I listen to podcasts daily on my commute, or occasionally during a 3 a.m. wakeup (although classic literature read in a rolling accent, or Buddhist meditation audiobooks, tend to work better to get me to relax).

And now I have one! Which currently only has a single four-minute episode, and is tied to my Substack. Since I’m already publishing newsletters monthly on Substack, and I usually write by dictating into my phone, I decided to make an audio version available too.

Here is what it took to set it up:

1. In Substack, go through podcast setup — this includes a podcast name, description, categories, and cover image.
2. Cover image has to be square, between 1400×1400 and 3000×3000. I used Canva to make mine by customizing one of their podcast cover image templates.
3. I’m lucky to have an in-house musician, so I got my son to compose and perform (on the piano) some music that I could use for intro and outro. Recorded it on my phone.
4. Watched this very helpful YouTube video on how to record a Substack voiceover and publish it as a podcast.
5. Based on advice from video, downloaded Audacity audio editing software.
6. Imported music into Audacity, edited it for noise reduction.
7. I had not yet published the Substack post, “Yes, and”-ing your way through conflict, that this was based on. I had dictation notes on my phone, which I turned into a written transcript. (Also tried winging it based on notes, but every pause and error is magnified on a recording. After one or two attempts at this, I decided I needed to read a script.)
8. Took out my Nano Blue Yeti microphone, recorded an intro for the podcast (again, several tries before I had something decent enough to use) and the voiceover for the post.
9. Edited the intro and voiceover in Audacity for timing, remove weird silences, fix flubs (this was difficult, I know bupkis about video editing).
10. Created multi-track episode in Audacity with intro/outro music, my podcast intro, and voiceover as separate tracks. Edited together and then normalized sound.
11. (Note – I could have recorded directly in Substack, but it was so much better to have all the files on my own computer. Later, I needed to upload the complete audio multiple times even though in theory I only needed to do it once and have it published everywhere. And now I have the files in case I need to edit or do something with them in the future.)
12.  Wrote my Substack post. Added the audio as a voiceover, along with a note saying “this newsletter now has an audio version!” On the voiceover, clicked to publish this as a podcast to RSS feed that I set up in step #1. Which theoretically should have taken care of everything.
13. But in reality, it did not publish as a podcast to my Substack podcasts page. And you need at least one post before you can submit it. Waited overnight to see if this would fix itself. Then created a new post on my Substack podcast page, where I re-uploaded the episode and had to re-write show notes (originally submitted in step #12).
14. Followed Substack’s instructions to submit my podcasts to platforms. PocketCast was simple. Spotify required me to log in and accept terms of use. Apple did too, and then had me go through the steps again of providing a description and categories. Then it told me to come back later once my podcast was approved, which took about an hour. According to the Substack instructions, once you are approved on Apple Podcasts, the other platforms will automatically discover your podcast and pick you up. So we’ll see about that.
15. And… I just subscribed to my own podcast on Spotify! Exciting!

We’ll see what happens from here. I didn’t really have a plan for any of this. Maybe I’ll keep recording episodes to go with my monthly newsletters. Maybe it will grow and I’ll have additional episodes and do interviews with people, or coaching sessions! That would be fun. Or maybe I’ll realize that even monthly episodes take up way too much time and nobody’s listening. Still. I have a podcast! Which I created in its entirety in the last 24 hours. So I’m happy.