MAYA ELLISON: Welcome back to The Back Catalog, the show about getting more out of the episodes you have already made. I'm Maya Ellison. My guest today produces a weekly interview show about urban gardening, and he has strong opinions about show notes. Tomasz Wierzbicki, welcome.

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: Thanks, Maya. Happy to be here, and yes, I do have strong opinions.

MAYA ELLISON: Let's start there. Why do show notes matter so much to you?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: Because most people find an episode through text, not audio. Someone searches for how to grow tomatoes on a balcony, and the page that answers them is the one with words on it. When we started, our show notes were two sentences and a link. After about forty seven episodes, I looked at our numbers and realised the episodes with proper notes were getting roughly twice the listens six months later.

MAYA ELLISON: Twice. That's a big difference.

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: It is. And it wasn't because the notes were clever. They were just specific. Guest names spelled correctly, the varieties we mentioned, the books people recommended, and timestamps for each topic.

MAYA ELLISON: Talk me through how you actually write them now.

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: I start from the transcript of the final cut. Not the raw recording, the version that is actually published, so the timestamps line up. I skim it once from top to bottom and mark the moments where the conversation changes direction. Those become my chapter markers.

MAYA ELLISON: And then?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: Then I search the transcript for the things listeners will want to look up. Names first. Last month we had a guest called Ngozi Okonkwo-Hart, and I wanted to be absolutely sure her name was right everywhere, so I searched for it, listened to each passage, and fixed the spelling in my export.

MAYA ELLISON: What else do you check?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: Numbers, always. If a guest says a raised bed needs about thirty centimetres of soil, or that a community garden in Leeds fed three hundred and twenty families last year, I listen to that sentence again before it goes in the notes. A wrong number is worse than no number.

MAYA ELLISON: That makes sense. Do you publish the full transcript too?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: We do, on our own site, below the notes. I export it as plain text, tidy up the obvious mistakes, and add the chapter headings. For the video version on YouTube, I export subtitles instead and check them in the editor, because the video sometimes has a different intro.

MAYA ELLISON: How long does all of that take you per episode?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: For a fifty minute interview, maybe forty minutes of work. It used to be most of an afternoon.

MAYA ELLISON: Last question. What's the one thing you would tell someone writing their first show notes?

TOMASZ WIERZBICKI: Write for the person who has never heard of your show. They don't know who your guest is or why the episode matters. Give them the names, the key ideas, and a reason to press play.

MAYA ELLISON: Tomasz Wierzbicki, thank you. That's it for this episode of The Back Catalog. See you next week.