September 30 is National Podcast Day. The observance started in the United States in 2014 and went international a year later, and it’s a day for listeners to recommend shows and for podcasters to remind everyone they exist.
Writers can get more out of it than that.
A podcast is a long recorded conversation, and long conversations are where books come from. Oral historians knew it, journalists knew it, and every ghostwriter knows it, because the raw material for most nonfiction is somebody talking for hours about what happened to them. The podcast boom put a microphone and an RSS feed around that old method and handed it to anyone with a laptop. Authors can use it from either side of the table, as the guest selling a book or as the host collecting one.
How did National Podcast Day become International Podcast Day?
By listening to the people who used it.
Steve Lee founded the day in 2014, with Dave Lee as co-founder, and the first one ran as National Podcast Day with six hours of live streaming. Feedback from the podcast community pushed it wider. The organizers rebranded it International Podcast Day in 2015, and September 30 stayed the date.
Plenty of people still search for the national name, so both stick around.
Where did the word podcast come from?
From a journalist looking for a label in early 2004.
The technology came first. In October 2000, Tristan Louis proposed attaching audio and video files to RSS feeds, and Dave Winer built it into the format. A show could now arrive on its own, downloaded automatically, without anybody visiting a website. In February 2004 the British journalist Ben Hammersley was writing about the trend for The Guardian and floated three possible names: audioblogging, GuerillaMedia and podcasting. He picked the third because Apple’s iPod was how most people listened to downloaded audio.
Then the format took off fast. Adam Curry launched his show Daily Source Code in August 2004. Apple added formal podcast support to iTunes 4.9 in June 2005, and the New Oxford American Dictionary named podcast its word of the year for 2005. The name outlived the iPod by a long way.
Why did Serial change podcasting in 2014?
Because it proved a podcast could be a serialized work of reporting that millions of people waited for.
Serial launched on October 3, 2014, as a spinoff from This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. Season one reexamined the 1999 killing of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, and the conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed.
Koenig worked the case one episode at a time, in public, and listeners followed the reporting as it happened. It became the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads on the iTunes store and won a Peabody Award in April 2015. By September 2018 the first two seasons had been downloaded more than 340 million times.
Serial’s lesson for writers is about structure. Koenig built suspense from the order she released information in, and that’s a novelist’s skill applied to nonfiction.
How big is podcasting now?
Big enough that it’s no longer a niche.
Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2025 found that 55 percent of Americans aged 12 and older had consumed a podcast in the past month, a record, and 70 percent had listened at some point. Video changed the picture too. Edison found that 51 percent had watched a podcast, and YouTube was the most used service among weekly listeners. The Podcast Index listed about 4.7 million podcast feeds as of August 2026, and only about 438,000 had published an episode in the previous 90 days.
That last pair of numbers is the useful one. Millions of shows started, and most stopped. A host who keeps publishing is rarer than the size of the market suggests, and a guest who shows up prepared is rarer still.
Why should authors go on podcasts as guests?
Because an hour of conversation sells a book better than a paragraph of copy.
I’ve made more than 100 guest appearances on other people’s shows, and they’re collected on the guest appearances page. I’m a recurring guest on The Impossible Puzzles Show about once a month. A single appearance reaches one audience once. A steady run of them builds the kind of presence an author can’t buy.
The format favors writers. A book is a long argument or a long story. Radio gives a guest a few minutes and a social post gives seconds, while a podcast host hands over an hour with listeners who chose to be there, and that’s enough time to make the argument. The host handles the promotion and the editing, and the guest’s job is to be interesting about the subject behind the book.
That takes more work than it sounds. A guest who pitches the book every five minutes gets politely ignored. A guest who tells the story the book is built on, and gives away the useful parts, sends listeners looking for the rest. If your book was ghostwritten, the page on interviews, podcasts and book events covers how to handle those questions.
A podcast guest who pitches the book every five minutes gets ignored. One who tells the story the book is built on sends listeners looking for the rest.Share on X
What does hosting a podcast teach an interviewer?
How to get a story out of somebody who doesn’t know they’re telling one.
I host Leaders and Their Stories, unscripted hour-long conversations with founders, executives, veterans and change-makers about the moments that shaped their work. I also plan to restart Author Talks. A host needs a different skill from a guest. The guest’s job is to tell a story well. The host’s job is to notice the story the guest skipped, and ask about it before the hour runs out.
That’s the same job a ghostwriter does in an interview. People summarize the most important events of their lives in a sentence and spend ten minutes on a detail that doesn’t matter. The interviewer has to hear the sentence, stop and ask what happened next. A good follow-up question is worth more than a good first question, and hosting a show is practice at asking it with a clock running.
What did Studs Terkel know about interviews before podcasts existed?
Nearly everything a podcast host needs.
Terkel hosted The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT in Chicago for an hour every weekday from 1952 to 1997, and he turned taped interviews with ordinary people into books. Hard Times was an oral history of the Great Depression. Working, published in 1974, carried the subtitle People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The Good War, his oral history of the Second World War, won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
The Chicago History Museum, the Library of Congress and WFMT later built the Studs Terkel Radio Archive to preserve his recordings.
He was running a podcast decades before the word, and his books prove the second half of the idea. A pile of good interviews, edited hard and put in the right order, is a book.
How can podcast interviews become a book?
The same way every interview-based book gets made: transcribe, sort and cut.
A season of long conversations is a pile of raw material. The stories are there, the voice is there, and the quotable lines are there. The episodes lack structure. Conversations wander, repeat and contradict themselves, and a book can’t. The work of turning episodes into chapters is deciding which stories make the case, putting them in an order that builds, and writing the connecting material the conversations never supplied. The post on whether a ghostwriter can turn speeches and podcasts into a book goes into the mechanics.
My own first interview for a book had nothing to do with podcasts. At seventeen I interviewed my grandfather about the Second World War, and the final version of that book, Behind the Wire, was written in 2025. The method hasn’t changed. Somebody asks good questions, somebody answers at length, and a writer shapes the answers into something a reader can follow.
The podcast made that method public and repeatable. An author planning a nonfiction book can run the interviews as episodes, build an audience while gathering material, and arrive at the manuscript with both.
How should you mark National Podcast Day?
Listen to an episode of a show you’ve never tried, all the way through, and send the host a note. Small shows run on that kind of feedback.
If you’ve written a book, pitch yourself to three podcasts whose listeners would want the subject. Lead with the story behind the book, and put the title in the last line of the pitch.
If you’re planning a nonfiction book, record one long interview with someone who belongs in it. Transcribe it. Read the transcript and mark the three moments where the speaker rushed past something important, because those are your follow-up questions and probably your best chapters. If you’d rather hear your book than read it, Audiobook Appreciation Month covers the other spoken-word format.
The rest of the calendar is on the literary holidays list. And if you’ve got hours of recorded conversation that ought to be a book, that’s the kind of material ghostwriting starts from.