Why This Show Is A Failure: A Song Of Joy and Peace

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a solo episode to wrap up the season, Meghan reflects on how the The Unspeakable Podcast is doing since launching fifteen months ago and how she's feeling about the venture overall. With radical honesty and perhaps a touch of self-sabotage, she lays out the download numbers and explains why they're as indicative of a failed show as a successful one. She lists the things she's done to try to earn money from the podcast and ruminates on what changes she might make to increase her numbers — and why she's not making them. With stunning bravery, Meghan confesses to struggling with professional envy toward other podcasters, so much so that her phone sometimes feels like a hot stove when their episodes drop. Finally, after much soul searching, she realizes that The Unspeakable Podcast isn't fueled by the culture wars as much as guided by the spirit of the book after which it was named. (Warning: this episode contain a SHOCKING REVEAL about Roxane Gay.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, welcome to the unspeakable podcast. Megan here, and this is the final episode of
0:10.9	2021. It's going to be one of those solo episodes where instead of having a guest, I just
0:17.2	talk to you for a little while. I'm going to offer some thoughts about the show, how it's going, how I feel about it,
0:23.7	how I feel about life in general these days.
0:25.9	But before that, a few items of business.
0:30.0	The first is that the deadline to apply for my next personal essay and memoir master class
0:36.2	on Zoom is fast approaching. The deadline is Monday,
0:40.3	December 20th, and you can go to Daummasterclass.com to learn all about it. The class itself
0:48.9	will run for eight consecutive Mondays, January 10th through February 28th, from 3 to 6 p.m. Eastern Time. This is a
0:58.4	small workshop, so space is limited, but if you're looking to workshop, an essay, or part of a memoir,
1:06.2	any kind of narrative literary nonfiction, this might be the place for you. I'll emphasize this is not a
1:13.2	video course. This is a live Zoom class taught by me from my home with my dog Hugo walking around
1:20.5	in the background. So you really get your money's worth. Again, check it out at dowmasterclass.com and apply by next Monday, December 20th.
1:32.5	Second item, not that this is earth shattering, but this episode of the unspeakable is the first one in a while that is no longer part of the podcast one network.
1:44.0	As you may recall, I moved the show over
1:47.0	to Podcast One back in August with the idea that they would help me with marketing and promotion,
1:52.6	and most of all, find some sponsors. As I may have gone over before, there are two kinds of ads
1:59.0	in podcasting, programmatic ads, which are the pre-made ones that
2:04.2	sound like radio ads that come barreling in at the top of the show and often in the middle of the
2:08.9	show. And then there are the far classier host read ads. The idea was to try to find host read
2:15.7	sponsors for me while running programmatic ads for a while.
2:19.7	While the programmatic ads were intolerable to me anyway, and podcast one, despite carrying some shows, I like a lot.
	...

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