Stories Mean Business - Nick Warren

Nick talks about the BIG insight he had after episode 1... and the MISTAKE that almost all podcasts seem to make.

Then reveals his daughter’s GCSE results. 

Also... What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?

Transcript

So, hey everyone, this is Nick, episode two of the storyhacker.tv podcast. And wow. Yesterday I realized that I've made this crazy

dumb mistake and it hit me I suppose in the afternoon because of course yesterday, if you listen to that couple of minutes, you'll know that it was my daughter's GCSE results day. And I said, ah, we're gonna know it in and hour and ten minutes... And what didn't I say? I didn't say, I'll tell you tomorrow what she got did I, and that is crazy. I mean I write stories for living, I write thrillers, amongst other things I do. And one of the things we do in thrillers particularly, but any kind of stories is we want to know what happens next and we want to give people a reason to turn the page or start the next chapter or whatever.

00:01

00:50 You know, the emails that I get that I love the most are the ones where people will say, "Oh, I couldn't go to sleep. I was up until

three o'clock in the morning because I had to finish the book." And it occurred to me yesterday afternoon that this is, this is a massive opportunity that almost - I mean I listene to a lot of podcasts, but almost none of them talk at the end of the episode about what's going to happen in the next one. And if you think about it, that is a massive, massive missed opportunity.

01:24 One of the the guys online, I really, really love his work. He's Andre Chaperon and he has a course about creating soap opera

sequences in emails. And you might have heard of that, but effectively the theory is ithat soap operas are continuing stories and are opening up gaps all the time.

01:56 Yesterday we talked about gaps. Didn't we? A little bit and we'll get more into that into future episodes. But effectively, one of the ways that we grab attention and hold it is by opening up a

knowledge gap. So that the reader or the listener or the watcher or whatever, want to know what happens next. And Andre chaperon in his brilliant course talks about how he uses this in emails. In one email, he'll close off a gap, he'll answer a question, but it'll always open up something else to keep interest. And so yesterday what I should've done at the end of the podcast, the first one is say, you know, listen to tomorrow is I'll tell you what Abbey got. And I think that's really interesting and it's the first insight. I mean, obviously you've gathered tha, I'm creating these things to find my voice and looking to find the way this side of my business is going to develop.