Things we wish we knew before starting our podcast
Starting a podcast has been such a fun journey and has given us such a valuable creative outlet that we both so desperately needed. It was our saving grace during the third (?) lockdown in the UK and gave us something so productive to do every weekend to keep us going and focused on. Generally, we just love books, love chatting shit to one another and we love creating content so it’s been such an incredible journey so far and we’re so excited to see where we go in the next year.
But… there’s a few things we wish we’d known before we started the podcast process. We were complete novices and had absolutely no podcast experience back in October 2020 when book(ish) was born and now that we’ve been working on it for almost 11 months (madness) we wanted to reflect on our experience and share the things we wish we’d known before we started, so you can learn from our trials, our mistakes and our errors.
Create your trailer in advance
We really didn’t realise just ~how~ long it could take for Apple to pick up our podcast so we were Apple-less for a couple of weeks. The best way around this is to make sure you publish your trailer in advance (and not the day before your first ep oops). Our trailer is only a few seconds long and was a really good way for us to try out different software, which brings us on to our next point…
Try different software!
There’s sooo many places you can record your podcast, from Anchor to Zencastr to Riverside.fm just to name a few. There’s different costs attached to different platforms depending on how much you record, if you want a post production mix and more. We have found that the platforms with two tracks are best for editing, should there be any issue with one person’s sound you can easily edit it out. We currently use a mixture of Zencastr, Riverside.fm (for video if and when we do this) and Anchor (for distribution) but our best bit of advice is to do your own investigation and trial and error and find the best fit for you.
Don’t spend loads on podcast equipment
Trust us, we’d love to splurge on some fancy microphones and look like ~the real deal~ but our low cost microphones work for now and we’re glad we didn’t spend big bucks to start off with. There’s loads of camera microphones that can work really well for podcasting and are much cheaper than the ‘podcasting’ microphones you can buy, although these are still very much on our wish lists.
It’s OK to re-record your podcast
It’s probably a bit embarrassing how many times we’ve had to re record episodes. Sometimes it’s been completely not our fault and the tech has failed completely but sometimes we’ve just been absolutely chaotic and produced rubbish content. Although it’s really frustrating, sometimes just carving out an hour to re record is the best thing to do. After all, you’ve put all that time into prepping the episode and are likely to also spend time editing it so the hour to record is only a small part of this.
Equally, we want to stress, it’s also OK to then miss an episode. Of course it’s nice to put an episode out on time but we’re only human and sometimes you’ve got to cut yourself some slack.
Structure your podcast episode
One thing we would recommend to minimise the amount of re recording you might need to do is make sure you structure your episode thoroughly. We don’t script our episodes (which is probably pretty obvious) but we do make sure we have a structure in place before we record so that we don’t jump around too much and we’d really recommend doing this for every episode in your prep. Don’t forget that podcasting is audio storytelling.
Time management is key
We both work full time and have other commitments like our social lives and side hustles so finding the time to work on the podcast can be challenging. However, with a bit of organising, some motivation and a few late night phone calls we always make sure we find the time to produce content. Sometimes this does mean being really smart about what we’re producing and when and creating bulk Instagram content has really been our friend this year.
We’re still learning, every single time we produce an episode we learn something new. We’re adapting as we go along and are enjoying every step of the way.
We leave you with a final bit of very important advice… enjoy it! Creating our podcast over the last year has brought us so much joy and we wouldn’t change any of the mistakes we made along the way.