SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

For authors

Podcasts and videos

Decorative banner with text reading 'early career researcher hub'

Videos and podcasts are great ways to engage your audience. They allow you to talk directly to people and tell them why your work is interesting and why they should want to learn more about it. If you’re making something for your own channel (or a channel run by your department or the journal you’re publishing in), these mediums can give you the freedom to be incredibly creative in how you tell the world about your research. If you’re making something for someone else’s channel, they can allow you to tap into a whole new audience for your work. While it can be intimidating when you’re getting started, both podcasts and videos are great tools for promoting your research. It can be a lot of fun making them, too.

Jump straight to:

What type of book/article/research makes a good podcast or video?

While there are clear benefits to making a video or a podcast, they also take a lot of work. Before getting started, it can help to think about whether your article will make a good candidate for promotion via one of these routes. Some things that make articles good candidates for multimedia promotion are:

  • Controversial topics: Who doesn’t love a good debate? Can you frame your research either as an argument against previous accepted thought or against another current school of thought? If so, you might just have a video or podcast on your hands. Drawing out why or how your work and ideas are different from someone else’s is a great way to build content.
  • Newsworthy or timely research: A video about Victorian dresses could do really well if there’s a popular period drama on Netflix. If there’s a nice round anniversary of a historical event that you’ve researched coming up, capitalise on it with a podcast. Relating your work to something that is currently in the news or popular culture can be a great way to introduce it to people outside academia. The extra attention can help to draw in other researchers as well.
  • Interest beyond the field: Do you think that philosophers might be interested in your history article? Could literary scholars gain something from your political science paper? A video or podcast could be a great way to reach those groups. Topics that fit into this category can produce content that continues to be watched or listened to for years.
  • Good video/audio from research: Make the most of the resources you have. Did you need to photograph, video or record anything as part of your research? Do you have the permissions to use any of that media for other purposes? If so, then make the most of it.

If your work doesn’t fit into one of these categories, it doesn’t mean that a video or podcast about your article won’t be of interest. All you need to do is find the right audience and you’ll reap the rewards. If your article does fit one or more of these categories though, we’d really encourage you to think about promoting it in one of these ways.

Types of podcast/video to consider

Between deciding to make a video or podcast and actually beginning the recording process, there are a couple of key steps. Deciding what sort of video or podcast you want to end up with is the first of these. It will help you to stay focused and avoid trying to cobble together multiple pieces that don’t quite fit later on in the process. When making this decision, you should think about who you want to reach (researchers in your field, researchers in other fields, the general public, etc.) and what you want to tell them (what sets your research apart from previous work, a really cool key element of your research, etc.). Once you know the answers to those two questions, you can start considering what type of video or podcast fits your aims best. Some common types that you may want to use are:

  • Interview: Interviews are a great way to draw out the highlights of your work. You can have someone interview you or you could pose questions to a co-author. You can craft the questions to bring out the information that you want to talk about. Send them to everyone who’ll be involved beforehand so that everyone has a chance to think about what they’ll say.
  • Debate: This can be against someone who has an opposing viewpoint to you (if you’re both confident in your position and can remain civil throughout your disagreement) or more of a one-sided discussion in which you point out where your research differs from previous thinking. The key is to set your work in opposition to something else and give the viewers or listeners the information that they need to decide whether they agree with you. If you are debating against someone else, it’s important to allow them to see the final version of the video or podcast before you post it. You should also avoid crowning a winner of the debate and give the viewers or listeners information on how to find out more about both sides.
  • Description/walk through: Does your article deal with really complex theories or have a lot of technical detail? Are you discussing a relatively unknown historical figure or work of literature? If so, your readers might find it helpful to have a brief explainer video or podcast to help them get into the paper itself. These videos/podcasts tend to get the most views/listens when they’re short and sharp (aim for 3-5 minutes). You don’t need to give a full lecture, just the basics that someone would need to be able to understand your research in an informal manner. If you want to reach an audience outside of your field, this sort of video or podcast can be invaluable.
  • How the research came about: Is there a funny or interesting story about how you came to the idea behind your research? Tell us about it! An amusing or surprising research story can be both a good way to hook in potential readers of your article and to frame the key sections/aspects of your work.

Some other things to consider at this point are:

  • Who else will be involved? (e.g. co-authors, someone to help videoing, etc.)
  • Do you need to travel to get the shots and/or audio that you want?
  • What software/equipment options are available to you? (There’s more information on this in steps 2 and 3 of the next section.)
  • How much time can you spend working on this project? Don’t overstretch yourself.

How to make a video or podcast

Making a video or a podcast can seem like a huge and potentially off-putting task. Once you start breaking it down though, the individual pieces of the task look a lot more manageable.

Step 1: Write your script (podcast) or make a storyboard (video)

Making a storyboard may sound like a bit of a ‘Hollywood’ step, but it’s essentially just breaking your video plan down into short sections and noting what you want to show and say in each one. This makes it easier to work out the flow of the narrative and guarantee that you hit every point that you want to.

Make sure to think about how long you have to cover each section. It can be difficult to judge where the line is between enough information and too much detail. Keeping each section snappy will help to keep your audience engaged all the way through. Remember, they can read the article for the full detail. Videos and podcasts should function more like trailers for the article or stepping stones to make the content easier to understand.

For podcasts (and, depending on how comfortable you are with ad-libbing, videos too), you’ll need a script of some sort. This can be a detailed word-for-word transcript of what you want to record, a few bullets of points that you want to make or anything in between. Think about what works best for you when giving a presentation to decide on the right balance. As with a storyboard, you just want something to give a bit of structure and keep you on track.

For interview videos or podcasts, write out a list of questions and send them to everyone who’ll be involved beforehand. The more prepared people feel, the more comfortable they’ll be and the more confident they’ll sound. Try to write questions that draw out the important sections of the paper from whomever you’re interviewing. Struggling to think of good questions? Watch/listen to some other interviews of people in your field and try to adapt questions from those to your topic.

Step 2: Recording Your Content

Whether you’re recording audio or video, this is probably the section you’re either dying to get to or absolutely dreading. It’s also where you need to think about your equipment.

There are a lot of ways to record your video or audio and it can be difficult to know which choice to make. The cheapest and easiest option will probably be to use technology that you already have. Whether it’s on your phone or laptop, you probably have access to equipment that will record you at a good enough quality level for your video or podcast. If you want to take things a step further, see if your institution has any equipment that you can use – if you’ve got a media relations department or a press team, start by asking them.

If you want to make a video, but don’t feel comfortable filming (or being on camera), you can use relevant images and just record an audio voiceover. This can be a really good way to use any photographs that you took as part of your research in the promotion process.

There’s tons of advice for recording video and audio online. A couple of very basic tips that will generally apply across most recording though are:

  • Lighting: Good lighting can be the difference between a professional looking video and one that is barely watchable. If you’re recording inside, try a few test shots with different lights on (you might want to bring in some lamps to help, and always make sure you are facing a window, not sitting/standing in front of one). For outside recordings, it’s generally best to have the sun behind the camera – watch out for shadows from the cameraperson though!
  • Sound quality: It may seem obvious, but recording somewhere quiet is a great way to improve your video or podcast. The better your recording equipment, the more you’ll need to think about this (something basic might not pick up the traffic outside the room you’re recording in, for example, but a high-quality mic probably will). Try to find an area with minimal noise or record at a time when fewer people are around.

Step 3: The Editing Process

There are tons of video and audio editing software options available. So many that we can’t do any of them justice with direct advice here. The key is to find a programme that you feel comfortable with and spend the time to get familiar with it. For some people, that will be a programme that gives you tons of options and control over every aspect of the content, for others it will be something very basic that can just clean things up a little or add some captions.

The amount of editing that you need to do (and in some cases, like a vlog-style video for example, you might not actually need to do any) will depend on the type of video that you’re making. For interviews (either videos or podcasts), you might just need to add the people’s names or maybe cut a little out for time. For description or walk-through videos or podcasts, you may need to do a bit more in terms of piecing things together in the right order, adding voiceovers etc.

You can also add music or sound-effects (where appropriate). A lot of these can be found on Creative Commons and used free of charge. In general, it’s best to use these sparingly, and be mindful of tone. In moderation, they can help viewers/listeners to pick out key elements or immerse themselves in your work. If you go overboard with them though, you run the risk of putting people off entirely.

Step 4: Upload the Final Product

Some journals or publishers have their own YouTube or SoundCloud profiles (or equivalents on other platforms) and would be happy to upload your video for you. Uploading your video to these channels will usually help you to get to a broader relevant audience. It also places your work amongst similar content.

If your publisher or the journal that your paper is being published by do not have these options, don’t worry – it’s still good to have a video for your paper out there. Creating a YouTube account and uploading a video is very simple. When you’re entering the details of the video, make sure to include a direct link to your article. Think about the keywords that you enter for the video as well – the ones you wrote for your article will probably be excellent options. The same goes for SoundCloud. We haven’t worked through every platform, but most popular ones are fairly intuitive (or at least have tutorials or guides to help).

Once your video or podcast is online, make sure to tell everyone about it. Promoting through your social media accounts is a great way to do this. You can ask the journal you’ve published in or the publisher of your book to do the same – their followers are exactly the people you want to reach.

Where to now?

Podcasts and videos | Edinburgh University Press