The Ghost of Podcast Past (2024 Edition)

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One of my favorite books from my college reading list is A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s a funny, tragic book that highlights the fact that someone will always think society is on a downward spiral…as well as hypocrisy.

An interesting fact about the book is that it almost didn’t see the light of day. The author, John Kennedy Toole, died tragically in 1969. A Confederacy of Dunces wasn’t published until 1980, thanks to work from another writer — Walker Percy — and Toole’s mother, Thelma.

A Confederacy of Dunces went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

I regularly think about all the incomplete and unpublished works out there — from authors and would be authors who didn’t, or couldn’t, get their books on the shelves.

Then I think about how easy publishing and distributing a book is today. And while the writing is still the hard part, that can be easier too.

Especially if you have a podcast.

What Podcasting has to do with Writing a Book

As someone who’s written 5 books over the last 12 years, I can tell you my process for each of them has looks more or less the same:

1. Pick a topic I know very well — something I’m an expert in. Do some research to see what other books exist on that topic.
2. Create a mind map or outline of everything I want to include in the book. Do some research to make sure I didn’t miss anything (or at least anything I feel should be included).
3. Organize that mind map/outline into chapters in an order than makes sense for the reader. Do research on how these topics get presented from other experts in the field.
4. Write each chapter, while (you guessed it), doing research to make sure I’m representing each topic accurately.
5. Adjust each chapter once I get them back from edit, once again consulting my old friend research, as I make those changes to ensure accuracy and consistency.

As you can see, there’s a lot of research involved. This is true whether you’re investigating a new topic, or you’re an expert on the topic. Good authors do research to make sure they’re presenting accurate, up-to-date information for their readers.

This is also true if you have a podcast (at least a good one), right? You’re selecting topics and presenting them in a way that’s easy to consume for the listener.

If you have guests, you’re researching those guests and asking them good questions as a proxy for your listeners, who may not have the same access to the guests that you do.

If you have a solo show, then you’re creating outlines, and possibly scripts, on topics you know well, while doing a bit of research to ensure accuracy.

And for many podcasters, once the episode is published, that’s the end.

But it doesn’t have to be.

A Quick Note on Using AI in Your Book Writing Process

Before I get to the main event, I do want to touch on a topic that you may have already thought this article would be about: repurposing with AI.

I am not talking about that.

While repurposing is all the rage these days, I have strong feelings that you can’t just use AI to repurpose spoken words into a book. To put it as plainly as possible:

Writing a book isn’t just organizing your thoughts.

Full Stop.

Writing a book is everything I mentioned above — creating a structure that lends itself to teaching. It’s not just rearranged word vomit.

What you CAN use AI for is pulling out the interesting ideas from your podcast, surfacing things you may have forgotten about, and yes — even organizing episodes or concepts to better fit in with your outline.

This is especially helpful if you have a deep catalog (my show, Streamlined Solopreneur, has over 400 episodes). But this makes AI your research assistant, not the author of the book.

OK — with that out of the way, let’s get to it. How can you use your podcast to write a book?

What Type of Podcasts are Perfect for Writing Books?

One of the most important building blocks for a successful podcast is having a clear mission statement — understanding who you’re talking to, what problem they have, and how you help them solve that problem.

If you have that, you can use your podcast to write a book because you should have a common theme throughout your show and episodes.

In-fact, this, above all else, is the main driver for your book — the format largely doesn’t matter.

If you have a solo show, wonderful. Your book can draw on the episodes you’ve crafted, covering your show’s topic (and mission) in-depth. You can likely derive both big ideas, and implementation details from your episodes.

If you have an interview show, great! You have lots and lots of case studies and perspectives to pull from. Your job will be to weave them together into a cohesive journey for your reader, giving them stops along the way to learn from more experts than just you.

And if your show is more news or current events based, that’s fine too! You can use all the time you’ve spent researching and opining to create an anthology of important history and facts for your readers.

But the show isn’t necessarily providing the words. It provides something much more crucial.

Why You Should Write a Book Based on Your Podcast

As I mentioned earlier, when writing a book, you must do research at every step of the process, from ideation, to final draft.

But when you have a podcast, it’s like you’ve given yourself a head start of months, or even years. And while it doesn’t feel like wasted work — after all, you did get great content out of the episode — I’m all about working smart, and reusing valuable content, information, and knowledge is perhaps the smartest one can work.

As you consider great non-fiction books, you may notice a pattern. The author is drawing from their expert experience to craft a narrative.

Kindra Hall doesn’t just tell you to write good stories. She demonstrates, through her research and experiences with her clients, why good stories are important.

James Clear doesn’t just tell you habits are essential. He leverages the years of research he’s done on the topic and shows how It’s helped him, and how it can help you too.

Tiago Forte, Georgiana Laudi &Claire Suellentrop, Walter Isaacson, and Robbie Kellman Baxter have all done the same thing. Research, experience, narrative.

Your podcast shortcuts this process. Through your content, you’ve been doing the research, talking to experts, leveraging experience, and maybe even experimenting.

Now it’s time to take all of that, and turn it into a book worth reading.

How to Approach Writing a Book Based on Your Podcast (the Short Version)

“Worth reading” is the operative descriptor in that sentence. You can, as many these days do, throw all of your transcripts into a custom GPT, tell it to write a book, and then “iterate” the prompts until you get something you’ve deemed good enough to slap a cover on.

But that’s not the right approach.

Instead, you should start your book without combing through your episodes catalog. Start with a topic that stands alone, that you happen to be an expert in. Of-course, you know what your podcast is about, and therefore will pick something that’s in line with your topic.

But there’s a difference between starting with the topic vs. combing through your episodes to see what’s there.

It’s like creating the prefect menu for Thanksgiving dinner, then buying ingredients, vs. looking in your fridge to see what you can throw together.

Once you have your topic, you can create the outline — again, I would encourage you to do this with little to no influence from your podcast. You want to create an organically good book, not some ham-fisted amalgamation of things you happened to talk about over the last 3 (or in my case, 8) years.

It’s after you have your outline that you can really start to leverage your show’s episode catalog. Feed everything into AI if you’d like, or do a good old-fashioned site search and look for episodes to support your outline. You’ll want to look for:

1. Times you or your guest explicitly talk about the points in the outline
2. Supplemental stories to drive your points home
3. Actionable advice based on the points in the outline

You can use whatever tool you’d like for this (I’ve switched over the years, but Ulysses, Notion, and Obsidian are great research tools), but grab excepts, links and summaries from your episode catalog.

These pieces can serve as your primary research while you write a brand-new book, supplemented by your podcast.

Your Book is the Dividends on Your Podcast’s Time Investment

If I haven’t made it explicitly clear at this point, let me state it more plainly:

You’ve invested a ton of time into your podcast’s content. Your book can leverage that time investment but using your podcast as the primary research for it.

Because, let’s face it: making money with a podcast can be really hard — and I’m saying this as someone who’s successfully made money with multiple podcasts. Writing a book is also really hard — you need a good, validated idea and enough time to do the research and actually write the dang thing.

If you write a book based on your podcast, all of those things get easier:

1. You’ve validated your idea already, assuming your podcast has listeners.
2. You’ve put in a ton of time over months and years, which you can use as research.
3. You can sell the book based on your podcast, which generates income;

I would never say writing a book worth reading is easy (it’s not), but your podcast gives you a considerable advantage in the writing and research process.

With it, you should be able to write a complete and published work that sees the light of day!