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Transcript

Podcasting is Your Secret Weapon · The Daily Writer

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Writer, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for writing success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of you who are listening are working on books.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to share a method that I've been using to write my upcoming Daily Writer book, which will release this coming October.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this process is very doable for anybody.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been doing my Daily Writer podcast since November 2020, well over a year now.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as you probably know, since you listen to this show, I release a short episode each weekday, and then I typically do an interview on Saturdays.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: On Sundays, sometimes I do a short episode, I do bonus content, another interview, or something else entirely.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what you may not know.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Each weekday episode is actually the first draft of a daily entry in this daily writer book that I've been working on for over a year now.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is going to be a book of daily meditations for writers.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, it has 366 daily entries.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So as you can imagine, those take a while to write.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, each quarter of this year-long book, each quarter has a specific theme, and each month has a sub-theme within that overall quarterly theme.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, each of these meditations is about 200 words, give or take.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are a little longer, some of them are shorter.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: But on average, each of these is about 200 words or so.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I write these in Scrivener, and so far I have a little over 80,000 words of content for the book.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the vast majority of this was produced as episodes for this podcast.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And 80,000 words is nothing to sneeze at.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually the equivalent of two full-length books or three shorter books.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to get rough drafts of these daily meditations done, I often dictate these while driving or taking a walk.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, like for in fact, for this um next batch of episodes over these next couple weeks, I sit just sat down and wrote these in Scrivener.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I did not dictate these.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes I do dictate these while driving or taking a walk.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the way this usually happens is that I have a seed of an idea that I have recorded somewhere ahead of time.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've dumped it into Scrivener somewhere, and then I dictate it or I write it, and then I clean it up for the podcast.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, before I put them into the book, I'm going to edit those uh probably two or three times, run those by a professional editor, and those will also go to a whole bunch of beta readers as well.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a whole process that goes into this, but the bottom line here that I'm trying to get across is that these all begin as daily episodes on this podcast.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And doing this has forced me to write these whether I feel like it or not.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And because I know people are expecting these every day, I have to sit down and I have to produce.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: For example, as I'm recording this, um, I have I'm recording this on Friday, January the 21st, 2022.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually the last episode.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've just, this is number 12 um daily episode I've recorded in a row.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually worked backwards.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I do that many times.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'll talk about this on another episode in a week and a half or so.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I have uh recorded a bunch of episodes at the same time I've batched all this.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And because I know that people are expecting this, uh, I have a group of people who listen to this show on a daily basis.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And did I feel like doing this today?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, honestly, I felt like just watching Netflix all day.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, to be totally honest with you.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: But people are expecting this.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're expecting this.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you expect me to show up as a professional and to provide content on this show and to give you value.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And because I've committed to writing this book and I've told bunches of people about it, and this podcast has been going for a while, this is why I do this, because I've set up a system that has forced me to produce this daily content.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And even though I'm batching it, it gets released on a daily basis.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, a big reason why I started doing this writing podcast was to force me to create these daily entries.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that if I just had as a goal to write this big book of daily meditations for writers that had 366 entries, I knew that I would never ever do that because the project is massive.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, by the time I get it done, it's going to be like 90,000 words or something like that, some kind of insane number.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew that I would never do it, but if I could do a little bit each week, you know, if I could write a thousand words of content each week for this and chunk it up over a few days, that that was actually pretty doable.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's how I've been able to do all this.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So my encouragement to you is that if you have a book that you want to write, but you're having trouble making time to do it, a really excellent way to do this is to outline it ahead of time, then write it as tiny little chunks and release this on social media or release it on a podcast.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can just, you know, you can have uh kind of an idea of what you want to talk about.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can sort of riff on it on the podcast, then you can transcribe it and then organize it into book content later on.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: For me, podcasting has been at the middle of almost every good thing that has happened in my business the last few years, whether it's connecting with people, ghostwriting projects, or whatever it is.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So a podcast, I think, and the regularity of having to put out episodes is a really, really good way to force you to create that content.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you're creating that structure where people are expecting it on a regular basis, and you've got to create it whether you feel like it or not.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is what uh people who work on TV shows do all the time.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we love the series Cobra Kai uh in my house.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I love the Karate Kib, you know, when I was a kid, many people did.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, you know, Cobra Kai on Netflix is a super duper cheesy show, but I actually really love it because it's just it's meant to be like a super fun show that doesn't take itself really seriously.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the thing is that anytime that you have a show that has a regular release schedule, like weekly, or you know, every year Cobra Kai is going to come out at some point during the year, they know they've got to produce 10 really good episodes.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when you have that release date looming ahead of time, when you have people who are expecting it, it forces you to create whether you feel like it or not.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your emotions with with the creative process, I think, are mostly meaningless.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your emotions have nothing to do with it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's really all about setting a date, having high standards for yourself, and then producing, uh, producing on a schedule.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's just this is what professionals do.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: We produce on a schedule.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I hope this is encouraging to you.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can do this.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: You really, really totally can do this.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be some big technological or creative genius to do a podcast.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, my goodness, you're listening to me.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm about as far away from those things as you can as you could possibly get.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: But here I am.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I show up every day on this podcast and I'm bringing you something uh that hopefully is valuable to you.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if I can do it, you can do it as well.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: So just some thoughts on this.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh hopefully this is helpful to you.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So here is your daily question Have you ever considered using a podcast as a way to force you to create content for a book?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.