I was browsing TheNewPR’s list of business podcasts last week and came across the SimonSays Podcast, a weekly show from publisher Simon & Schuster about its latest books and audiobooks.

Take a gander at the show archives and you’ll find three episodes from this month, four from October, four from September, and so on. Indeed, SimonSays has been a “weekly podcast” that publishes weekly — as opposed to the litany of “weekly podcasts” that don’t — since September 2005, as best as I can tell.

And yet, if you were a longtime subscriber to the SimonSays Podcast through its, the last new episode you would have received was published way back on July 20, 2006.

Why? Incredibly, the SimonSays folks haven’t added a single one of their 17 shows produced since that date to the podcast feed — have a look in the iTunes music store if you don’t believe me — despite posting “subscribe” links beneath each episode’s show notes, listing the full RSS feed at the top of its podcast page, and having a section explaining “How to Subscribe.”

In technical terms, SimonSays hasn’t updated its RSS feed, which is what delivers new episodes to your iTunes or other podcatching application.

What a great way to kiss away all of its subscribers.

I’m only guessing here that Simon & Schuster doesn’t know it has to manually update its RSS file after each new episode — perhaps the person who was doing that left the company sometime around … late July?

I’m also guessing that Simon & Schuster may not know about the problem because it doesn’t make itself very contactable. To wit: There is no “contact us” link of any kind on its podcast page.

BryanSays to SimonSays …
My advice for the creators of the SimonSays Podcast:

  1. Update your RSS feed!
  2. Update your RSS feed!
  3. Create a way for listeners to comment on the shows. Turn your podcast page into blog so that each new episode generates a new post, and make sure you enable comments. Your listeners will surely add some follow-up comments each week, and this could generate even more buzz for your books. Even better, you could post a request for questions for the author a few days before you record and incorporate some of them into the show
  4. Give the WordPress blogging platform a go and use the Podpress plugin to embed your podcasts into your blog posts. This will serve two purposes: 1) it will allow visitors to the blog to easily stream a podcast episode 2) your RSS feed will be update automatically
  5. Have I mentioned the need to … update your RSS feed!

For the record, I did eventually find a contact form elsewhere on the Simon & Schuster site, and I sent in a message with some of the above suggestions. That was six or seven days ago. No response yet.

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