Edit, edit, edit, and then edit some more.
Before you officially launch your podcast, you’re supposed to have a bank of episodes to hook people in and get theme excited for you to release your next one. This week, my goal was to finalize the podcast trailer and my first four episodes.
The trailer is under 2 minutes and explains what this podcast is about and why people should listen to it.
Episode 1 is 6 minutes and reminds our listeners how a bill becomes a law.
Episode 2 is 12 min and explains 15 of the most common ways lobbyists kill bills.
Episode 3 is my first interview episode and out of an hour-long recording, I pulled the best 17 min of content.
Episode 4 is similar, with 23 min of content that I felt was interesting enough to keep.
It takes hours and hours and hours to edit these episodes, and the AI tools are not as sophisticated as you would think. They can take out pauses and filler words like “uhm,” “you know,” and “like,” but they often cut off the word before or after. You have to manually go in and fix the deleted part not to cut off the words you want to keep. And some guests have a lot more filler words that need to be removed than others.
You also have to mute the person who is not speaking, but then unmute them when they say “uh huh,” or “oh, for sure,” because you want the episode to be conversational. You don’t just want one person speaking, and then the other person speaks, etc. You want there to be that nice banter back and forth, but unfortunately sometimes the microphones are competing with each other and it’s hard to edit the dialog exactly perfect to where you can hear both people speaking at the same time.
And just when you think you’ve got everything perfect, you have to export the recording and listen to it again. You will inevitably find things you didn’t catch, so you need to reopen the file and edit again. And again. And again. When you finally, finally get the exported file into as good a shape as you’re ever going to get it with your completely amateur skill set, you publish it to Spotify where you find mistakes that you didn’t pick up on when listening to the exported file.
You may also need to re-record yourself and splice it in, for example, when you accidentally call Eugene the capital of Oregon instead of Salem…
So you delete from Spotify, reopen the export, edit some more, and export again. You re-publish to Spotify, pick your cover art (try — and fail — to photoshop your own cover art), write your descriptions, adjust the preview (a roughly 30-second clip of your episode), and wait for Spotify to crash or an error to occur. When you finally get everything uploaded correctly and saved, you open Spotify on your phone to discover that the cover art for your episodes got switched even though that’s not what your computer screen shows.
My shoulders, back, and neck hurt from being hunched over, my ears are full of wax, my kids had to fend for themselves all weekend, I am even more sleep-deprived than usual, and my eyes feel like they’ve been staring at lasers. All for a project that I am doing for free and which may never go anywhere. So yeah, I’ve spent a LOT of time editing this week. The audio isn’t perfect. The volume levels are not quite where I wish they were. Sometimes the smoothing feature ends up making it sound like I am leaning into and away from my mic like a person rocking back and forth in their chair while they talk. But I know it will get better. I will find my groove, and eventually editing will take less and less time.
I need to focus on my actual job this week, so that’s why I was determined to get the trailer and these four episodes DONE before Monday. I have a recording session coming up this week with my friend the pharmacist who became a pot lobbyist turned startup executive, and I am looking forward to interviewing her. For now, I am going to put on my headphones, get some fresh air, and go for a walk while I listen to these episodes for the 19th time to make sure there are no glaring mistakes.
Oh wait, it’s raining…
