3 Ways To Take A Podcast Vacation

Hello! My name is Deanna and I help people create great podcasts. Every Sunday I'm sharing one tactical tip to make a killer podcast. So let’s get into it!

As a freelancer, it’s pretty hard to take time off. I rarely get holidays off other than Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. So today I want to dive into 3 ways you can take a podcast vacation.

Pre-Record Episodes

The first, and personally my least favorite as the person who has to cram in double the work, is to get episodes done ahead of time. The downside to this one is that almost no one starts early enough and it results in me having to cram 5 weeks of work into 2-3 depending on when exactly the show wants to be “on vacation.”

For example, with Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast, we post 4 episodes per week. The. format for each episode is 2 interviews, a news segment, and a moment of fuckery. Those last two are typically not included in the vacation episodes and we just run the interviews. But is you’ve done the math, that’s still 16 extra interviews to get done.

If this is the route you want to go and you hire out your editing, I’d suggest getting these episodes done as early as possible so you don’t have an editor on the verge of quitting every holiday season. Just a thought, though!

Re-Air Episodes

I’ve seen a lot of shows do this where they re-air episodes that were fan favorites or in the case of Stars and Stars with Isa, we’re creating video versions of episodes from season 1 when the show was not publishing video. (The details of how I’m doing video edits for already edited audio episodes is a whole topic for another newsletter in itself.)

Here’s another idea for this. Maybe you have an older episode from the early days of your podcast where you didn’t know what you know now (or you didn’t work with an editor then) and you want to redo the edit or mix on it to improve it. That’s a good way to give a second life to an episode you really liked, but maybe didn’t have the technical skills to make it sound as good as you wanted.

And now, for the final suggestion!

Just Take A Break

I know, I know. This one is hard to grapple with because consistency is key. Let me use a very extreme example here, though. In the image below, you’ll see the first 30 day numbers for the last 7 episodes of my podcast Chat Sematary.

If you look at the release dates, you’ll see that I “ended” the podcast almost 2 years ago and just now brought it back to start covering the Stephen King movies and books that have been released since it ended.

Is there a drop in numbers? Yes, of course. But it’s not nearly as drastic as I expected for a nearly TWO YEAR break.

So, can your show take TWO WEEKS off? Yeah. It sure can.

Some Final Notes

For podcasters, decide if you’ll air new material, reuse older material, or take a break. If you choose to still air episodes, get them done as early as possible. Even if you don’t work with someone and you’re doing it yourself, your future self will thank you for planning ahead.

And if I seem a bit grumpy about the topic of vacations, it’s because I am! Turns out I’ve been extremely burnt out and I would love to have some actual time off. So here’s what I’m doing to try to remedy that because even the 4 days I’ve had off for Thanksgiving (Wed-Sat, since I’ll be working today) was not enough.

Step 1 is that first thing tomorrow morning, I’ll be emailing my clients to give them a deadline to get me episodes by. If they don’t get them to me by that deadline, then I cannot guarantee that I’ll get them done.

Step 2 is to actually say no to people when I have way too much work already. I’m very, very bad at this. I’m one person and I’m one person who is very aware that I don’t do well when everyone wants everything all at the same time. This is why, as I alluded to above, I’ve come very close to quitting during previous holiday seasons, among other reasons like the fact that I have to work on roughly 10 podcasts (which exacerbates this problem) just to make a decent living as a freelancer right now and I am tired.

Anyway, before I end up going on too many rants, I’ll leave it at this:

Decide what you want to do as early as possible and be nice to your producers/editors, especially if you know they work on multiple shows.

P.S. I’ll be less grumpy in the next newsletter. Maybe.

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