Building An Audience

I’d like to introduce you to someone I’ve never met, never spoken to, communicated with only once. Josh Woodward. That’s him on the left. Josh writes dark, sensitive songs which I love. Listen to Josephine and I hope you’ll see why.

How did I come across Josh’s work? Well there’s a website called Garageband, where unpublished musicians post their work, which is then reviewed anonymously by reviewers. I was keeping my writing skills sharp a couple of years back, writing music reviews, and that’s when I first heard Josh.

I liked what I heard, and wanted to find out more. I checked his profile page. What I found there was an enormous catalog of material – 150 songs, 7 CDs. Today many of Josh’s songs are flying high at the top of the Garageband acoustic charts. And there’s something else. If you want to download any of the songs, you can. For free! Alternatively, Josh offers the physical CDs and charges a flat $4 for shipping costs, but leaves it up to his fans to decide what they want to pay – there’s a minimum charge of $2 to cover the material costs.

Is this a good business model? I don’t know. I’ll see if I can persuade Josh to tell us whether his music is supporting him, or whether he does something else to earn his daily bread.

But one thing’s for sure. He’s certainly built up a large fan-base. Josh is all over the web. As well as his website, he has a presence on MySpace (40,000 plays), ILike (8400 fans), Facebook (1300 fans), YouTube (top songs have over 10,000 plays). Not forgetting Twitter, where he engages one-on-one with fans.

All this without a publisher. Which has other advantages. Josh retains control over what he records, when he releases it, and the price he charges for it. So, when the Haiti earthquake struck, Josh recorded and released a song ‘Motionless Land’, the same day, inviting listeners to send donations to Doctors Without Frontiers. OK, as he says himself, it was a rough cut, but on this occasion he wanted to respond immediately.

So what can we writers learn from this web pioneer? Well, most obviously, that it’s possible to build a career and a fan-base without an agent and a publisher (or in his case a manager and a record-label). Provided there is:

Commitment: The fan base didn’t grow overnight – I know that Josh has been working on this since at least 2005.

Continuity: Josh has been releasing new songs every few weeks, so that his fans never forget who he is. Now I’m planning to publish The Lebanese Troubles fairly soon, but I’m not likely to finish another novel for another year or so. So if my aim, like Josh’s, is to steadily build my audience and help readers to remember me, then why not publish a few short stories as well … and release them as he has, on the web? Perhaps in audio format too, for the IPod. I wonder if there’s a market?

Control: At this stage in my career I, like Josh, want to retain control of the entire publishing and pricing process. I want to be able to write a story and get it to my audience next week, not wait six months for it to appear. I want to be sure that pricing is set to encourage the maximum number of purchases. (Incidentally there’s a good deal of evidence to show that ebook sales are not necessarily stronger when the price is set very low – but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Coverage: Readers need to be able to find our work easily and see our names regularly. We need to be on all the main social networking sites, and be clear about what we are trying to achieve on each one (- again a topic for another post).

Communication: I’m incredibly impressed that with all these fans, Josh still manages to communicate with them personally. People who talk to him will feel they have a stake in his success. Twitter is a good choice as a communication channel. As the fan network grows, it keeps messages short – or we could find this overwhelming.

Creative Commons Licensing: We need to learn when it’s best to allow readers to copy, download and share our work. In publishing, there’s huge discussion at present about DRM – Digital Rights Management. Essentially this is all about publishers defending their traditional territory – ensuring that work cannot be copied and current pricing-levels are maintained. In the process of building my market, I want to be DRM-free.

Put it like this. If Josh Woodward hadn’t made his work shareable, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post – and he may not have been able to pick up a few more fans today.