Picking A Podcast Format

One of the most important things you can do for your podcast (and your listeners) is to pick the format that a) best suits the show and b) best suits your schedule.

At one point, I was doing two weekly shows and one of them required me to do a lot of reading. I had started both at a time when I had very little work, but then as I began to edit more podcasts, I found myself feeling rushed for time.

When Welcome to Geekdom felt like it wasn’t working, instead of taking a break to figure things out, I tried to switch things up on the fly. Instead of talking about a specific movie, comic book, TV show, etc. I decided I wanted to talk to more creators about their work and their process.

It was short-lived to say the least. And even after I went back to the original episode format for the show, I bowed out at 300 episodes.

With Chat Sematary, I caught up on all of Stephen King’s releases and honestly have yet to come up with new episode ideas for the main feed. I am trying to release consistent content on Patreon, though.

If you don’t have a format that works for both you and your podcast, it’ll be tough to keep things going. I’m sure it would be easier for me if my job was something other than working on podcasts. Because once I’ve done that all day, it’s hard to want to do even more editing. My ears and eyes can only handle so much of that per day.

Now, I’m not saying to do what I did with Geekdom and just stop doing the show if you find yourself becoming busier and busier. Just take a beat and figure out what you can do and work from there.

Maybe that means taking a seasonal approach to your show with 2 months on and one month off (or whatever amount of time you decide). This will give you a breather and allow for more prep time.

Or maybe try out doing a mini-series before committing to something longer. There are a ton of options and there aren’t really any rules for how you release your podcast.

If weekly works for you - great! If it’s every other week, that’s fine, too! Don’t feel the need to do something just because it seems to be what other podcasts are doing. That will lead to some quick burnout (my burnout was 100% my own doing).

I know I’ve touched on this subject before, but I’ve recently been thinking about doing another mini-series of some sort so it got me thinking about formats again.

The upside to doing a mini-series (for me, your mileage with formats may vary!) in the near future is that I could do all of the prep, record in batches, and then edit whenever I happen to have a slow week with work.

I tend to be a fairly deadline-driven person, so I would still need to at least set a launch date because without one I know I would just spend forever on it. Done is better than perfect, right?

Anyway, just some food for thought there. I’ll likely use this newsletter as a way to just think through some things that I’m working on and I hope others find it helpful.