My Podcasting Experience (So Far)

Since the launch of Words and Roses podcast back in September, I’ve wanted to write about what it has been like to be a newbie podcaster. Miranda and I were clearly aligned as co-hosts when this journey began: let’s keep this project fun, and not let it stress us out. After all, we discuss stationery in our daily lives, which is something we both love.

The Origin Story

Some of you may know this story already, but the first talk of the podcast came about in summer of 2022 when Miranda mentioned on one of her weekend Twitch stationery streams that she would be interested in doing a podcast. Cue the reaction from our mutual friend Ame: “go talk to Chelsea!”

You see, I was out and couldn’t tune into the stream at the time, but I had mentioned to Ame long ago that I also wanted to start a stationery podcast someday. I forget the exact words I used, but I remember feeling quite hesitant when I brought it up. Something along the lines of, would anyone want to listen to what I have to say? and I think people will get tired of my voice really quickly. I even had a Yeti Nano mic ready to go that I had received as an end-of-year holiday gift a few years back, because I had been thinking of podcasting even back then.

Needless to say, I was excited when we started brainstorming together - what did we want to focus on? How on earth would we name this podcast? After coming up with a rough draft of the podcast structure and writing down a list of ideas, we landed on the name Words and Roses (after our usernames thosewithwords and havokrosewrites). There were a lot of other fun names that we considered - maybe we’ll share them with our audience one day, who knows!

The Process

For a complete podcast newbie like me, it was really helpful to have a co-host who already had ample podcasting experience. Luckily I had a separate mic and it only took a few adjustments on Audacity to get the audio levels right, but I’m always deeply appreciative that Miranda takes care of the audio editing side of the house.

Where I could be of more use was running our Instagram account with posts of new episodes and journaling prompts. The fact that we provide a journaling prompt at the end of each episode and then open the next episode with our answers has been one of my favorite things about the podcast so far - the prompts tie the episodes together in a natural way, and allow us to talk about fun topics that are not always related to the episodes themselves.

Although we aim for a 45 minutes to 1 hour long episode every two weeks, our recording sessions infamously run longer than that because we end up chatting and catching up before we begin recording. One of the biggest reasons this podcast brings me so much joy is that I get to talk to a close friend on a regular basis - I hope that our connection shines through in a genuine way in our episodes for the audience as well. We’ve gotten into a good groove and rarely have to do retakes of what we say, but we also get fun visits from Miranda’s cats (it’s one of her cats - you probably know which one if you’ve been to her streams before) and random outside noises, so we try our best to keep things flowing.

The Community

It goes without saying that I enjoy recording and sharing the podcast from a co-host perspective, but I’ve been so grateful for the support from the lovely stationery community. Early on in the process, Miranda and I reached out to one of our good friends Job with an idea for a logo - instead of creating one logo (which is all we asked for and would have been more than enough), he gave us an entire branding kit that make social media updates a breeze.

According to the Podcaster Wrapped report from Spotify, the podcast also had listeners from 26 countries in 2022. Words and Roses is a fun, personal project, so it was wild to see that people listened to our chats at all. I was so touched by the shout-outs from The Pen Addict and The Stationery Cafe, as well as anyone who reached out with encouraging comments and helpful feedback.

There are still some ongoing improvements we’d like to make, of course, but I’m really glad that our conversations about stationery are resonating with people and giving them something enjoyable to listen to. It has been such a blast and a bright spot in all of my days to co-host this podcast, and I hope to bring you more engaging episodes in 2023!

Signed,
Your Resident Newbie Podcaster