When to stop editing your own podcast

Every year there's a new piece of software that makes editing easier, and every year the same shows stall at episode eleven. That's not a coincidence. A better tool takes a three-hour edit down to two, which matters, but it doesn't change who has to sit down and do the two hours.

What actually stops shows is that editing is elastic. It expands to fill a Sunday afternoon, then it gets pushed to Monday evening, then a launch lands at work and it doesn't happen at all. Recording has a guest waiting. Publishing has a date. Editing has neither, so it's the task that quietly absorbs every other pressure in your week.

So before choosing between Descript and Riverside, it's worth asking whether the choice you're actually making is between doing this yourself and not.

The edit takes more than three hours an episode. The published estimates put a basic edit of a one-hour recording at two hours and a produced one at three to five, and my experience matches that. If you're consistently past three, you're either doing production-level work (which is a job) or fighting your recordings (which is a fixable problem, and a producer will spot it in the first episode). Either way, the hours are the signal, and I've written up where they actually go.

The schedule has slipped twice in a quarter. Once is life. Twice is a pattern, and patterns don't correct themselves because you've resolved to be more disciplined. If you're chasing yourself to hit a Thursday, the show has already started costing you something you can't get back, which is the audience's habit.

You've stopped getting better. This is the quiet one. The first twenty episodes you edit, you improve fast, and it's satisfying. Then you plateau, because you're spending your editing time on the same problems (a quiet guest, a boomy room, a tangent at minute 40) rather than on craft. At that point you're not learning a skill, you're doing a chore with a skill you already have. That's when handing it over stops feeling like giving something up.

The comparison most people make is a producer's per-episode fee against zero, because editing yourself doesn't send an invoice. That's the wrong sum.

The right one is your hourly value, times the hours the edit actually takes, times the number of episodes a year. Three hours an episode on a weekly show is 150 hours a year. If your time is worth anything like what a business pays for it, that number is larger than any production fee, before you count the episodes that didn't go out because the edit didn't happen.

Our editing cost calculator does that arithmetic with your own figures. It's deliberately unflattering. Most people who run it are surprised, and a few decide the honest answer is that editing themselves is still cheaper, which is a legitimate outcome and one I'd rather you reached with the numbers than without.

This is the section a producer isn't supposed to write, so here it is.

You enjoy it. Genuinely, not in the way you enjoy having done it. If the edit is the part of the week you look forward to, keep it. Plenty of good shows are made by people who love the cutting, and outsourcing a thing you love to save time is a bad trade.

The show is a hobby. If it exists because you like making it and nobody's livelihood depends on it publishing on Thursday, then a slipped week costs nothing and a producer's fee is a real cost against no real problem.

You're under ten episodes in. Early on, editing your own show teaches you things about how you talk that nothing else will. You'll hear your own filler words, your own habit of trailing off, the question you keep asking twice. Do at least a handful yourself before deciding you never want to again.

You can't yet say what you want. A producer can match a spec. A producer can't invent your taste. If you don't yet know whether you want the conversational texture kept or a tighter cut, a few more episodes of doing it yourself will tell you, and it makes the eventual handover far better.

If the signals above are pointing at you, don't hand everything over at once. Sequence it.

The edit first. It's the biggest block of hours, the most skill-dependent, and the one that's actually slipping. Handing over the edit alone is enough to make the schedule hold, and it tells you within two episodes whether you've found the right person, because you'll be able to hear it.

Then show notes and chapters. They take longer than anyone expects and they're done badly on most shows. Once the edit is off your plate you'll notice these are the next thing eating your evening.

Then clips and publishing. These are the most systematisable parts and the ones where a producer who already cut the episode has an unfair advantage, because they know which forty seconds actually landed.

What you keep is the conversation, the guest list and the taste. Those are the show. Everything else is production, and production is the thing that was never really yours to begin with.

If you've read this far and recognised yourself in the three signals, the tool comparison you started with is probably not the decision you need to make.

The services and rates are published, in pounds, with no form in the way. Editing on its own is where most people start, and it's priced so that the arithmetic in the calculator above comes out clearly one way or the other. If you'd rather talk it through, say what the show is and you'll get a straight answer, including "keep doing it yourself" if that's the right one.