With Writing Show host, Paula B.
July 3, 2006
DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE WRITING SHOW MP3 HERE
This is Paula B. Welcome to The Writing Show’s first anniversary special. To celebrate our first year of podcasting, I thought it would be fun to take a behind-the-scenes look at the show: how it came about, how we produce it, and where we’re headed.
My husband Alan and I started the show as an experiment. After our bookselling debacle, Alan got a job as chief technology officer at a software company, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. Should I go back to writing books? Should I try to get a job in publishing? Should I sell real estate? Believe it or not, I contemplated all three, and actually started a real estate course. That was during the boom here in Southern California, and everybody and their grandmother was getting a real estate license. I actually have some background in real estate and enjoy a lot of things about it, so I decided to give it a try. But after a few weeks of study, I realized that I do not have the personality to be a real estate agent. You’re dealing with a lot of money and a huge amount of emotion, and I decided that that was a lethal combination.
I have long been interested in author promotion, and since I have a lot of ideas about how authors can promote books as well as a fair amount of experience doing it, I thought perhaps I could build a service around that. So I started to put together a plan for a publishing and book marketing consultancy, in which I would help authors with proposals and marketing. I set up a tiered service that would appeal to all budgets. Unlike bookselling, this was something I knew, and something I was good at. However, to my surprise and chagrin, I got quite a bit of negative feedback about the idea from my friends and colleagues. The main objection was that writers won’t pay for it. Disappointed, I tried to figure out some way to make the idea work, but frankly, I think my friends were right. Most authors are paid so little that to hire someone to help them with a proposal, let alone promotion, would devastate their earnings, even though in the end they would probably make more because of my help. I’ve written seven books. I know this from personal experience. The economics of publishing are very much stacked against authors.
In the meantime, Alan kept telling me that I had a lot of interesting things to say about books, and that all I really had to do was quote—be interesting about books–unquote. I have an extensive background in interviewing as well as writing, and as I mentioned in one of my How Not to Run an Online Bookstore episodes, I had thought about doing an Internet radio show, although at the time, I was thinking about doing interviews on all aspects of creativity. I also knew someone who was doing an Internet radio show, and from what I saw him doing, it seemed like something I could put together with Alan’s help, since he knows a lot about audio and home recording. At the same time, I had started to hear about this thing called podcasting. I started to research it, joining the Yahoo podcasters’ group where I still hang out, and reading various material.
Originally I envisioned the show as a collaboration between me and a co-host. We would conduct the interviews together and get a lively banter going. I approached a writer friend of mine I thought would be perfect for it, and he was interested, but he had a number of heavy personal things going on and couldn’t make the commitment. So I started it with just me as the host.
So I wrote a business plan, which is something I’ve done quite a lot. I came up with a mission for the show. It was pretty easy to decide that we would provide “information and inspiration for writers” since I had already gone through a branding exercise with the Compulsive Creative, and I was just focusing on a sub-set of that mission. As far as the name was concerned, that was partly down to what domain names were available. So many of the best ones are taken these days, usually by speculators. But I got lucky. The Writing Show was available, and it is perfect.
I made a list of potential guests and subjects. Many of those people have now been on the show, although I still have a healthy backlist, which I add to all the time. Would you like to hear some of the original subjects I came up with? Okay, here’s a sampling:
· Ask publishers about the future of publishing
· Talk about issues for bookstores
· What are the trends in reading? What are people reading and why? What have they stopped reading and why? Does it matter?
· Intellectual property issues
· Writers’ earnings
· Can writing be taught? Are writers born or made?
· Do grammar and punctuation matter?
· How do books attract people’s attention?
· Whither libraries?
· Favorite fictional characters and why
· How do you integrate research into your writing?
· From page to screen
· Whatever happened to science fiction?
· Are writers artists? What is their function in society?
· Small publishers.
· Contracts
· What’s happening to magazines?
· Journalism
· Favorite authors and why
· Writing copy and blurbs
· Author Web sites
· Writing dialog
· Should writers be shaping opinion? Do they have too much power? After all, they’re not that different from the rest of us.
· How do you write biography? What’s the process like? What happens to your feelings about your subject over the course of the project?
· Ghost writing
· Teaching writing
Wow—what a list! In a year, I’ve barely scratched the surface, and I’ve added substantially to the list. I could do a show a day and still not run out of new things to cover. Of course, if I did a show a day, I’d need a staff because I could never keep up with myself.
I also came up with a philosophy of booking guests. Here it is:
How to make it compelling and give it a bit of an edge:
· Interview opinionated authors
· Interview authors who’ve written fascinating books
· Interview authors who’ve had some sort of hard time
· Interview authors with different or controversial points of view
What I find really interesting about this list is that I’ve pretty much ignored it and gone for subject coverage. I haven’t sought out authors who have had a hard time, I haven’t looked for authors who are particularly opinionated, and I haven’t purposely gone after authors with controversial points of view. Even though every single guest I’ve had on the show has been fascinating to me, I’m still missing whole areas that I could pursue. My goodness. I guess I have my work cut out for me.
I had a bunch of ideas for special features. For example, I knew from the get-go that I wanted to do series like my How Not to Run an Online Bookstore saga. They would provide a change of pace from the interviews and get people to tune in on an ongoing basis. And by the way, I have other series in mind for when the bookstore one ends.
I also wanted to do a sort of reality show, following writers as they pursue their goals. We might follow an author as he or she writes a proposal and tries to get published. Or as they market their book. Or interacting with their publisher. Or their readers. Or developing their Web site. Or trying to sell movie rights. I still have a lot of ideas for this kind of series and would love to pursue them. Just to drop a hint, if anyone is interested in being the subject of this kind of show, please drop me a line.
I also had an idea for something I called open source characters. Here’s the opening of the plan section dealing with this idea:
The Open Source Character Project allows writers to collaborate to create non-proprietary characters that will enter the popular culture. Like Santa Claus, Paul Bunyan, Sherlock Holmes (originally proprietary but now in the public domain), and Merlin, these characters can be used by anyone in any story without permission. The idea is to create characters so dynamic and compelling that people will love to write about them.
But of course, I haven’t gotten to this yet either.
I was wondering if I should start another store. Not like the disastrous bookstore, but a store in which I’d sell Writing Show branded books, e-books, and CDs of our interviews. Actually, for a long time, this was one of the major ways in which I saw the show bringing in money, but I’ve put it way on the back burner for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Alan and I have come up with what we think are some better ideas. For another thing, such an endeavor is really labor-intensive, and I can’t find enough hours in the day already. So this one may happen some day, but not any time soon.
Anyway, to get back to our guests, I decided to see if I could get author Michael Dean who wrote $30 Writing School and other books to be our very first interviewee. I had interviewed Michael by email back when we had the store, and I thought he was a very colorful guy. I was thrilled when he accepted my invitation. Thrilled but nervous, because I had no idea how the interview might go, both on a technical and substantive basis. As it turned out, it went great on both counts and has been one of our most popular interviews, if not the most popular interview.
Michael’s interview was my first experience in audio editing. What a kick! I hadn’t developed the skills I have now, and I hadn’t developed an editing philosophy. What would I cut? What would I leave? Would I move parts of the interview around as I would with a written piece? In the end, I did cut a lot because of redundancies. I’m much better at planning the flow of my interviews now, so I rarely have to do that anymore. The cutting took me several days. Now I can edit an interview in less than a day, sometimes half a day. I’m not sure why, since I’m just as picky and meticulous now as I was at the beginning. Maybe I’ve just gotten into a rhythm.
My next interview was with Searcher magazine editor Barbara Quint, for whom I write on a regular basis. Barbara is one of the most knowledgeable people around about the information industry, and a real hoot. She was, as always, just fabulous, but I made a big mistake with her interview, which fortunately I’ve learned from.
Barbara said something during her interview that I didn’t think was true. It had to do with who holds copyright on books—authors or publishers. Rather than mentioning my views to her during the interview, I added a sentence or two of my own during the editing process. That was a huge mistake, for which I apologize. This was a beginner’s error, and I beg your indulgence. I should have brought up my point when Barbara was there and let her respond. I have not repeated the mistake and never will. Frankly, I don’t know what I was thinking.
One funny thing that came out of Barbara’s interview was her reaction to my editing. When I asked her if she had listened, she said, “Oh yes. But I talk too fast.” No, Barbara, you don’t. That was me editing down the gaps between thoughts, a natural process that occurs with most interviewees. I apologize for that one too. It was nothing but inexperience.
After I had a few shows under my belt, I heard from a listener who told me that I didn’t really need to be so single-minded about editing out guests’ “ums.” Ums are perfectly natural, he told me. Leave them, and the interviews will sound more natural. So now I leave some ums and other imperfections in, although I still get rid of a lot of them. I believe that your time is important, and you don’t want to listen to a lot of stammering and aheming. I think I’m hitting a good balance now, but please let me know if you don’t think I am.
Another listener wrote to tell me that I shouldn’t say “Uh huh” so much while the guest was speaking. I saw his point, and now I edit out most of my “uh huhs.” It shows the guest that I’m listening, but it is a bit distracting for everyone else.
One thing I wasn’t sure about was how long shows should be. I theorized that the shorter they were, the more likely that people would listen. I tried a couple of things to keep the shows short. One was to attempt to limit the interview itself. That turned out to be a miserable failure. During my first few interviews, I couldn’t get the guests to shut up, and before I knew it, I had at least an hour of sound, most of which was too interesting to cut. The next thing I tried to do was to cut shows in half and present them as two parts. That lasted for an extremely short time because I discovered that it just didn’t work. My download statistics were telling me that length was irrelevant. If people were interested in a topic, they’d listen no matter how long the show or how big the file. So now I don’t worry about length.
I gradually realized a few other things. Although I gave each show a title, unless someone looked at the show notes or paid attention to the title that showed up in their aggregator, they wouldn’t necessarily know what the show was going to be about. So I started adding a couple of sentences at the beginning to put the show that was to come into some context. I also started adding various remarks at the end—usually news about upcoming shows, communications from listeners, and events like our writing weekends and contests. Since most people seem to listen rather than go to the Web site and read the show notes, I discovered that I needed to communicate on the podcast itself. I still post news on the Web site, and I hope you’ll come there because there are features you just won’t find on the audio, but at least I can now let you know about major events right on the podcast itself.
Since I started, I’ve added a number of new finding aids to the Web site. You can now find shows by the name of the guest by looking at the category list on the right-hand side of the screen. There are also two indexes of all the shows—one by guest and one by date—that you can find under the pages heading, also on the right-hand side of the screen.
Which brings me to the Web site. Alan and I don’t much care for the Wordpress software we’re using for the site. It’s very limiting. We’re in the process of designing a new site that’s laid out better and more stylish, and with a lot more features. This process is interminably slow for us because Alan has a full-time job and has to do the programming whenever he can fit it in. However, we are getting closer, as I will tell you about a bit later.
When I first started The Writing Show, I worked on it part time. It’s become almost a full-time job. I still write articles for Searcher magazine, but other than that, I put all my effort into the show. What does that entail? Here’s a list of what I do on a regular basis:
Come up with show ideas and find guests. Sometimes potential guests contact me, but more often, I approach people I’d like to interview. That means I have to find them or be referred by a mutual acquaintance, explain what the show is and what I’d like them to do.
Research the topic. Often this involves reading the person’s work or otherwise experiencing it, like watching a movie or movies they’ve written. For example, to prepare for Josann McGibbon Temkin’s interview on Runaway Bride, I watched four of her movies. To prepare for an upcoming show with author Paula Paul, I read two of her novels. For Betsie Bush and Annie Coleman’s show on intellectual freedom, I refreshed my memory on issues of censorship by reading about the topic on the American Library Association Web site.
Prepare questions. Once I’ve researched a topic, I prepare a set of questions to guide me and the guest or guests. Since a lot of my questions tend to be the kind of thing one has to think about, this works better than just blindsiding people. Of course, each conversation takes on a life of its own, and I always end up asking things I didn’t think of in advance, but at least my lists give us a place to start and help if I ever get stuck, which I actually don’t.
Schedule the interview. This is usually not too difficult because even with frantically busy guests, we can usually find a mutually acceptable time. Even with time zone differences we can usually work it out, although I have done interviews on far too many weekends to suit my taste. But you do what you have to do. I’ve done interviews with people in North America, Japan, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. That’s quite a range of time zones. I’m waiting for the time I talk to someone in India. That will be a challenge, as the time difference is just about 12 hours. Still, I think it can be done.
Conduct the interview. I usually do from zero to three interviews a week, although the time I recorded the Australian horror writers, I did almost all of them back to back over a weekend. Never again.
Back up the interview. Whenever I finish recording, I back up the interview on my hard drive and on a DVD before disaster strikes.
Edit the interview. As I mentioned, this process can take a couple of hours or a couple of days. Sometimes my wrist hurts when I do a lot of this. I know—I should start using a tablet. Better yet, I should get someone to help me. Actually, I’m working on that.
Record the intro and closing remarks and splice them in. I usually do that around Thursday of the week before I post the interview so I can include the most up-to-date reader comments and event announcements.
Give the final bundle file to Alan for sound conditioning. Alan cleans up the audio and compresses it for me. We’ve started using a product called Sound Soap, which helps a lot but still doesn’t take out some of the distortion and weird noises. We’ve decided that it’s more important than ever to get a clean recording from the start, so we’re asking guests to make sure they use land lines or Skype and record from separate rooms if they’re in the same building. Even so, we get line problems that we can’t clean up. We’re still working on solutions to this problem.
Write the show notes. This task involves getting a photo of the guest and putting together some background on the show, including a set of teaser bullet points. Sometimes I also add in some affiliate links so people can purchase the guest’s books through me. So far, you guys have purchased a grand total of two books through these links. If you’d like to go for more, I wouldn’t object.
Update the feed. This is pretty easy. At first, I got a lot of errors that I didn’t know how to fix easily, but now I almost never make mistakes in my feed. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. Podcasters love to talk about feed issues, but you can really glaze over on a topic like that.
Move the feed and the audio file to our server. That’s really easy. It just takes a few minutes.
Check to make sure the show got uploaded properly and plays in iTunes and from our Web site. Again, this is just a quality assurance task.
Answer listener email and blog comments. This is the most fun thing I do. I see it as the most essential part of my job. The part I hate the most is getting rid of blog spam, which occasionally takes quite a bit of time. I think I’ve got that under control now, though. I shouldn’t say that, because I’ll jinx myself.
Promote the show. I won’t go into the details of this as they’re always changing, but suffice to say that it takes a bit of time. Mostly, though, I let the guests and listeners promote the show for me.
Administer contests. We’re just about to close our first contest, and despite a few stumbling blocks, it’s gone pretty smoothly. For the contest, I came up with the idea and the rules, recruited the judges, and have kept a record of and distributed all the entries. I also answer all emails related to the contest, including those that come with the submissions. Once we’ve decided on the winners, I will arrange for their material to be recorded and posted on our site, and I will send out the prize money.
Promote the writing weekends. Actually, I don’t just promote these, but I also come up with writing exercises and participate in the weekends myself.
Work with guest hosts. Okay, right now I only have one guest host, the fabulous Mick Halpin. I have attempted to recruit several others I know would be wonderful, but so far, that hasn’t worked out. I found Mick through a note he wrote on his Web site about the show. Boy, did I get lucky! He’s knowledgeable, interesting, and knows how to do a great interview and record it. He even edits his own stuff. I couldn’t ask for better!
Troubleshoot technical issues. This is largely down to Alan, but it takes my time too. Don’t you just love technology?
Work on our new Web site. Well, I guess now’s the time to tell you what’s in store. We’re working on an expanded collaborative Web site for writers. The first part of the Web site will be a writers’ workspace. This will be a place for writers to create, share their work and ideas, and get inspired. Once we’ve implemented the workspace, we’ll start on the writers’ resource site, where you’ll be able to contribute and find all kinds of helpful stuff like book review sources; lists of agents, publishers, and writers; seminars and courses; and more. And once that’s done, we’ll implement…well, I have to leave some mystery, don’t I?
I suppose I’ve forgotten a million things, but that’s a lot of what I do each day and each week.
We’re often asked how we actually record the show. Our method has evolved. We’ve always used Skype rather than the phone, and we’ve always used Cakewalk Sonar as an editor, but other parts of our setup have changed.
From the beginning, we wanted to record my voice and that of the guest on separate tracks for easy editing. In order to do that with Skype, we needed two separate computers—one for each channel. I would dial up through Skype on my computer, either to the guest’s phone or Skype account, and Alan would capture the recording on another computer with Cakewalk Sonar. That setup proved to be so cumbersome and intrusive that we changed to one computer—mine—and a minidisc recorder and mixer. I now use a Sony portable HI-MD Walkman and an Alesis Multimix FX 6 mixer. I also use an Audiotechnica AT4033A capacitor microphone. So when I record, I dial up with Skype, turn on the mic and the mixer, and just go. When I’m done, I transfer the digital audio file from the minidisc recorder to my computer using Sonic Stage software and a USB cable, then import into Sonar for editing. The minidisc is nice for in-person recording, even though I’ve only done that once so far, with author Tee Morris. A lot of podcasters love the little iRiver recorder, but I bought the Sony before I knew much about that. Anyway, so far, so good.
One of the major issues when we’re recording is noise. Even noise from my computer and external disc drives degrades the quality of the recording, and we get other things like leaf blowers, tree trimmers, trash trucks, and lawn mowers outside. For a long time, I knew when the local gardeners were going to show up and scheduled my recording sessions around that, but things have changed here in my neighborhood, and now I can never predict when the noise will start. We’re hoping to move and set up a real studio, but for the moment, we’re stuck with the situation. It’s not that bad, actually, since the noise only shows up on my track, and I don’t talk that much. I suppose in the worst case, I could re-record my part, but I’ve never had to do that. Noise is a challenge, though, and something that Alan has to deal with when he conditions the file before he makes the mp3. If we could fix the problem, he’d save a lot of time.
By the way, I know I haven’t talked much about money. When I first started the show, I didn’t know quite how it would help me make my living. Now the plan is to bring in revenue through the Web site, primarily through advertising, but we have other ways in mind too. I have no plans to monetize the podcast. I have always felt that commercials on the podcast would be intrusive and just a little obnoxious. So for the foreseeable future, the podcast will remain commercial-free. Once the site starts making money, I should be able to cover my costs, make a living, and pay wonderful people like guest host Mick Halpin and Kristy Harding, who’s typing transcripts of the interviews. I also hope to find sponsorship for future contests so I can pay the judges, who are all volunteers this time.
So that’s it in a nutshell—a behind-the-scenes look at The Writing Show. I’m sure there’s stuff I haven’t covered, but I’ll leave that for a future episode. After all, you can never run out of things to discuss when writing is involved.