The Audience Is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast

by Tom Webster

“How do I get more listeners?”

You are a podcaster. And if you were a beast on a David Attenborough nature documentary, that would be your plaintive cry.

This is not a book about how to make a podcast. You know how to do that, and anyway, the tech in podcasting changes all the time. This book will be useful to you for the rest of your career, because it will show you how to make your podcast better.

The Audience is Listening is a book of tough love that presents you with a repeatable process to earn and keep an audience.

You’ve been told that you need to be passionate about your topic. That’s true, of course. But it won’t guarantee you an audience. No one deserves an audience, but you can earn one—a body of humans who look forward to your show, week after week, and make it a regular part of their lives.

Ultimately, every podcaster is producing an entertainment, a diversion in a universe full of diversions. In such a universe, the listener is in complete control. You only need to spend some time with them, learning from them, and their secrets become a little less mysterious. It is this arcane knowledge that can turn your podcast into a show, a thing people care about enough to tell somebody else about.

It’s that last bit that really matters. In The Audience is Listening, Tom Webster will show you how to do it.

Genres: Business

214 pages, Paperback

Published June 7, 2024

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The biggest mistake in podcasting is that hosts think they are teaching a class instead of putting on a show. There's a reason why fun casts are listened to every week and why online courses have a 3% completion rate. This book explains why, and what you can do about it to make a show that grows because the audience wants to tell others about it. Required reading if you're going to produce audio.

[Dave Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It should've been called, "You Baby Is Ugly," but Tom's not mean. He understands the power of podcasting, but it starts with making AMAZING content. Half this book is yellow from me highlighting it on my Kindle. I own three versions. My kindle to highlight. My audio to listen, and a physical copy to old up on Livestreams (which I do a lot). Every podcast should read this book. Now.

[Eric Pratum · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the focus is podcasting, this is the best marketing book I have read in a long time. I've always liked Tom's work and his voice, and that has not changed with listening to the audio version of this book. This is a really great product and resource.

The only reason it's not a 5-star for me is that it's not a book that everyone should read, but rather I would recommend it only as a must-read to anyone looking to build an audience. Tom knocks it out of the park in that area, so while no I wouldn't recommend it for example to my mother, I would recommend it to my friend working on getting a startup going, my buddy leading a marketing team, that prospect that is contemplating "thought leadership", and so on.

If you're at all involved in marketing and/or communications, read this book.

[David Hooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book with a "radio" approach to podcasting that's important for podcasters to hear. Radio has filters—limited time to air content, limited distance of a radio tower, you need a very expensive license from the FCC, etc. On one hand, it's great that podcasting doesn't have any of these things, but on the other, we've gotten lazy, especially when it comes to keeping in touch with who's listening (or who we want to listen).

The Audience Is Listening is a great reminder of the power that comes from testing and bringing listeners in on the creation of your show. It gives you a plan you can implement that will make your show better and more attractive to the people you want listening.

It's a bargain.

[Blaine Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very great, pragmatic, insightful advice that requires work to put into place and get results. These are foolproof ideas, though.