Chirp
What is Chirp?
Chirp is an a la carte audiobook retailer that helps connect listeners with limited-time deals on audiobooks from leading publishers and independent authors. Users receive personalized audiobook recommendations every day based on the genres they select. You can read more about how Chirp works here.
What is my role?
I’m currently an Editor on Chirp’s Content Team. Editor is a holdover term borrowed from the publishing industry; my responsibilities are very different from those of an editor at a magazine or press. In a nutshell: I’m in charge of selecting featured deals for our listeners based on their tastes and genre preferences, as well as merchandising full-price content on Chirp’s site. I was the first full-time hire for the Chirp content team, and helped to create some of Chirp’s foundational training documentation. Now that I’ve transitioned to a part-time role with Chirp, the majority of my resposibility is writing and editing user-facing copy.
Microcopy
What is the goal?
Write and edit marketing copy (blurbs) that will give listeners a concise, accurate, and compelling summary of the book’s content. Copy should grab the listener’s attention and ideally convince them to purchase.
Things to keep in mind…
It’s important for blurbs to showcase the appeal of the listening experience and highlight the quality of a book’s content by including awards, accolades, and blurbs from trade publications and/or big, buzzy authors. Blurbs must be fact-checked and free of grammatical and spelling errors, and be no more than 60 words.
What did I do?
I was responsible for internalizing the Chirp brand voice and specific category trends and incorporating these elements into each blurb. Edit according to brand voice, incorporate positive genre tropes and trends, consult sensitivity guidelines to ensure that the language used is inclusive and appropriate. Meet regularly with freelancers to provide detailed, constructive blurb feedback. Create documentation around blurb processes, including editing, best practices, and proofreading.
Examples
What might I do differently?
We based the structure of blurbs on what we know to be successful from the BookBub product. Ideally, we would have conducted user research and A/B testing that was specific to Chirp listeners to see what type of copy our users were most responsive to: Do they care more about the book’s content, its awards, other users’ ratings? Should we include audiobook length or narrator name more prominently? Is the 60 word limit useful? How much are blurbs even factoring into a user’s decision to purchase compared to other factors such as the book’s price?
Training Resources
Chirp Content Wiki & Category Knowledge Bases
** Note: Both these projects were internal and involved potentially sensitive data about Chirp’s business and users, so it’s difficult for me to fully share the extent of my work. However, I’d be happy elaborate on my process and involvement in more detail in an individual interview setting — you can contact me here!
What were the goals?
Chirp Wiki
Create documentation to help onboard new members of the Chirp content team and serve as a hub for the department to find essential information including, a brand style guide, detailed lists of genre-specific trends, a glossary of key terms, and step-by-step instructions for all core processes
Category Knowledge Bases
Craft category-specific knowledge bases that will allow the team to align on the general definitions of specific genres/categories and how they should be tagged in Chirp’s system, avoid confusion and poor customer experiences, and finally, make the category tagging process more efficient so that it will require less back-and-forth.
What were some of the challenges?
Chirp Wiki
What questions might new employees or people not on our team have about our processes and policies? How can we anticipate these questions and use this documentation to answer them?
Chirp was still in its early stages as a company when this documentation was created, so much of the internal tooling we now use was still in the process of being built. How can we build this database knowing that processes will likely change?
Because there was a lot of ground to cover and it’s easy to overwhelm people with text, we wanted to make sure the copy was concise, conversational, and easy to read — and make good use of screenshots and visuals where appropriate. We wanted to show AND tell and to explain not just the what but also the why!
Can we make sure this documentation is detailed and robust enough that it functionally allows anyone to take over another employee’s responsibilities if need be?
Category Knowledge Bases
How can we ensure we’re meeting readers’ expectations of categories and the books they browse on site or opt into in their email?
How can we make sure members of the Content team are experts on all categories and aligned on deciding whether or not a book falls into a category?
How can we make sure that these documents are detailed enough to cover most definitions of a given genre but not so exhaustive that they cover every edge case and are too long to be useful?