--- layout: post title: Upgrade Your Audiobook Promotion with Headliner author: Steven date: 2018-10-26 08:34:11 categories: - Musings tags: - audiobook - design - software - web featured_image: https://www.stevenjaycohen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wsi-imageoptim-bbc.gif --- We are trying out these new audiograms! Click below to hear a snippet from our latest ep ... http://t.co/UbEhZSIln8 pic.twitter.com/xa6qgi8XWM — Radiolab (@Radiolab) September 14, 2015 Audiograms are cool! By combining your audio with an image (like the book cover) in a compelling way, audiograms increase social media engagement. "What the heck is an audiogram?" I hear you say. Sorry for getting ahead of myself. Let me explain... Audiograms were first created by the WNYC Media Lab team in 2015-2016. They were looking to solve the problem of low discoverability involving audio clips on social media. After all, social media is generally designed to get you to respond to eye-catching visuals (something that even compelling audio lacks by default). So, to address this, they merged a compelling image with the audio and added an animated waveform (to indicate the audio). And, voila! The audiogram was born! Then, if you thought that the WNYC Media Lab team couldn't get any cooler, they open sourced the code and method for building audiograms! And then, the BBC decided to see what they could do to enhance and extend WNYC's work. They added text transcription and a few other cool things. "But Steven! You're a geek who likes figuring out geeky things! I see how this would be helpful in promoting audiobooks, but I'm no geek. So, how do the rest of use use audiograms?" I hear you say. This is where Headliner comes in. The people at SpareMin used the leveraged the open sourced code to build a simple web app that lets you build your own audiograms, simply, easily, and for free. On how/why this tool is free, Headliner owner SpareMin says, "We are always trying to improve the workflow for creating videos. By you using Headliner you are part of helping us collect data on the best ways to improve over time. For example, when you manually re-crop an image after we haven’t done a great job of it, we are able to improve auto-crop going forward. Your use of Headliner helps us build a better platform, which is another reason why we are keeping it free." So, now that you know how simple it is to create your own audiograms, you'll probably start using them everywhere you post online. Before you do, look through each platform and see if you can divine some best practices: Transcription? Yes or No? Color coordinate the sound wave with the cover? Bars or lines? etc... Come up with something fun? Tell me about it (and link to it) below! [coffee]