Complete practical guide
The podcast editing book about the eleven-hour clean-up
37 chapters and 68 worksheets on editing and producing podcasts - why a ninety-minute quote took eleven hours, why a free music bed cost a host money, and why a guest was told an episode was gone when it was not.
Look inside — read the first chapter freeOne payment, USD. Yours permanently — no subscription.
What this guide is
Wren quoted a quick clean-up at about ninety minutes. It took eleven hours. The host and guest were on one merged track, recorded on a laptop microphone with the guest on speakerphone, in a room with a refrigerator in it. The guest's line dropped four times, so four sections existed twice with different wording. Forty minutes in, there was a tangent the host wanted removed - and it turned out to be structural rather than decorative, referred back to eleven times, so removing it meant finding eleven places where a sentence no longer made sense and building a bridge over each. Then the things nobody had mentioned: an intro, show notes, timestamps, three clips, a title, a description and the upload. Nobody behaved badly. The host asked for a clean-up and genuinely believed a clean-up was one thing. Then at month four a music bed taken from a download described as royalty-free generated a claim nine weeks later, on episodes already downloaded by thousands, and the host paid. At month seven a guest asked for a section to be removed three weeks after publication - Wren cut it, re-uploaded, and told the guest it was done. It was not done, and it never fully could be. And at month nine an edit removed a hesitation that happened to sit immediately before the word 'allegedly', turning a report of an allegation into a flat statement of fact about a named company. The host caught it with two hours to spare. None of those four were audio problems.
What you get out of it
Specifics, not promises.
- Why one merged track costs two to four times the hours on an identically priced job
- The four-minute source check that decides whether a job is ninety minutes or eleven hours
- Finished minutes per production hour - the number this trade turns on, and nobody keeps
- How a hesitation cut removes the word 'allegedly' without anybody being able to hear it
- What replacing a published file actually achieves, and what you must never tell a guest
- Why 'royalty-free' is a payment model rather than a permission
- The deliverable list that arrives one item at a time for a year if you do not price it
- Why a re-cut after publication can cost more than the original edit
- The pre-publication gate that runs the evening before, not the morning of
- 148 AI prompts - and a large share exist to stop a confident wrong value becoming a preset
Ideal for
People editing and producing podcasts for solo hosts, small networks, agencies, branded and internal shows and institutions as a side hustle - per-episode editing, full show management, clip and short-form packages, launch and setup work, and repair work on shows edited elsewhere. Particularly three groups: somebody whose episodes take three or four times what they quoted; somebody who has never asked for separate tracks; and anybody who has been asked to take an episode down and did not know what to say.
- Anybody editing podcasts for hosts, networks, agencies or branded shows
- Somebody whose episodes take three or four times what they quoted
- Somebody who has never asked for separate tracks
- Anybody who has been asked to take an episode down and did not know what to say
What's inside
Format
- Digital download, delivered instantly after payment
- Formatted for letter paper — read on screen or print it
- Yours permanently, re-downloadable from your library any time
- Licensed for use in your own business
By the end you can
A reader finishes with a customer type and format chosen on recurrence, templating, source quality and longevity rather than on subject; a source check run in four minutes on the actual files before any price exists, because at least one answer in every intake conversation is wrong; a deliverable list established one item at a time and written into the agreement with a price against each additional item; a show price containing a show fee, a base edit for a stated format and raw and target length, each deliverable priced individually, an automatic source-condition surcharge, a turnaround measured from receipt of files, a revision definition that distinguishes an adjustment from a re-cut, and a stated review point; a session template per show carrying the track layout, a documented processing chain, the intro, the beds, the markers and the export presets, so the first ten minutes of every episode contain no decisions; a full listen-through before any cut, producing flags rather than silent fixes; an edit log recording every removal above cosmetic with its category and whether it was requested; a consent register and a music licence register filled at the moment rather than afterwards; a pre-publication gate of thirteen checks run as a list the evening before rather than the morning of; a one-page recording guide sent to every host, improving the source permanently at the cost of one message; and finished minutes per production hour counted from the first episode, which costs a note in a log and is the only leading indicator the trade offers.
A complete working system for editing and producing podcasts - built on four rules covering the fact that what arrives is an unrepeatable event with its faults permanently attached so that clipping is missing information and a dropped connection was never captured, the fact that every cut is an editorial judgement on somebody else's words published under their name so that removing a hesitation adjacent to a qualifier converts a report of an allegation into a flat assertion and nothing in the audio indicates it, the fact that a feed pushes outward to applications that download immediately so that replacing a file changes only what new listeners receive and there is no version of taking something down that is fully true, and the fact that the price set on a chosen trial episode applies to an open-ended commitment against a source condition varying two to fourfold and a deliverable list that grows - with revenue per production hour as the economic unit, finished minutes per production hour as the leading indicator, and four gates the trade cannot be run profitably or safely without: the source checked by the editor before any price exists, the deliverable list established one item at a time, the full episode listened to before any cut is made, and a pre-publication gate run as a list before anything reaches a feed.
Instant download · One payment · Keep it forever
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