A History Professor Launches A Thriving Book Podcast
Marshall Poe is a rare academic who has managed to achieve something that most professors would find formidable: establish a wildly popular platform that hosts sparkling conversations about books. I have been listening to episodes from the New Book Network (NBN) ever since the pandemic shuttered us into private spaces of our own making. Most vividly for me, it was like being hoisted back into hyper-caffeinated college days, when one stumbled into corkboards postered with talks on Iranian History or Jewish Studies, or eavesdropped into fierce arguments about Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.
In a conversation with Richard Lucas, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Poe describes the platform as a bookstore of sorts. That is an apt analogy. After all, it’s a non-critical space in which one can collide into all the brilliant, fun, engaging, absurd, surreal and sometimes downright weird and hilarious pathways that academics and writers trip down for years or even decades. To me, it’s also like a college café, or a think tank’s garden. Where you can corner some of those offbeat, genius minds to describe what they have been obsessing over for the past five or ten years, and why indeed they have been obsessing over “History, Space and Getting Things Wrong” or “Mardi Gras Beads” (these are names of real episodes on the NBN podcast).
The Founder’s Life in Brief
Poe’s own enchantment with books was forged despite struggling to read in his primary school years. Diagnosed with dyslexia, he grappled with the obtuseness of texts till the second or third grades. Despite surmounting his condition well enough to garner a Doctorate in History from U.C. Berkeley, Marshall still empathizes with intelligent audiences that labor over texts, but quite easily absorb orally transmitted material. Well before he turned “founder”, Poe was a professor of History at Harvard, NYU and the University of Iowa among other places. His specialization was Early Modern Russian History, a domain that also required him to spend time in the Soviet Union.
Scholarly sojourns in Russia imbued him with an appreciation for free enterprises. Of how necessary they were to solving regular, everyday problems. After all, in those pre-Glasnost days, everything in Russia felt like a trial. For instance, as Marshall recounts, even getting his glasses fixed required an entrepreneur’s guile and tenacity. He returned to the U.S. with a new-found respect for liberal, free-market democracies.
The Problem That Seeded NBN
In the meanwhile, as a Professor of History at some of the best colleges in America, Poe also realized how much effort academics expend on their research and writing. And how few of those works were read by anyone at all, apart from a smattering of students and curious peers. Getting those ideas out into the wider public seemed impossible.
The problem wasn’t just shrinking attention spans (an aspect exacerbated by our harried digital times), but a lack of dissemination. Even if you were interested in Himalayan glaciers or Buddhist Psychology, how would you access the research related to the field? Especially for laypersons, who were not associated with particular colleges or academic institutions, such knowledge was sealed off behind unaffordable journal walls. And despite Amazon’s grandiose mission – to ferry all books to all parts of the planet – college textbooks and academic tomes were pricey.
Starting Out As An Experiment
So in 2007, Poe started New Books Network, initially as a podcast devoted to History books. As with any high-quality, niche internet venture, the podcast soon attracted a devoted following of 10,000 listeners. Marshall, who was still a Professor and running this as a side-venture, felt gratified that the conversations were fulfilling a latent need. Eventually, as word spread, other academics started approaching him, saying “Why don’t you add Anthropology?” Or Philosophy or Literature.
Since Poe had already cracked the technical knowhow to host, record, edit and publish podcasts, he agreed. Though he was pretty much investing his own time and effort, he acknowledges that “we succeeded by saying yes.” Eventually, the NBN started reaping a network effect, with each interviewed author or interviewee host, spreading word about the platform’s effectiveness.
Setting Up Processes
Over time, like with any venture that starts scaling rapidly, he needed to establish criteria for hosts. The New Books Network, which focuses primarily on serious non-fiction was keen on exuding a certain quality. Poe ensured that hosts, most of whom were highly-credentialed academics, were specialists in their fields. At a certain phase in his career, Marshall had worked at The Atlantic Monthly in New York. He was attuned not only to the mechanics of deep research, but also to the process of conducting witty, sharp and chiseled interviews.
For NBN, he sought folks who could facilitate nuanced conversations, by wielding an expert’s familiarity with past works and contemporary takes.
A Platform for Serious Authors
Poe was, however, clear about NBN being an author’s platform. Hosts were not permitted to critique or denigrate featured works. Questions were designed to encourage authorly voices to shine through. Interview lengths were flexible. If authors wished to talk for longer, they could. Marshall knew that most authors were the most eloquent guides to their academic fetishes or pet projects. He cites the familiar adage, “They just wrote the book.”
Scaling Organically
Around 2011, Poe realized that the platform was taking off, and required his full-time engagement.
The NBN currently has about 300 volunteer hosts, with more being added every week. Besides qualifications and subject matter expertise, hosts need to display commitment and persistence. Like in all ventures, Marshall admits that more hosts enthusiastically volunteer at first, but drop out over time, when they realize they don’t have what it takes.
The platform also generates revenues through ads and has attracted investor interest. They currently feature more than 100 subject categories. Every month, about a million users tune into their channels, resulting in about five million downloads. They add 50 to 75 episodes every week.
While Marshall still edits most of the audio content himself, he might consider outsourcing tasks to support the platform’s growth. More than anything else, he is keen that the NBN is robust enough to outlive his involvement. After all, it’s a space that truly lives up to the torch of enlightenment: to illuminate potential pathways to anyone, anywhere, whether it’s a teenager in Madurai, India, or a homemaker in Teheran, Iran.
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