A New Publishing Startup Focuses on Storytelling through Voice Assistants

Headcanon wants to help publishers and authors create and monetize interactive voice books for digital assistants like Alexa

Audio, audio, audio—that’s the drumbeat today at so many conferences, not just in the publishing industry. But for traditional book publishers, there’s extra reason to focus on audio: the continued growth of digital audiobook sales has been making up for continued declines in ebook sales. Independent authors also have reason to be optimistic, as more opportunities may be in store for those not exclusive to Audible, as we reported back in October.

At Digital Book World, one of the more fascinating sessions we attended featured Jon Myers, who runs an audio storytelling platform called Earplay. He works with publishers and media companies to produce entertainment for voice-enabled media and devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa. According to him, this technology is an opportunity for authors to tell stories in a new medium: interactive audio. “It’s a different set of rights and a different way of experiencing a story. There’s more agency for the listener, but there’s a little less agency for the author,” he said.

There’s a new startup entering voice-tech storytelling with a slightly different take on what the future looks like. Headcanon started earlier this year and was founded by Ron Martinez, a digital innovator who has launched several successful startups, including Aerio (now owned by Ingram). In a nutshell, Headcanon intends to be a voice publishing platform for serialized narratives of any kind. Martinez calls the resulting product voice books.

Because Alexa and similar devices typically have your credit card on file, Martinez believes episodic freemium content is the way to go if you want to monetize. Currently, Headcanon has been experimenting with a story of Martinez’s own creation, Here Boy, which has 16 episodes, each about three to four minutes long. Listeners can have one free episode per day or pay for full access to all the episodes and binge the entire thing. The story works fine without listener interaction, but interactivity is there if desired. After listening to an episode, you can say something like “Look around” and get more detailed descriptions of the environment, or you can hear the character’s thoughts. “It’s another angle into the story,” Martinez says. However, he doesn’t believe in mandating interactivity; people shouldn’t feel like they have to explore—or, for example, interrogate a suspect—to get the full story. “There’s a straight line through,” he says. “The story has to be powerful without the interactive features.” (It’s interesting to note that Martinez’s résumé includes turns at a game developer and a digital wallet company.)

Still, Headcanon wants to make it simple to add interactivity to voice books. Martinez suggests that even optional interactivity, such as an author’s commentary (like a director’s commentary on a movie) can be compelling. For example, listeners might want to know what the author really meant or was thinking about when they wrote a particular scene or chapter, or how they researched it. Plus, some voice devices support visuals. Martinez says, “One thing we’ve experimented with is taking a children’s book, like a board book, taking the text out, voicing the text, then advancing through pages. Those can go up on a Fire TV at home if it’s Alexa enabled.” So, for instance, you could say to Alexa, “Play The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” There might be interactive elements, but you can also just listen and watch.

Headcanon is being built to help people produce voice books without coding experience. Martinez wants to make it a self-service platform, where authors or anyone can generate computer audio (to avoid hiring a narrator) or upload their own audio files to make a serialized story available for sale. “If you’re a publisher who wants to make a radio play with Lincoln in the Bardo, and you have the budget for that—wonderful,” he says. But not everyone has those resources. With advances in text-to-speech technology, soon anyone will be able to generate audio that sounds incredibly natural, with different types of delivery. (For those who doubt the capabilities of computer-generated audio, Martinez suggests checking out Resemble.ai.)

We asked Martinez if he thinks that the hype currently surrounding voice tech is excessive. Those who remember the app development boom for smartphones earlier this decade might recall a lot of investment in book and publishing apps, or enhanced ebooks, that never paid off. Martinez said, “My career, 30 years, has been understanding emerging platforms. What can we do here that creates a novel and meaningful experience? Shovelware is where you take what you have and you shovel it into the new platform. You’re expecting it to perform in some way, [but] it’s simply replicating it rather than taking advantage of what that new platform is capable of. A lot of the things I’ve seen fail have been cutting and pasting something from one medium into another.” He said that today, we’re still discovering what voice tech’s unique capabilities are. “I don’t think there is any magic in a new platform without understanding what it can do and coming up with meaningful applications and content.”

Bottom line: Headcanon, Martinez says, “is an instant monetization model. I’m always thinking in terms of the aesthetic user experience, but also how do people make a living doing it?” Currently, Martinez believes there are no good monetization methods for fiction podcasts, and this provides a potential solution for that group of creators. But he acknowledges that there’s a category-wide issue with getting people to buy things through their voice assistants; precious few people go beyond the basic commands of “Alexa, turn on the lights” or “Alexa, play music.” Martinez says that while a lot of the voice tech apps aren’t so interesting or sophisticated, it’s still early—and he likened the current situation to the very first iPhone. “At first the iPhone made a phone call and it had a few basic apps. It was a utility device. Then the app development added incremental value. Then the iPhone became essential and grew in value because of the new apps added. A year from now, things could be different.”