Founder: Danielle Hampson

Radio and TV "talk shows" as we have known them for decades present a wide variety of carefully selected topics to their audiences, and to captivate the largest number of listeners and/or viewers - their ultimate goal - it is essential that these programs be dynamic. To help them with that task, show producers introduce guests to be interviewed by the show hosts on the topic at hand. Often these guests are authors and although generally given less than 5 minutes of "spotlight" (especially on TV), these authors welcome the invitation as it offers them a chance to talk about their books. Everybody is happy: the station has a program, the producer has a topic, the host has a guest, the guest has an audience s/he would most likely otherwise never get elsewhere. But there is one problem: so many authors, and not enough radio/TV time available!

Early 2005 when all the radio/TV stations "pooh-poohed" the Internet, Danielle Hampson had the vision to build a platform where authors would be given much more than the time generally allocated by conventional media. So, she developed, produced and hosted her first Internet TV show called "Arizona Authors", where each author was interviewed for up to 15 minutes and broadcast online for up to a full week, non-stop 24/7.

The word about her new show spread like wild fire and shortly after Arizona Authors' debut, Danielle started to receive requests for interviews from authors in California, Oregon, Washington and other west coast states, and to accommodate these out of state authors she renamed the show "The Authors Show".   

Very soon authors contacted her from Texas, Michigan, Florida, New York, and eventually from all over the United States, Canada and also from overseas. Guests were flying to her Phoenix based green screen studio from the UK, Germany, and even from the Middle East.

In 2007 Ms. Hampson launched the online radio version (podcast) of the show and asked Don McCauley to host it for her so she could focus on the production and marketing of the program.   Within less than 72 hours of the radio show announcement, she received over 700 interview requests from authors around the world, and soon authors were booked on the show to discuss their books via telephone interviews with the host.

Faced with rapid growth, Danielle decided to focus on audio only and found herself in the position of having too many authors for one host, so to relieve Don of some of the hosting pressure she jumped back into hosting again and together they shared the task of conducting all the interviews. But with more and more interviews being conducted, in 2014 she brought in Linda Thompson as an additional host. 

Now in 2022 and in its 17th year of production, The Authors Show broadcasts interviews on multiple "channels" each featuring one individual author for a full 24hrs Monday through Thursday, and 3-day weekends (Fri/Sat/Sun). In the past 14 full years of production, the show has processed over 6000 authors from multiple continents.  It also recently started a "twin" show for French speaking authors:  "Le podcast des auteurs".