How to Make a Book out of a Podcast

It’s never been easier to take long-form audio content like podcasts and repurpose it into an easy-to-write book.

If you’re already podcasting, this is a way to boost your credibility as a “published author,” and have a product to sell on your show.

The process of transcription, editing, and publication can seem daunting, which explains why so few people do the seemingly obvious.

You can’t just put up a bunch of rough, unedited transcripts and expect people to read more than first couple of pages.

The spoken word comes out differently than prose. That’s not the only hurdle.

• Without context, the interviews won’t flow together
• People use way more words than are necessary to convey their points.
• Publishing your work means formatting it as a book.
• You’ll want to get your guest’s permission before editing their words.

These are hardly insurmountable and I’ve done over half a dozen times.

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Get organized

Create a dashboard to track the interviews through each stage from initial approval to rough transcription, through later rounds of edits and final sign-off by your guest.

Notion.so + Google docs will take you 90% of the way there, with Signature.ly being an easy way to collect permissions.

Step 2: Edit a bit at a time, one round at a time

The first read-throughs are for identifying broad subheaders and starting to “trim the fat.” You can hire freelance editors for the first round, or get accurate transcripts through Rev.com. You can also work with AI-generated transcripts from sites like Otter.ai but this will take a bit longer.

Step 3: Omit surplus words and rearrange content to flow together better

You have to ruthlessly cut out any words or sentences that don’t contain good content. Get a copy of Style by Strunk and White or Plain English for Lawyers to learn how to edit for conciseness and accuracy.

There are ample resources from Amazon showing how to publish once you have a polished manuscript. Don’t let these early hurdles stop you from writing your book.

This post was created with Typeshare