Is Audio Content better than the Written Word?

One of the great lessons for me from writing and publishing Book Rapper was the limit of the written word.

Book Rapper was designed as a series of documents you sat down and read. Whilst they were all derived from the one book, each page was concise and a unique chunk in itself. It wasn’t like a story that just flowed. I tend to think of this as being designed for the visual.

Along the way I had numerous requests to create an audio version of the same material. And to be honest I never really got my head around how to do this easily and effectively.

I realised I had a couple of options.

One was to read Book Rapper as it was written. Although, as I’ve said, this didn’t make sense as I think it would have been confusing for the listener.

Two, I could have just verbalised and spoke about the content more generally so it flowed more easily as a presentation and an audio version. Although, in my purist, perfectionist way of thinking this would have taken as long as writing the issue.

Three, ignore it altogether. Unfortunately I took this route and lost a few followers along the way.

There’s a couple of lessons here…

Firstly, not everyone wants to read stuff. This particularly applies if your audience is time poor. Reading means you have to sit still, in a chair and concentrate. Compare this to audio… you can listen whilst you drive, watch your son play soccer, run the treadmill at the gym… Bottom line, you can listen whilst you’re doing something else.

Secondly, the lesson from The Long Tail is to think about your audience niches. Some people prefer the written word, some prefer audio and some are happy with either or both. And, today the opportunity is to provide your content in multiple sizes and in multiple formats. Ideally, both audio and video and both a long and a short version.