PodcastBook

You interview the best in the world on your podcast. Where’s the book?

PodcastBook turns a podcast of long conversations into a book: every conversation a chapter, edited to read the way it felt in the room, with nothing rephrased and nobody corrected. We spent months obsessing over the workflow that makes it, on a real podcast book, one conversation at a time. So the months went into the workflow, not into your wait.

Book a half-hour call See everything you get

One book, up to 40 episodes

$3,499

Published on Leanpub and on Amazon: a Kindle ebook, a 6 × 9 paperback and a 7 × 10 hardcover

Your book comes back less than a week after the files land, privately, with zero human editing. Publish it as it is, or change anything you like first.

A PodcastBook

In Their Own Words

Your name on the spine

The service

Are you an interviewer?

Do you sit across from the founders, the investors, the artists, the scientists, the athletes, the people who actually built something, and get them to say how they did it? Then you have already done the hard part. You earned the trust. You asked the question nobody else asked. You let the silence work.

Everything we know about Rockefeller, Edwin Land, Enzo Ferrari and Steve Jobs, we know because somebody wrote it down. The letters, the interviews, the dictated memoirs. The biographies you love were built from primary sources, and most of those sources were conversations. You are recording the primary sources of the next century. Right now they live in a feed, where episode 40 is buried under episode 400.

A podcast is heard once. A book is read for fifty years.

The shelf

You already know what this book feels like

If you have read Founders at Work, you know the attraction. Jessica Livingston sat down with the people who started Apple, PayPal, Hotmail and Craigslist and asked them what it was actually like. The book is nearly twenty years old and it is still pressed into the hands of first-time founders, because nothing beats the person who did it, telling you in their own words.

The Paris Review has been publishing its interviews with writers since 1953. Studs Terkel’s Working is nothing but people talking. Charlie Munger’s talks became Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book that has now outlived him. A conversation, edited with care and bound between covers, is one of the oldest and most durable things a person can make.

Your show is already that book. It is just trapped in audio.

The problem

A transcript is not a book

You have seen the transcript. Every “yeah, yeah”, every restart, every sentence that begins twice and ends nowhere. It is accurate, and it is unreadable. Nobody has ever given a transcript as a gift.

A machine can produce one in thirty seconds, and that is exactly what it is worth. It is disposable, like the feed it came from.

A book is different. Each conversation becomes a chapter with a title that earns its place. A standfirst tells the reader who this person is and why the conversation matters. The false starts go, the crosstalk is untangled, and the moment where your guest finally says the true thing lands on the page the way it landed in the room. The reader gets the conversation as you remember it, not as the microphone recorded it.

The Engineering Room by David Farley, from $12.99

The proof

Read the one we already made

Dave Farley hosts The Engineering Room: long conversations with the people who shaped how software gets built, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Kelsey Hightower and Nicole Forsgren among them. We turned thirty-eight of those conversations into a book, and he published it under his name. It is the canonical PodcastBook: made by this workflow, to these rules, start to finish.

If you are curious what PodcastBook would make of your show, do not take our word for it. Buy his book and read a chapter or three. That is the product: the chapter titles, the standfirsts, the way a two-hour conversation reads at the pace of a page, and the guests sounding exactly like themselves.

If you buy The Engineering Room, you get a $100 discount on PodcastBook. Just tell us on the call.

Read The Engineering Room

The book

Edited to read, faithful to the room

Every host wants two things that pull against each other: the words exactly as they were said, and a book that reads. A transcript gives you the first, and nobody reads it. PodcastBook gives you the second without giving up the first.

What goes. The crosstalk, the false starts, the filler, the repetition, the digression that went nowhere. Up to a tenth of what was said, and every cut is cut whole and checked back against the audio.

What never changes. The words. We never rephrase a sentence, never reorder a conversation, never put a cleaner phrase in anyone’s mouth. If your guest misremembered a date, the page has them misremembering it, because that is what happened. We repair the transcription. We never correct the speaker.

What gets added. Each conversation becomes a chapter with a title that earns its place and a standfirst that tells the reader who this person is and why the conversation matters. Then the whole book is typeset properly: PDF, EPUB, the web, and a print-ready edition.

The result is the book your guests deserve, and the one you can sign without flinching. It reads at the pace of a page, it sounds like the people in the room, and if anyone ever asks what was actually said, the recording is still the recording. Read The Engineering Room and you have read exactly what we would make from your show.

How it works

What we actually do

We spent the months so you wait less than a week. We built and tested this workflow on the first PodcastBook, The Engineering Room: thirty-eight conversations, 320,000 words, six full editorial passes, arguing over every changed word until the process was right. Those six passes changed exactly one spoken word, in a sentence that made no sense as transcribed. Every other fix was on our side of the page: a hyphen, a capital letter, the title of a cited book. Your show gets that finished workflow.
You hand us the files. Audio or video, any format, in a shared folder. The whole show, or the episodes you would put in a first volume.
We make the book from the audio, not from a transcript. Every line is checked against the recording, so what reaches the page is what was said, not what a captioning tool guessed.
We edit it to read. The false starts, the filler and the crosstalk go. A digression that went nowhere goes. Up to a tenth of what was said is cut, every cut is cut whole, and every cut is checked back against the audio. Nothing is rephrased and nothing is reordered.
We repair the transcription. We never correct the speaker. This rule is built into the workflow. If the recording says one thing and the page says another, we fix the page. If your guest misremembered a date, or chose a word you would not have chosen, it stays. We put nothing in anyone’s mouth.
We give every conversation a chapter title and a standfirst that says who this is and why it matters, so a reader opening the book cold knows why to keep going.
We typeset it properly. PDF, EPUB, the web, and a print-ready edition. The kind of object you can sign.
We hand it back in less than a week. Zero human editing. Privately, for your eyes only. No pressure, nobody waiting on you.
You read it. Then publish it as it is, or make any edits you like yourself first: it is already a Leanpub book, so open it and start. You own everything, and you owe us nothing here. Of course, we’d love for you to publish it on Leanpub.

The book is made by AI, start to finish, but the AI workflow was built with human obsession. People spent months testing it against real conversations, ruling on every kind of change it is allowed to make and every kind it is not, until it did what a careful editor does and nothing a careful editor would not. The tool is sharp because multiple people spent a long time sharpening it.

What's included

What stays yours

Your name on the cover, and your copyright on the page behind it.
Your guests’ words, exactly as spoken. We repair transcription, while keeping their words.
Every editorial call. Which episodes, what order, whether guests see their chapters first, whether the conversations are dated. We will advise if you ask. We will not decide.
You choose your price. Sell on Leanpub from day one at Leanpub’s standard royalty (80% on sales of $7.99 and up, 80% minus 50 cents below that), and in print through Amazon.
Your book, privately. Nobody outside the room sees a page until you say so.
Your book to change. It is a Leanpub book from the day it lands. Cut a chapter, add a foreword, reorder the conversations. Or publish it exactly as it is.
Your podcast, untouched. The book is a companion, not a replacement. Every chapter can point back to the episode it came from.

Book a half-hour call

The price

One book, published on Leanpub and on Amazon, back in less than a week. You publish it, as it is or after your own edits.

PodcastBook

$3,499

for one book

Your book, published everywhere it should be.

Your book, edited to read, back in less than a week
Published on Leanpub as PDF, EPUB and on the web, with a print-ready PDF
Published on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, a 6 × 9 paperback and a 7 × 10 hardcover
10 free paperback copies
5 free hardcover copies
You choose your price on Leanpub — 80% royalties on sales of $7.99 and up, 80% minus 50 cents on sales below $7.99

One book holds up to 40 episodes and 40 hours of audio. A longer show, or one with very long episodes, becomes more than one book. Each additional book is $2,799, published on Amazon like the first. We will estimate the book count after you provide the audio or video files.

Have you bought The Engineering Room? That is a $100 discount on PodcastBook. Just tell us on the call.

The fit

Who PodcastBook is for

It is for a particular kind of show, and the call is where we both find out whether yours is one.

You interview people whose words are worth reading.
You have a body of work. Dozens of long conversations, not a handful of short ones.
Your podcast is a body of work that belongs in a book.

It is not for you if a transcript is all you want. There are excellent tools for that, and we are not one of them.

Your part

What we need from you

You have already done the years of work. What is left is small, and it is yours alone to do.

Task	Your time
A Zoom call to start it	30 minutes
The audio or video, for every episode you want in the book	A shared folder
Choosing which episodes to send	Minutes
A read of your book	You can probably read the whole thing in a few evenings, at your own pace. Or just skim it to ensure you’re happy; it’s entirely up to you.
Telling us to publish it, or publishing it yourself	Whenever you are ready

Our side of it
We are creating this for your eyes only. Do what you want with it. It’s yours.

Frequently asked questions

Questions you should be asking

Is this just an AI transcript with a cover on it?

It is AI, and it is not a transcript. A transcript takes thirty seconds and reads like one. This takes days, though less than a week, because the workflow does what an editor does: repairs what the microphone got wrong, trims what the eye should not have to wade through, shapes chapters, writes standfirsts, and checks every change back against the audio. The AI runs that workflow. People spent months building and testing it on a real podcast book, ruling on every kind of change it is allowed to make and every kind it is not. What we hand back has had zero human editing.

Can I see one before I book a call?

Yes. The Engineering Room by Dave Farley is the canonical PodcastBook: thirty-eight conversations, made by this workflow, published under his name on Leanpub. Buy it and read it. If you then go ahead with PodcastBook, you get a $100 discount.

Will my guests sound like themselves?

Yes, because they are themselves. We remove what a microphone catches and a reader should not have to wade through: false starts, filler, crosstalk. We never rephrase what a person said, and we never correct them. If a guest got a fact wrong, the page has them getting it wrong, because that is what happened. If you want a footnote, you can have one. That is your call, not ours.

Do my guests need to approve their chapters?

That is your decision, and we will not push you either way. Some hosts send chapters to guests as a courtesy. Some do not. We will support whichever you choose.

Which episodes go in?

The ones you send. One book holds up to 40 episodes and 40 hours of audio, so send the whole show if it fits, or the conversations you still think about. A longer show becomes more than one book, and we will estimate how many after you provide the audio or video files. The table of contents is yours to change afterwards, and we will help if you ask.

How long does it take?

Less than a week from the files landing to the book in your inbox.

What happens once the book comes back?

You read it. Publish it as it is, or make any edits you like yourself first: it is already a Leanpub book, so open it and start. Then we publish it on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, a 6 × 9 paperback and a 7 × 10 hardcover. We do no human editing. We are confident in what the workflow produces, and the book is yours to change.

What does it cost?

PodcastBook is $3,499: the book, published on Leanpub and on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, a 6 × 9 paperback and a 7 × 10 hardcover, with 10 free paperback copies and 5 free hardcover copies. One book holds up to 40 episodes and 40 hours of audio. A longer show becomes more than one book, and each additional book is $2,799. If you have bought The Engineering Room, you get a $100 discount.

Why is the hardcover a different size from the paperback?

Amazon does not print a hardcover over 550 pages, and a book of 40 conversations runs longer than that at 6 × 9. So the hardcover is a larger book, 7 × 10, with the type and margins set to fit. The paperback stays 6 × 9.

What if I read it and don’t want it published?

Then nothing happens. The book was made for your eyes, and it stays that way. Nobody outside the room ever sees a page. We would still be glad we made it.

Can I use the book to promote the show?

It is your book. Excerpt it, give chapters to your guests, sell it, sign copies at your live show, hand it to the next guest before they sit down. Every chapter can carry a link back to the episode it came from.

I only have video. Does that work?

Video is fine. We only need the sound. Send whatever you have, in whatever format, and we will sort it out.

It starts with a half-hour call

If you host the kind of show this page describes, we are already fans, and we would love to do this. Book a half-hour Zoom call with us: we talk about the show, which conversations belong in the book, and how to get us the files. The call is free and commits you to nothing. Your book comes back less than a week after the files land, privately, with zero human editing.

Book a half-hour call

Or just write to hello@leanpub.com.