From Recording Your Podcast to Publishing Your Book
Publishing your own book is a great way to establish your credibility, but writing a book takes a lot of work. Before you can think about the book’s cover art, you need to assemble all of the topics, stories, and examples that will fill the space between the covers. Compiling all of that information is easier said than done, especially if you are starting out with a blank page staring back at you. Even once you have gathered everything you want to include, organizing them and combining them into something valuable can take a long time and isn’t very engaging. All in all, it can be a grueling process, but there is a simpler way that provides so many more benefits than a simple book could ever offer.
Hosting a podcast allows you to get your wheels turning and you can flesh out your ideas. On Episode #004 of Creating The Greatest Show, special guest Molly McGrath shared how she is using her podcast, Hire And Empower with Molly McGrath, to write her next book. Casey Cheshire also touched on how he used The Hard Corps Marketing Show to write his book, Marketing Automation Unleashed. With a podcast, you can interview experts, cultivate your own ideas, and curate the best stories to fill your book with and establish yourself as a thought-leader.
Enjoying The Research For Your Book
Before you get recording or writing, you need to figure out what you need to learn and who you need to talk to learn from. If your book is around a topic, such as B2B marketing automation, like Casey’s, you should be talking with B2B marketing experts. Once you know what you need to cover in your book and who you need to learn from, you can begin inviting those subject matter experts to your podcast. Following this method lets you gain the expert level insight without having to bury yourself in books and online courses.
When interviewing experts, it’s important that your podcast has a structure that allows them to share their nuggets of wisdom. It’s best to start the podcast with a section for SMEs to discuss their secrets of what they specialize in. For example, Casey always asks guests to, “smash a marketing myth or misconception” as the first question on The Hard Corps Marketing Show. This way the guest start providing valuable information right from the start and it’s easy to know where to look for knowledge when referring back to their episode.
Starting your own podcast has too many steps to get into here but check our other resources to learn more.
READ MORE: Basic Podcast Equipment Checklist
Building out the Framework of Your Book
Whether you’re a novice or a renowned expert in your book’s topic, a podcast lets you explore the topic at every level. As your understanding of the subject matter grows, you can pursue the idea further and get deeper into the concept. As you record more episodes and learn from more experts, you can discover the best jumping-off point to introduce the topic to your readers.
Molly enjoys this format because you can start with topics in mind or discover them along the way with the podcast. For Molly, the podcast has been so helpful that it is serving as the backbone of her book.
My podcast right now is going to be one of the biggest frameworks for my book.
Molly McGrath
For his book, Casey took everything he was learning from The Hard Corps Marketing Show and organized into webinars around each sub-section. The transcripts from these podcast-based webinars became the base manuscript that was used as the foundation of each chapter. As you can see, writing a book is not the only way to repurpose the great content from your podcast.
READ MORE: 11 Ways to Repurpose Your Podcast Content
Gathering Amazing Anecdotes From Your Podcast Guests
Writing a powerful book requires filling it with powerful stories. Stories are like currency for authors. Unfortunately, not everyone’s life is as full of great stories as Jerry Seinfeld’s so it can be excruciating to find the right stories to include.
Instead of hunting down interesting stories, with a podcast, you let the stories come to you by inviting interesting guests. Through your podcast, you get to hear your guests’ stories and experiences. Your podcast allows you to be a facilitator for great stories. While you could just ask those same people to email you a written copy of their story, as Casey put it on the podcast, “stories come out so much better in a dialogue like this”.
To keep track of the great stories and how the guests tell them, Molly takes notes during the podcast and specifically writes down the exact words that her guests use. Using their exact words makes their quotes and stories more powerful. Molly loves using this format because “the stuff that comes out is liquid gold.”
Casey also finds it’s much easier to learn from his guests on the podcast than to research all of the information himself. In his words, “my book was created from having interviews with people and then I summarize what I learned and what I already knew.” This is a great way to shorten the amount of time it takes to write a book because you can reinforce your own knowledge with that of your guests.
Making a Ghostwriter’s Day With Your Podcast
While many people want to write their own book cover to cover, hiring a professional ghostwriter makes much more sense from a practical standpoint. This doesn’t mean that your book will be devoid of your voice and personality. For ghostwriters, your podcast can be an invaluable resource in the writing of your book. By listening to your podcast, a ghostwriter can learn your tonality and voice which they can then weave into your book.
Beyond just the stylistic concerns, your podcast exists as a well of knowledge about the topic that your ghostwriter can constantly draw from. Providing your writer with the transcripts of your podcast gives them a great base to work off of. This was so effective in Molly’s case that when she had her first call with her ghostwriter, “she came back and pretty much had the entire chapter outlined.”
Casey got so much from his podcasts that his publisher forced him to trim the book’s length.
When I originally did this process with my book, we ended up with 40,000 words, and then the publisher was like, yay, that’s great. But you know what? We’ve talked about this and you’re contracted for 30,000 words
Casey Cheshire
Casey managed to draw so much material from his podcast because the material within podcasts is so dense. When you’re speaking with experts, you don’t want to cut them off when they’re getting into the details and when you’re outlining their ideas in a book, it’s easy to run long. Along with depth, podcasts also let you cover a wide variety of topics, and trying to fit all of them into a book can cause problems.
However, by working with a professional writer, you can distill your book down to the most impactful stories and content. Remember, there are plenty of great ways to reuse anything that doesn’t make it into this book!
READ MORE: Advanced Podcast Content Repurposing
What to do when there’s Too much to fit into your Book
There are some great ways to integrate your podcast and book to create a more valuable and powerful resource for your readers. You can’t fit everything you’ve learned on the podcast into your book, but it’s important to direct others where they can get the full learning experience.
Molly came up with an ingenious solution to integrate her podcast into her book. She will include a scannable QR code in the book next to sections that correspond with a specific episode. This way, readers simply have to scan the code to open the podcast episode and continue learning.
Casey went with a more manual solution to this problem in Marketing Automation Unleashed. Wherever a section of the book referenced a specific guest or episode, there was a graphic included in the margin of the page that displayed the guest name, episode title, and episode number to help readers find the right episode.
It’s plain to see that the headache-free way to write the book that will cement you as a thought leader is with a podcast. The next step is to start a podcast. Don’t panic! We have all the resources you’ll to create a great podcast, starting with finding the right spot to record your podcast.
READ MORE: How to Choose a Podcast Recording Room
The Next Step Toward Your Book
If you’d like to learn more about creating a book from your podcast, repurposing your podcast content, or starting a new podcast, book a call with our team. We’d love to explore how we can help you reach your B2B goals, whatever they may be!