The Daily will be off next week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We'll be back Monday, November 29 with your morning headlines, resources, and tips. See you soon!

PodMov Daily: Friday, November 19

Episode 543: Week Download Complete

Coming Up: Two Affordable, Can't-Miss Podcast Festivals

The fourth annual Vancouver Podcast Festival and the Charlotte Podcast Festival’s free Pop-Up event are packed with great programming. All day tomorrow, the Vancouver festival will focus on education from an indie creator perspective, featuring speakers like Paul Bae (The Black Tapes). Passes are $25 CA (~$20 USD).

The Charlotte event runs Tuesday, November 30 through Saturday, December 4. This year’s festival will feature a wide variety of panel discussions and seminars on podcasting skills and techniques (recording, editing, marketing, hosting, and beyond) as well as virtual networking for podcast listeners. 

Each day of the festival has two sessions, making it easy to drop in for individual topics. Award-winning NPR journalist Kelly McEvers (Embedded) will teach tried-and-true hosting and interviewing techniques, and a pitching panel will feature expert judges like Ian Chillag, host and creator of Everything is Alive.

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The Creativity Faucet: How to Accept Your Bad Ideas

How do you consistently tap into your strongest ideas? Writer, marketer, and developer Julian Shapiro has been taking notes. One of his best Twitter threads explains the Creativity Faucet, a creative process shared by two outstanding artists: songwriter Ed Sheeran and author Neil Gaiman.

Visualize your creativity as a pipe backed up with wastewater, Shapiro writes. “Because your pipe only has one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.” The same applies to writing down our thoughts: “Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.”

Most of us self-criticize, reject what we’ve come up with, and turn off the faucet prematurely. If instead we accept enough lame ideas, our minds can more easily identify those weak qualities. Shapiro’s blog version has an interview clip with Sheeran, Gaiman’s tweet of approval, and other treats.

Keep Episodes Fresh with Dynamic Content

With Buzzsprout, it’s faster than ever to keep your podcast fresh — and your listeners up-to-date. The Dynamic Content tool lets you easily add and remove short pre-roll (intro) and post-roll (outro) content to your episodes. It's the perfect solution for timely messaging.

Whether you’re promoting a virtual event or giving a special shout-out, Dynamic Content makes it simple to swap, automatically add content to new episodes, or apply it to your existing catalog with a click. Old files are removed and replaced, so there’s no clean-up.

This innovative feature offers more than flexibility. It benefits your audience in more ways than one: Buzzsprout respects your listeners’ privacy. Unlike most Dynamic Ad Insertion, the Dynamic Content tool includes no tracking or targeting. Ready to make the switch?

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Here's what else is going on:

• Promo code: Apple Podcasts has released a tool that builds customizable marketing materials, meant to promote listening on its platform. Creators (or anyone, without a login) can enter a show or episode and download images sized for Instagram Stories, Facebook posts, and IAB banners.

• On paper: With the purchase of an audiobook company, Spotify is set up to achieve its goal of becoming “the place you consume all audio.” Ashley Carman of Hot Pod explains how it “might be able to strong-arm publishers into putting more books on its platform at more favorable prices.”

• Travel log: On Saturday, November 27, the Africa Podfest Discovery Tour stops in Johannesburg, South Africa on the road to this year’s event. Host and producer Sisipho Skweyiya (The Journey…)will lead a talk on experiences, skills, and tips. Begins at 6:00 am CT/2:00 pm GMT +2.

• Present tense: It’s about time to plan gifts for podcasters or podcast fans. Lindsay Harris Friel of The Podcast Host has suggestions for gear, software, courses, education, events, and more. Keep in mind that “the best thing you can do is to ask them about their work, and to listen to it.”