Recordings of improvised bedtime stories about fairies, pirates, princesses and tigers, told to my three daughters

I'm a physician with three children. I've always enjoyed the dramatic arts as a hobby.

The podcast gives me an outlet for my creative side. It's a fun hobby that provides a change of pace from work.

My target listeners are children who enjoy less-formal improvised stories. The stories were originally told to children from ages two to thirteen, but are probably best enjoyed by those in the 5-10 age range.
 

For the past eighteen years, from the time my oldest child was two until my youngest turned thirteen this year, I told my children a new bedtime story every night, making it up as I went along. The stories were shaped by their requests, questions, and running commentary.
From 2007 to 2012, I recorded those stories on a digital dictaphone. We burned their favorites to CD so that they could listen to them repeatedly. Over time, other young relatives would hear them and request their own copies of the CDs.

Family encouraged me to turn the stories into a podcast or books, but I never found time.

During the early days of the pandemic, I suddenly had both time and a desire to start a hobby to distract from the avalanche of dire news. So I started the process of turning those old recordings into Stories for Wonderful Children. Learning how to edit, setting up hosting, and creating the first few episodes took about four months. The show premiered August 22, 2020.
 

New stories are posted every Wednesday and Sunday.

Episodes usually take about an hour each to edit the saved audio and enhance it. Some episodes take a bit longer if my children were creating a lot of extraneous noise during the story.

I occasionally tell new stories for young relatives' birthdays, or for special episodes. For those, I usually take requests about story topics and interests, then plan the story out in my head for a week or two before sitting down to tell it. Even the planned stories aren't written out ahead of time; I don't want to lose the spontaneity of a live telling.

Stories for Wonderful Children is a self-financed hobby. It costs about $200 a year between the podcast and website hosting. It is money well-spent if it is allowing others to share the joy that my children found in my stories when they were younger.
 

I podcast for the satisfaction of sharing my stories with those who enjoy them. I'm fortunate that podcasting can be a hobby for me, and so I don't seek sponsorships.

Listeners who want to support the show can best do so by leaving a review with their podcatcher, telling a friend about it, or dropping me an e-mail to let me know they enjoy it.
 

Many of dictaphone recordings of the original stories are uncatalogued. I've been going through them in the order they were told.

The first thing I do is listen to the story at 1.5x speed to determine whether it's a good candidate for an episode. My children frequently requested stories about copyrighted characters that prevent me from using them as an episode, so those get sent out just to immediate relatives. I'm also listening for audio quality. Because these stories were told with a live audience, sometimes there's too much background noise to make it worth trying to edit into something with reasonable quality.

Once I've decided that a story is worth editing, I import it into Audacity. I do a noise reduction, then edit out any verbal slips. I also trim any commentary by my children that's irrelevant to the story. Then, I add intro and outro and upload it to Buzzsprout, my podcast host.

I also tell new stories for special occasions like relatives' birthdays or landmark episodes (we just hit episode 100). Those are a pleasure to edit because my equipment is much better now, but I miss my live audience heckling me.

I usually try to have episodes uploaded a couple weeks before they go live so that I don't miss any episodes if work gets busy or we take vacation.
 

I've marketed the show through social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and even tried a Facebook ad for a week or so. I was also featured in a local neighborhood magazine. None of those avenues seemed to have much of an impact.

The most useful and effective way of marketing was joining Kids Listen, an association of podcasters for children who advocate for high-quality children's podcasts. The organization is a wonderful group of people who really care about creating the best and most appropriate podcasts possible. They've been a terrific resource for both my own edification and for getting the word out about Stories for Wonderful Children.
 

Only start a podcast if you find it personally rewarding. It's going to be more work than you think. You are very unlikely to have a hit podcast and even less likely to make a living doing it.

However, if you have something to share with the world and you're going to enjoy the journey for its own sake, go for it! Don't let lack of knowledge or equipment stop you. Just get started and learn as you go. Don't stop working to improve: focus your topics; edit mercilessly; upload on a regular schedule; and have fun.
 

Stories for Wonderful Children can be found on the website https://storiesforwonderfulchildren.com/ and I can also be contacted at storiesforwonderfulchildren on gmail.

The podcast can be found on all the podcast apps and directories, as well as the marvelous Kids Listen app.