Fringe Highlight Podcast: How Authors use Podcasts to grow their Brand

This week's Indie Author Fringe Highlight is hosted by Tim Lewis who is the host of the Begin Self-Publishing Podcast where he interviews authors, experts and marketing specialists to showcase how to produce and market a book.

If you're considering starting a podcast to raise your indie author profile and grow your audience, Tim shares the what, why, and when of podcasting for beginners.

Topics Covered in this Podcast:

• What is a Podcast?
• Who Can Launch a Podcast?
• The Basics of RSS Feeds & Podcast Hosting
• Why you SHOULDN’T launch a Podcast
• Why you SHOULD launch a Podcast
• How do you Start a Podcast?
• Podcasting Equipment
• Choosing Your Podcasting Niche
• Stereo vs. Mono Audio Tracks
• Avoiding explicit content
• Avoiding Copyright Infringement
• Podcast Hosting Options
• Podcast Ratings and Reviews
• Building a Podcast Audience
• Podcast Editing
• Make it easy to Subscribe on Android
• Become a Podcast Guest
• Keep at it!

Fringe Highlight Podcast:

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Fringe Highlight Video:

Fringe Highlight Transcript:

Tim: And hello and welcome to this presentation for the Alliance of Independent Authors Fringe event, How To Use Podcasting to Grow your Indie Author Business. I am Tim Lewis and I am the host of the Beginning Self-Publishing Podcast. I’ve just finished my 110th episode and I’ve been podcasting since 2015. I’m also, obviously, a self-publisher and I’ve recently been nominated for the 2017 Podcast Awards in the Education category. You never know, I might have actually won it by the time you see this presentation. I think that’s probably quite unlucky as I’m up against Grammar Girl, but you never know.

What is a Podcast?

So, some of you are probably wondering what a podcast is anyway? So, podcasts are, basically, on demand audio shows that you typically listen to on a phone. They started off as little audio productions that you could download to these iPod devices that Apple had a few years back, hence the name podcast. Podcast isn’t a great name but you basically would listen to a show that you downloaded on your phone. So, for example, you can see on the right hand side, I’ve brought up what you see when you search for one of the ALLi podcasts. And you have a show and then you have all of the episodes, whenever they’re released. So, typically shows are released on a weekly, sometimes a daily, basis, depending on the creator of the podcast.

You can find podcasts on the built in podcast app on IOS, which is iPhone or iPad. Or if you’ve got an android phone, then you have to go and download an app from the android store, to actually be able to use that. One of the best ones is something called Stitcher Radio, there are a few other ones, Pocket Cast is another one that you might want to look at if you’ve got an android phone. Simply there are also slightly better apps that you can pay for or download for on iPhones. So, I use one called Overcast myself.

So, you basically subscribe to these shows and then you’ll receive an update when a new show is available and you can listen to that on your phone, out of bounce. It downloads the show to begin with, so, you don’t need to have network coverage. So, it’s very good for things like flights, or if you’re doing washing up or anything where, so, background activity, podcasts are very good to listen to.

Who Can Launch a Podcast?

So, the next question is who can launch a podcast? Well, it’s more or less exactly the same kind of concept as we in indie self-publishing. Really, anybody can launch a podcast and I’m sure that some people would say that anybody has launched a podcast, there are some truly terrible ones out there. Just like there are some truly terrible indie books out there. But on the whole, most podcasts are of quiet a good standard and you can find an awful lot of niche podcasts about particular subjects. Apple is the big dog in the podcasting world, in the same way that Amazon is the big dog in the self-publishing world. There are other services out there but Apple are probably even more dominant in podcasting than Amazon are in self-publishing.

The Basics of RSS Feeds & Podcast Hosting

So, the way that a podcast works from a technical perspective, and you don’t necessarily need to know this too much to actually launch a podcast, is that there is a file that you have somewhere available on the internet and that file lists all of the episodes that you’ve got for your podcast. So, it will point to where they can download the audio file, which is basically an mp3 file of the show. And that is called an RSS feed. So, it sounds like its very, sort of, interesting concept but really RSS feed is just a list of locations of episodes of your podcast. The whole RSS thing stands for a Really Simple Syndication and they use it, you might have seen it with blogs as well, it’s basically just a list of articles. So, when you want to publish a podcast on to the Apple podcast app, you have to log into Apple and give it the location of your RSS feed.

So, in general, you’re better off to use a dedicated podcast hosting company like Libsyn, rather than trying to store the audio files on your own server. But you should never ever be trying to host your audio files on your own web server. Simply because the actual media capacity of downloading audio files, especially when you have a new episode, means that most web service hosts will throw you off their network if you try and host a pod cast with any kind of traffic whatsoever on to just a normal WordPress site. So you’re better off to be hosting those audio files, which basically just means putting your mp3 file somewhere where it is available to be downloaded.

So, as I said before, podcasting is the radio equivalent of self-publishing. And similarly to the Amazon Marketplace, the Apple Podcasting Marketplace has the big companies who are basically the old radio companies. So, MPR, the BBC, CBC, whatever country you’re in, chances are, there will be an awful lot of commercial radio shows that are repurposed as podcast episodes. And those shows usually have several people working for hours in a recording studio with a whole team of editors and sound effects people. And you can notice the difference between that and two people in a shed talking into a microphone. Which you may have heard in some of the podcasts. But actually, again, as we’re indie publishing, most people are somewhere in between those two levels. And you can actually get a very, very long way to becoming close to the more radio format show with a reasonably small amount of equipment. And certainly with the right preparation and try and avoid some of the mistakes, it’s actually surprisingly easy to get good audio quality.

The other thing that is slightly similar to indie podcasting is that there are a lot of huge indie podcasters who are independent people who are having really big success on the platform. For example, Dan Carlin, who is a former radio host, I believe, his Hardcore History podcast, which is an independently produced one, had twenty million downloads for his show in January. His show is very strange in that he does multiple hour, almost audio book quality history monologues. And he only releases an episode every six months or so. But even so, that is the kind of level that the really, really big shows get.

Why you SHOULDN'T launch a Podcast

So, I think it’s only wise to say the negatives first. Now, a lot of people will just skip this slide when they’re talking about podcasting and tell you what a great idea it is and why you should start a podcast but there are actually, in my experience, quite a few good reasons why you shouldn’t launch a podcast. Or at least these are reasons why you shouldn’t think about launching a podcast. So, whatever anybody says, podcasting is generally a terrible way to build up a following. Unless you’ve got a following on an existing platform, you are not going to get that many listeners for your podcast, when it starts. So, we talked about Dan Carlin’s twenty million downloads a month for a show. And that seems like, oh great, I might get that my first month. Well, unless you’re very lucky or very skilled at marketing or you’ve already got twenty million people reading your blog, you’re most certainly not going to get twenty million downloads a month. The average figure from Libsyn, who are basically the biggest podcasting hosting company, is that in the month after you first publish a show, the average medium, that is the show with 50% of the downloads below it and 50% above it, the average number of downloads is about 250. It varies, up and down from about 220 to 260, depending on the time of year and how many podcasts there are. But this basically the average of downloads that your show will have. And most beginning podcasts, including mine, you will start off with hardly any downloads at all. Again, this is affected by what existing audience you have. But if you have no audience at all and you’re a new author, then podcasting isn’t a great way to build a following in the short term.

It’s also actually quite a lot of work to produce a podcast. Because you’ve got to edit the audio files, you’ve got to record the show in the first place, you have got to pay for hosting costs and if you’ve got guests, you need to book them in and you need to arrange it. And yeah, it’s also a lot of time to actually produce it because you almost have to produce a blog post as well a lot of the time, depending on what you do.

And of course the old, buy my books policy. But that doesn’t really work anywhere. So, if you just have a podcast that is an enormous advert for your book, you’re not going to get any sales from that. In fact you probably won’t get any downloads at all. So, that approach, just like with blogging or any kind of social media thing, if you’re just only telling people to buy your books, then you’re not likely to be that successful.

Why you SHOULD launch a Podcast

So, let’s get on to the happy side of things. Why should you consider launching a podcast? Well as I discussed, and this is certainly the case of ALLi which is why ALLi has launched so many podcasts recently, is if you have a community already, then the connection you get with your audience, if they listen to your podcast, will be so much more in depth. If you think, if you’re listening to my voice now, how much more connected do you feel to me, than it would be if I would just put the slides up and there was no voice whatsoever. Sure people can find blogs easier because SEO is much more advanced and blogs are easier to consume in some ways, than a podcast. But on the other hand, podcasting, the connection you have with people, it seems even strange in that many ways it’s even more a connection than you get with video. I’ve never really ever seen a medium where you make such a connection with people on a personal level, as with podcasting.

Now, for non-fiction, it gives you the opportunity to have credibility in that area. So, let’s say you were writing say a non-fiction book about fly fishing. So, there may not be an podcasts about fly fishing or the particular kind of fly fishing that you do. So, maybe it’s like rivers in South Scotland, is where you’ve got your book about fly fishing. Then by starting a show, you can always tell people well, I’m the host of the South Scotland Fly Fishing podcast. And that gives you credibility. Now, obviously having a book on it as well, gives you credibility and it gives you a way to basically start interviewing people and talking to people. And they will think, oh yeah, who was that person who was interviewing me about fly fishing in South Scotland? And you get a credibility from having a podcast.

This comes on to the other point that if you have an interview show, then it gives you a great way to make connections with other authors or people in your field of expertise. And personally, I think this is one of the big reasons why I’ve kept going with my podcast, despite not necessarily at times, having great download figures. It’s just given me an opportunity to interview or talk to and make connections with people who I would otherwise have no connection with whatsoever.

And you can see it as an author, if you want to get to know other authors in your genre, then a podcast is potentially a fantastic way because you can have a pre-chat before the show, you can talk to them. You’ve obviously got the show time. It’s a great way to be able to talk to authors. Now, clearly you can email people but it’s not really quite the same. We’ve come back to this connection thing with audio, it’s not the same as having a, basically, a Skype call with somebody. And this gives you a great opportunity to reach out to people. I mean I found that in general, I’d say about 90% of the people I’ve approached for podcast interviews have said yes. Now, you’ll probably want to build up some kind of relationship with they, say, tweet at them or have some sort of conversation with them first, if you can. But even so, even with cold asking for people for a podcast interview, an awful lot of people will say yes, if they know what a podcast is. The tip is to try and find people who have also got podcasts because they are going to mention you on their podcast, that they’ve been interviewed, possibly and it also means that they may reciprocate and interview you on their podcast. Which is good for everybody.

And the last point I’ll make, I’ve mentioned before, but if you are the first podcast on a particular topic, that does make you, basically, the first expert on it, at least in that medium.

How do you Start a Podcast?

Right, let’s get on to some technical stuff here. So, how do you start a podcast? Well, as I described, what you’re needing to do is produce what’s called an mp3 file. So, that’s basically just a file which is a recording of anywhere between say five to two hours of audio. As I said, Dan Carlin’s shows, he’s done up to six hours. But the normal length of a podcast is somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour. Though, like with anything, you can do as long or short podcast as you like. Generally speaking, I think the length of the podcast should be related to how often you do it. So, I wouldn’t suggest doing an hourly podcast every day. And similarly if you’re going to do a podcast every three months, then you may want to make it a longer format show. But like with everything, there are no particular set and fast rules for this.

Podcasting Equipment

Tim's Podcasting set up

So, in terms of what you’d need for equipment, you could quite happily just record a podcast with your laptop, using the built in mic, the only trouble is actually, most of the built in mic’s in laptops are terrible. So, we shouldn’t start using a laptop mic for a podcast because it will sound terrible. So, at the very minimum you need what is called a USB mic. Now, this can be as simple as one of these sort of headset things that you can buy, something like a Plantronics one, though those themselves have issues. But if you’re just going to be doing very simple interview based shows using Skype, so, you’re not talking to somebody in person, then one of them can be just about useable for using for a podcast. Generally speaking though, you probably want a separate set of headphones which can be just something that plugs in to your computer, like one of those Apple ones or just a normal set of headphones will do, if you’re doing an interview and a USB mic which is a mic that just plugs into one of the USB sockets in your computer. I’ll show them in here, in the middle, a little illustration of what a USB connector looks like. If you’ve ever used any kind of component on your computer you will have plugged in a USB connector into a USB port. It’s become the standard now for modern computers.

Now, there are some great, cheap microphones which are both USB and XLR. Now, XLR is like an audio connector for a microphone. And this is what people use for professional things like, if you’re doing music recording or things like that. They use this three pin XLR connector. Now, there are some microphones like the ATR2100 and there’s an equivalent Samsung make of microphone which is cheaper, everywhere outside of the US than the ATR2100. And both of them have both an XLR and a USB connector. So that if you buy, say, an ATR2100, then you can use it with your computer to begin with via USB connector and then later on, if you want to go to a more advanced setup, you can switch over to the XLR connector. Now, the problem with XLR connections is that you can’t plug them directly into a computer. You have to plug it into something like a mixer or some kind of audio equipment. So, the intermediate level, which gives better quality audio than just plugging in a USB mic into a computer. You can take and XLR mic and plug it into a mixer, and potentially you don’t even actually need a computer in this setup, if you’re doing just an interview with somebody else who is present in the same room as you. Because even with the best computer in the world, they tend to make a certain amount of fan noise, which is hardly noticeable on most audio recordings but dependent on your computer, may actually be noticeable.

So, if you’re going to be doing interviews with somebody at your house and they’re going to be coming to visit you, then you might want to get two XLR mic’s, and a mixer, you’ll probably need headphones for both of you and a digital recorder. Now, a digital recorder is a device where it basically records what’s happening around. Now, sometimes these actual digital recorders can give fairly good recordings just without any other equipment. The only slight issue is that you have to worry about placement and where you are. They almost all accept an input from a mixer or they will, some of them actually have multiple XLR mic connections in directly. And you could actually record a podcast directly into a digital recorder. Although there are issues with sound levels, if you do this.

So, the whole advanced area of podcasting is somewhere where you really do need to follow tutorials because if you’re like me, you can start getting into audio equipment and then you discover the fatal fact that virtually all audio cables seem to be totally different. So, even though there’s an XLR connector, there might be a strange connector called like a TS or TRS at the other end of the connection and then you almost invariably buy the wrong connector. So, if you do want to go for a more advanced podcast set up, I would certainly talk to somebody who has done it before and read through some of the tutorials or maybe even buy an equipment package by somebody like Cliff Ravencroft, does an equipment package where you get all of the mixer and the microphone and the cables, all with nice little diagrams telling you where to install stuff. But yeah, certainly not something to rush in to.

But another very simple situation, you just need a USB mic and a set of headphones. The absolute best, of course, is to hire a recording studio because they have actually got a sound proof booth. Though, I would say that I’ve actually been interviewed on podcasts where they do hire a recording studio and it’s fallen foul of the fact that I wasn’t in the same location and they run me on a telephone line. Almost invariably telephone connections are about the worst connection you can get in terms of audio. Telephones aren’t actually that good at high quality audio, in the same way the Skype and a lot of the other solutions out there, give way more clean audio sound. So, if you do hire a recording studio, don’t let them tell you to ring people, get them to use some sort of digital connection. And they probably should have the software to do this, to connect to somebody via Skype or some other digital medium, rather than telephoning people. Because then you end up with you sounding absolutely terrific and your guest, if they’re in a different location, sounding terrible.

Now, I put two field interview ones, and what I mean is if you want to go to places and interview people, as I say, the most obvious thing is to just buy a digital recorder and some of these can be quite portable and small. And they usually have a mic on them. And you can just sit there and just hold this digital recorder up to one or two people. A more advanced interview, field interview setup is to have two XLR mic’s and plug them in to a digital recorder, or possibly only one mic which you can move from you to the other person in a kind of reporter style format. You probably want headphones in that situation, so you can just check that the levels that are actually recording are working properly. So, these are general kinds of equipment that you could use for podcast.

Honestly you can spend almost as much money as you like on podcasting equipment. I’ve got a picture of my equipment on the right hand side. I’ve got a digital mixer, I’ve got a mixer, a digital recorder, I’ve actually got a voice effects box, which I’m too afraid to use most of the time and I’ve got it linked up to my computer, which has got a webcam on it. And I have done shows where I’ve actually just recorded the audio off a live Facebook broadcast and that may be a way, if you’re looking to get actual audio building, to do something along those lines.

Choosing Your Podcasting Niche

Ok, a very quick summary now of what not to do, from my lessons of doing a hundred odd podcast episodes. Now, the mistake I made and I keep doing the podcast because I find it useful for the connections I make, but don’t create a podcast about a topic that is nothing to do with your books. Now, this may sound like obvious advice but so many authors are doing this, and they do it with blogs and they do it with other content. If you’re really looking to create a podcast that is going to help your writing career, then you probably want to create say, a podcast that is related to the topic of your book. And this is true with fiction and non-fiction. It can be about the process of writing your book but it shouldn’t be just a general writing podcast, in my opinion. And certainly you probably don’t want to do another self-publishing podcast, unless you’ve got a book about self-publishing or you intend to write a book about self-publishing. So, it kind of sounds obvious but it’s not something, clearly, I’ve done. I’ve never written a book about self-publishing. I’m possibly never ever going to write a book about self-publishing. So, if you’re say a crime thriller writer, you probably want to podcast about something to do with crime or crime thrillers. You could interview other crime thriller authors and talk to them about their books or do a podcast where you talk to maybe real crime people. But really try to get an audience of people who are interested in your podcast, who are also people who are likely to be interested in your books.

Another thing that I don’t generally do very well, and I’ve seen other people do very well, notably Joanna Penn and Paul Teague, is don’t be afraid to mention those parts of your life that you feel comfortable sharing. So, people like the personal stories and, to find out what you’re doing. It’s almost this kind of voyeurism that we have. Now, I don’t do that, that much, on my show but certainly with Paul Teague’s Self-Publishing Journey’s podcast, his diary shows, in many ways, are much more interesting than his normal author interviews because he goes through everything that he’s doing each week. So, while I say make sure your podcast is about something to do with your books, don’t go down the fully professional route where you’re going to be not giving any of your kind of personal life away. You may be very private, in which case you may not want to do this but give as much of yourself into the podcast as you can.

Stereo vs. Mono Audio Tracks

Another much overlooked point is you probably don’t want to create a stereo podcast. Now, this is a little bit of an audio thing but we’ve all heard of like, stereo effects where you get one sound in one ear and one sound in another ear, if you’ve got a set of headphones or if you’ve got stereo speakers and the speakers have got two speakers, and you hear different things in each speaker. Now, you can do, you can record in stereo. So, you’ll hear your voice on one side and it’s great for music, stereo, music sounds so much better on stereo. But the trouble is that for an mp3 file, having a stereo mp3 file is twice the size of a mono podcast. So, this causes a problem for places where there are low or poor internet speeds. And let’s say you’re trying to go for a  global audience, as people download podcasts, you don’t want your podcast to be the one that takes three times as long to download as everybody else’s. So, I would suggest going for mono podcasts, where you’ve just got one channel. I mean, the introductory music will sound worse but ultimately, I think it’s worth it in terms of having a smaller show to download.

Avoid an explicit podcast

Another thing that you probably want to avoid is having an explicit show. This means one with swearing in it. Now, I’ve got nothing against swearing and I’m not saying this to make any kind of point. But iTunes does ban shows from being available, in particular iTunes stores, if they contain swearing and they’re flagged as such. Now, the very worst thing is to have an explicit show and not tag it as explicit on iTunes because then you’ll probably get your show thrown off iTunes and be banned. So, you don’t want to do that but if possible, keep all swearing out of your podcast. And just bleep people if you need to.

Avoid Copyright Infringement

Another great podcast failure is people playing copywrited music. So, even though you might like We Are The Champions by Queen, don’t play it in your podcasts because you will be opening yourself up to being sued to, well, have no money whatsoever. Now, there’s an awful lot of podcasts that totally ignore this rule, but the trouble is that if you suddenly have success with your podcast for some reason, you don’t want to end up being sued by record companies because you haven’t purchased your own music or, I think YouTube has a collection of music that you can use and there are companies like Dual Beat and Music Radio Creative, who you can buy music off, to use as your introductory music on the show.

Podcast Hosting Options

The next what not to do is to go to a hosting company that isn’t established or has potential financial issues. Now, the company I’m thinking of here is SoundCloud. A lot of these companies offering free and cheap hosting of podcasts are venture capital funded and they’re running out of money. I mean SoundCloud has almost gone bankrupt several times in the last few months. And while SoundCloud will probably continue to be funded, the podcasting side of SoundCloud is so small and so loss making that it’s extremely likely that at some point, they’re going to abandon all the podcasters. So, that’s why I wouldn’t recommend going to SoundCloud. Unless you’re doing a very, very short run podcast where you’re not bothered if your show just disappears in a couple of months time.

Podcast Ratings and Reviews

Another one is something that you hear a lot about and it’s not necessarily with the release of IOS11, which is the newest one where they’ve changed the podcast app a little. Not quite as big an issue as it was before but, now a lot of people obsess about ratings and reviews for their show and also something called new and noteworthy. New and noteworthy is an Apple chart where they show podcasts that have been new or noteworthy. And there was all of this idea that if you got your show into new and noteworthy, you get so many hundred downloads. But basically what seems to be the case is that hardly anybody ever looks at the new and noteworthy chart. And I’ve got my show into new and noteworthy and I saw hardly any increase in downloads whatsoever. But you’ll hear of, a little bit old from a few years ago when people go on about getting into new and noteworthy. So, don’t worry about that whatsoever.

Now, similarly with reviews for podcasting, hardly anybody looks at podcast reviews. It’s not like books. It’s not formatted the same way as Amazon where reviews are extremely important and people do read the reviews on Amazon. But you’ve got to remember that podcasts are free, you can listen to a little bit of it if you want to and generally most people tend to find podcasts through word of mouth or through other advertising. And they don’t look at the reviews. I mean, obviously, you don’t want to end up with just three one star reviews but honestly, reviews for podcasting are possibly one of the biggest waste of time things to worry about in the whole podcasting area. And not many people will say this but it’s just not worth concentrating on ratings and reviews.

Ok, so we talked about what not to do. What should you be doing?

Building a Podcast Audience

Well as I said, if you’re interested in the idea of building an audience, then you can kind of do that with a podcast but you have to combine it with something else and I would say the best way to do this would be to have a Facebook live show where you record the audio of it and then that audio becomes the podcast. There are some things that you do need to bear in mind if you do this though. Firstly don’t, either don’t shout out too much to people who watch live on your show or edit those bits out when you actually release the audio. Because you will, if you regularly have a Facebook live or a Periscope, which is Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook live show, then you will get people watching it live and they will find out about it and they’ll mentioned it to other people. But you don’t want your audio podcast to be about just you saying hello to people who nobody is going to know who you’re talking about. And similarly if you do anything visual on the video side of a Facebook live or a Periscope, then either describe what you’re doing or cut it out of the podcast.

The next thing I said is to set up checklists of what you should do and how to promote your show. I’m just going to pause here for a second and then bring up my, so, by the magical world of video editing, I’ve now got my edit podcast audio list. Now, I don’t actually use this anymore because I outsource my podcast editing, it saved me a lot of time but obviously costs more than doing it myself. But you almost certainly want to create this kind of checklist of things so that you can guarantee that you’re going to do it. Because it’s very hard to remember, certainly with podcast editing, and also with things like show promotion, exactly what you need to do. So, as you’re going through, write a little checklist, and just keep pen and paper and photocopy some sheets of your checklist. There are all sorts of ways of doing this. But I would suggest having a checklist.

So, I’m now going to magically go back. So, we talked about creating the checklist and yes, expect the first few episodes to be terrible. This is kind of true with any activity. They won’t be brilliant. Nobody expects new podcast episodes to be that wonderful.

If you’re really a stickler for perfection do a trial run podcast for about 10 or 20 episodes. Get used to how to do it and then switch to whatever your main one is.

Podcast Editing

One thing I would say is if you’re going to do the editing yourself, and possibly if you’re not, take a tutorial sometimes, find something on YouTube or find a podcasting tutorial about using either Audacity, which is free software or something like Adobe Addition, there’s Reaper, there’s quite a few, Hindenburg, there’s quite a few different programs for editing audio. A lot of people use Garage Band, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that but it depends on how much editing you want to do. I remember all the um’s and ah’s and clicks and noises from my show. But a lot of people leave them in and to be honest, it doesn’t make that much difference.

Make it easy to Subscribe on Android

I put here, add the subscribe to android button to your website. And I’ll quickly show you what that is. So, on my Begin Self-Publishing podcast, you can see I’ve got a subscribe to android button. Now, there’s a site you can go to, called Subscribe on Android and it’s set up by the guys at Blubrry, one of the big hosting companies. And you post in your URL for RSS feed and it will create a bit of code that you can paste on to your site. And all of these apps which are for android, because we said android hasn’t got it’s own native podcast app, like with IOS. So, by all of these apps, if you browse through your site on an android phone, and you’ve got that button on your site, if somebody clicks on it, it will automatically subscribe to your show from that podcast app. So, the subscribe on android button, and you go to subscribeonandriod.com to create it, is worth creating for your show.

Become a Podcast Guest

So, another thing which makes sense to do is to be interviewed on other podcasts. Now, depending on your budget, you can actually pay services to get you podcasting interviews. Generally speaking , your best advice is just to listen to podcasts and maybe approach the people who run them and see if they would be interested in having you as a guest. You can just forget about the whole process of starting your own podcast and just go for being interviewed on podcasts, and that’s a totally reasonable approach. But yes, any chance you have to do podcast interviews exposes you to everybody in to that particular podcasts audience. So, it’s certainly worth doing.

Keep at it!

And my final point is to just keep going. You need to appreciate that podcasting is kind of like with self-publishing in that you need to keep going and you will only probably get results over time. So, don’t necessarily give up if you don’t end up with twenty million downloads in the first month. Just appreciate that, say, if you get 50 downloads a month, that is you talking to up to 50 people every week or however often you do your podcast.

And finally, this is how you can contact me. I am on both Twitter and Instagram as BeginSPPodcast. I have also got Stonehampress accounts on both of them. And you can email me at [email protected]. Obviously feel free to look up the Begin Self-Publishing podcast on the podcast app and also, obviously, all the Ask ALLi podcast shows are worth listening too as well. So, hopefully you’ve learnt something about podcasting today and thank you very much for watching this.

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About Indie Author Fringe

If you’re not familiar with our Fringe event, it’s three-times a year, online conference for self-publishing authors, brought to you by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and fringe to the major global publishing fairs; London Book Fair, BookExp, and Frankfurt Book Fair.

ALLi brings together the most up-to-date self-publishing education and information available and broadcasts it to authors everywhere. Running 24 sessions over 24 continuous hours allows our members, and other authors round the globe, to attend sessions, no matter where they’re located.

Our next Indie Author Fringe Conference in on October 14th. Just click here to register and you won’t miss any of our event updates.

Author Bio

Tim Lewis is the author of three Science Fiction novellas and two (soon to be three) short fantasy novels.  He is also the host of the Begin Self-Publishing Podcast as has interviewed over forty authors, experts and marketing specialists about how to produce and market a book.

Website: http://www.stonehampress.com

Facebook: Facebook/timlewis808

Twitter: @stonehampress

Pinterest: stonehampress

Email: [email protected]