How a 7-time Bestselling Author Writes Voice Overs, with Jo Piazza

How much writing do you do for your podcast? Maybe you write just a little, a guest intro and outro. Maybe you write a lot, like I do, and my team does. Maybe you're somewhere in between. Regardless, you do have to do some writing as a podcaster, even if you're just writing your questions. So here's my question. How can we, as podcasters, improve our writing so that we can maximize the quality of our speaking? Well, today's episode of Grow the Show will help answer that question. Now, like I said, I do a lot of writing for my two shows. Filihoo, my first podcast about my home city of Philadelphia, features tons of narrative-style voiceovers. And I've written over 70 episodes of that show. This podcast Grow the Show only has a handful of episodes so far, but it actually features even more writing. But in my three years of podcasting, writing my own shows and writing for bigger media companies, including Comcast NBC Universal, Technically Media, and Tom Brady's Media Company, Religion of Sports, I still, through all of that, have never even come close to the amount of writing that today's guest does probably even in a month. That's because today's guest is Joe Piazza. She is a best-selling author of seven books. She's written thousands of articles for major outlets, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And yes, she writes, hosts, and produces three podcasts on the I Heart Radio Network. Today, Joe Piazza is here to talk writing. Specifically, she's here to share what she's learned while writing at the highest level for the past two decades and how you can take her lessons and take your podcast writing to the next level. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your audience and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. Today, we're talking about the importance of good writing because no matter how many new listeners you get for your podcast, none of them are gonna stay listeners if your writing doesn't dazzle them. So, stick around and you'll get your listeners to stick around. Here, on Grow the Show. You can go to Grow the Show. Making a podcast is easy, but making a good podcast is really fucking hard. That is my friend, Joe Piazza. Joe is the best selling author of seven books and she is a former editor and columnist who has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and several other major media outlets. But that's not why she's here today. I wanted to invite Joe on to Grow the Show because she is the best podcast scriptwriter I have ever come across in my three years of podcasting. Joe and I first met in the spring of 2019 when she was featured on my other podcast, Philly Ho. I love podcasts, I love podcasts, I love audio. It's the most fun that I've had in journalism in a very, very long time because I think that the internet has largely ruined journalism. We are living in the age of some of the best journalism. There's such incredible long form journalism out there. But then you could spend just 10 minutes on the internet or on Twitter waiting through all of the content out there. And you're like, wow, we're living in the worst time of journalism. And so you think that podcasting is on the good side? Podcasting is on the very best side. I mean, it is a place where you are telling authentic stories in long form and people are actually listening. That's the thing. What I've discovered is this is how people want to consume content right now. And so if you're putting out a quality podcast, then you're going to develop a really great audience. At that time of recording 2019, Joe was two seasons into her very first podcast committed. That show is on the I Heart Radio Network and it features the stories of couples relationships that have withstood insurmountable circumstances. Since then, she's added two more shows to her resume as a podcaster as well. And I honestly can't fathom how she creates and writes so much. But what's even cooler than the sheer volume of top level work that Joe is able to crank out is how she uses that work and the process of creating it as a way for her to learn new things. I kind of figure out life and figure out what the hell I'm going to do next and how to live by reporting it. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I think it's good. And it's what most of us podcasters are doing. We're learning and becoming experts simply by sharing and reporting. And it's that process of learning life through reporting that brought Joe into the audio world in the first place. It all started six years ago. Joe was looking for her next book to write and at the same time, she was facing a pretty major life event. I had just published my novel, The Knock Off. And I was engaged. I met my husband in the Galapagos Islands. We got engaged in three months and we were about to get married. And I was about to turn 35. And I'm like, oh my god, I have no idea how to do this. But I was a travel editor. And so I'm like, I can travel around the world and report on what marriage looks like around the world. Joe wanted to learn how to be married. So she thought, all right, the book. And she pitched it to her editor. It gets approved. I travel all over the world during my first year of marriage asking people, how do you do this? How the hell are you married? How am I supposed to be a wife? I've been a single feminist my entire life. And we realized no one talks about a real marriage. If you're married, you never hear the real versions of other people's marriages. You only hear like the pretty beautiful social media hashtag date night versions of people's marriages. People talk about the engagement. And then they talk about the end of a marriage, which is divorce or death. But they don't talk about the middle and the nitty gritty of like, how do you make this work? And that's how she wrote the critically acclaimed book, how to be married. It's the stories that I picked up along the way. The stories of other people's marriages. And it did really well. And it was really well reviewed. And in the course of promoting that book, Joe was featured as a guest on a few podcasts, including part time genius, which is part of the How Stuff Works network. And after that, I was like, I really like this. I'd like to do more of this. And at the same time, they were like, we'd like to do more with you. Let's have fun. Let's make some podcasts. And I'm like, great, cool, fun. And with that, Joe's first podcast committed was born. Out of the gate committed got a lot of attention. And there were a lot less podcasts back then. And it did really well. People were very into these stories. Three years later, making podcasts is kind of my full-time job. Today, Joe has three podcasts on the I Heart Radio network. Committed is closing in on 100 episodes. Her second show, Fierce from Tribeca Studios, tells the stories of the women who have changed history. And her most recent show, Under the Influence, dives deep into the world of social media mom influencers. Joe is as busy and as successful as a podcaster can be. And I know what you're thinking. Of course, she was able to make podcasting her job. She had the support of I Heart Radio right off the bat. And she had industry connections. But here's the thing. A network's power can only go so far. They can help a podcast get discovered, yes. But in order to keep the listeners coming back enough to justify 100 episodes, it's up to the podcaster to tell compelling stories that hook listeners and hold their interest. Clearly, Joe Piazza has done that herself. So what can we, as independent podcasters, learn from how an award-winning author and journalist makes the move and starts writing audio? Well, when she initially made that move into audio storytelling, Joe focused on how she was going to tell the stories before she really even had recorded a bunch of episodes. We spent six months playing with the scripts and playing with the voiceover. And was this going to be a straight interview show where I was interviewing them? Or would it be more like this show heavily edited with tons of voiceovers? She chose this kind. It requires a lot more time. But I think that at the end of the day, you get a better product. Once she'd figured that out, Joe then had to search for compelling guests. She didn't necessarily want to tell stories about average marriages. She wanted to find amazing stories. I had a producer from How Stuff Works, Ramsey. And we were like, what would be an interesting marriage? So a couple where one person is in prison, a couple where one person is a stripper. Like we thought of the most extreme examples we could possibly think of. But then I also had this one couple, a woman who had written to me. And her and her husband had both lost legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. And also Mengesh, who was our executive producer, knew a couple where the woman had short-term amnesia. It was like that movie with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. And he's like, you have to talk to these guys. And so we had our first two episodes. But and we did the interviews. And I knew nothing about podcasts. I interviewed these people the way that I interview anyone for a newspaper article. And it's very, very different to be capturing someone in audio. And to figure out how to keep an audience excited in audio. This turned out to be Joe's focus when learning how to write for audio. Keep the listener excited. Podcasting and audio consumption is passive consumption. And with reading, it's very active. Like you can only read. You can only do one thing while you read. But with podcasting, you can do a lot of things. While you listen to a podcast, I ride my bike. For example, I take a shower, I breastfeed a baby. And because of that, because people's brains are engaged in other things, you have to make sure that your voice cues are constantly bringing them back. One of the best pieces of advice that I got as a novelist was from my agent. And she said, you have to make sure to surprise and dazzle your reader at least once a page, which is hard. Just maybe just one turn of phrase that's really dazzling or a plot twist that's dazzling. But if you're not doing that, then you're not really giving them a reason to keep going. And so you have to create kind of little sparks, little feelings of joy, or some other kind of emotional response, piss them off, do something. Make them have an emotion at least once on every page. You have to elicit an emotional response probably once a paragraph, because otherwise, you're going to lose them. And do you want to lose your podcast listeners? Boom, emotional response. But you don't just want to tug on the emotional strings now. And again, there's another element of your show that will also dazzle your listeners. You have to make sure that your points are really succinct and that you're also switching up your VO with other kinds of sounds and sound design in order to keep the listener engaged, again, to make it more of an experience rather than just something that they're consuming. Reading something and writing something that someone is going to consume on the page is kind of two-dimensional, whereas podcasting is three-dimensional. You want to make them feel very absorbed in this world. This, of course, is much easier said than done. But the vast majority of shows don't even think about this at all. And so if you just simply keep listener absorption in mind, you'll already be winning. So after writing an episode that dazzles the listener in every paragraph, the last thing Joe focuses on is also the first thing and the most important thing. I write the entire episode and then we'll go back to the intro. It's almost like writing the first page of a book is the hardest. And I've probably rewritten the first chapter of the current novel that I'm working on eight times because it's the most important, right? So I just write the script as if I'm starting after the intro. After the, I'm Joe Piazza, this is committed. And then the intro comes to me while I'm writing the rest of it because I'll be writing the rest of it and I'll be like, oh, this is the moment. The first 90 seconds are kind of this narrative preview of what you're going to get from the rest of the episode. So we make it probably the tensest moment in a person's relationship. And it's always kind of a cliffhanger. I want to convey this feeling to the audience. It's like, you have to stick around. If you don't stick around, you're going to get major film out. And so yeah, the first 90 seconds of voiceover are always, I think, the most important part of the episode. So if it's the most important, why not write it first? It's the most important thing that you're going to write, but you don't know what the episode is yet. In those 90 seconds, you're supposed to be conveying everything the episode is. So write the episode first. It's like, I would never write the title or the meta data before I've written the whole episode. And I also write those as I'm writing the episode. So I throw those into a separate document too. I'm like, oh, I'm writing the episode. So that way I'm also not toiling over the title of the episode or the meta. It's all just happening as I'm writing a script. All that said, it's different for every show. And it does take time to figure out the best writing process that works for you. I think it took us about half of the first season to really hit our stride with what committed sounded like, but we did. And it was all trial and error. And it was creating a first draft, listening to a first draft, and then tweaking it and getting other people to listen to it. It was just much more labor intensive for me because I felt like we were creating an event as opposed to an article, which an article I can sit down and bang it out in a few hours. And this felt more like an experience. In Joe's opinion, you can't just create an experience though. You have to take full ownership of your audience growth in order to have a successful podcast. You can no longer just put really great podcasts in the world and hope they become popular. I have a lot of friends who've made beautiful podcasts that got no attention and got no numbers. And that sucks. I really, I find that a gigantic bummer. And I wish that that problem would get solved. That is exactly why we're here at Grow the Show. Yet you can't have one of those things without the other. You can't just have a growing show without taking ownership of audience growth like we've said many times before, but you also won't have any audience growth to take ownership of if you don't have a great show. Making a podcast is easy, but making a good podcast is really hard. And I wish that more people would go into podcasting knowing that because I think a lot of people are also disappointed because they're like, well, it seems so easy. And when you get into the nitty-gritty of it, it's actually a lot of work to make something that I think will stick around. I lived in the world of media and then digital media for long enough that I saw 90% of digital media just devolve into spam. And I think that we're now about to enter the podcast world of spam. Well, let's do everything we can to fight back. Let's fight back, let's fight the good fight. And because you're here listening to me right now, you have joined this fight. So let's not make spammy podcasts. For the next episode of your podcast that you work on, simply pay a little extra attention to your writing. Whether you go all in on voiceovers, like I do, or even if it's just a catchy intro for your guest, think about how you can dazzle the listener, how you can tug on their hard strings, and how you can keep them fully immersed in your show's listener experience through good writing. And if you want some feedback on that writing, feel free to pop over to the Grow the Show Facebook group where you can post your script. And I and my circle of 300 high-performing podcasters can give you feedback and help you take your writing to the next level. The link to the Facebook group is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was produced and hosted by me, written by me and Catherine Nails, with associate production by Catherine Nails and post-production by Max Graham. Here's a very special thanks to Joe Piazza for joining us today. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidlin. See you next week.