How to Optimize Libsyn for Your Fiction Podcast

Libsyn is one of the longest running podcast hosting companies. I started using their services all the way back in 2004 and used them to host around 700 fiction podcasts. However, a quick scan of our database on The End shows that only about 8% of the shows we’ve listed use Libsyn as their hosting provider. That’s how much the landscape of podcasting has changed in 20 years

But does Libsyn still make a good place for fiction podcasters to call home? It can be, but due to the quirks of fiction podcasting vs “normal” podcasts, some tweaks need to be made to optimize Libsyn for fiction podcasters. Libsyn has recently made some changes to their interface to make it easier for fiction podcasters to fully optimize their feeds, which is great news!

In the subsequent sections of this article, I’ll break down how to optimize your Libsyn account on a page-by-page, field-by-field level. I'll use the exact name of the fields and even include a cropped screenshot of each to help make things as clear as possible. But please note that I’ll only offer advice/opinions/directions for the fields that need optimization. If I don’t have anything to say about a field, that doesn’t mean the field isn’t important. It probably is! It’s just not something that needs to be optimized. With that, let’s get started!

Dashboard > [Your Podcast Title]

Start this process by logging into your Libsyn account. Once you are in, you’ll be on the dashboard for one of your shows. Libsyn allows you to host more than one podcast in their accounts, so be sure you’re in the dashboard of the fiction podcast you want to optimize. If you’re not, select the correct show from the dropdown on the upper right corner of the dashboard.

The dashboard gives you an overview of stats, recent episodes and more. But the place we want to start is hidden under the gear icon on the upper right-hand corner of your page:

Click that, and then choose Podcast from the boxes on the resulting page:

Now we’re getting somewhere. There are 11 tags we’ll optimize on this page: Title *, Description *, Category One *, Category Two, Owner Name *, Owner Email *, Author *, Website URL, Release Frequency *, Type *, and Episode Display Limit *.

Title *

This is the title of your fiction podcast, obviously. Some creators like to add “Audio drama” and stuff like that, but I say do that only if you need it. And remember, you don’t need to add “podcast” (probably) to the name of your show.

Description *

The words entered here are used both for the description that appears on your Libsyn-generated website as well as the description that is distributed to various podcast listening platforms and directories. Note: podcast listening apps and directories search through the show description text when returning search results. Is it important? Yes. Very. And it’s probably something you should revisit on a regular basis as your show grows. 

You have up to 4,000 characters to work with when you write your description. I included some tips on crafting a great fiction podcast description in this article. It’s item #3.

Category One *

My strong recommendation: Unless you have a very good reason not to, the entry in this field should be Fiction or Fiction > [Comedy, Drama, or Science Fiction]. Don’t get me started on how dumb it is to limit fiction podcasts to just those three subcategories. It aggravates me too, but as Sigourney Weaver’s character told us in Cabin In The Woods, we work with what we have. 

Category Two 

You can choose another category/subcategory for your fiction podcast. Choose whatever makes sense based on the contents of your fiction podcast. I’ve seen fiction podcasters also categorize their shows as Arts > Performing Arts, Arts > Books, Comedy > [subcategories], History, Leisure, Kids & Family, and many others. Whatever makes sense for the story(ies) you’re telling in your fiction podcast.

Owner Name *

Whatever you put in here is part of Apple’s required tags. It’s shown in your RSS feed, but it’s generally not visible to the world. Unless you’ve a good reason to not, I suggest making this value the same as you’ve placed in the Author * tag below.

Owner Email *

Make sure the email address here is one you don’t mind giving out and is one you check. Regularly. My advice: create a show-specific email address, something like “myamazingfictionpodcast@gmail.com,” and forward that inbox so that all mail to it routes to your personal email address. Now you won’t miss any important updates, and no one has your personal email address. Sweet! 

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Author *

The contents of this field are displayed prominently along with your show’s title and artwork in most directories and apps, so make sure it says what you want it to say! Repeating the name of your show here is rather pointless and, at the risk of repeating myself, repetitive. Using only the name of a production company won’t give you or other creators any branding. But you can enter something like Creator Name | Other Creator Name | Network/Studio in that field if you want to give more than one person/entity some credit.

Website URL

If you have your own website—i.e. MyAmazingAudioFiction.show—enter the full address in this field, starting with https:// (or, less ideally, http://) to make a fully formed URL. 

If you do not have a dedicated and separate website/page for your show, then I recommend letting Libsyn generate a website for you. In which case, you’ll leave this blank. (Though, really, you need your own domain name, at least. That’s my very strong opinion.)

Release Frequency *

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Libsyn, unlike most hosting companies, allows creators to set their release frequency, a tag that Apple Podcasts uses and may be part of the Podcasting 2.0 spec that other apps can use. 

You should use this tag, even though it’s not perfect. When you’ve posted the series finale episode, make sure to come here and select Serial Show (Complete). It’ll keep you ahead of the rest! 

Third Party Content *

This  is another Apple Podcast-specific tag that, like Release Frequency above, is only used if you have Libsyn submit your show to Apple Podcasts on your behalf. But I still recommend selecting one of the two options. And unless you make and own the rights to every bit of music, effect, or other element of your show, you probably want to select the second one. 

Type *

This is the big one. The one that is all too often missed by fiction podcasters. Chances are, you want Serial as your feed type, not Episodic. Episodic describes podcasts with formats like interviews, current events or news, or weekly gab-fests. With those shows—they make up the largest share of podcasts—it’s fine for a brand-new person to listen to the most recent episode. 

But most fiction podcasts—yes, there are exceptions—presenting the most recent episode to a new listener makes for a bad listener experience. When you read a fictional story or start a new fictional series on TV, you start at the beginning, not the end. And certainly not at whatever the current episode is, right?

Changing your feed type to Serial gives fiction podcasters like you some control over how your episodes are presented to your listeners. Serial. That’s the right answer for fiction podcasts that publish episodes that really should be listened to in a particular order.

Explicit *

Another tag that is Apple Podcast-specific, but this one does show up in your feed, so other apps and directories can use it. Everyone has their own interpretation of what constitutes “Explicit,” with some insisting that any use of violence or cursing is enough.

I’m not in that camp. And I wish Libsyn didn’t force you to set this tag, but here we are. Follow your gut on this one. I tend to only set something as Explicit when there’s gratuitous sex, violence, or a steady stream of F-bombs. YMMV.

Episode Display Limit *

In the olden days of podcasting, there was a concern that an RSS feed could get too big, causing timeouts or other challenges for directories and apps. But it’s been 20 years, and this has largely been solved. 

Change this setting to “0” which means “no limit,” so that every episode of your show is in your feed. As they all should be.

OK! That’s it for this page. Hit the green Save button near the bottom right of your screen and let’s move on.

Episode

Click the gear icon in the upper right once again, and then choose Episode from the boxes on the resulting page:

You’ll now be on the Episode Defaults page. I’ll tell you which of the seven fields to optimize, and what to leave blank. You’ll notice none of these fields are required, for very good reasons.

Category

If you’re using Libsyn’s generated website, you can use Categories like you would most blogging platforms. But this is really only useful if you’re uploading non-episode content to Libsyn, which you probably are not. Leave it blank unless you have a good reason not to.

Permalink Points To

If you’re using LIbsyn’s generated website as your official show website, then you’ll select Blog Page. 

If you have a custom website and you make episode-specific pages with things like your extended episode details, transcript, cast and crew credits, fan art, or other nifty things specific to each episode, choose Custom URL. You’ll get to set each specific episode URL in a moment. This is just setting that up for you.

Update ID3 Tags

I’m a fan of setting ID3 tags at the .mp3 file level, even though it’s made rather moot due to many listening apps rewriting these tags based on information they find in the RSS feed. 

You’re probably safe to leave this one blank, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

Explicit, Season Number, Episode Number, Schedule Release

Don’t worry about these four. The first was set by the Explicit tag we talked about before, and you’re going to set the other three on a per episode basis in a moment.

One more page done!. Hit the green Save button near the bottom right of your screen once again.

Website

Click the gear icon in the upper right once again, and this time choose Website from the boxes on the resulting page:

We won’t be here long, as this is only useful to you if you’re using Libsyn’s generated website as your official show website. If you set a Website URL previously, you can skip all of this.

But if you are using Libsyn’s generated website as your show’s official website, this is where you make it look nice. The only thing I’ll suggest is that you add the show-specific email address we talked about earlier into the section that says * Public Contact Email.  If you changed anything, Save again.

and click the gear icon again, this time selecting the Player box:

Tinker with this to your heart’s content. There’s only one field that matters to me: 

Playback Direction

By default, this will be set to Last to First, which means the embeddable player you can use on your website will present your episodes with the last first and the first last. Yeah, that’s how a lot of podcasts should be displayed, but not a fiction podcast!

You very likely will select First to Last, so that the player shows your episodes in the proper order, starting with your first episode.

That’s it for this one. Click the green save button if you changed anything. And we’re done with show-level settings! Now it’s time to optimize your episodes.

Episodes

The rest of the work we’re going to do to get your Libsyn account up to snuff is all in the Episodes section. In the top nav bar, click the Episodes link, and let’s dive in:

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You should now see a list of your previously published episodes in reverse chronological order. Before making any changes to any specific episode, take a moment to look at the list of episodes you see on this page. Specifically, I want you to focus just on the Titles of your episodes, and ask yourself some questions:

• Do the story episodes look like they are all part of the same story?
• If you see episode drops or promos, do they look different from your “normal” episodes?
• Does the trailer episode(s) clearly look like a trailer?
• Are any bonus episodes clearly tagged and named so they look like bonus episodes?
• Do your season finales clearly look like season finales?

The text used for the title of your episodes are important, but it’s also important that every episode looks like it belongs, is in the right place/order, and is properly tagged. If an episode looks odd to you in this view, I can promise you it looks odd to potential listeners when it hits their listening app. And you don’t want that.

We’ll make changes to your Episodes one by one, so start by clicking the Edit button to the right of any episode.

We have 11 fields to optimize on this page: Episode Title *, Description, Episode Type, Season Number, Episode Number, Apple Podcasts Title, Author, Permalink Points To, Episode Artwork, and Availability.

Episode Title *

There are many schools of thought on how episode titles should be written, but I belong to the “most important things first” clan. That’s probably not the episode number. That’s probably not the title of your podcast. What’s important is what the content if that episode actually is. That could be as simple as Chapter 1. Or it might be The Plot To Steal Xmas or whatever nifty title you’d write if the episode were a blog post or article. 

If you have extra things you want to add to your title, like Season 2 finale or Part 3 of 4, add those to the end of the title, as they are (probably) not the most important things.

Description

Each episode can—and should—have its own description. These are often called show notes in podcasting parlance, though I hate the term and prefer episode details, as that’s more representative of what this text should be. But I’ve been lobbying for that change since 2004, and I’ve gotten nowhere. Regardless, see item #8 in my previously mentioned article on some good ideas of what information you should put in this field for each of your episodes.

One nice thing about Libsyn is that you can do some basic formatting of your episode details. My suggestion is to keep these very simple, unless you’re using Libsyn’s generated website as your official homepage for your show. Not every listening app or directory can read things like images, so I’d stick with standard things like bold, italics, and bulleted lists.

Episode Type

Most of your episodes will be tagged as Full and get a sequential number in the Episode Number field. In fact, that’s a good rule—if an episode of your show is NOT to be missed, mark it as Full and give the correct Episode number so it displays in the proper order.

Got an episode drop or a special announcement episode in your feed that isn’t part of the story? Then it is most likely a Bonus episode. Bonus episodes are just that—extra content that a new listener doesn’t have to listen to enjoy the continuing arc of your story. Some apps, like Apple Podcasts, will segregate most (but not all) Bonus episodes to the bottom of a season or series. Keep in mind that caught-up listeners—those who eagerly download and listen to your latest episode as soon as it comes out—will hear your Bonus episodes as you add them. The segregation I spoke of is really for people who are “behind” listening, if you will. Or bingers (like me). So you don’t need to worry that your Bonus episode won’t be heard by your most rabid fans. It will be! But for people who come in a month (or years) later, those Bonus episodes won’t be speedbumps in their (our) listening. 

Bonus episodes can be numbered, but only if the Bonus episode is a Bonus episode for a specific Full episode. For example, let’s say that you had a guest actor on an episode, and you decided to do an interview with them. If you think it’s important for your listeners—current and future—to hear that conversation, give that Bonus episode the same Season and Episode number as the Full episode the actor appeared in. That will cause your Bonus episode to show up after the Full episode, at least in the modern apps that respect those tags.

Trailer is the other type, and it’s most often used like trailers are used in the movies, but can also be used to denote “sample” content. When you tag an episode as a Trailer, modern apps will elevate that episode to be the first thing a brand-new listener hears—sometimes even before they decide to follow or subscribe. And, if you use multiple seasons and you make a new trailer for each season, you’ll want to add the Season number to your Trailer episodes as well. 

One key point about Trailers: None of them should be required listening. Once a person is following your show in a podcast app, the trailer episodes will not (or at least should not) play during binge-listening sessions. 

Like Bonus episodes, Trailer episodes can be numbered, but that’s unusual. I’ve seen some audio fiction creators put out Trailer episodes for a delayed-but-soon-to-be-released episode as a sort of teaser. The same rule applies: use the same Episode number as the Full episode that Trailer is about. (Pro tip: Episodes like that are only meaningful for people who are waiting on the next episode. Once it publishes, I think you should delete the numbered Trailer episode.)

Season Number

Assuming you changed the Type * field in your settings from Episodic to Serial, then you’ll most likely want to use season numbers. Modern listening apps like Apple Podcasts and others use the Season tag to group episodes of a season together. So… use it. Only use non-negative, non-zero integers (e.g. 1, 2, 3…).

Episode Number

Episode Numbers work in conjunction with Episode Numbers. This field also only takes non-negative, non-zero integers, and they are used to determine the order in which episodes of a particular season should be displayed. 

It is very possible that some of your episodes will not have an Episode Number. You’ll see why soon enough. Also, it’s best practice (though not a requirement) to restart your episode numbering with each new Season. For example, your first Season may have Episode Numbers 1–10, and your second Season might also have Episode Numbers 1–10. That’s fine, because the Episode Number combines with the Episode Number (e.g.S2E1, so there won’t be any duplicates.

Apple Podcasts Title

Apple used to be strict about not wanting any information about season or episode numbers in the title. They’ve completely relaxed on that, so you don’t have to worry about getting an episode taken down.

But Apple had good reason to request a possibly different title for their use. The Apple Podcasts interface is the best for serialized fiction podcasts (don’t at me, I’ve done the research) for a lot of reasons, and one is how prominently they display both Season Numbers and Episode Numbers in their app.

So if Apple is already going to put Season 1, Episode 2 along with your title, you don’t need to include “S1E2” or whatever in the title Apple uses. It’s redundant. 

Author

This is a mostly obsolete field, but it’s useful for anthologies or shows that are compilations of other “presenters.” If that fits your format, then you can use this field to add the name of the narrator, the voice actor, etc. It will be included in your RSS feed, but few services will use it. Still, it’s good to be complete.

Permalink Points To

You’ve seen this setting before, and I said we’d come back to it. Here we are! If you’re using Libsyn’s auto-generated website, leave this at Blog Page.

If you have a custom website and you make episode-specific pages with things like your extended episode details, transcript, cast and crew credits, fan art, or other nifty things specific to each episode, you’ll change this to Custom URL, and a new box will display where you enter said custom URL. 

This connects your website to your RSS feed, so that listeners are taken to your website and not Libsyn’s when they click on “more information about this episode,” or whatever app they app calls the link. 

This also gives you a nifty SEO boost, as you’ll have a bunch of links from Libsyn pointing to your website. Nice, huh?

Episode Artwork

If you make custom artwork for each of your episodes, this is where you upload them for each episode. By default, your show-level artwork displays. It’s up to you to decide if you want to do it or not. Some of the most popular podcast apps are showing them, however. I like it.

If you decide to create them, make sure they are perfectly square images 3000x3000 pixels (smallest is 1400x1400), and try to keep the “weight” of the image to under 500 KB.

Add Episode Transcript

If you make a transcript for your episodes—which you should do, by the way—this is how you can associate them with the episode in your RSS feed. Some apps will then display the transcript as the audio plays to listeners who’ve changed their settings. Of course, this requires a specialized kind of transcript complete with timestamps. Look up “.srt files” for info on how to do this and a list of tools you can use—some free—to generate a transcript for your episodes.

Availability & Start

I’m a firm believer that every episode of your show should be released on the same day of the week at the same time without fail. Yes, even though podcast episodes aren’t listened to live. Your audience would love to anticipate when new episodes come out, rather than getting them at random, I assure you.

So don’t use Immediately on Publish. Use Schedule Episode instead, and be consistent.

There are other fields on this page I skipped. You won’t need to use any… unless you have a specific reason to use them. 

Hit the green Publish button to save your changes on that episode, then go back to the top of this section and do it again. Yes, for every episode.