On the Casting of Pods
I am (softly) relaunching my old podcast, "Author Alchemist"
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Back in 2018, I tried to launch a coaching business. It was all the rage in the era for “digitalpreneurs” and I genuinely felt like I had something to offer by way of helping authors with their writing goals. I also thought that I needed to niche down, as that was always recommended by gurus such as Pat Flynn and Brooke Castillo.
None of this was in error! It was a good idea overall.
No, the error was in my approach to doing those things.
I mimicked what other people were doing, hoping it would work. I wasn't being true to who I was or what I was selling, putting on a veneer of “internet influencer” combined with “confident voice of authority,” and the upshot was that I didn't do it very well. I felt like a little kid trying to walk around in her mother’s heels—it didn’t fit.
However, out of that experience, there was born a podcast. The Author Alchemist podcast began in June of 2018, which I only know now because I went back and looked at the recording date for the audio file of episode one.
Back then, I was stumbling around in the dark and had no idea of how to put together a podcast and publish it. I was learning as I went, which is honestly one of my preferred methods of learning anything, but it was definitely challenging.
Furthermore, I have unreasonably high standards for myself. You might even call me a recovering perfectionist (an ongoing process).
These days, I know better than to expect perfection from myself, but back then I had been listening to a lot of podcasts and had some very firm ideas on what my podcast should be like. I completely dismissed the fact that the highly polished podcasts I had been listening to were created by a team of professionals doing recording, sound processing, editing, and everything else that goes into creating a quality podcast. No, that fact I just ignored. I had a goal, damnit!
In the end, I mucked around until I put together something that wasn't half bad. I tried to do it weekly, but between my soul-sucking full-time job and trying to write a novel, that didn't happen as regularly as I wanted it to. I waffled back and forth on scheduling. It probably affected how many subscribers I got, but despite all of that, I managed to record over forty episodes between late 2018 and early 2020.
I half-heartedly recorded a few episodes in 2021 and 2022, but eventually dropped it entirely when I decided the coaching business was a bust and headed in a completely different direction. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my motivation for it crashed during the pandemic lockdown.
So, it's just been sitting there since June of 2022. I had moved it from one podcast hosting company to another, losing all my metrics and (unknowingly) most of the show notes that went with each episode. OUCH.
I honestly didn't plan to pick it up again, I was just too lazy to blow it away entirely. I figured the Author Alchemist business had folded as a failed enterprise with a lot of good lessons learned but no hope for the future. I was at peace with not having a podcast to produce anymore.
Or was I?
Along came my friends Gina and Melody, who are fellow authors although in different genres than I write. We enjoy getting together and talking about creativity and writing and spirituality, usually over the delicious food that Melody cooks up for us.
At some point during one of our ladies luncheon escapades, one of them (I'm not sure if it was Gina or Melody) said, we really should record these conversations for a podcast!
We laughed, of course…but then I thought about it and said, “Conversations are rarely as interesting when they are recorded as people think they are, but we do talk about a lot of interesting topics. If you want to do a podcast, well, I have some hard won knowledge on how to do it. I'll be the producer, so we just have to figure out what we're going to talk about and schedule a time!”
I'm not sure they believed me at first, but I pushed a little because I know a great idea when I see one.
We just published our 29th episode of Around the Writer’s Table.
I'm super proud of what we've done. I've even ported over all the older episodes onto YouTube, as that is becoming a much more popular podcasting app these days (and is only going to become more popular as Google closes out their separate division of Google Podcasts to lean more into YouTube).
Recently, as I was sorting through folders and files and doing some very basic organizational cleanup on my computer, I came across some of the older episodes of the Author Alchemist podcast. I realized that the whole podcast is still sitting out there in the world, available on all the popular podcast apps.
I thought about what a shame it was that the podcast was abandoned. There was some good stuff there—not always great stuff, but occasional good insights layered over with the coaching business focus that I had at the time. But still, I talked about things like trusting your obsessions, . And in the same way I had asked Gina and Melody if they really wanted to do a podcast, I asked myself: Do I really want to do a podcast? Again?
The answer is pretty obvious. I was already doing one podcast with friends, so really, why the hell not do one for myself?
TL;DR: I'm starting up the podcast. Again!
As with so many things over the years, though, my focus has shifted. I’ve talked a lot in this newsletter about how my goals as a writer have changed significantly over the past couple of years, even if on the surface it doesn't look like they changed at all. My motivation and my goals are very different now and that's the important part, right? RIGHT!!!!!
So, this time, the podcast is going to be less about me trying to be some mystical, all-powerful guru for authors (ick!) and more talking about my own experiences, reflections, and goals (yay!). I plan to bring more of myself into the story, mining my own experiences to talk about the challenges authors face today. It will still mostly be about mindset, with a few side quests into craft.
I’m not hoping or planning on it becoming popular, or a critical piece of my overall business as a writer. Mostly, I enjoy sharing my thoughts about the things I’m going through and are challenging me, and I hope it will serve as a point of connection to other writers with similar challenges and readers who want to know more about my work.
I hope you'll join me! It is available on YouTube as well as Podbean and all the other major podcast distribution apps. I’m slowly re-adding/correcting show notes (ack!) and porting older episodes over to YouTube, but that will take a while as I’m going to be leisurely about it.
Let me know what you think, or ask me questions, or suggest topics you’d like to hear me talk about. I'd love to hear from you…almost as much as I love to talk about writing!