Spoken Label after a
while (if you have read my previous Podcat on Podcasts) was a happy
accident that has kept growing and growing over three and a bit years
and over time become a much more smoother process to operate and I
like to think has inspired other people to have a go at doing it
also.
Some of you know I
am dating a lovely young lady called Amanda Steel who I met all the
way back at the start of 2016 not long after Spoken Label actually
got going and who I ended up dating from the end of 2016 onwards. Now
whether I was partly responsible for this or not, Amanda in the
summer of 2018 decided to do her own Podcast called Amanda’s
reading recommedations where every month she would read and talk
about what books she has been reading over the past month.
I forget why exactly
but after a few months of it, she wasn’t happy with it being a solo
operation and asked me would I like to come onboard with her and make
it a joint book review Podcast. Who titled it Reading in Bed I can’t
remember (although I suspect it was Amanda) but I remember well the
first episode or two being awkard between the pair of us as although
by that stage we had been dating for over a year working together on
a project like this takes time to work out each other strengths and
weakness on projects like this
In this case, part
of the problem was voice levels as by nature I have a louder voice
than Amandas and I simply had to learn to calm it down a bit, and
make sure it was the Andy and Amanda show not the Andy out-shouts
Amanda show but over time we became to get a pattern right for it,
where Amanda would always do the artwork for the Podcast, I would
record and mix it for release on bandcamp and then send it over to
Amanda over viva Dropbox as a single file for upload in mp3. We
became to split the Podcast into 4 or 5 sections monthly with a short
add break inbetween each section to let us pause before we carried on
chatting.
We’ve had the
occasional problem owning to technical issues on one of our laptops
or another case where I gave both of us colds and made us sound like
Daleks for the Podcast which took ages to get right mixing) or most
memorably when I forgot we ad agreed to review some thriller (I’m
not naming which one) and I realised with only about 12 hours I had
agreed to read that one and ended up reading a full 450 book in about
8 hours which was not fun.
I can also remember
doing such a close knit podcast together it comes up in conversation
when we see each other when Amanda may ask me have you started that
book or if I ask her she may swear jokingly, sadly yes or in the case
of one book she hated it that much she declined to tell me the name
off it during the Podcast depending my attempts to get hints out of
her and I reckon would have surprised people as much as me when they
heard it.
In a future Podcast,
I’ll talk about Patreon and how that is a interesting tool to link
into Reading in Bed, but I’ve learnt a lot about myself doing
Reading in Bed which is almost like a band in some ways where you
have to have things prepared, in this case what books we are going to
review and any notes (which we don’t show each other) until we are
recording, just ensuring they are split into strengths, weakness and
ratings.
It’s proved great
fun but in a lot of words tons more work than Spoken Label which I
just book and record sometimes with a gentle control but I love it
also.
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