I DEA L OGICAL COMPANY
W
ords-to-be-read must now
become a content category,
along with still images, vid-
eo, and audio. Audio includes
“words-to-be-heard”. We are in what
must be the early stages of a reordering of
primacy among these varieties of “content
for delivery and consumption”, which is
distinguished from “content for interac-
tion”, or the world of “gamified content”
along with who-knows-what-else.
In a post three months ago, I observed
that I had been fortunate enough to have
been taught to type when I was a little
kid, so producing written words was rela-
tively fast and easy for me. That led to
great “experience” with the practice of
narrative word creation at a young age, a
great competitive advantage in school and
the workplace (quite aside from enabling
the writing of several published books).
That piece also made the point that
words-to-be-read were, until some very
recent moment, the cheapest and easiest
form of content to deliver and distribute.
Still pictures required film and pro-
cessing. Audio and video required con-
trolled (and often expensive) circum-
stances for recording and a variety of
skills to deliver professional content. And
S UMMER 2018
beyond that, delivery by cassettes and
CDs was expensive and also failed to
reach large numbers of the potentially
interested people.
We get regular reminders that since
the combination of multi-function smart
phones and ubiquitous wifi connections,
this is no longer the case. It is very much
simpler and even cheaper to capture and
distribute a still photo or a chunk of video
or audio than it is to deliver “words-to-be-
read”.
What really rang a large bell for me
was the recent New York Times article
about the rise of audio, which focused on
big-earning writers whose fortunes and
reputations had been earned through
“words-to-be-read” (in what we can now
see was really a different content era), but
who were now switching to audio. One
such author, John Scalzi, was moved to
reconsider his publishing strategy when a
recent book sold 22,500 hardcovers,
24,000 ebooks, and 41,000 audiobooks.
Author Mel Robbins responded to her
self-help book “The 5 Second Rule” selling
four times as many audios as print by
making her next creation an audio origi-
nal.
P AGE 32
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE