Dana Schwartz Of ‘Very Special Episodes’ On The 5 Things You Need To Create A Very Successful Podcast
First, consistency is key. Listeners notice when the output isn’t steady.
Second, genuine passion is crucial. If you’re not excited about your subject, whether it’s sports, history, or even a unique event, audiences can sense that.
Third, invest in a decent microphone. With technology advancements, achieving great audio quality is accessible and not overly expensive.
Fourth, proofreading is vital for scripted podcasts. Ensuring your script is free of grammatical errors is important for credibility and clarity.
Lastly, always have a big cup of water next to you while recording. It’s essential for clearing your throat, which I do every time I record.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Dana Schwartz. Dana is a multi-faceted writer, podcaster, and journalist, known for her diverse contributions to the fields of literature, podcasting, and entertainment journalism. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, specifically Highland Park, Illinois, Schwartz’s initial academic pursuit was in the realm of medicine. However, her collegiate experience on the East Coast led her to pivot towards her true passion — writing. This decision marked the beginning of a career that would see her contributing to some of the most prestigious publications and creating content that resonates with a wide audience.
Schwartz’s literary journey boasts the publication of five books, with her works, “Anatomy: A Love Story” and its sequel, “Immortality: A Love Story,” achieving the status of #1 New York Times and #1 Indie bestsellers. Her books have found a global audience, being published in over 20 countries and translated into more than a dozen languages. Her foray into writing was fueled by a proactive approach during her senior year in college, where she immersed herself in writing for local blogs, culture journals, and freelancing — most notably for Mental Floss after pitching directly to the magazine.
Her transition from New York, where she began her professional journey in journalism and literature, to Los Angeles, marked her entry into the television and podcasting industry. In Los Angeles, Schwartz not only continued her writing career but also ventured into podcasting and television scriptwriting. As a journalist, she has contributed to a variety of high-profile publications, including Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ, Vanity Fair, and more.
In the podcasting arena, Schwartz has made significant strides with her creation of the history podcast “Noble Blood,” produced by iHeartRadio. This podcast, which delves into the lesser-known stories of royals throughout history, showcases her ability to engage audiences with compelling narratives. Her involvement with iHeartRadio has expanded over the years, leading to the development of other successful podcasts such as “Haileywood,” “Stealing Superman,” and the recently premiered iHeartRadio Original series “Very Special Episodes,” each of which underscores her knack for uncovering and presenting extraordinary stories.
Her journey into television writing unfolded through a combination of her literary accomplishments and networking within the industry. After moving to L.A. and initially working for Entertainment Weekly, Schwartz wrote a series of scripts and comic books for Marvel, which eventually paved the way for her first TV writing job on “She-Hulk, Attorney at Law” for Disney Plus. This diverse career path exemplifies the non-linear trajectories often found within the entertainment industry, emphasizing the importance of versatility, networking, and a relentless pursuit of creative outlets.
Beyond her professional endeavors, Schwartz’s personal life is equally enriched by the creative community. Her engagement and subsequent marriage, stemming from an invitation to guest on the podcast “All Fantasy Everything,” highlights the serendipitous connections that can arise from collaborative ventures. Currently residing in Los Angeles with her husband and their cats, Eddie and Beetlejuice, Schwartz continues to explore and expand her creative horizons across various media platforms, establishing herself as a prominent voice in contemporary storytelling and cultural commentary.
Yitzi: Hey, Dana, it’s a delight and honor to meet you. Before you dive in, I’d really just love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share this story of your childhood and how you grew up?
Dana: Absolutely. I’m from the suburbs of Chicago. I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, in a pretty big family, one of four siblings. I went to school on the East Coast. Originally, I aimed to become a writer and move to New York when I graduated. Although I had planned on being pre-med when I came to college, I realized that my real passion was writing. So, I moved to New York City, worked in newspapers, and a few magazines, then ultimately got to write my own novels, which was a wonderful experience. Later, I moved to Los Angeles and eventually started working in television as well. Now, I do a little bit of everything. I feel incredibly lucky to get to work on books, television, and of course, podcasting.
Yitzi: Amazing. So you have a really fascinating, varied, and textured career, and you’re very lucky. Can you tell us a bit about how it started? How does a young person go about achieving the success that you have? Where do you start to become a podcaster for iHeartRadio, work on movies, or write a book?
Dana: Yeah, the main thing I’ve learned is that putting work out into the world just begets more work. When I was a senior in college, I decided to really throw myself into writing. I wrote for the local college blogs and the local college culture journal and started freelancing. It’s actually kind of an interesting story. I loved the magazine and website Mental Floss, so I emailed them with a bunch of pitches, ideas for freelance articles that I could write. Eventually, they agreed and accepted my pitches. So, while I was in college, I was freelancing for Mental Floss. After I graduated, I came to work for Mental Floss in New York. My editor there was a man named Jason English. Years later, Jason reached out to me to work on an earlier podcast we did together called Haleywood, but ultimately on this podcast, Very Special Episodes. Jason produced it. I talk to Jason in some of the introductions of the episodes. It’s crazy to think that we now know each other because almost 10 years ago, I sent him an email from college.
Yitzi: And how about getting involved in Hollywood? How did that start?
Dana: Oh, gosh, that’s a more circuitous process. If you ask every television writer how they got started, you’ll find that every single one has a different story. For me, I moved to L.A. when I was working for the magazine Entertainment Weekly, but I knew I wanted to ultimately write for TV. So, I wrote a bunch of samples and scripts, scripts that I kind of knew would never get made but could hopefully serve as writing samples. Then, I also wrote a few comic books for Marvel. An editor at Marvel had read one of my books and asked me if I would have any interest in writing comics. I think it was ultimately that connection and my writing samples that led to my first TV writing job, which was writing for “She-Hulk, Attorney at Law” on Disney Plus a few years ago. So, yeah, it’s a roundabout process. The tricky thing about the entertainment industry is that there’s not a single career path. There’s not an entry-level position that leads you there.
Yitzi: It’s been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake you made when you were first starting and the lesson you learned from it?
Dana: Yes, absolutely. Well, I used to work for a magazine, a newspaper called the New York Observer. On my very first day, they told me I was going to do a phone interview with Christina Aguilera and they gave me a brand new recorder to record the phone interview. I didn’t know how the recorder worked and I put the microphone in the wrong slot on the recorder. I lost the entire interview on my very first day. So, that was a life lesson early on: when I do interviews, to always have a backup recording.
Yitzi: Can you tell us a bit about your podcasting history? Can you tell us about how that started, what you started working on, and where you’re at now?
Dana: Absolutely. My first podcast creation was Noble Blood, which tells stories of royals from history. I created it because I realized there was no podcast out there that was exactly what I wanted — history in small digestible bites that’s about people and tells stories. Not history in the sense of memorizing dates or battles, but history that talks about scandals and real human stories that always interested me. I’ve always loved history, but I’m not a professional historian. So, I wanted to approach Noble Blood with a conversational, layperson bent, looking at these stories from an outsider’s perspective, being able to research and share them. It was an extraordinary experience, produced by Aaron Manke, who created Lore, which was sort of the blueprint for what I was trying to do. I was lucky enough to develop Noble Blood at iHeartRadio, and it became enough of a hit that they let me keep making it a weekly show.
Once I was in the iHeart family, it was Jason English, who had been my first boss at Mental Floss, who reached out to me about joining a new podcast they were doing, which was a limited series we did last year about a historical time that Bruce Willis bought up all the land and property in a small Idaho town to remake the town in his image. It was an extraordinary story and a really fun podcast to work on. Then we did it again the next year with Stealing Superman, a miniseries about how Nicolas Cage, an avid comic book collector, had two of his rarest comic books stolen from his house and the mystery of their theft and recovery.
The newest podcast that Jason approached me about is Very Special Episodes. It’s my favorite concept for a podcast, taking strange and extraordinary stories from all over the world, from all across time periods, from Soviet Russia to the making of the film Titanic in the 90s, telling weird, fascinating stories, one story per episode. Each episode is a standalone, very special episode that you’ll immediately want to tell your friends all about.
Yitzi: As a fellow writer, I’m curious, if I was given that assignment, I’m not sure where I would turn. So where do you go to get inspiration or resources or material for these untold stories?
Dana: You know, we have a really big, kind of wonderful team working on the show. It’s people who are very excited about their pet topic, all coming in to guest-write episodes about things they love. One thing I was really excited about was, in the back of my mind, I’ve always been sort of obsessed with the huge scale disaster of the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. And I was so excited that we got to turn that into an episode of this podcast. The rise and fall of the multi-multi-million dollar disaster, the Spider-Man musical. So what’s been so great about this podcast is it gives writers a chance to get an outlet for their pet project. That story that’s been rattling around in the back of their brain for years. This is what that podcast is.
Yitzi: That’s great. Is there a podcast that you didn’t create but that you listen to that you think is a good model for how to run a successful podcast?
Dana: Oh, it’s a conversational podcast where comedians talk. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my husband’s podcast called All Fantasy Everything. They fantasy draft things that aren’t sports, like sandwiches or ’90s action movies. I have to shout it out because one, I love it. I think it’s a great show and my husband is very funny. But also, I met my husband because I was a guest on his podcast.
Yitzi: That’s an amazing story. If you don’t mind, we’d love to hear that story.
Dana: Yeah, he followed me on social media and invited me onto his podcast. It sounded like fun. We had never met in person, but I joined the podcast, and we just hit it off. We had chemistry as we were chatting on Zoom. We started texting, eventually met in person, and about a year later, we were engaged. Now, we’re living in a house in Atwater Village with two cats. Such an amazing story. Yeah, podcasting really did bring us together.
Yitzi: I guess the lesson of the story is, become a podcaster or a podcast guest, and you may find true love.
Dana: Podcasting brings people together. In real life, you rarely have an opportunity to talk to somebody uninterrupted for a half-hour, an hour, or three hours, like you can in a podcast. You can really connect with someone. You find out a lot about them, their sense of humor, personality, and interests. If you’re looking to find somebody, become an interviewer and listen to podcasts.
Yitzi: Doing something on a consistent basis is not easy. Podcasting every week or even every day can be very monotonous. What do you do to maintain the discipline and consistency? And what do you recommend to others to avoid burning out?
Dana: That’s a great question. It’s been really challenging with Noble Blood because it’s a weekly show. So, keeping up the pace of the writing and recording has definitely been a challenge. The way I’ve avoided burnout is to know my limitations. When the show was just starting, it was every other week. But now, I have a wonderful team that helps me research and put together the episodes, which makes the weekly schedule possible.
The thing in my career that allows me to prevent burnout is that I get to focus on so many different projects. I never get bored of one thing. I might record Noble Blood one day, but another day I’ll be working on a TV show, another day writing a book, or editing a new podcast. Jumping from project to project helps keep everything fresh for me and prevents boredom, which is something I definitely need.
What’s also great about Noble Blood and Very Special Episodes is that every single episode is different. Every episode feels like its own project and its own challenge, which definitely keeps it interesting. I hold to a mantra when I’m recording a podcast episode: if it’s boring for me, it’ll be boring for a listener. So, I try to only do podcasts about things that I’m genuinely excited about and things that genuinely fascinate me. If I can’t stop reading it, I think audiences will want to listen as well.
Yitzi: So the phrase “very special episode” seems like there’s a hidden message there that I’m missing. What did you have in mind?
Dana: No, it’s silly. It’s a phrase that comes from 90s TV where episodes from a sitcom would be labeled a “very special episode” if they were talking about a very important issue or a serious issue. I think we just had the fun idea of calling this podcast Very Special Episodes because every episode is special. Each episode is a big deal, is a standalone story. Each episode could be its own event. So that’s what’s exciting about this show: every episode is a very special episode.
Yitzi: That’s great. So, what are the main takeaways or messages or insights that you hope listeners take away after they listen to an episode?
Dana: Here’s what I’ll say. I think that listening to a podcast is a very isolated activity. It’s usually something we do alone, sometimes with headphones, but when you’re listening to a podcast, you’re normally on your own. I hope listeners listen to Very Special Episodes and then use what they learn to go out and connect with people. I hope that every single episode makes them want to call a friend or go into the other room to talk to their significant other and tell them this story. So, I hope it’s absolutely a podcast that connects people.
Yitzi: In your opinion, what makes your style, your style, your approach different and unique from others who are doing somewhat similar things? What do you think is special about your approach as a host and creator?
Dana: I think so many podcasts these days, and they’re wonderful, are casual conversations that make you feel like you’re chatting with someone. The podcasts that I make, I hope, convey the amount of research and effort we put into fully writing a script. These are fully produced, scripted podcasts, so there’s a level of polish to every episode that people can expect. And I also hope that people realize that whether I’m talking about monarchs from the 1700s or missing moon rocks that have been stolen from NASA, people know that I take the history very seriously, but I don’t take myself very seriously. And the story itself will usually be a very fun time.
Yitzi: This is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success. Looking back to when you started, can you share five things you need to create a highly successful podcast?
Dana: Yeah.
- First, consistency is key. Listeners notice when the output isn’t steady.
- Second, genuine passion is crucial. If you’re not excited about your subject, whether it’s sports, history, or even a unique event, audiences can sense that.
- Third, invest in a decent microphone. With technology advancements, achieving great audio quality is accessible and not overly expensive.
- Fourth, proofreading is vital for scripted podcasts. Ensuring your script is free of grammatical errors is important for credibility and clarity.
- Lastly, always have a big cup of water next to you while recording. It’s essential for clearing your throat, which I do every time I record.
Yitzi: That’s great, beautiful. Okay, so we’re almost done. This is our aspirational question. So Dana, because of the platform that you’ve built and your great work, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Dana: Oh, that’s a very big question. I think I’ll just go small on this one, just because there are too many options here. And I would say encouraging people to take time to think before they post things on the internet. Just taking time to consider whether it’s actually necessary when they post things online.
Yitzi: Okay, how can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they listen to Very Special Episodes? How can they support you in any way possible?
Dana: Oh, thank you so much. You can listen to Very Special Episodes on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on Instagram at Dana Schwartz with three Z’s at the end or on TikTok. And listen to Noble Blood, the other podcast I do, on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, depending on how tired you are already by the sound of my voice.
Yitzi: Well, it’s really been a delight to meet you. Wish you continued success, and I hope that we can do this again. Maybe next year when we have a new exciting podcast, we could do a follow-up.
Dana: Absolutely. Anything else you need, just let me know. Send me an email.
Yitzi: Okay, wonderful, Dana. So nice to meet you.
Dana Schwartz Of ‘Very Special Episodes’ On The 5 Things You Need To Create A Very Successful… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.