Hello, podcasters, and welcome to episode 37 of Adventures in Podcasting. And the reason why I might be sounding a little bit sad is that I haven’t released an episode now for more than two months. How did that happen? Well, I know how that happened.
We all know that life gets in the way of our very precious solo podcasts, where even though I have guests every now and then, essentially I’m only accountable to myself – and you – and I know you have lots of other podcasts to listen to. So your world is not going to stop because Adventures in Podcasting is not out. But it does mean that I have been more than two months without releasing an episode.
The good news is I really missed it. And sometimes I wonder whether we need to stop doing some of the things we enjoy to find out whether we really do enjoy them, whether we really should be doing them, or whether we’re just doing them because at some point we thought it was a good idea.
I’m going to go off on a tangent straight away. I was listening to an episode of a podcast I really like aThe host is a writer and he was talking about editing – sorry, not editing, about outlining his novels and how he doesn’t like it because he was saying, in essence, that, writing a novel takes months. And if you write an outline down and adhere to it, you’re essentially following the plan of you a few months ago. And that might mean that you’re following the plans of someone who was less experienced than you are now, because of course, during that time you will have evolved – as a writer in this case. And so I thought that was a really interesting idea – going back to podcasting, when we plan a show, when we think we have to do a show, when we decide to do a show, for the long run, sometimes we evolve.
And if we’re not careful, we continue doing something that our former self thought would be a good idea to do. So that’s a very long winded way of saying: it’s really nice to be here.
And what is really, really nice is to know that I’ve missed it.
So all of this I was rambling while I was looking for the title of the show I was talking about. The show is called Death of a Thousand Cuts, and a thousand is spelled in numbers 1000. And the podcaster who is an author, is called Tim Claire.
So if you are into writing poetry, fiction, or if you really enjoy podcasts about the craft of writing and the pains of writing, then do check it out. I really enjoy it. He’s got these shows where they are unedited, they are unscripted, they’re rambles.
He calls them writing rambles. And I love them because for me, it’s pure podcasting. It’s a podcaster going behind the microphone and talking to his audience.
And the other day, I heard him break down on the show and again, it wasn’t that he’d planned, oh, I’m going to get all emotional. But he was telling a story and the story drew him back to a painful time. And so you could just hear he was basically choking up.
He was choking. Tears were coming to his eyes and talking of choking, (oh, I love solo shows because I can go off on whatever direction), I was listening the other day to the Tim Ferriss Show, and I’ve only recently started to listen to that show because for some reason, I never was drawn to the person of Tim Ferries.
I read The Four Hour Week when it came out, thought it had some amazing ideas, there were one or two things I was like, not sure, but great book. And I mean, the man changed the world of the freelancer and small business. Well, actually of the entrepreneur.
Anyway, I was listening to the episode with Derek Sivers, who I really, really like. He is for me, he’s one of these entrepreneurs that ever since I read his book, right, ages ago, which was called Anything You Want, I loved it. And I’m really drawn to Derek Sivers. He really chimes with me. I think that’s the expression.
Anyway, he was talking about his family or something like that. He was talking to Tim Ferries and they were just talking, and then suddenly he just choked because he was talking about something that was so meaningful to him. And so, I don’t know, I think in these kind of shows, hopefully this won’t be the one of those kind of shows because, well, you never know what might happen during my adventures in podcasting.
But I don’t have any shows which are prone to that kind of journey, either by the podcaster or the guest. And the Tim Ferris show, well, they’re long conversations and he brings in people, some of them, whom he knows them very well.
So he creates the space for anything to come up and he doesn’t shy away from this happening. So I’m enjoying I’m enjoying those kind of shows. I’m not going there anytime soon as a podcaster.
But anyway, all that to say, I’m happy to be here with you. What have I been doing? I have been working on the other shows and of course, on my still, I call it my day job, but it’s my company Virtual not Distant, which I’m trying to bring down the client work so I can do more of this. And so I’ve been working on Management Café, which is one of those shows that will not go away.
And this thought is what I wanted to share with you today about those shows that, well, like this one, actually, this is one of those shows. Adventures in Podcasting is the show that will not go away. I started it… Let me just scroll down the published episodes list on Trello and I started I don’t even have the dates, but sometime in 2021, I think I started definitely, yeah, I started releasing episodes sometime mid 2021. So we are now in May 2023. That’s a long time.
And I have only released 37 episodes, I think I said at the beginning. So, yeah, this is the 37th. However, it will not go away. So Steph Fuccio, who was on the show in the episode, on the 29 January, episode 34, she is now a podcast editor and she has a newsletter that I’m signed up to. And she mentioned about these shows, that they are there, but they don’t have any momentum behind them.
And every now and then she maybe does an episode for them, but she will not close them down. She will not stop the shows. There is something there.
There’s something there that’s saying, stay here with me. Stay here. And Management Cafe was one of those shows that, again, I think I started it in 2016.
And it was a solo show, heavily scripted. Some people didn’t like it at all the beginning, especially when I pretended I was another character and you could tell it was me changing my voice. And there was something about that show that I really liked.
At one point, I brought in one guest just because I thought what he had to say fitted that show better than 21st Century Work Life, and because I wanted to continue releasing episodes in a way to keep the feed warm. And I’m very glad I did, because I waited and I waited and I could see that the show wasn’t that popular, because if I looked at the download numbers, people were downloading or listening to the latest episode.
But then the numbers beyond that were not growing. So to me, that said, they’re listening to the episode that’s at the top of the list when they come across the podcast by chance. And then they weren’t enjoying it that much that they started to binge listen. Whereas, for example, in 21st Century Work Life, I can see that the latest episode gets downloads, but also other episodes, too.
But still, I thought, this show, there is something in it.
And I waited and waited. And then eventually I asked my connection, my friend now, Tim Burgess, to join me and we’ve been podcasting now for a year. We were releasing an episode once a week, and these are short conversations, we decided that they weren’t going to be more than 25 minutes long. I think we’ve got one episode that’s a bit longer than that. And I really enjoy it. We’ve got a few points that we want to touch upon, but we just talk about an aspect of management and leadership that’s important to us or that we have an opinion on.
I have lots of opinions. He is very thoughtful. He’s thought a lot about his own practice as a manager and he’s been through a whole load of stuff that I haven’t been, so I’m learning a lot from him. He loves to read, so he brings a lot into the conversation from the outside as well. And I’m just enjoying it so much. I’m so glad I stuck by it.
I think sometimes shows need something and you don’t know what it is, or a show is waiting for something and you don’t necessarily know what it is. And so this is, I think, what was happening with Management Cafe. The concept was there.
What I was bringing to it was too much structure, too much thought, too much script. It probably didn’t feel like you’d stepped into a café, even though I had the sounds at the beginning and the waitress character, and now we still have the café sounds at the beginning. What we do is the conversation starts and I pick it up at one point where it makes sense to the listener, and then about a minute into it we go, oh, hello listeners.
So that’s the joke, but it’s still in a café. But also it does still feel like you’re overhearing a conversation, whereas the previous version where it was me talking to the listener didn’t feel like that. So again, it was a good for me, it was a good name, Management Café, and a good length to aim for a good bite size kind of episodes compared to everything else.
And I didn’t let it go the same as I don’t want to let this one go. And you could say, Pilar, do you ever let any podcast go? Yes, I do. Word Maze.
It’s there, but I’m not going to come back to it. It’s of its time. I was a different person, a different podcaster. It’s about writing. There’s so many great podcasts about writing. I don’t have much to offer. Maybe one day, maybe one day when I’ve eventually finished my novel, I might come back and talk to people about it or I don’t know.
And Spain Uncovered, that was my first show. It did its job, which was to get me podcasting to sell more of my A to Z of Spanish culture, which is now very out of date. We had a third edition done, I think, about five years ago, and it needs another one, but I’m not doing it. So, again, that served its purpose. I played with the structure a lot, I played with the format, and at one point it was done.
So I think it’s important just to listen to ourselves, especially if you are one of these people like me that just like to do shows, and that always has ideas for shows. And at the moment, I think I’m involved in five shows, so you have to choose. And at some point a show might say, goodbye, I am off, I’m closing my doors, which is what might be happening with Gastronostalgia.
So here’s my story, my adventure with another show, which I absolutely adore. And, well, something I forgot to say about Management Cafe is that Tim and I were releasing every week. We batch recorded, so every time we meet, we recorded two or three episodes, then we released them.
We have a really good workflow where I do the audio, he does the writing, the podcast writing. And I suggested that we went to every other week so that I had a bit more time to see whether I could do any illustrations for it or any comic style things for it, because I’m also playing with illustrations and I want to create some space for myself to do that. And I realized I was doing so much podcasting, I had very little time to draw.
I still write because that’s very easy for me to get into, but any kind of drawing cartooning, I’m not as experienced. I’m not as experienced at bringing up concepts as I’m not as experienced at drawing. So anyway, I said, Tim, can we do one every other week? He said, yeah, sure.
And that’s what we’re trying now. And it’s working quite well, I think. I’m not doing loads of drawing, but still doing more than I would if we were doing one a week.
So, very similarly with Gastronostalgia here, we were releasing one episode every week, one for each of four courses of a meal, plus episode five of each month, which had the full menu and an aperitif. And I said to Tomas, my wonderful co host, he really is wonderful, and again, great collaborator, I said, you know what, Tomas? We’re going to get to Episode 100. Let’s face it, the show doesn’t have a massive audience.
It’s got the right audience for us, which is some of our closest friends, my mother. So it’s enough to know that people are listening and we enjoy it, we just love creating it. But I said, how about we stop at Episode 100 and use the time we’d spend on the show to start putting the content we’ve created for the show into a book? But not just any book.
This is a Gastronostalgia book. So this book, I can just see it, it’s got very little type, it’s got lots of handwritten-type of writing. It’s got comic style things.
It’s got these pages of his recipes with little illustrations to the sides. I can see it. Why don’t we spend some time maybe it’s another year, why don’t we spend some time creating this book? And then maybe if the book does relatively well, if it sells some stuff, then maybe we can bring more audience into the podcast, more listeners. So let’s use that content we’ve already created and put it in a new format, but something that makes sense for us.
Tomas loves writing. He’s a journalist. That’s how he describes himself. That’s where his heart is in journalism, like in its broadest sense. And he’s a writer and he’s very creative. So he’s up for this. We’re going to see where it takes us. I know he has other podcast projects he wants to do. So actually this will free up some of his creative energy and time to do that.
I’m very excited about that. But again, I feel like that show, I think 100 episodes will be a good time to wrap it up and we haven’t fallen out. It’s not that we still don’t have anything to say about the topic because, hey, who ever gets tired of talking about food? That’s all Gastronostalgia is.
We talk about food. Sometimes it’s more difficult to find topics than others, but you never run out of stuff to say. We might repeat ourselves, of course.
So that’s another so I think that this is quite important as podcast is, to know, to understand why we’re doing a show and at some point to think, if we have a big body of work, can we do something with it that is not the podcast? Have we created so much information or sometimes so much value that actually what we need is to now put it in another shape, in another form and reach a different kind of audience of readership? Interestingly. I’ve thought of doing something about this with 21st Century Work Life, but no way. That is a podcast. That is nothing else. That is a podcast in itself.
So that is also a very interesting reflection that just came to me, which is why I love doing these solo shows. It’s like talking to yourself, but I know that you’re there. So that’s interesting that 21st Century Work Life is a podcast. And again, I think it needs to shift at some point what I’m doing with it, but still exciting. I’m still enjoying it. I was editing one of the conversations yesterday and I was having a really good time doing it.
I love editing. I don’t know about you, maybe you outsource your editing, but I just love sitting with Audacity and more if it’s a conversation than it’s me on my own, let’s face it. So I wanted to tell you about something else as well.
I think this is going to be my last point…
But I was in a studio last week recording for an audio course that a colleague and myself are preparing for. Virtual Not Distant. And it’s a course on asynchronous communication for remote teams, in case you’re interested. We decided, after doing the better version by recording on our laptops with a remote connection, and then me editing, we decided to go into a studio. So we went into a professional studio that I’ve used before, that I’ve known for ages, very near me.
Excellent. And we went in there and did a four hour session recording nine modules. Some of them had two parts of between ten and the longest one was 17 minutes long. And it’s just such a joy. I have to say that the audio from my side in the studio, compared to the audio I get here in this setup is not that noticeable.
I have a Rode Nt USB. (I had to look at the box to read that because I never remember.) And honestly, if you have a room which is a little bit treated, as in it’s not too big, it’s got lots of wood, lots of carpeting, lots of furnishings, then the audio, well, I don’t think anyone would tell the difference just on the quality of the microphone and myself.
The difference is all the other noises that can interfere. So that’s one reason why we were going into the studio. Also because Simon, my colleague, doesn’t have the setup at his end, so his audio, depending on the day, would sound okay or not very good. And seeing as this is something that we want to release and then not have to do again for another, I don’t know, until we decide, well, I don’t want to have to record it again, really. It should stand the test of time. We decided to go and have it properly recorded and I really enjoyed it.
And you know what I enjoyed also? Not having to edit later because I don’t mind it. And as I said, I like editing, but I’m tired now of these scripts. We’ve been working on them for like a year and a half.
So the last thing I wanted to do was to have to really listen to it and then export, run it through Aphonic, blah, blah, blah… The engineer just did everything, sent it back and he’s done a really good job of cleaning it up.
You can also go to my website, adventuresinpodcasting.com and listen out because I am preparing a course about Trello for podcasters.
The plan is to work on that in July this year. The format is going to involve some kind of drawings. It’s not going to be me and in a little circle in a corner with Trello on the screen, that might come later.
But to start with, I want to do something that is a joy to create where I can do a lot of the work away from the screen as well. And I love Trello, it’s a fantastic tool. So if you want to know any more about Trello before I release the course, email me. I’d be very happy to have a chat with you. I love listeners and if you have anything else to say, or you have or you are a podcaster that would like to come and have a chat on this show, I would love to hear from you.
Thank you for listening. Keep podcasting.
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