NPR's Podcast Start Up Guide: Create, Launch, and Grow a Podcast on Any Budget
304NPR's Podcast Start Up Guide: Create, Launch, and Grow a Podcast on Any Budget
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Overview
Whoever you are, whatever you love, there’s a podcast audience waiting for you, and in today’s booming audio storytelling landscape, it’s never been easier to share your voice with the world. But while the barrier to entry for podcast production is relatively low (just the cost of a mic and a laptop), the learning curve is steep—and quality matters. That’s where NPR comes in.
In NPR’s Podcast Start Up Guide, Glen Weldon draws on NPR’s extensive educational materials and army of talent—from recognizable hosts, such as Guy Raz (How I Built This), Gene Demby (Code Switch), Linda Holmes (Pop Culture Happy Hour), and Yowei Shaw (Invisibilia), to indispensable behind-the-scenes players, such as producers, engineers, and editors—to guide aspiring podcasters through the conception, creation, and launch of a podcast.
Part master class, part candid informational interview with the best in the business, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to make their dream of starting a podcast a reality.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781984862518 |
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Publisher: | Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed |
Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
Pages: | 304 |
Sales rank: | 1,024,245 |
Product dimensions: | 7.02(w) x 8.97(h) x 0.84(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Podcasting with a Plan
Whoever you are, whatever you love, there’s a podcast for you. More every day. Sports fan, knitting obsessive, culture vulture, armchair psychologist, political junkie, science nerd, foodie, left-handed Bolivian dental hygienist—you name it, there’s a podcast about it.
Podcasting’s growth has been nuts, and it’s continuing. In 2019, the New York Times counted more than seven hundred thousand podcasts in existence, with two to three thousand new shows appearing every dang month. That same year, podcasting reached a major milestone when an Infinite Dial Study by Edison Research and Triton Digital found that more than 50 percent of Americans ages twelve and over said they had ever listened to a podcast.
Podcasts are booming because they speak to our collective obsession with wanting to know stuff (the faster the better; we’re busy!) and to enjoy stuff (being busy can be stressful; we need downtime!). Podcasts make these leaps in knowledge and pleasure available in the time it takes to tuck in earbuds—while freeing our eyeballs and hands to do other things. We listen while we commute, work out, walk the dog, cook, or drift to sleep.
But there’s another growth curve. Hundreds of thousands of us are transforming our love of listening to podcasts into creating them.
Maybe you picked up this book because you’ve got an idea or a message that’s important to you. Maybe friends or family have said, “You should do a podcast!” Maybe you want to explore audio storytelling. Or maybe you heard that podcasts can help your business.
Most of us who love podcasts haven’t thought too much about what goes into making them. They’re just there for us. We wake up, open our phone, and our favorite podcasts are downloaded and waiting. But a lot of steps happen between the seed of an idea and that polished, finished product.
With so many people getting into podcasting, quality varies hugely. Too hugely. Sure, the barrier to entry in podcasting is low—like, very low. So low it’s making a divot in the carpet: If you’ve got a mic and a laptop, you can create a successful podcast, right?
Wrong. Execution matters. Poor sound quality, sloppy or non-existent editing, undercooked storytelling, and a host of other issues render many—okay, most—podcasts unsustainable and unlistenable.
The barrier to entry may be low, but the learning curve is steep.
Sit down with any podcaster and you’ll hear stories from the trenches, from forgetting to hit the Record button to learning—with slow-dawning horror—that the one interview subject they’ve built an episode around dried up somewhere between the juicy preinterview and the guarded, dull-as-dishwater recording session. While any project worth undertaking has challenges, many of the most common stumbling blocks, blind alleys, rabbit holes, and curve balls are avoidable, if you know the questions to ask yourself first.
That’s what this book’s about. Setting your sights on quality is crucial in a crowded marketplace where audiences will move on if they aren’t instantly hooked by a story. And every podcast out there is jostling for attention—for listeners clicking, downloading, and sharing—in the merciless algorithmic mosh pit called the internet.
Consider this: Typically, 20 to 35 percent of a podcast episode’s audience drops out in the first five minutes. Getting and keeping audience attention is serious business. You have to give this podcasting thing your best shot to avoid the dreaded, all-too-common petering-out phenomenon that some have labeled “podfade.”
I’m here to help. I want to share what we at NPR know about keeping people listening.
This book is the definitive, go-to guide on how to podcast, powered by NPR’s decades of experience, expertise, and acclaim in the audio space. I’ll share proven strategies, from nurturing the glimmerings of an idea to getting your audience to hit Play. You’ll learn how to figure out the best structure and format for your podcast; storytelling techniques that hook listeners; important fundamentals on scheduling, budgeting, and legalities; the dos and don’ts for recording and editing; and the nuts and bolts for the launch and distribution of the final product.
Some of this book’s information has been adapted from materials developed by the NPR Training team—which includes our wide-ranging catalog of tips and tricks for audio journalism and storytelling. But you’ll get much more than that. How do the pros open a story in a compelling way that makes listeners stick around? What advice do they have for aspiring podcasters? You’ll find insights from some of the most respected names in the NPR and podcasting universe, plus wisdom from our producers, writers, editors, sound technicians, and project managers, who know what it takes to get a podcast done and done.
To be clear: The goal isn’t for you to sound like NPR. It’s to outfit you with the questions to ask yourself—based on the hard-won lessons we’ve learned over the years—that will make you sound like you.
Because that, at the end of the (very long!) day, is what your podcast must and should be: your voice, your passion.
Your story.
Table of Contents
Foreword Anya Grundmann, senior vice president for programming and audience development, NPR vii
Introduction: Podcasting with a Plan 1
Part 1 Imagine
Questions to Ask Yourself 7
Chapter 1 Wait. What Is a Podcast? 9
Chapter 2 So … How Do I Get Started? 19
Chapter 3 Who's on My Team? 41
Chapter 4 How Long Will It Take and What'll It Cost? 53
Part 1 Plan
Prepare to Podcast 65
Chapter 5 Finding Your Voice: Three Steps to Your Best Vocal You 67
Chapter 6 The Well-Equipped Podcast 79
Chapter 7 Audio Storytelling 101 93
Chapter 8 Legal Issues for Podcasting 123
Part 3 Create
Putting It Together 137
Chapter 9 Collecting Audio Like a Pro 139
Chapter 10 Acing the Interview 155
Chapter 11 It's All in the Mix 171
Chapter 12 Shaping the Story 183
Part 4 Share
Your Podcast Goes Public 199
Chapter 13 Me, My Platform, and I 201
Chapter 14 Countdown to Launch 213
Chapter 15 Let the Pod Go Forth 231
Chapter 16 Grow for Me 241
Conclusion: Five Rules to Podcast By 259
Glossary of Audio Production Terms 262
Resources 266
Notes 268
Acknowledgments 288
Index 290