Make Noise (Book)

Strategy-and-craft book

Nuzum led podcasting at NPR for a decade, helped create TED Radio Hour and Invisibilia, and co-founded Magnificent Noise in 2019. His book skips RSS tutorials and focuses on creative principles. Read this after you can already make a podcast. Tape from Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Anna Sale.

Make Noise: A Creator's Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling is Eric Nuzum's 2019 book from Workman Publishing. Nuzum is considered one of the leading creative thinkers in podcasting — he led NPR's podcasting efforts starting in 2005, helped develop TED Radio Hour and Invisibilia, and in 2019 co-founded Magnificent Noise, a New York production and consulting company. He's had a hand in creating and launching 130+ podcasts. The book is explicitly not a "how to start your podcast" tech tutorial — Nuzum skips RSS feeds and audio editor walkthroughs and focuses on the harder problem of how to think about your show: who's it for, what makes it worth their time, how to structure ideas, how to interview, how to manage a creative team. There's advice and tape from Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Anna Sale, and other audio stars. Read this after you've already launched a show and you're trying to figure out why it isn't connecting, or before you start a serious project and want to think strategically. Limitations: it's six years old now, predates the video podcast era, and the worldview is rooted in US public radio production sensibilities. Nuzum also publishes the Audio Insurgent newsletter on Substack, which extends his thinking on the medium.