Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices. This is the last newsletter now until January, when we’ll be back with a new series of guests and building up to our Publisher Summits and Awards in June. Have a lovely Christmas!

Some end-of-season reflections, learnings, and a quick question

Here’s how the first few months of our pivot from general media coverage to a more specialised publisher product focus has gone.

Over the summer, we announced that we were moving from a daily to a weekly newsletter, and going deeper with what we cover rather than trying to keep up with everything going on. All three of us were pretty burned out, and needed to find a better balance between other freelance work, caring responsibilities, and actually living life.

TLDR: It’s gone pretty well. Dropping the daily newsletter was a huge wrench but has given us all more space to do better interviews, write-ups and not be worrying about a newsletter test at 10pm. But it’s not all sunshine and roses.

If the inner workings of an indie business interest you, read on! If not, I’d like to take this moment to thank you for joining us, whether you’ve found us recently or have followed since our launch 8 years ago.

The newsletter

First up, the good stuff. Unsurprisingly, going from a daily news round-up to a weekly deep dive has proved successful, with a clear inflection point from September onwards in our stats.

I suspect this is partly because a weekly newsletter is a very different commitment level to a daily one, but also because we’re adding value and depth with feature-length pieces, rather than a round-up of industry news. Not that there isn’t value in daily news, but we were competing with publishers who had far more resources and exclusive stories.

Open rates - for what they’re worth - have increased and hover at around 48-52%. This is partly driven by a big clearout of inactive subscribers at the end of August. But again, it’s easy to fall behind on opening a daily newsletter. Weekly or twice-weekly seems to be the right cadence for you and us.

A fun note for newsletter nerds: Putting that week’s lead author as the send name has definitely given open rates a boost.

The podcast

This is where things get interesting. With more people discovering our work and signing up to the newsletter, my natural assumption was that our podcast audience would grow. Instead, we’ve actually seen a decline.

[Some context to the above chart: We published a big exclusive interview with The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson in April, which has skewed numbers, and didn’t publish between May and September.]

Listener numbers are steady across the season, but there is a notable drop of 10-15% on previous seasons. I have a couple of theories about why:

1) The newsletter change: Without the daily newsletter, there’s not a regular reminder that we have a podcast. Our current format also doesn’t push the fact the interview is based on a podcast - it’s mentioned but not the sole focus.

2) The format change: Our previous podcasts were in two parts; a news round-up followed by an interview. Anecdotally, we knew people enjoyed hearing Chris, Peter and I chat about the week’s news, and we never really knew how far through people were listening.

Now, each episode is a deep dive with a guest into a particular publisher product or strategy. I suspect if you work in newsletters, you aren’t going to be interested in listening to someone talk about apps, or podcasts. Without the news round-up, listeners are being pickier about which guests are interesting to them.

3) We took too long a break: Habit is key with weekly podcasts, and taking April-September off publishing may well have completely broken that habit for some.

None of these things are too concerning at the moment. The new format gives the podcasts a much longer shelf life, so my bet is that they’ll have a much stronger long tail than the previous format.

But what we are looking at doing is bringing the three of us back into the mix more regularly, whether that be a monthly news round-up or more specials around topics that get us talking.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Did you used to listen and now don’t? Do you still listen? Just hit ‘Reply’ and even if you have a line or two’s feedback, insight is really helpful.

And if you didn’t know we had a podcast? Well…

Events

Following a number of requests after the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summits to keep interactions and learnings going, we launched a series of online autumn Publisher Masterclasses. Some learnings from these:

• Charging adds value - We have a £49.99 ticket price on for attendees, and pay all our speakers. This means people actually show up and speakers take the time to put together a solid class.

• There’s a balance between presentation and Q&A - Attendees have said they prefer a heavier presentation element rather than interview style, but the opportunity to ask questions throughout is really helpful.

• VOD is harder to sell - We’re charging for the on-demand classes too, but haven’t quite cracked marketing them. It can be done apparently! The current plan is to get series of newsletter and podcast-themed classes and offer them as a bundle.

Our Pod in a Pub end of year meetup and live podcast was a pretty last-minute decision, but was great fun, and it was amazing to record with the energy of a live audience. We’d love to do more of those but there are always logistical and time costs involved that need to be considered. Watch this space!

Finally, we announced that we’re bringing the Publisher Podcast Summit & Awards and the Publisher Newsletter Summit & Awards back to London in June next year. For the first time, we’re also having the Publisher App Summit and Publisher Print Summit alongside them!

Two Award ceremonies, four Summit streams…yes it’ll be a crazy two days. But crucially, we’re really excited about pulling together an agenda for all these topics.

If you’ve got a print, podcast, newsletter or app case study you’d love to share, there’s an interest/speaker form here.

Entries for the Publisher Podcast Awards will open in January, and Newsletter Awards in February.

Finally…

A huge thanks for being here, whether you’ve just signed up or have been in it for the long haul. We’re taking a break now, but will be back in January with some more amazing guests.

Esther, Chris and Peter

This season’s podcasts and features: