3 Things to Consider For Authors Starting Podcasts
Are you an author considering starting a podcast? A year ago, I was in that position, and while it was easy to find information on equipment, editing, promotion, and other aspects of the trade, I couldn’t find anything that addressed my concerns as someone whose top priority is their fiction writing.
I’ve had various short stories, poems and a novella published, and I’m working on my first novel. In 2020 I felt like I needed a different sort of creative project, but how would I keep it from interfering with the writing and sucking up all of my free time? As I was grappling with this, a panel of authors who were also podcasters, at the Flights of Foundry con, was extremely helpful in sharing their experiences.
So, here’s my attempt to pay it forward and share my own thoughts on starting a podcast as an author, now that I’ve done it:
- Statistics and Metrics
Nothing about being a writer prepares you for the sort of stats and metrics you get with a podcast. I wrote non-fiction for over a decade, including being published in big, mainstream venues, and never got access to how many people from which country had read how many paragraphs of my articles. With fiction writing, seeing any kind of data is rare, and even established writers who get sales reports don’t get numbers immediately or with a ton of parameters.
But with a podcast, the day I put up a 30 minute episode that explains why the TV show “Hannibal” is the best existing adaptation of Nabokov’s “Lolita”, I watched in real time how people from all over the world were downloading the episode, how much of it they were listening to, when and how. I could see how many of my listeners subscribed to the podcast, I could see how many had quit listening and at what point.
As a writer, it can be transformative to see people reacting to your work immediately, to have tangible proof that more and more people are subscribing, that they’re listening to the episode all the way through. It gives you confidence in your voice and your perspective that feeds back into fiction writing.
- Time investment
I started a podcast because pivoting from media criticism to writing fiction meant I no longer had the time to pitch articles to editors or write regular columns. But I still had ideas about media I wanted to express somewhere.
Since my biggest worry when I started Pop Culture Sociologist was that it would eat up time I had zealously saved for writing, I decided up front that fiction was more important, and the podcast would always come second.
I designed the podcast in a way that would let me do it consistently on the one hand, but make it a manageable commitment on the other, even though it meant compromising on how “successful” the podcast could be.
For example, I settled on releasing an episode a month, for 6-7 months out of the year, which went against every commonly given advice for how often episodes should come out, because I knew any more than that and promoting the episodes would eat into my writing time.
In retrospect, I’m very glad I made that decision because if I hadn’t set those clear boundaries for myself, I would have absolutely spent more time on the podcast, if only because the feedback and excitement around it was so immediate.
Writing is such a long-term time investment, battling distractions is already hard enough. Decide in advance what priority the podcast will take, and accept that if it doesn’t come first it might always feel like you’re not doing enough to make it the best it can be.
- Feedback
Aside from stats, the other major thing a podcast gets you is immediate feedback. People listen and they want to talk and share their ideas, respond somehow. With short stories, unless your story is nominated for an award or appears in a major publication, often you’ll get very little feedback from readers.
So, this is the one thing I encourage you to plan ahead and designate a space for. Whether that’s a website where people can comment, a Discord server, a Facebook group, etc. All of those take time and resources to maintain, but if it’s possible to fit into “budget”, this is the one investment I would recommend a writer to make.
Writers face so much rejection, regularly, that having people to tell you your voice and your efforts have affected them can be transformative even if those people are commenting on your podcast rather than your stories. And of course, in an age when every writer is advised to get a platform, maintaining a community of people who are already interested in something you’re doing can only benefit your writing career.
For me, I’ve found that the podcast is always a balancing act between the joy of seeing immediate metrics and getting feedback from listeners, and the feeling that I’m failing somehow, because if I was willing to dedicate more time to the project it could really take off. But that feeling is also familiar for most writers, I think, because it’s always how you feel when balancing writing with everything else (job, family, etc). “If only I had more time to spend on this” is a trap – if the time you have is good enough to produce something you like and other people enjoy, it’s usually worth the investment.
Marina Berlin
Marina Berlin grew up speaking three languages in a coastal city far, far away. Her short stories and poems have been published in Strange Horizons, Arsenika, Futuristica and other anthologies. Her essays on media have been published in Vice, IGN, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues. You can find her podcast Pop Culture Sociologist at her website: https://marinaberlin.org/