I Survived NaPodPoMo 2019

Introduction

I was recently on Twitter and saw The Odd Dad Out Podcast mention NaPodPoMo, which I thought was just a typo. Turns out it is the podcast equivalent of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). NaPodPoMo = National Podcast Post Month.

I figured that I didn’t have enough to do, so I would secretly take part in this to see if I could do it. I had started a super duper extra secret podcast a few months ago titled “I Watch Movies” which seemed like the perfect podcast to participate in NaPodPoMo with.

The podcast consists of sub 10 minute reviews / discussions of movies that I’ve watched, so the only real hold up would be finding the time to watch movies, and about 60 minutes to write an outline, record, edit, and schedule each post. I can easily find an hour here or there to handle the podcasting side, but the difficult part would prove to be watching movies.

The First 20 Days

To be honest, the first 20 days were a breeze. I had decided long enough before November to take part in NaPodPoMo that I was able to get 6 or so episodes in the can and scheduled. Thanks to this, I wasn’t forced to watch a movie every single evening, or even record every day. I was able to watch a large number of movies in a single day, and batch record the episodes because I had a backlog stored up.

On Day 18, I did run into an error because I did not double check my audio prior to releasing it. On the Belko Experiment episode, I scheduled the release and when I listened back to the episode at work the next day, I realized all there was, was the intro and outro. When I got home I reexported the podcast, and released it on the 18th (but for some reason this shows as the 19th….but I SWEAR, it was released on the 18th).

The Hiccup

As life goes, things got in the way. I had plans to release a large number of videos on Podcastage which meant I lost a lot more evenings than I was initially planning on, and this meant that by day 23 I had no episodes in the can to fall back on. I was ready to throw in the towel and quit. However, for the first 9 or 10 months this year, I had been writing reviews of movies I watched and posting them on Letterboxd, and in a personal note taking app.

Instead of quitting, I was able to pull up one of my reviews for a movie I wanted to discuss, and wing an episode. Was this episode very good? I don’t think so. But through motivation from amazing people I know, and being able to repurpose some content, I was able to pull through.

Wrapping Up The Month

After overcoming the hurdle around day 23, everything was a breeze, I had a few extra days off work, there was thanksgiving and I had no plans to leave my house, so I was able to watch movies all day and record episodes and bring the NaPodPoMoTrain in smoothly. And I have to say it provided me with an awesome sense of accomplishment.

Why Did I Do This?

You’ll notice that above, I never mentioned statistics once. I did not care about statistics or download. TIf I wanted downloads or stats or anything, I would have told people about it. But I didn’t. This was something that I wanted to accomplish for MYSELF, and no one else. I wanted an excuse and a reason to sit down, watch movies, and think more critically about them. This experiment afforded me that opportunity and I think that because of it I have ultimately improved as a podcaster.

What I Learned?

First, I can do it. This may not seem like much, but by completing this task it reminded me that I am able to do something that I set my mind to. When things got tough, I could have quit, given up but thanks to a chat I had with an awesome person on my podcast network, I was able to keep it up. And that’s an amazing thing to remind yourself of. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Second, it’s okay to miss episodes. To be clear, I didn’t miss an episode in NaPodPoMo, because I wanted to accomplish this, but if you’re going to release a subpar episode, it’s okay to skip that release day (unless you’re Dave Jackson who hasn’t missed a single podcast release day in like 15 years). Your audience would likely prefer fewer pieces of high quality content as opposed to a lot of crappy content.

Third, it’s okay to be more spontaneous on your show. I try to be as prepared as I can be, by formulating my thoughts, writing an outline, and knowing the general direction I’m going to be going. On the 2 episodes that I repurposed old content from, I didn’t write any outline, I just pulled my old review, read it, and talked about the movie. Of course, if you’re trying to be informational, this may be a detriment as you can go off topic and forget stuff you want to talk about, but it certainly does add more character tot he show.

Fourth, it’s okay to repurpose content. If you are in a bind and you have nothing to talk about, it’s okay to repurpose old content. For example, if I wrote a blog post 6 years ago about starting a podcast, that does not mean that I can never speak about it again. In a pinch, I could pull that article up, make some tweaks to update it, and re-release it. Also, if you made a video a few years ago, there’s no reason you can’t repurpose that and write a supplemental blog to it.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed participating in this event even though I didn’t take part in the NaPodPoMo community. It allowed me to have fun and experiment in peace without the pressure of pleasing an audience. On top of that it helped me create a backlog of content on a relatively new podcast. If I were to release one episode per week, it would take me 30 weeks to release this many episodes, but I was able to put out over half a years worth of a catalog in one month.

With this accomplishment in my belt, I’m going to go back to casually releasing episodes on this show because my flipping GOD, that was really difficult to do. Maybe one episode per week is something I can manage.