Chapter One
Preproduction
Whatâs Your Podcast About?
WITH JUSTIN MCELROY
In podcastingâs golden era (or at least when we started our first show in 2010), you didnât need your podcast to really be about anything. Hell, you barely even needed a microphone. There were fewer podcasts in those days, and listeners were just happy to have something, anything, to fill the terrible silence.
Thatâs not just me pining for a simpler time, though Iâm thirty-nine now, so I do that a lot. But itâs important for you to understand that your favorite show, especially if itâs been around for a while, is probably not a good model for what a podcast can be about.
As of this writing there are something like 850,000 podcasts out there according to Podcast Insights. You might be the worldâs most charming conversationalist or gifted storyteller, but unless youâre already a big star, you arenât going to rise above the din without a great concept. You just wonât. There are just too many podcasts competing for the same oxygen. Ear . . . oxygen. You get the idea.
First, you need your concept. You can start with a paragraph about what you want to achieve and how exactly youâll go about it, but itâs important to be able to boil it down to a single-sentence pitch. Remember, the pitch isnât just for you. You want your audience to be able to spread the word about your show in a way that is both concise and interesting. Can you sell it in a sentence? Thatâs your pitch.
Heck, even the big stars have more success when they have a strong pitch. The first line of the Apple Podcasts listing for Anna Faris Is Unqualified is âNot-great-relationship advice from completely unqualified Hollywood types.â Thereâs your pitch right there (and itâs a good one).
The Big Sentence
You may be tempted to start with that one-sentence pitch, but itâs putting the podcast cart before the podcast horse (his name is Bucko, by the way, and heâs a delight). Instead, letâs use that one sentence as a navigational star to guide us through this process. Give yourself the freedom to roam around as you hone your pitch. But if you find you can no longer boil your pitch down to one punchy sentence, youâll know youâve gone astray.
If we were launching My Brother, My Brother and Me today . . . well, we wouldnât. Or at least we wouldnât in its current state. Letâs try to pitch it.
âThree brothers give bad advice, but itâs funny.â
Itâs short! Thatâs good! But it falls apart in the last two words: âitâs funny.â The listener hears our pitch and rightly replies, âWho says itâs funny?â We look at one another furtively and blurt out, âUh, we do?â Except weâre talking to nobody because the listener has already moved on to one of the other half million shows.
Letâs look at one of our much more recent shows: The McElroy Brothers Will Be in âTrolls 2.â Iâd write the pitch out for you, but the title really says it (more on that later). Three non-celebrities try to con their way into a major motion picture. Now, maybe thatâs a show for you, maybe itâs not, but youâre at least able to make an instant judgment call about whether you want to listen. My show Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine is . . . well, itâs right there in the subtitle, isnât it?
So, thatâs the big sentence, letâs start building it.
Why Are You Here?
Why do you want to make a podcast? Do you want fame and fortune? Do you want to spread awareness of something? Do you want to contribute to a community? Do you want an excuse to talk with friends? Theyâre all completely valid reasons to start a podcast, but they will each shape your show differently.
Justin just kinda casually granted you fame and fortune, but let me do a little expectation setting. Podcasting is a long game. I know podcasts that didnât start getting real attention until they had already produced more than one hundred episodes. Most people donât start listening to a show until they can binge at least ten episodes. If your show releases biweekly, thatâs five months of work before you see any noticeable audience growth. It took us more than eight years of podcasting before we were able to all make it our full-time jobs. What Iâm saying is making money is great, but you are probably going to be making your show for free for a while. Maybe for as long as the show exists.
Letâs say you have a great time talking about old movies with your friends and you think, âThis is hysterical, we should be recording this!â Thatâs . . . well, itâs an extremely twenty-first-century impulse, isnât it? Regardless, itâs not a bad seed for a podcast. But there are an unfathomable number of shows in that vein. Doug Loves Movies, The Flop House, How Did This Get Made? . . . we could go on. Itâs dizzying. If itâs the show you wanna make, go for it! But keep in mind that unless you have an incredibly smart hook, itâs gonna be real tough to grow a large audience and stand out from the crowd.
On the flip side, maybe your goal is just to make a massively successful podcast, so you research current trends and analyze the stats and find that âprofiles of artisanal yak shaversâ is the next big thing. You pay thousands for your promotional art, you book Malcolm Gladwell for your first episode, and then you realize something: you fucking hate yaks. Canât stand talking about the things. You may have positioned your show for success, but you donât care about the topic, which is a recipe for disaster in terms of both building an audience and your personal happiness.
If you wanna make a show thatâs just for you and your friends to goof around with, I think thatâs great and cool and worthwhile. There are probably large swaths of this book you can skip if you want. Thatâs fine, you bought the book, do what you want with it. As an independent podcaster, you have the benefit of not having to worry about being canceled by a studio. So you might have an audience of only twenty, but if those twenty people really love your show and you really love making it, who cares? If youâve made something that brings joy to yourself and to others, even if itâs only a few people, youâre a success.
If audience size isnât your priority, make peace with that now. If you can free yourself from the burden of worrying about how many people are listening, youâre going to save yourself a lot of stress down the line.
Even though Iâm not opposed to the idea of vanity podcasting, for lack of a better term, I would humbly urge you to take a moment and consider if thereâs a way you could make your movie chat show something lots of people would want to listen to. Youâre putting in the work to inject something into the worldâwhy not try to make it something the world might want?
Whether the show is designed for an audience of one or an audience of millions, there is one constant: itâs not worth making a podcast you donât really care about. Audiences are savvy and podcasting is an intimate medium; theyâre gonna spot someone feigning enthusiasm for yaks a mile away and theyâre going to turn the podcast off every single time.
What Do You Obsess About?
If I were to ask you what you cared about, your answer would likely be fairly instinctual. My family. My job. The planet. Thatâs good! Youâre a human being with your priorities well in order.
But I want to know what you obsess about. What headlines are you irresistibly compelled to click on when they pop up on your timeline? What do you find your fingers googling before your brain realizes whatâs happening? What do you passionately explain to friends and family despite the fact that they couldnât give a solitary shit? Thatâs where your podcast needs to live.
You know something Iâm obsessed with? Workplace training videos. I think the first one I saw was made in the mid-1980s and it was called âWendyâs Grill Skills.â In it, a magical, digital ghost pulls a young man into a TV screen and then raps at him while detailing proper burger-frying technique. How could I not be hooked?
I could talk about workplace training videos endlessly. I show them to friends and family who always reward me with expressions of bemusement. If I could talk to the people who made these weird little examples of non-entertainment, Iâd be in heaven. Iâm utterly fascinated by them.
My other obsession is cereal, and I already make that podcast. Itâs a meditative show about cereal called The Empty Bowl that I host with a cereal blogger named Dan Goubert. I donât profit off it, and it has a much smaller audience than many of our other shows, but people have told me that it helps them to relax in trying times, and I get to talk about stuff I love, so itâs a success.
Do you have a weird little part of your brain that you devote to that kind of minutiae? I think itâs time you jam a metaphorical microphone up there and make that bit of think meat earn its keep by selling underwear and mattresses to eager listeners. The beauty of living in the internet age is that you donât have to find a local audience! If .0002 percent of the world population is interested in your topic, you have an audience of 15,600 people! If you need more convincing, look at how many vibrant subreddits and forums there are devoted to obsessively discussing a facet of a sliver of a tiny nugget of pop culture. Thereâs one called, I kid you not, PicturesOfIanSleeping that is just pictures of some guy named Ian sleeping. Itâs got more than forty-four thousand followers. It takes all kinds, folks.
You notice I didnât say Iâm obsessed with YouTube (where most of these videos live) or workplaces in general. Iâd argue that those are too broad to justify an obsession. The cool thing about how fragmented the internet is is that you can find success without trying to cover huge topics on a very surface level. If you dive deep into a specific niche, youâll likely find some willing souls to follow you down. Donât be Entertainment Tonight, be Self-Produced Beanie BabyâCollecting Tips Videos Tonight.
Who Else Is Here?
Once you have an idea for the topic you want to cover, youâll want to know how itâs already been done. (And it probably has, Iâm sorry to say. Did I mention there are a lot of podcasts?) So, letâs research the competition.
Competition, by the way, is useful shorthand here, but it isnât a very useful way of thinking about this. If youâre putting the work into coming up with a creative, smart approach to your subject, your show will be an entity unto itself. Just because someone already listens to a Survivor recap show, it doesnât mean they canât make room in their heart for yours.
According to a 2019 report from Edison Research, 32 percent of Americans listen to podcasts on a monthly basis. The way I see it, any podcast that makes a big impact and brings new people into the ecosystem is a boon for everyone who makes podcasts.
Letâs stick with Survivor. Search the various podcasting directories like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher for Survivor and see whatâs out there. How are other people talking about Survivor? Whatâs working (and not working) about that approach? For example, the âSurvivorâ Fans Podcast is a recap that features audio from other viewers of the show. Rob Has a Podcast is hosted by a former contestant (there are more than a few of those). The âSurvivorâ Historians Podcast is about the highlights of the showâs past.
The Survivor market has been well saturated, but so has pretty much any popular TV show. You may decide that there are to...