All Things Writing

The Craft of Writing

Category Archives: Podcasting


by Leave a comment

Must-Haves

If you’re going to go it alone – or at least try to – in establishing yourself with a blog and various other social media accoutrements, here are some things that can save you some sanity.

Podcasts: Yes. You create the audio recording. You can use GarageBand for that. It works great. You might want a different mic. All of that is discussed in this post. However, unless you bleed through your eyes, you may not discover that you need to burn a feed and submit the feed to Apple. How do you do that? My suggestion is to run to Feedburner. It works. Oh. And you’ll also need to upload your audio file somewhere. You can upload it to your WordPress site, but you have to upgrade it first. You’ll find that info when you click on Media and look closely at all the stuff you ignore when uploading images. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Hmmm

Has anyone else noticed that writers don’t just write any more? Maybe they never did, but I distinctly remember not doing a lot of what I now do when I first started freelancing. What am I talking about? This whole social media – presence thing.

In the past two weeks I have created a podcast, burned a feed, submitted the podcast to iTunes, pleaded with them to help me switch to a different feed, tweaked the feed, and seen it all appear in iTunes – pretty much as I’d envisioned it. Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

My Brain Hurts

I can now relate to both the Monty Python guy who said, “My brain hurts” and whoever it was that said he’d give his kingdom for a horse!

It is not just a matter of creating the podcast in GarageBand and then purchasing the WordPress media upgrade and uploading the audio file to WordPress.

Oh. So. Not. So.

You then need to create a feed in FeedBurner – which I did. But I wound up with two and opted for the first before I read all the stuff at the bottom. It was evidently the WordPress one I somehow already had. So now I have some of the correct info in the iTunes listing. And some not. But it’s up there! Am I disappointed? Yes. But I’ll mark it a Triple and go for the Grand Slam next time I’m at bat.

Meanwhile, would it not make sense to mention that there were additional steps to getting the correct url for iTunes. Never mind. I clearly have no business messing with this stuff. However, I am going to continue because having a career as a freelance writer is evidently not painful enough.

So – does anyone want some posts about how to do this, given that I can get you about 98% of the way there? By that I mean, your podcast will appear in iTunes and people can subscribe. The exact description of the podcast may come from the header of your blog rather than your heart’s desire.

Next up? A trailer for my book – which I saw on the shelf  at Barnes and Noble in Bethesda yesterday!!!!


by 3 Comments

Podcasting

Oh. My. Stars.

It’s not that I thought a podcast would be simple. I mean, I’m a writer. On demand, I can imagine some truly vivid worst case scenarios. Seriously, even my fevered imagination did not do justice to this effort.

First, I spent a couple of days figuring out the GarageBand was going to be just fine. (It was not at all obvious to me from the info on the Apple site!) I quickly discovered that using just the mic on my computer left me sounding like a child screaming into a tin can on a string in a cave with a serious echo. Enter the Blue Yeti microphone. I suppose there is a way to make it less obvious when I press and un-press the mute button – so far this eludes me. Likewise cutting the audio and re-taping a portion. If I were in charge of the audio for a film, the entire cast would sound like they had a bad case of the hiccups. I hasten to add that I am not blaming this on the mic. It clearly took care of the problem of sounding like a child with a tin can.

Now that I’ve invested days in this endeavor, I have a 10-minute podcast. I honestly am excited about it – I just wish it sounded more professional. I know how to get it into my iTunes. Next up for today is how to get it onto the iTunes store and add a link to my blog.

Fingers crossed, it will all work out just fine.