The Book He Built in 2015 With QR Codes

By Junaid Ahmed

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Adam Bird runs a podcast network. He has, on his desktop right now, five episodes that haven't been edited yet. One of them has to go out this week.

He went from weekly to bi-weekly because the calendar didn't have room for the work the show actually requires. Not the recording. The everything-after-the-recording.

He has done this long enough to be clear-eyed about it. He told me, on a demo call, that this year will probably be the most episodes he's put out in six years. He said it the way a person says a thing about themselves that they don't really like.

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We were forty minutes into the demo when I got to the book builder.

I showed him how to pull a published episode, turn the transcript into a chapter, and stack the chapters into a manuscript. Cover. Metadata. Amazon BISAC categories. EPUB export.

He went quiet for a second. Then he told me about 2015.

In 2015 his team took an organization's podcast, chopped the episodes into chapters, and printed a book. At the bottom of each chapter they put a QR code that took the reader back to the full interview.

He said it the way you say a thing you are proud of and also a little sad about. "That was kind of before its time."

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He has another book coming. Possibly two. A client he can't name yet, large in the sports world. He has done the math on it before, the way every self-publisher eventually does.

The math is bad.

The audio is fine. The transcript is fine. The interviews are fine. What kills the project is the part between I have a lot of source material and this reads like a book. Hiring an editor. Cover art. Formatting. Pricing the printer. By the time the book ships, the margin is gone.

His exact words: "I was just losing a lot of, not time, but money."

That is the cost of a book that should have been straightforward. A book made of material you already own, that you already paid for once when you recorded the episode.

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Here is what I keep coming back to.

The IP already exists. Adam has recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with people who are, by any reasonable definition, experts. That is a book. It is, in fact, multiple books.

The reason it isn't a book is that nobody connected the parts. The transcript lives in one tool. The chapter outline lives in a doc nobody opened twice. The cover designer needs a brief. The Amazon KDP form needs metadata. The editor needs the manuscript in EPUB. Each of those handoffs is the work, and each of those handoffs is the reason most podcasters never write the book.

The QR code at the bottom of Adam's 2015 chapter was the right instinct. The instinct was: the audio and the book are the same asset, served two ways. He had the idea before the tooling caught up.

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What PodGlue does inside the book builder isn't clever. It just refuses to treat the transcript as a dead end.

You pick the episodes. The transcripts become chapters. You reorder them. You generate the intro chapter that says here is what you'll learn. You generate the Amazon metadata. You export the file your editor actually opens.

The editor still edits. The cover still gets reviewed. A human still has to decide what the book is about. But the four weeks of moving files between tools, that's gone.

For Adam, that's the difference between two books happening this year and two books getting talked about this year.

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PodGlue is built for the people who are sitting on hundreds of hours of conversations they already own. If that's you, the waitlist is at podglue.com.

Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks & Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue.