Make a Nerdy Living

by Alex Langley

  A microphone pop filter: Any brand will do, really. You just need something decent that will soften out the harshness of your speech so your Ps don’t pop so hard and the little clicks and ticks don’t come through so loudly.

  WordPress: If you need somewhere to build your site, it’s hard to go wrong with a WordPress site (it’s what I’ve used for years). Other services like Wix® and Squarespace® are also solid choices for site making.

  Skype®: Most podcast guests are already going to be familiar with Skype, which cuts out some of the potential technical snafus when showtime comes. Plus Skype makes it very easy to set up conference calls in the likely event that you/your cohosts/your guest are not all in the same location.

  Ardour: This flexible recording program gives you the power to set it up as you need, regardless of what operating system your computer runs on. Audacity is another good choice for all your recording and editing needs. Google Hangouts™ are another viable option.

  FeedBurner®: a web feed–management provider that makes it fairly painless to get your podcast uploaded to iTunes and the like

  Remember that this is a business, and as with any business, you need to spend money to make money. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend much money to start a podcast—you should be able to get high-quality equipment for a couple hundred bucks. It may be tempting to go a little cheap when getting started, but critical pieces of equipment such as microphones are not the place to cut corners. If your audio sounds like garbage, no one will want to listen and you’ll be wasting your time.

  PICK A TOPIC YOU’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT

  If you’re not into baseball, don’t host a baseball podcast. If you don’t think Star Wars is amazing, don’t agree to cohost Wookiee to Wookiee. If you don’t like to argue, don’t do a podcast about re-watching every Star Trek series to figure out which captain is best.* A podcast lives and dies by the energy and drive of its hosts, so if you can’t muster up the enthusiasm to do variations of the same topic over and over, your podcast will suffer a quick and meaningless death.

  As with any creative endeavor, think through the podcasts you enjoy and consider what you can learn from them: Do you like the topic or the format? Do you like the host’s informative style, or the cohost’s wandering comedy? Is there a type of podcast you’d love to hear, but no one else is doing? Which podcasting trends are starting to take off, and which ones are you sick of already? If you don’t have a clue how to answer these questions, you need to listen to more podcasts before starting one.

  SOME WELL-KNOWN PODCASTS AND THE GENRES ONE MIGHT CATEGORIZE THEM UNDER SHOULD ONE FEEL INCLINED TO DO SO

  Comedy podcasts are focused on, first and foremost, delivering the laughs.

  Examples: Spontaneanation; My Brother, My Brother and Me; 2 Dope Queens; With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus; You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes; The Adventure Zone

  Pop culture podcasts endeavor to better understand popular culture and its effect on the people who absorb it.

  Examples: How Did This Get Made?, The Read, Hollywood Babble-On, Doug Loves Movies, Ghostbusters Interdimensional Crossrip, Sistah Speak, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

  Gaming podcasts discuss the trends and impact of video games.

  Examples: Giant Bombcast, 8-4 Play, The Patch, Gamers With Jobs, Three Moves Ahead

  Education and history podcasts draw from real-life events and people of the past to teach us a li’l something for today.

  Examples: Serial; StarTalk Radio Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson; BackStory with the American History Guys; Stuff You Missed in History Class; The History Chicks; 1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories & Mysteries; Radiolab

  Horror podcasts inject a double dose of spooky right into your eardrums

  Examples: Welcome to Night Vale, Lore, Pseudopod, The NoSleep Podcast, Tales To Terrify

  Advice podcasts, as you might expect, offer advice. Generally, these podcasts rely on listener stories and questions to generate their content, so they can be difficult to get up and running if you don’t have anyone asking for advice.

  By doing an advice podcast, you will be telling people how to live their lives, and, depending on the topic, that may veer into dangerous territory. If you have a tech advice show telling people how to deal with computer problems, you’re probably in the clear. Most advice podcasts, however, focus on life advice, often hosted by people whose only qualification is life experience. I can’t recommend that people without professional backgrounds give advice to others on life, love, and health, as it’s likely they will give bad or misguided advice. If you’re going to do an advice podcast, do it in an area you’re well-educated in.

  WORDS FROM WORKING NERDS

  Justin McElroy, one of the titular brothers behind My Brother, My Brother and Me and The Adventure Zone podcasts, YouTube’s Monster Factory, Polygon editor and cofounder, and all-around entertainer

  When I was thirteen, I was on a local kids’ TV news show called Kid’s Mag. While I was in high school, the creator of that show and I wrote a video-game column called Gameview. I started writing about video games for a site called HuntingtonNews.net after that and then I started working full-time in newspapers after college and freelanced about video games on the side for [publications] like Official Playstation Magazine and PC Gamer and others that no longer exist, because video game magazines don’t exist anymore. Basically, I got in while the getting was good. From there I got a job at Joystiq and I started doing the Joystiq Podcast. I joined with them after they’d done ten episodes, and we sort of built that show up and built an audience for it. In 2010 we spun off MBMBAM [My Brother, My Brother and Me] and the other shows kind of spun off MBMBAM.

  What is your daily routine like?

  It varies wildly. I don’t really have set times for hardly any of the projects we do; we schedule everything ad hoc, as wild as that is. An average day for me usually starts with trying to comb through my e-mail. During the morning, I try to do recording early in the day, between ten o’clock and two o’clock—I find that’s creatively the easiest to deal with. We do a lot more meetings than we used to with, like, our merch partners, and stuff like that. The evening is usually when I’ve got a window, between five thirty and eight o’clock, where I’m with my kids and it’s dinner, baths, and bed. After that is the one time my wife and I are free, so it’s the time when we tend to work on Sawbones-related stuff, either recording the show, researching the show, or working on the Sawbones book.

  What has surprised you the most about your line of work?

  That I’m able to make a living doing it. That sounds like I’m kidding, but honestly, when I was younger I had no idea you could do this kind of work. I just didn’t know this was a career choice people had. I think the biggest surprise to me is that we were able to find an audience—I didn’t understand that it could happen for me until it did. I think once we started building our live touring business, that was the first time it sank in. Like, seeing that we had a venue with three thousand people who were all there to see us was one very humbling but also wild thing.

  Your work has inspired others to be creative, with everything from other podcasts to people getting tattoos referencing specific episodes of your shows. How does it feel to know you have that kind of impact?

  [It’s been] humbling and overwhelming and has filled me with no small amount of paranoia. I still don’t think of myself as particularly exceptional—I would extend the label of “exceptional” to my brothers and wife and the people I work with. I honestly spend a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop and expecting people to wise up that I’m not that great. I think that’s probably a healthy response?

  What are some of the challenges you face with ongoing projects like podcasts?

  I think the bigger challenge is trying to infuse stuff with fresh energy, like we’ve been doing MBMBAM for a bunch of years now, and it’s a challenge to try to make it feel fresh every time.

  Like, with The Adventure Zone, which we still do, w
e ended the story line that we were working on, and I think that was sort of a natural realization that we’d reached the end of the road with that story, that we’d told it. Eventually people move on, they outgrow stuff, and I think the audience moved with us.

  Are there any particular obstacles you feel you’ve had to overcome to get where you are?

  I am limited by geography a lot of times. Where I live is not an entertainment hub. There are probably a lot of opportunities I could pursue if I lived in NYC or LA that I don’t pursue. [My location] keeps me from pursuing those opportunities. That and there’s not much in the way of collaborators in my area, so I don’t organically meet the people to do stuff with that I would in a larger area.

  We developed a friendship with the guys who do the podcast The Worst Idea of All Time. We met them at LA PodCon and developed a friendship, and we make a podcast together where we watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 every year at Thanksgiving and then do an episode about it as an annual event. But we met them at a thing and developed a relationship and made a thing with them. I think I would do more of that kind of collaboration if I did live somewhere where other people were doing this kind of work.

  Who or what are your inspirations?

  My dad is probably the biggest. He was a radio deejay for forty-some odd years doing the morning shift, and he’s someone who really wants to make people happy. Seeing the way he handled [his career] and his priorities is a big inspiration to me. I feel like a lot of the people . . . I worry about idolizing people I don’t know, because it seems like a lot of them end up being bad dudes and bad women—more bad dudes, let’s be honest—so I don’t tend to have a lot of people that I feel that way about necessarily, I tend to keep [my inspirations limited] more to people that I know. My wife, too, is a big inspiration to me to keep my head on straight and prioritize stuff and convince me to take opportunities when I feel that imposter syndrome we talked about. She’s the one who convinces me of my own worth.

  What tips might you recommend to newcomers looking to get into the business?

  Here’s the most valuable thing I can tell anybody. . . . It’s a brief story, so begging your forgiveness: Bob Thompson plays piano for [national radio show] Mountain Stage. I was talking to him when I was much younger and told him I was trying to get into entertainment. He told me that when he was getting started, he went into . . . I think it was Capital Records, and he had a demo. [Capital Records] listened to it and said, “This is great stuff, but we can’t do anything with you.” He didn’t understand, and they said, “This is great, but there are ten other people who can do this exact thing. Come back to us when you know what it is you do that nobody else does.”

  That’s the sort of thing that I think is extremely valuable in my line of work. It took me a long time to figure out, and a lot of people don’t figure this out first when they really should, and that is: What is the thing that you do better than anybody else, or that nobody else can do? I believe that everyone has that something, not necessarily an entertainment thing but the something their life has uniquely positioned them to make. But I think that until you figure out what that thing is, you’re going to have a tough time.

  I mentioned the freelance stuff I did, but the undercurrent of that is the dozens of job applications and freelance pitches that went nowhere or took forever to come to fruition. I’m kind of surprised, knowing myself, that I stuck with it as I did. The interesting thing for me is that I really wasn’t ready when I was sending those pitches. The important thing was that I was still working on my own stuff, trying to hone my craft, and I think if I’d gotten some of those opportunities earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready for them.

  PICK A NAME THAT’S CLEVER WITHOUT BEING SO CLEVER, IT’S NOT DESCRIPTIVE

  Nerdist cohost Matt Mira had a long-running podcast called Talk Salad and Scrambled Eggs, which was a series analyzing the merits and missteps of the television show Frasier. While the name may be amusingly clever to Frasier fans, it made it hard to draw in new listeners who weren’t familiar enough with Frasier to know its closing theme by heart. Most folks probably took one look at the name and thought it was a cooking show, which might be why the full title is actually Talk Salad and Scrambled Eggs: Frasier Reconsidered.

  People need to have some idea as to what your show is about. Whatever your given topic, find some kind of cheeky wordplay you can use that will catch the eye while still being descriptive. Also, know that if your podcast is one about the general state of geekdom, you’re going to have a hard time finding a unique name, because there are only so many clever permutations of the words geek or nerd.

  THE NEXT STEP: PODCASTS

  OR

  TRAINING UNDER THE FREEZING WATERFALL OF THE INTERNET TO STRENGTHEN YOUR PODCAST CHI

  All right! You’re ready to get your podcast going, eh? Well, despite the simplicity of entry to the podcast game, getting good at podcasting requires a serious investment of effort on your part. If you ever want to crack iTunes’ Top Twenty (or Ten, or Five), you need to hit the books. Well, the book. This book. Which you already have. Anyway, here’s some ways to help make your podcast better.

  LISTEN TO YOUR OWN VOICE

  Since our mouths and ears are all connected to the meaty things we call our heads, the sound waves of our speech vibrate our eardrums differently than they do everyone else, so we don’t hear what we actually sound like. A good rule of thumb is to realize that your voice probably sounds higher than what you’re used to. Record yourself speaking in a variety of tones to get a feel for what you truly sound like; if you’re going to be using an auditory medium, you’ll need a better understanding of what you’re working with.

  Also know that not everyone is blessed with a nice speaking voice. Whether you’re gravel-voiced from smoking or that old witch’s curse has left you with a cat’s meow instead of human vocal tones, you may face some extra difficulties in doing a podcast. Again, listen to your voice. Adjust as much as you can to sound as smooth and nice as possible (and if you smoke, well, y’know, don’t). Taking voice lessons probably isn’t a bad idea, either.

  TRAIN IN THE ART OF CONVERSATION

  Conversing with the beast known as “hyoo-mann” isn’t always the easiest. While much of your podcast is probably going to be you bullshitting around with your friends, you’ll need the occasional guest and you may not always know those guests ahead of time. Make the effort to become a better conversationalist. Practice active listening, try to focus on the positives of both your guest and your topic, maintain speaker balance between yourself and the other people on your show, and don’t be overly critical of the other speakers.

  A conversation is a gentle, sloshing back-and-forth; it’s the ocean, not a fire hose. Don’t drown your guests and cohosts. Get in a little rowboat and paddle around with them.

  LAUNCH WITH SEVERAL EPISODES AT THE READY

  On launch day, start by posting three to five episodes, publish multiple times a week for the first few weeks, and have a buffer of several additional episodes at the ready for the coming weeks. If people listen to your first episode, they’re hopefully going to want to listen to more. If you already have more ready for them, you just got yourself a subscriber. If they don’t have anything else to listen to, odds are high that they’ll get distracted by cat memes and forget about your show instead of subscribing.

  LAUNCH BIG AND STAY BIG FOR THE FIRST TWO WEEKS

  The first couple of weeks of a podcast are an important crucible, as they determine whether you can land yourself in the New and Noteworthy section of iTunes and other podcast directories. Do your best to draw as much attention to yourself as you can those first two weeks, whether it’s through flooding your social media and mailing list, doing mass giveaways, being a guest on other people’s podcasts/blogs/video channels, streaming constantly from your own video channel, or dressing up as a podcast-themed supervillain and robbing a bank.*

  GET A GOOD INTRO AND OUTRO

  Intros and outros should be sh
ort, punchy, and professional. While there are many areas in professional nerddom where it’s a good idea to rely on your partially skilled friends to do something for you for free, your podcast intro and outro aren’t among them. These are the first and last things your listeners will hear; your intro is your one shot to get people listening, and your outro is the last thing they’ll be thinking about once your podcast is over. Shell out a few bucks to get professionally made music and voice talent to record what you need done.

  Also keep the intro short—thirty seconds or less. You’ve only got a few seconds to hook people in, so make it count. If your intro is an overblown affair, your potential listeners will grow bored and move on to the next thing that ain’t you.

  PLAN YOUR EPISODES AHEAD OF TIME

  Podcasts take a considerable amount of set-up and coordination. Before you start on your podcasting adventure, figure out what sort of publishing schedule you feel is feasible, factoring in the difficulty of wrangling the many cohosts and guests you need for every episode.

  WORDS FROM WORKING NERDS

  Sistah K, co-creator, producer, and cohost of the Sistah Speak Podcast Network

  I love TV, and I’ve been a TV junkie since childhood. I’d been listening to podcasts for a year or so, and after talking with my co-creator and cohost, Sistah J, about the latest events on a few reality shows, we decided to start our own podcast. We wanted to talk about the things that were important to us, namely the portrayal of people of color on television and in movies. We created our first podcast in the summer of 2007, and we’ve been podcasting continually since then.