A road less travelled

A first thing to consider. Successful businesses find their niche by solving a problem for someone else.

So here’s a problem. Publishing knows very little about readers. Publishing is very good at talking to retailers, to itself, and to the wider world, but because of the way the sector is constructed, has little opportunity to engage with a reading audience. Authors are increasingly required to leverage their social media profile to launch new books, and while the result of that effort is genuine engagement with people who are going to part with money and keep the whole edifice from collapsing, it’s also done at the expense of having data to back that engagement up.

Now here’s the second thing.

Stood on a busy road, as the last notes of the musical score fade in your ears, you glance down at your phone, just as the voice that guided you here told you to. Overlaid over the map of the city you’ve walked through is a village that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist, but you know you’ve just walked around its border, learned some of its secrets, and in a moment you might be tempted to purchase the book whose mysteries it has inducted you into. 

You’ve just walked Roads to Withered Hill, a companion to David Barnett’s novel Withered Hill, a folk-horror novel just published by Canelo. Roads is an immersive audio experience that brings Withered Hill to life, squarely and unapologetically promoting the book, but also offering something personal to each reader, that responds to where they are and remembers that they’re also a person, and not just a set of data points. It is also, as David Barnett described, like "couch to 5k", but scary and you get to "walk, not run". As the designer and writer of Roads to Withered Hill, I’ll take that. 

We thought there was a way to bring readers to the eponymous village that was specific to audio, and immersive media, and a reader’s presence within the world

Fundamentally though, we wanted to offer Canelo and Barnett a way to promote Withered Hill that hadn’t been seen before. We thought there was a way to bring readers to the eponymous village that was specific to audio, and immersive media, and a reader’s presence within the world, but that didn’t spoil the twist at the heart of the book. Roads has gone global, with readers in the US, Canada, Australia, South America and Europe as well as the UK, and each of them has a connection to the novel that is tied to their personal experience of walking the work. Withered Hill itself has gone to a second printing, which is definitely the result of David Barrett’s indefatigable promotion (but I think we helped a little too).

Each person’s progress through this immersive experience is also data though. We know how many users completed the whole walk, and found themselves in a fictional Lancashire village. We know the percentage of them who had bought the book already, and those who hadn’t, and of those, how many clicked on the "buy the book" link at the end of the walk. We know that casually browsing the work peaks during the working week, but real engagement increased tenfold at weekends. We can measure how many of our audience shared the link to the walk with a friend, and we also know, down to the precise GPS location, where they were when they walked Roads to Withered Hill.

None of those things are going to change the way an author writes their book, but they can tell us valuable things about readers, about how they respond to immersive narrative, and how they engage with an experience that sits alongside a novel. Moreover, as Roads to Withered Hill will remain a live experience for the next year at least, it provides a lens on reader engagement that extends far beyond the publication window for the novel itself.

Here’s the third thing.

None of that means anything unless we learn from it. As someone invested in making immersive narrative, I’m learning how Roads to Withered Hill worked in practice, and how to make the next thing I write and design better. The granular data we can gather points to how to engage at scale, how to nurture an emerging audience as they take each step with us, and how to reward their patience and their persistence. The work we make is not going to respond to every genre or any book, but there are, I believe, ways to think differently about how we bring readers to a book, and how to use digital media without sacrificing what makes the book, and its relationship with readers, the heart of the publishing project itself.

I’d like to think that’s helpful to a publisher, and to publishing. 

Tom Abba will be speaking about audio innovation at the FutureBook 2024 conference on 25th November. You can buy tickets here.