Transcript Fatigue Was The Worst Part of Ghostwriting. Then I Bought a Kindle

Last year I officially pivoted my copywriting business to executive ghostwriting. 

The change happened organically at first. My projects became increasingly centered around executive communication instead of website copywriting. After several months, I embraced the change and made it official.

Well, a new writing direction comes with new learnings. The big new problem I faced this year was what to do with long, messy call transcripts. 

Ghostwriting requires me to record half-hour to one-hour calls, multiple times per month, with various clients. I drop these recordings into Otter for easy transcriptions.

Here’s where I hit a snag. For the past year and a half, I couldn’t find an efficient way to process the information in the transcripts. I experienced transcript fatigue and the whole process seemed more arduous than it had to be.

(I know, I know. Not much of a problem.)

What I tried

Reading in Otter… sucks: I love Otter. It saves me so much time and effort. But the interface is not conducive for longform reading. And no, copy-pasting the transcript into Google Docs wasn’t much better. 

For a while, I tried relying on the built-in AI tool in Otter for transcript summaries. But I quickly noticed that I could surface much higher quality and greater quantity stories by reading the transcript in full. 

AI summaries were fast. They weren’t very effective. I needed an easy way to read every transcript in full.

Waste of paper: The best solution I had for a while felt wasteful. Following some interviews, I would print the full transcript and read it at my desk or from a reading chair. This was awesome in practice. The analog transcripts made for easy reading, note taking, and highlighting. 

Most conversations required anywhere between 15-30 pages. Frankly, printing all that paper felt wasteful. I seldom did it even though I knew it worked. 

In the digital age, surely there’s a better solution out there than paper, right? 

This week I finally found it. 

Kindle Scribe: The unsuspecting workhorse

Last Sunday, I purchased a Kindle Scribe. If you’re not familiar, it’s basically a large Kindle reader that comes with note-taking features and a stylus for easy writing. There were mixed reviews online about the Kindle Scribe. Most people seemed more impressed with traditional, smaller-sized Kindles.

But most of those reviews had nothing to do with work. I wanted a large screen. I wanted easy note taking. I wanted a dedicated screen where I could edit and read PDFs, move quickly through jumbled text, and easily save gems.

Here’s my winning process:

1. Prepare interview questions.

2. Conduct a recorded client interview over Zoom.

3. Sending the recording to Otter for transcription.

4. Copy-paste the full transcript into a Kindle-approved file. 

5. Email the file to my Kindle.

6. Read the transcript in full, leaving notes and saving the best stories.

7. Use the highlights to write highly personalized content for my clients.

And repeat. 

If you get nothing else from this article, remember this: You know you’re in a writerly business when your biggest problem is solved through purchasing a Kindle.