It’s a fantastic day for audio fiction podcasts in Apple Podcasts (still far and away the most important discovery and listening platform for these shows).

See the new category listing here: ApplePodcasts.com/Fiction

For many years, a common complaint amongst fiction podcasts — spanning the range from full fledge radio drama/audio drama to narrative-based, single or multi-voiced productions — was that there wasn’t a sufficient ‘home’ for these shows.

Under the previous category structure in Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes), most shows awkwardly listed themselves under “Performing Arts” or perhaps “TV/Film” — odd, because most shows in these categories were actually shows ABOUT these subjects (e.g. Game of Thrones recap podcasts) vs. original content in and of themselves.

There is a long and ongoing conversation about the importance of category labels vis-a-vis discoverability, but suffice to stay it’s still important. Many people use Apple Podcasts to find new shows — especially since it became a standalone  app in 2012 — and so the choices that Apple makes are important. Further, since Apple still drives ~80% of podcast traffic, their choices set the tone for how other indexes work, and hopefully we’ll see other podcast listing services adopt a dedicated category for fiction podcasts soon.

So What Does This Mean for Me as a Producer of Audio Fiction?

Nearly all of the major podcasting services have introduced compatibility for the new categories [see: Apple’s take on podcast hosts], and it’s pretty intuitive on how to change the category of your show… which you should do immediately.

I personally use Spreaker, you’ll find this option under the ‘RSS Customization’ section. Just look for the new ‘Fiction’ category, and use one of the sub-categories — Drama, Comedy, or Science-Fiction — if relevant for your show:

These new categories have been spotted in the wild as of early August, 2019, so don’t delay!

Some other Metadata wisdom, while we’re at it

This new update is a pretty quick ‘win’ for categorizing your show properly and making sure it is found (and competing for chart placement) in the correct location.

A few general best practices around marketing your show remain true:

• Cover art, cover art, cover art!!! — While you’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, we know people do, and people treat podcasts the same way. Imagine someone scrolling through top 100 charts and quickly getting of feel of ‘is this show right for me’ based on your podcast art. Is it legible when rendered on a iPhone’s screen? Does it stand up to getting maximized when someone drills down to see the show’s art blown up in full res on an iPad Pro? If the experience for the user is poor, it’s hurting your ability to get discovered and attract new listeners.
  • Clear, clean art – character art can be gorgeous but if it’s too ‘noisy’ it’ll be hard to see on small screens
  • High res!!! – Artwork should be 3000px x 3000px — it’s the only chance to be featured by Apple Podcasts
• Consistent naming of episodes — It’s super important that you use some of the newer RSS organization features such as Seasons, and labeling of content as Bonus content, Promos, etc. for optimal user experience in Apple Podcasts and other podcast readers. While Apple rolled back strict rules around including episode # in podcast episodes, it’s still ideal to use the iTunes title field to separate Season # and Episode # from the name of your episode Title, for ideal presentation in iTunes. More on this at Podnews. Note: Unlike the new categories, podcast hosts seem to be a little less savvy at supporting this metadata feature. So choose podcast hosts wisely!
• Build, and use, your network — The top way listeners discover new podcasts is through word of mouth… Which, by “mouth” in the 21st century we mean — sometimes literally telling other people with recommendations, using social media, meeting each other at podcast conventions to talk about favorite shows, and sharing shows on other shows (usually in the indie space done by trading 30-60sec promos vs. actually exchanging payment). As a podcast creator, developing a network of your fanbase, as well as other producers in the space, is super-critical to getting the word out about what you’re doing. If you’re wondering where to start, listen to the showcase anthology Radio Drama Revival (which I used to host, and currently am Executive Producer) to learn about the full breadth of the audio drama community.
• Take advantage of Apple Podcast’s marketing guidelines – Apple has provided a great resource for using the Podcasts brand to promote your show, as well as other promotion tips, at: https://www.apple.com/itunes/marketing-on-podcasts/identity-guidelines.html

UPDATED for Google’s latest announcements in August, 2019

The job that’s actually paid the bills while I’ve produced audio drama podcasts for the last 10+ years has been in digital marketing, most specifically in the field of organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Or in other words, learning & abiding by (or bending) & developing strategy around the whims of Google.

It’s thanks to SEO that I was able to get my sites, finalrune.com and radiodramarevival.com to rank in Google for terms like “Radio Drama” and “Audio Drama” — rankings that as a result got me noticed by the Wall Street Journal back in 2010 and launched the audio production enterprise that FinalRune has grown into today.

Yet, as much as I have spent far more of my life online than I care to admit, I never felt like I’ve been as innately given/driven to built traffic for my shows on social media, which has been a far more important medium for the growth in podcasts. Look at how breakout hits like Welcome to Nightvale and Limetown used Tumblr and Twitter to build massive audiences — there is an inherent exponential impact in social media that doesn’t really exist in the world of SEO. In terms of discovery, only so many people are going to be Googling ‘post apocalyptic podcast’ or ‘horror audio stories.’

Which is all a way to lay context around my perspective on Google’s most recent foray into podcast optimization: the integration of podcast posts and feeds within Google results… including playback features and category browsing.

WAIT?! Podcasts are in Google?!

In case this is news to you… Check out nice summaries by Nieman Lab and The Verge  (Fyi while this incaranation is quite new, Google has had XML guidelines for podcasts for a number of years)

This new feature to Google looks something like this, when seen in the wild:

UPDATE: 8/9/2019

This was originally posted in May. Check out how things have changed in just three months. (And thanks The Verge and Search Engine Land for staying hot on this topic; oh and see Google’s official announcement as well). Now instead of pointing people to Apple Podcasts landing pages, these point people to Google’s Podcast interface. Let the podcast platform wars start in earnest!!

So what does this mean for podcast creators?

Nick Quah’s suggestion is that “the introduction of this feature also yields other potential complexities, mostly associated with the everyday doldrums of SEO management. In particular, this is probably going to change how people think about naming their shows, as they now operate within a universe that contains a powerful search engine with robust rules.”

However, I’m pretty confident that ‘old school’ SEO rules are not going to apply to Podcasts, and that you will be a fool to rename your podcast / change the way you market your show purely to appeal to Google (UNLESS you are in a really niche podcast space).

I make this claim because Google, overall, is moving beyond keywords and towards machine-learning and user signals (‘stickiness’) to rank web content, and surely ‘stickiness’ is nowhere more important, than in the realm of podcasts!

What the heck is machine learning and stickiness and what does it have to do with search?

10’ish years ago when I started in SEO, ranking in search engines had two primary components, 1) the actual words that appeared on your site (and in an age where tons of websites were made in Flash, you had a huge leg up just putting your content out as words on a page), and 2) the links outside of your site that linked to you, which Google saw as a proxy for your popularity/influence, in the same way that academic papers referencing other papers are seen as a vote of confidence for that paper.

Sooo much has changed since then, particularly around Google providing results based on context clues (e.g. if you Google ‘pizza’ from a mobile phone at 9pm at night it’ll show you a different result than from a desktop computer at 3pm in the afternoon) — but perhaps most powerfully is how the explosion of mobile devices and voice search changed the way people use search.

Unbelievably, over 15% of the phrases input into Google on a daily basis are completely original, the first time the search engine has ever heard them. Voice search encourages people to use natural language to search vs. the kinds of simple phrases used in the past. In other words, a modern day web searcher is more likely to search “what kind of weird podcasts are out there other than Welcome to Nightvale?” rather than “weird fiction podcasts.”

While the old-school SEO factors (on-page content optimization and off-site ranking signals like links and brand mentions) are still very (and perhaps the most) important, Google’s long-term strategy involves machine-learning, specifically, their “RankBrain” platform.

Essentially, RankBrain is an evolution of Google’s old-school model, where, rather than results being static, the machine does it best guess as to what your query might be, and then gauges the user’s response to that query to help inform how good a job it did. So, if you Google one of these weird phrases, visit a site, and then immediately ‘bounce’ back to the search results page, Google will interpret that as a failure (you didn’t find what you want and so you reverted back to the search results page) and be less likely to show that result in the future.

The corollary will also be true… If the result shown has a positive signal (the user ‘sticks’ to it) then Google will be more likely to show this result in the future.

8/9/2019 update: My theory seems to have some credibility to it, The Verge quotes Google reps as saying: “Google will take certain signals into account when determining what shows to surface first, like how many people listen to a show or whether the show comes from a publisher that has “a lot of authority.””

Also, recently unveiled is that Google is transcribing podcasts on their own using machines, which will affect indexability.

(For more on RankBrain, check out Moz and Search Engine Journal RankBrain coverage)

So how does this affect how I should be promoting my podcast?!?!?!

1 – Do Not Try to Game Google with Stupid Spammy Crap in your Title/Metadata

If you look at how this feature looks in the wild today, it’s clear that whatever ranking factors Google uses, they are not primarily derived from the wording that appears in Podcast titles or metadata.

Take, for instance “Fiction podcasts”.

Now, let’s start with a screenshot from when I first did this, in May of 2019:

Compare that with the same search result from August 2019:

The results have actually improved significantly in the last three months — namely that “Serial” is no longer classified as a “Fiction” show.

Importantly, none of the shows listed in the “Fiction” pack actually use the words “Fiction” in their title or metadata. It would be stupid, actually, to have a fiction show that says, “A Fictional Fiction Story About Aliens and Whatnot” — you should definitely have relevant, useful descriptor words in your podcast, but focus on what will make it appealing to LISTENERS not to the Google machine (more on that in a moment).

There are relevant use cases, like, “A podcast of short fiction from emerging writers” — but don’t just add a bunch of words that you think will make you appear higher in search, just to try and game the system. In fact, since Google is going to rely on their webspam team (again, according to The Verge), you will almost definitely get caught in the earliest rounds of spam penalties (whenever they get introduced) for podcasts if you take on this callous strategy.

HOWEVER!! If you are making a podcast on a really specific topic, it probably will be to your favor to describe very particularly your show and how it fits the niche (ASMR podcast on hand-forging iron tools out of scrap parts found around the house) so that the very specific audience you are appropriate for, finds you.

2 – Use Apple’s New Categorization Correctly

#ShockingNotShocking ??

It looks like Google is using Apple’s recently introduced category overhaul for their own indexing (if you want to be a real podcast SEO nerd, you could go through ALL of the new categories that Apple introduced and see if this is consistent throughout… tbh I only really care about fiction so that’ll be my focus).

Google is now grouping shows into their own mini-lists and allows you to browse shows using the category links at the top of the page like they are “Breadcrumbs.”

I think this new feature is actually pretty cooll. Each show kinda has their own mini search result that’s browseable by tabbing through the cover art:

 

All the shows that appear above are pretty popular, so they likely meet the definition Google gave to The Verge of “a publisher with a lot of authority” but — hey, even those of us with NO authority can do this (this is from the RSS feed source of Black Tapes podcast):

So in case getting organized correctly in Apple Podcasts wasn’t important enough, this categorization also very likely affects your ability to appear in Google results. If you haven’t adopted the new standard yet, you better get on that!

3 – Get on the Lists / Make Friends

This next part is where it gets tougher, since this is where real PR and marketing work enter into it. Going back to the ‘balance’ of Search Results, beyond the top index, you see a ton of Lists for podcasts appear in the search results.

Google LOVES lists. Structured data is how Google figures out a huge number of its add-on features (everything from movie listings to reviews to airline travel to movie tickets). While you better believe Google’s own Podcast platform and everything you can put into it is super-important, I also think the ‘off-site’ factors such as the context in which your podcast is talked about on other podcasts, will be super important in terms of not just placing your podcast in the correct ‘neighborhood,’ but also in ranking it.

What you really need to be focusing on is creating a show of the caliber that gets you listed. And probably, as much or more importantly even than that, is networking with the people who are influencers in the space such that you are on their radar to ever get listed in the first place.

In the face of increasingly complex technical rules — which tend to allow the bigger networks, which can staff technical people to figure out these technical requirements — the best chance indie podcasters have to stay relevant is to independently build their own support networks where they can pool resources and ‘signal boost’ each other’s work. Already there are Discords, Facebook Communities, Slacks, etc. for all sorts of producer / fan communities within the podcasting space. These communities are critically important to making sure the indies remain relevant in an increasingly monetized podcasting environment.

4 – Podcast Art is Important

Assuming we follow the notion that clickthrough and engagement is also an important ranking factor, it then follows: having appealing episode art which people click on is also critically important. Notice how — long before you ever hear any of these shows, you see the art!

Apple has been giving us advice all along that Artwork is hugely important to success in podcasting (you are optimizing for small screens and trying to suggest enough about what the show is about such that someone scrubbing through listings on their phone can self-identify if the show is for them) — and Google agrees!

5 – You Can/Should/Must Create Your Own Website

This is a general rule for anyone doing anything serious online about anything. While it’s really encouraging to try and build a following on social media, or using the DIY website builder w/ Libsyn or Podbean, etc. ultimately I am a much bigger fan of people ‘owning’ their own digital real estate on their own websites. It’s harder, and it can actually be harder to rank this way (as Google may not immediately see your site as an ‘authority’) but for long-term viability of your effort, having your own home is better than ‘renting’ on social media platforms.

However, there is another super-important part of this:

Google tells us they are going to transcribe podcasts (already have done about 2,000,000 episodes) — well what if the machines doing this suck? What if they have trouble following dialogue in a fiction show that has high levels of dynamic range, all sorts of accents, non-English (or made-up) lines, rich sound design, etc? The likely result is a bunch of mush as far as a transcription goes.

I’m not 100% sure how smart Google is going to be about seeing your own webpage as the ‘canonical’ copy of a podcast, but I *Suspect* this is going to be possible, meaning you will have access to supplement your show’s context with more than the rather limited amount of info that can get stuffed in an individual episode’s RSS metadata description field.

Many/most big shows already do this, so they can have a particular fan experience across device platforms. Some of the cool stuff you might want to put on your own website and posts that relate to specific podcast episodes:

• Your own transcripts or scripts for shows (to supplement/enhance Google’s likely-to-be-crummy machine interpretations)
• More context around what type of show it is (this may be a more appropriate place to talk about how your show is a genre-bending sci-fi mashup of CHEERS and MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS).
• Abilities to cultivate your own audience, e.g. newsletter or Patreon signup, comprehensive episode archives, etc.

6 – Make a damn good show

Yes, all this marketing stuff is important and you really have to do it in order to get noticed, especially as podcasting breaks over ~1,000,000 published shows and the bigger networks are starting to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

HOWEVER — none of the SEO in the world is going to help a show that sucks come out from the backwaters of obscurity. You need to create audio content people actually want to listen to. Your success doing this will increasingly get measured by platforms as real-time data gets sent back to the host platform, so I suspect everyone including Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. will count (to varying degrees) the ‘listen through’ rates to shows as a ranking factor… if not already, then certainly in the future.

What I Don’t Love About All This

Now, I have to eat a lot of my words from when this was originally published in May 2019, since the current product (August 2019) provides a FAR better user experience.

Let’s compare. Say, for example, I am a huge fan of Seth Godin and I want to look up podcasts that he has been a guest on. I found this result (from May) tremendously uninspiring:

Things have gotten MUCH better. You’ll now actually see which podcasts had Seth Godin on as a guest. Who knows exactly how the podcasts rank (how would you know which are the ‘best’ interviews he’s given?) but I think this result does a far better job at giving me the results I was looking for:

However, I’m still concerned about how this technology stands to further the consolidation of power into the hands of the networks, and the people who have the resources to influence the influencers, commission amazing Art, and use their entrenched network power to amplify their own voices.

New creators are only further put to the fringe if Google is dominating feeds with all of the shows that are already popular. And imagine! It’s hard enough to learn how to write, cast, record, edit, sound design, score, and package up material… Now you need to have a PR background, SEO skillz, AND social media management to have a hope of getting noticed? Eek!

Luckily, there are a growing number of indie creator communities who can counteract this to some amount… “Signal boosting” each other’s work, talking it up on both social networks and blogs, and — increasingly!! — actually getting positions of influence such that indies can continue to have a voice in the podcasting mainstream.

My parting words to the audio fiction community: there is no zero sum game in promoting each other’s work. Love defies the 1st law of thermodynamics — more of it can be created, and it doesn’t cost anything, it only creates more, and more of it. And damn, does this world need more!

Back in 2007 I said, “I think an “all you can eat” subscription based radio drama/audio theater store is apt to be more successful than anything else.”

It’s now 2014 and I think the same thing, though sadly that killer site has not yet come to be. What? We have iPhones, grumpy cat, angry birds, and $19 billion messaging apps, but audio drama still hasn’t made it from the transition from obscurity to mainstream?

Sigh. It frustrates me, too.

What’s also frustrating, it that it is really, really hard to find great new material.  When you find a sizzling new radio play, it floors me (winner of this contest recently is the Dublin-based dark comedies Any Other Dublin).  It reminds me of why I’m in this, what makes audio drama so good.

Part of this is because there just honestly isn’t that much great stuff being produced.  For every The Truth (and truly, there is only one), there are dozens of hackneyed, tired, stock-FX’ed fan fic shows recorded in someone’s basement while their roommate snores in the next room.  The internet has made it so that this material gets out there and mixed in with the great stuff.  So when someone goes into the iTunes store and starts surfing for audio drama… well, God help them.

I say this as someone who loves podcasting.  Podcasting is what has made FinalRune what it is and without it I certainly wouldn’t have made it into the Wall Street Journal or even my local daily paper.  But if audio drama has a future, it needs to get past podcasting.  Podcasting may be able to support a few extraordinary titles that break away from the norm – the We’re Alive‘s and the Nightvale‘s – but most shows aren’t going to get that success.  Many shows are excellent one offs or mini-series, well worth a listen, but not with the staying power to attain a cult following.  The people who make those kinds of shows are producers first and foremost, and their lack of a marketing machine to back them up stands in the way of getting those titles to the average listener.  The fact that the fan-fic creators tend to be more versed in the internet than the talented producers is particularly unjust.

So, what to do? Audible.com is so vast that it beggars description – it’s almost impossible to distinguish audio drama titles from the crowd, and even if you do purchase through Audible the royalties paid out to the producer are so miniscule that they’ll never be able to fund new productions with it.  And don’t even get me started on CD sales.  My thoughts on pay per download are known.  Crowdfunding is promising and several producers (myself included) have used it to good effect.  But crowdfunding alone can’t run an industry.

This brings me back to the App.  Audio drama needs a store.

Since the Lodestone Catalog closed in 2007, there has been no purpose-made catalog for purchasing audio drama productions.  There is no front-door, no easy portal to the insane wondrous mind-bending joy of the medium.  If someone asks a friend, “Hey, I liked this, how do I get more of it?” the best they can do is send their friend down the rabbit hole of the iTunes store search feed.

Some people enjoy panning the great wide ‘net in a desperate hope for gold, but most people have 100,000 other things to get to and wading through crummy RSS feeds is not on their to-do list.  People do not give bad audio second chances.  Which is why we need curated content – the good stuff – delivered by an incredible simple to use and elegant mobile App.  Think Pandora for audio drama.

I have started down this foray myself, with fits and starts (and you can see the results thus far on my sister site, Radio Drama Revival).

Actually, this is not Pandora we’re talking about.  We’re talking about Netflix.

We’re talking about producing shows with mainstream appeal – grabbing B-list TV properties, writers of some renown, and other media properties that have a native audience.  We’re talking about funding these with reasonable budgets – say $150,000 – $250,000 for a 4-5 hr mini-series – which is enough to hire proper talent but not so expensive that you can’t recoup your costs once you get steady revenue going.  By picking works that have potential audiences in the millions, you only need a small percentage (I find 3-5% convert on my ‘freemium’ model on this website) to pay to subsidize the rest.  Since it’s all built to scale on the internet, you just need to establish a modest subscriber base and you have a tidily profitable business.  Equally important is ensuring that royalties for the model are paid out equitably to the producers, so that the people creating the work will want to promote this site first as the best way to access their material, rather than trying to funnel everyone to their own personal production website.

Are people going to listen?  I think they will.  Listening to a dramatized story certainly isn’t any weirder than Twitter, and despite all of the other distractions out there, you still aren’t allowed to watch TV while driving a car.  So long as there are commutes, audio drama has a future.  Give them something more engaging that the talk, music, and spiffy sound effected urban chic shows and give them story.  Reel people in with something familiar, and they will want more.

That is why the discovery platform is so important – the experience needs to consist both the listening of the familiar thing – the awesome killer addictive special edition of a TV series you wish they had made more episodes of – as well as a way to get you digging deeper into lesser known material, which offers hundreds of happy hours of listening ahead of you.  The App should learn your tastes, be flexible for your listening habits, and make it easy to get hooked (First one’s free, folks…).

Audiobooks are currently a multi-billion dollar industry.  Audible is struggling to scale quickly enough to create audio versions of all the books they want out there.  So why is audio drama relegated to one dark corner of internet obscurity?  To me, it’s lack of vision.  For audiobook publishers, the cost to hire a bunch of actors and sound designers, when they’re use to (barely) paying a single narrator, seems obscene.  To TV and film people?  I don’t know, maybe they haven’t thought of it.  We could create killer audio drama in the pocket change they lost on the set of Transformers 3.

Within audio dramatists, you find great artists, but not great businesspeople.  None of us has access to the capital to create a really incredible production – top notch writers, top notch actors, top notch studio.  Skills?  Yes.  Drive? You bet.  Oh, of course there’s Dirk Maggs, with Neverwhere, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Christopher Freakin’ Lee and promoted by Neil Gaiman himself.  And what happens?  The BBC runs it for a week and then buries it forever in obscurity.  As of this writing, there is nowhere legal to purchase the drama (not quite true, apparently it’s available on Audible – thanks EC Bond).

And you wonder why the medium is obscure.  Silicon investors with big oodles of cash: Are you listening? Throw us your pennies and we’ll make you a kingdom.