Chapter 134: Reader, Wherefore Art Thou?

My students are about to begin working on their version of “The Memory Project,” the book my class produces each spring. This is cause for excitement. 

And anxiety. 

Excitement because I cannot wait to see how their stories come to life. Anxiety because come May they will set about the unpredictable, maddening, and sometimes – we hope – thrilling business of selling what they have produced.

The conceit of the book and the class is simple: each student chooses a photograph (they can pick whatever they like so long as it is not a photo of themselves) and sets about reporting the story of that frozen moment. It is often the case that, like a detective in a noir mystery, the story they set out to find becomes something else entirely. 

At the same time, they are also learning about audiences from my colleagues James Robinson of The New York Times and Millie Tran of Conde Nast. They learn how to identify potential readers – who, out there in the great amorphous world of audiences – is most likely to be so interested in their book that they will pay to read it? Yes, pay: the students split the royalties. 

In 2019, the class sold over 800 books in two weeks. That is a lot of books, especially if your name is not King, Steele, or Grisham. Last year’s class – which worked just as assiduously to connect with readers, sold 400. A very good number. But still, not what it had been four years earlier.

The two versions of the book were very much the same, as was the approach in thinking about readership. 

So what changed? 

Short answer: everything. Or more specifically, the ways that made it possible in 2019 to identify and connect with strangers and convince them to shell out $10.99 for a book written by a group of graduate students.

We’d been seeing evidence of this change at the Delacorte Review, where traffic for our stories – we publish original works of narrative nonfiction that often exceed 10,000 words; call us nuts but that’s what we do – has declined over the past five years, even as the time readers spent with our stories remains the same. It is much the same for many publishers, small and large, as more competitors enter the market – Serial Season One was transformative in terms of storytelling – and social sharing habits have been transformed.

So I was not surprised that the number of books sold last year was roughly half of what it had been in 2019. But we have a new issue of the Memory Project coming out in May and if this year’s class is anything like their predecessors, they will be a competitive bunch eager to surpass what was sold before.

Which means we need to understand what’s happened and what we can do about it.

I put the question to Millie, who before coming to Conde Nast, where she is vice president for content and growth, worked on audience and readership at the Times and at the Texas Tribune. 

I began by asking what's changed in terms of connecting with audiences over the last five years?

She replied: “The biggest change in the past five years has been with Google and Facebook, which together at their height, used to account for just under half of online traffic news sites, according to Reuter’s 2023 Digital News Report. It was ‘easy’ then to post, and hope you optimized accordingly so the various algorithms could help you find your audiences.” 

She continued. “In another report on predictions for this year, a majority of the media leaders surveyed were worried about a decline in referral traffic from social media sites. That worry comes as Facebook continues to deprioritize news, and X (formerly Twitter) continues its own turmoil. 

“While Google Search still remains an important audience channel for many publishers, social media is more diffuse now as audience behavior also shifts. There are many more players, and TikTok, Instagram and YouTube all seem to morph into each other in terms of videos they’re favoring, with TikTok going longer, while Instagram and YouTube go shorter. And the pattern of people migrating to more private spaces and messaging apps has only continued. My colleague Sarah Marshall outlines much of the changes in the last year here. 

“What hasn’t changed is that people still want the best, most relevant, interesting, useful journalism and stories delivered to them. Now we just have to work a bit harder — but then again, maybe it was too easy before.” 

How, I asked, have publishers adapted and what have they discovered that makes adapting hard?

“The short answer,” Millie replied, “is focusing on what we can control, and creating our own channels and platforms — but also not ignoring how audience behavior and consumption is changing. I wrote this in 2018 (five years ago!) and think it still rings true today: It was never about putting all your eggs into one platform basket, or chasing every new thing. It was and always will be about serving your readers and now viewers, listeners, users and continuing to do so by adapting journalism fundamentals to ever-evolving contexts and challenges. That means also adapting how you reach them, whether that’s through search, social, an email, app, or ideally directly, and in whatever the best format may be.”

Directly? I asked. What do you mean? Email? Newsletters?

Millie replied, “Email newsletters can be a direct way of reaching readers, depending on your goals. If your goals are primarily about pageviews on your website because your business is primarily an advertising-led model, you want your readers to click through to a link. However, if your goals are about habituation, subscriptions, or perhaps even affiliate revenue, getting that reader to visit your site is not the primary goal anymore because you can achieve that daily habit, or getting them to subscribe, or purchasing something straight from the newsletter. Most importantly, going back to control and ownership — even if Google is sort of an intermediary for email (or another email service), you, for the most part, own that audience and how and when you reach them. That’s powerful, and a privilege.”

“In this new audience/readership landscape,” I asked, “what do you see as the potential good that comes when the big social sharing engines decline?

“I’m hopeful that moving away from always having an intermediary between our journalism and the audiences we’re reaching will remind us that we do what we do for people on the other side of the story. That means, putting in the hard work to make those connections, understand people’s needs and create products that surprise and delight, much like this newsletter!”

Class starts this week. Fingers crossed.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.