Podcasting is an enormous industry, reportedly bringing in over $7 billion of revenue in 2024. Podcasts are not only popular to listen to—they’re also popular to create.

The lowest barrier to entry is a podcast where you hang out with your friends, hit Record, and chat about pop culture. 

Scripted, fictional podcasts, while requiring more work up front, are a fantastic way for creative writers to find an audience without the kind of high barrier to entry you can run up against in traditional publishing, playwriting, or screenwriting. 

Lots of fictional podcasts have found enormous success, sometimes resulting in TV adaptations and book tie-ins. Even an unknown voice, with some sensible planning, can produce a low-cost podcast that could potentially find a sizable audience. 

A Podcast Is Not an Audiobook

You might be tempted to pull up your manuscript and simply record yourself reading it aloud, but that’s not the best idea for a few reasons. 

For one thing, audiobooks are many hours long, so getting someone to listen to the whole recording isn’t any easier than getting someone to read your whole book. For another thing, a novel isn’t structured in the same way as an effective podcast. Think about the works of Charles Dickens and other classic authors who wrote their novels serially in magazines: there are lots of cliffhangers, installments are tightly paced, and they’re written to make sure listeners get small reminders of the action and main characters between episode releases. 

If you want to pursue fictional podcasting, write for that medium. Consider how you could construct your story around the audio format. Is your character a journalist speaking into a personal recorder to take notes as they investigate a murder? A therapist recording her sessions with a strange new patient? You could even get really meta with it and write a podcast about friends hosting a podcast. 

Podcasting is a creative outlet all on its own, and projects made to be a podcast will always do better than something you retrofitted to record and post online. 

Consider Genre

Other than plot and setting, think about what kinds of stories do best on audio.

Scary stories told around a campfire are as old as humanity itself. These days we’ve traded dark nights for commutes, which might not seem like they lends themselves as well to setting a spooky mood. But consider how intimate it is to be in someone’s headphones; it’s like you’re talking directly into their minds! Horror is an easy fit for scripted podcasting, with lots of people listening to horror stories rather than reading them. 

Science fiction and fantasy can also work very well over audio. You can even use very simple sound effects to produce the beeping of a spaceship or the growl of a dragon. And remember that while it can be fun to make the character dialogue part of the format, you don’t have to. If you have access to different people to play different characters, you can also have a narrator who sets the scene, just like you would in a traditional novel or short story. 

Mysteries are also a great fit for podcasting because plot twists and big surprises are built in to the genre. You’ll want to make sure you structure the story so that your listeners don’t totally lose track of all clues between episodes, but that can be done very simply with a brief recap at the beginning. 

Build Your Toolkit

It’s true that podcasting can be a very bare-bones endeavor. But with a wildly popular medium comes oversaturation that in turn leads to massive competition, so it’s worth taking a few small steps to achieve a baseline level of professionalism. 

While you do have a microphone built into your laptop already, don’t use it if you’re serious about gaining traction in the podcasting world. You’ll end up sounding like you’re talking from the bottom of a tin can, and a lot of podcast listeners are picky about sound quality, even if your words are clear. 

That being said, you don’t have to spend a fortune on a sound studio. You can buy a decent entry-level microphone for under $50, and luckily the free editing software that comes with your laptop should do just fine for creating a final product. But you should take some time to watch tutorials and learn how to use it properly. A well-edited audio file can elevate a cheap microphone and vastly improve the listening experience on a budget. 

And who is going to do the actual speaking? Is it you, actors, friends, a combination of all? Depending on your format, you might need only one voice, and that’ll likely need to be your own if you’re on a budget. But if you have the means, via money or a friend, a skilled actor can push your production to the next level.

Have Fun!

Even if you’re using a small budget and you don’t have a ton of time, podcasts are relatively fast and inexpensive to produce. And it’s very normal for big-hit podcasts to be produced independently—unlike publishing or other creative mediums, most podcast listeners don’t carry a stigma against self-produced work. 

So there’s no real downside to going for it and trying something new. You might even discover that podcasting has been your calling all along! 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.