The #1 WORST Mistake New Writers Make (in Audio Drama)
Make the best impression possible, and retain more new listeners starting with one simple trick
As you begin writing your masterpiece, before you even complete your first page, chances are you’ve already committed your first cardinal sin, and it is quite possibly the worst mistake a writer could make, but also one of the easiest to fix.
I’ve spent the last 3 years studying and analyzing, not only my successes and failures but that of other writers, and content creators as well.
I’ve been experimenting endlessly, and along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have garnered roughly 2,500,000 downloads. Sometimes I’m wrong, and the audience has let me know quite passionately, and other times I’ve been right.
But it wasn’t until I released my second podcast, Tiny Terrors, that I got a clean slate to see the lessons I’d learned in action without the immediate momentum and leeway that over 100 episodes of ‘The Town Whispers’ had afforded me.
One of the most startling realizations when I started writing, producing, and releasing ‘The Town Whispers’ was the audience drop-off rate.
The number has fluctuated over the years, and as more folks move from ‘Tiny Terrors’ to ‘The Town Whispers’, or come back to give it another chance because of a friendly recommendation that number has gone up over time, but at one point roughly 60% of listeners never made it past the first episode.
I’d spent the last couple of years working in the video game industry as a designer working quite closely with the analytics teams, so I began looking at what I call “Friction Points”. These friction points are key! Friction points were the center of our focus when trying to increase user retention. The more barriers placed between a user, and the promised value proposition, the less likely you are to retain users.
The same can be applied to any form of entertainment, especially writing.
During The Town Whispers Episode 1, 11% of listeners dropped off at, in, or directly after the intro. I came between the listener and the story. I hadn’t provided value in the form of the entertainment they were seeking fast enough. That was a friction point.
But, not all my friction points were as self-explanatory.
Looking at the 2:00 to 5:00 mark there is an increased falling off of listeners, and then beyond the 5:00 mark, we continue to see established drop-off points of 5%-10%.
The result… Exactly 50% of users made it to the credits, let alone Chapter 2…
But why? I’d spent weeks theorizing what the perfect first episode would be. I wrote and rewrote it over and over again. How could all my hard work just be written off before anyone truly had a chance to figure out what the story was about?
Have you figured out the problem yet?
How could listeners just discard the podcast before they knew what the story was about?
I hadn’t told the listener anything. What I thought was the beginning of a story, was simply a scene - no context, no subtext, it was just an uncomfortable scene meant to draw the listener in through my sheer talent of narration, and writing alone.
I hadn’t respected the listener’s time.
Why had it taken me so long to figure out the issue?
I thought I had. I believed I was respecting the listener’s time, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t given the listener a single promise, or intention.
I hadn’t given them a Hook!
(We could also say I didn’t establish a unique voice, but let’s save the topic of voice for another day)
In reality, I didn’t fully understand what an effective listener hook was. I didn’t know where to put it, and I went about it as best I could because there was no one to advise me otherwise at the time!
A modern parallel would be the youtube introduction. It’s the opener to a conversation, it’s the first thing you see, it’s your impression of the style of the video, the contents of the video, and what the promise of that video is.
Let’s take a look at a Mr. Beast intro:
”We just landed in ANTARCTICA, and we’re going to SURVIVE the next 50 hours here. We’re LITERALLY at the BOTTOM of the globe at the COLDEST place on earth!”
Within 5 seconds I’ve been given a hook, I know what I’m watching, and what to expect, and I’ve been given a promise.
Mr. Beast has reduced every possible friction point within the opening seconds of his video. There is no intro. There is no “Welcome back”. There is no chance for the viewer to click away before they’ve been given the promise, pitch, and hook.
If Mr. Beast, and Youtube, seem like a far stretch for you, let’s bring it back home and take a look at the opening paragraph of ‘The Magnus Archives’, for a point of comparison.
”My name is Jonathan Sims. I work for the Magnus Institute, London, an organization dedicated to academic research into the esoteric and the paranormal. The head of the Institute, Mr. Elias Bouchard, has employed me to replace the previous Head Archivist, one Gertrude Robinson, who has recently passed away.”
In the first paragraph, the writer Jonny Sims establishes the driving voice (himself), tells the listeners what to expect (a podcast about an organization doing esoteric and paranormal research), and we have a hook when we close out the paragraph finding out that his predecessor has passed away.
Excluding ads and an intro, this paragraph is delivered within 25 seconds. The listener knows the character, place, sense of conflict, and a hook in as little time as possible, with as few friction points as possible. There’s barely a chance for the listener to fumble for the stop button before Jonny Sims has told you what the show is.
Not so dissimilar to Mr. Beast, is it?
I don’t want to get into every mistake I’ve made in my writing career, but let’s briefly compare the opening minute of my first episode to that of ‘The Magnus Archives.’
The Town Whispers always starts the same for me, the listeners listen to my intro script:
”The Town Whispers is a narrative horror podcast that will tell the many stories hidden behind the rain, the fog, and the trees of The Fort. Listener Discretion is advised”
Don’t be me! I’ve wasted 15-30 seconds of the listener’s time, and I haven’t gotten to the minute-long intro song yet!
I’ve told the listener what podcast they are listening to, but they already know what podcast it is. I’ve told them it’s a horror podcast, but they already know that it’s a horror podcast. I told them listener discretion is advised, but it’s a horror podcast… THEY. ALREADY. KNOW.
(Content or Trigger Warnings are great if you choose to use them, but the episode description exists for a reason)
If we were to progress through the entire transcript of ‘The Town Whispers Chapter 1’, we would see the same trend. I spend the next minute or two describing the setting, I go on to talk about spooky fog that looks like ghosts. It’s 3 minutes into the podcast and people are confused, impatient, and ready to move on to something else.
Stephen King spends months, or years thinking and ruminating on opening sentences for a reason. It’s an art to delivering that ephemeral voice that wiggles its way in and burrows deep into your brain, or to hook a reader, listener, or viewer, without banging them over the head as heavy-handedly as Mr. Beast does.
Here is the opening paragraph of the novel ‘It’ By Stephen King. Notice a similar trend? As a reader, you are immediately introduced to the hook, and King knows this as he’s stated in the past that he’ll work on an opening for months, sometimes years.
”The Terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years- if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell with a boat make from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
I’ve been obsessed with spotting, categorizing, analyzing, and theorizing on hooks for the past 2 years, and I’m forever frustrated with myself that it took me so long to identify this common writing mistake in my prose.
Have I mastered this art? NO.
What I can say though, is that it does work, even when you begin to employ these tactics without the deft hand of a New York Times Bestseller like King.
When I released ‘Tiny Terrors’, I decided I wanted to hook the reader. I wanted to introduce the unique voice of the audio drama immediately, and I wanted to try and stave off the massive drop-offs that I saw in my previous project.
I wrote and rewrote the beginning of ‘Tiny Terrors’ over and over, trying to employ what I had learned by reading the explicit advice of others, utilizing what I had summarized on my own, and trying my best, without putting it into such concrete words as this article, to introduce a killer opening hook.
Was I successful? Partially.
In the first episode of ‘The Town Whispers’ I lost 50% of listeners before the credits rolled, but with ‘Tiny Terrors’ 81.03% of listeners decided to give the entirety of the episode a chance before deciding if it was for them or not.
Better yet, the trend continued where less than 10% of listeners dropped from the start of the episode to the end when the credits rolled, giving ‘Tiny Terrors’ the best chance possible to become an audio drama that listeners felt was worth their time because I had identified and learned what it meant to respect the listeners time.
This looks like a success, but I could have done better. We could always do better. That’s both the fun and frustration of writing. No matter how many times you write, rewrite, edit, and revise, there’s always room for improvement.
I could have moved the intro song, further into the episode, and I could have introduced a more immediate, or a more relatable internal struggle. There are plenty of writers better than myself, who could do the job better, but I am improving.
Even while trying to articulate how I feel about this common mistake, and one I make more often than I feel I should, I’ve learned truths about my writing, and how I can improve in the future. I could be embarrassed by my lack of self-awareness, but instead, I’m excited to see what I manage to create in the future.
I’m excited to see what WE create in the future.
I run podcast sharing scary stories myself called Wilhelm Presents Frightening Tales. And retention has been a huge concern for me. I've got the production value - But something was missing. I'm going to take to heart this concept of the hook and see how it'll help season three. I think I'll even go back into my finished writing and see if I can't improve it. Thanks for sharing this.
But to be fair, I just finished watching the train wreck called Tar last night and it's up for multiple Oscars. No hook to be found there...