I need to get that straight right up front, because I’m seeing other authors do something that I think shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both their relationship with Amazon, and the business model of the independent author.

You see, Amazon has started offering KDP select, where an author enrolls their books for renewable periods of 90 days on an exclusive basis. In exchange for the exclusivity (and for allowing Amazon to lend your book to prime members at rates yet-to-be-determined), the author gets the promotional tool that everyone’s been gagging after for two years now:

The ability to price their book for free (for an author-selected 5 days out of every 90) to goose sales.

And it seems to be working, at least for some authors, in a spectacular fashion. They list their book for free, the curiosity boosts their popularity ranking, helps them crack some also-bought lists, and leapfrog into the recommendation engines that Amazon’s servers have running behind the scenes.

Sounds great, right? It’s been treating some of my friends astoundingly well over the last month and a half.

It also gets around a problem with the Amazon KDP agreement: Amazon guarantees a low price, and when you sign up you warrant that you will not sell through Amazon competitors at a lower price. If you do, Amazon may pull your book or close your account. If another retailer discounts you without your permission (for example, because they don’t follow the agency pricing model), Amazon reserves the right to discount your book to match, without your further permission.

This means that setting something free through Smashwords while charging for it at Amazon puts you in a tenuous legal position, which leaves some authors uncomfortable (and some of us unwilling to play system-gaming games in case someone at Amazon decides to make an example of us).

When you put these factors together, you get the recipe for a judgment call summed up by LJ Sellers in her recent blog post: She’s pulling her books from all other retailers, except Amazon. And who can blame her? The bulk (between 70 and 95%) of most indie author’s income currently comes through Amazon, so why not capitalize on it? Why not remove the risk that Kobo will discount your books and cut into your income? Why not put yourself in a position so you can rotate your books on promotion?

The Context of Doing Business
Capitalism is an amazing thing, and among its most amazing qualities is that it makes allies out of people who might never have spoken or met before. The guy that runs the hot dog stand on the street corner, or who drives your taxi, is in your life because they can do something you want better, faster, cheaper, or more conveniently than you can do it yourself. You value the service and products they give you more than you value your money, so you buy, and everybody wins.

In this sense, an economy is very like a biosphere. Symbiosis is as much a part of it as predation, and creativity results in destruction and spurs greater creativity, and thus are industries forged.

But like a biosphere, a healthy industry needs diversity for the free exchange of energy and information to continue. From the point of view of an author, in the book industry, retailers are our allies–they help put our books and other products in front of customers who might want them.

But unlike with the local butcher, who might become your friend if you chat with him while you do business, a corporation is incapable of having friends. It’s not human, it has no feelings. It is merely an ally, and when the ecosystem (or economy) changes, the alliances within it change.

Amazon Is Not Your Friend
Amazon is a corporation, and it has (on the whole) behaved astonishingly well by its indiependent authors. Its dynamism and creativity make it one of the worlds most powerful, best-growing companies.

If you’re a small supplier, this dynamism is a two-edged sword. Today, you’re on the cutting edge because the strategic needs of the business dictate that you’re a good ally. Tomorrow, you might wind up on the bleeding edge, when the industry changes. This isn’t just true of Amazon, it’s true of any company. While you may benefit handsomely and for a long time when your interests are aligned, you must always remember:
They are not in business for your benefit, they are in business for their benefit.

You, as a businessperson, must take a similar view.

Short Term, Short List Thinking
If you’ve got only a book or two out, chances are you’re chasing sales, or audience, or eyeballs, etc. I did when I had only two out. Everyone I’ve known has. You have one egg, so you try to find the basket that’ll do the best by it, and watch the basket. You go out and try to get everyone to come check the basket out. In the short term, it feels marvelous.

The trouble is, eventually the rate at which you find people who want that egg will slow to a trickle, and you’ll pour more time and money into the effort of continuing the build, when, in the long run, you’ll do better by laying more eggs. And if someone comes along, without malice, and steps on your basket cause it’s in your way? Well, then you’re pretty much screwed.

Leverage
Successful business works on leverage: one bit of promotional energy creates multiple opportunities. One new product creates geometrically greater exposure. Here’s how it works:

If you have 15 storefronts, and one new product, you have 15 streams of income (of varying sizes). If any one of them dries up, or goes dark for a while, you might hurt, but it won’t sink you.

But if you have one storefront, you have one stream. If that stream dries up, you’re screwed.

Similarly, if you do any promotion, advertising, book tours, speaking tours, etc. on that one stream of income, all that effort only makes the one stream swell. And, best case scenario, if you catch one customer, you get one sale.

However, if you have 15 products in 15 storefronts, you’ve got 15×15 (read: 225) streams. Now, every time you do any promotion work, you have a better chance of making one or more streams burst their banks. But better than that, anytime someone falls in love with one of those books, they have another 14 they can go through. Catch one person, get 15 sales.

Every time you add one book (or audiobook, or film) to the inventory, you’re geometrically increasing your income potential. Every time you catch a new customer, you’re increasing the likelihood that you’ll move from their “that was a cool book” list to their “I can’t get enough of this author” list, because there’s enough of your stuff for them to really gorge themselves on.

Short Term, Short List Thinking
Some of you have asked me why 2011 was a quiet year for me, podcasting-wise. What you just read is the reason. I podcast two novels, and I had only two novels to show. I was giving it away as fast as I could produce it. I had nothing around that you could tell your friends about, and many of you got frustrated waiting for the next book in the series, or the next thing from me.

But many more of you (perhaps these ones aren’t reading) liked my books, but couldn’t find anything more, so moved on to fresher pastures. And that’s a crying shame, because my livelihood depends on entertaining the hell out of you.

So I took a year off, to get my house in order, and now I’m back in the studio recording more audiobooks–but not at the expense of writing more other books. I intend to keep this going for a long time, so I have zero incentive to pull my books from markets just to take advantage of a sales-goosing opportunity in a single market.

The Unseen Markets
A year and a half ago I started building a spreadsheet list of what rights I’d licensed out to stories, so I could keep track of what I could legally put on the market. I started with the rights I could license from a single story, intending to code a quick listbox. After all, there are ebook rights, serial rights, hardcover rights, trade paper rights, and MM Paper rights.

Then, I got to thinking. I’ve worked in film. So I know there are film rights, TV rights, Radio rights, audiobook rights, full cast audiobook rights, video game rights…

I kept listing them. When I ran out of ideas I called another writer friend, who listed more. Between the two of us, in under an hour, we had a list of marketable rights for a single short story that topped four single-spaced pages (at one right per line). At that point we stopped because we both had prior appointments. One of these days, I’ll finish that list–I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes to 8 pages, or more.

What does this mean for you? It means that when you go exclusively through one retailer for one book, then you concentrate on goosing the sales on that one book, you’re leaving most of your medium-and-long term money on the table. It means that in limiting your exposure (even without an exclusive agreement), you’re reducing the odds that someone who might see it who wants to license a film deal, or a video game, or a graphic novel adaptation–not just here, but around the world in places where Amazon isn’t a strong presence, but Apple or Kobo or Sony is.

Rushing to narrow your niche in order to spike your sales on one or a few titles also narrows your opportunities to exploit each property to its full value. And with all respect to my friends who are currently doing this (all of whom are, at the moment, selling better than I am), it’s bad business.

Short term cash is nice. Long term dependable income is my goal. We are in the intellectual property business, entertainment and information division (i.e. not inventions). In this business, the only sustainable model is the long-term one, because it is the only one that dependably creates passive income.

Something to think about before you go pulling properties from existing markets in order to take advantage of today’s bright and shiny promo tool. Trust me, the business world never sleeps–there will be another tool like this tomorrow, when you’re in a better place to exploit it without screwing yourself over in the medium and long term.

The following was my response to the committee. If this is something that interests you, please take the time to send your own take on the issue to them, or chime in on the comments, as I have it on good authority that some members of the committee occasionally enjoy subjecting themselves to my particular flavor of psychosis

The following is the relevant text of my email to them in reply to their question about what differentiates a Full-Cast production from an Audio Drama and an Audiobook:

Leaving aside the issue of abridgements or the occasional ad-libs, the
full-cast audio I’ve seen (and produced) tends to be pretty slavish in
terms of its loyalty to the text. If you’re looking for a number, I’d
say “less than 5% of the text can be changed,” but I think the issue is
more the character of the change than the amount.

If I were writing the definition of full-cast audio I would define it
something like as follows:

“A Full-cast audio production is an audiobook that uses multiple readers
to play different roles. While the form may incorporate incidental
and/or theme music and sound effects to heighten the listening
experience, the text of the novel remains essentially unchanged.

Small deviations from the original text are permissible (such as the
substitution of sound effects for onomatopoetic words–such as the sound
of a slap instead of the word “SMACK!” standing alone as its own
sentence–or omission of dialogue tags to facilitate flow) are
permissible. However, if the text of the novel is adapted to dramatic
form (ex: substituting dialogue and foley for chunks of narration), the
production will be considered a dramatic adaptation and treated as a
radio drama for purposes of the awards.

When submitting your sample audio, please include the text of at least
one full clip in-line with the email so that we may verify that your
production is a full-cast audiobook rather than a radio drama.”

For what it’s worth

Dear Committee–

A couple years ago, the categories surround podcast novels were modified so that single reader podcast novels were given their own category, while full-cast productions were transferred in to the long form audio drama category. While this did solve the persistent issue that had excellent novelists like Nathan Lowell losing to full-cast productions on the basis of production lushness rather than writing merit, it has introduced a more basic, and more intractable, problem.

To explain:
The Audio Drama artform is a well-defined one, stretching back to the very beginnings of radio. The Audio Drama community is a vibrant one, with many sets of awards all basically agreeing on the formula. These are dramatic, scripted presentations–a movie for the ears, so to speak. But Audio Dramas are not, and never have been, audiobooks. The audiodrama version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, for example, has a different text from the audiobook version–it is a dramatic adaptation, with narrative weight shifted from the narrator to the dialogue and the soundscaping.

Full-cast audiobooks are a younger art form, dating back only to the 1980s or so (Simon and Schuster sometimes uses this format, and Full Cast Audio is a company wholly devoted to it). These productions contain the full text (or abridged text) of the novel, complete with all narration. The text of the novel is not adapted for the production, with the occasional exception of omitting dialogue tags. Soundscaping and music may be used, but not to the exclusion of the text. In other words, these are Audio *Books,* not Audio *Dramas.* Full-cast is a fully distinct art form, with a fully distinct history, format requirements, and production ethos.

I submit that conflating the two in a single category is a grave mistake. It does injustice to the unique difficulties and challenges involved in adapting a book to dramatic form or in writing an original dramatic script on one side, and to the different production challenges and more spare style and choices necessitated by the full cast producer.

The Full-Cast producers community is a bona-fide community within the podiobooks/podcast fiction community, even to the point where there is a podcast dedicated to teaching people the ins and outs of the form (The Full-Cast Podcast, which is a 2011 Parsec finalist for “Best Podcast about SpecFic Content Creation”). Yet, as a result of the category changes two years ago, Full-Cast productions have been effectively sidelined. Prominent full-cast community producers such as myself, Philippa Ballantine, Abbie Hilton, Chris Lester, Starla Huchton, et al., who produce full-length *unadapted* full-cast audiobooks have been placed in direct competition with long running episodic series such as Decoder Ring Theater (which is in no way a “long form” drama, yet consistently gets nominated as such), Prometheus Radio Theater (which does actual long-form audio drama serials), and other excellent dramatic production companies whose art form is entirely distinct from the full-cast format.

I urge you to rectify this situation for the 2012 Parsec Awards by giving full-cast audiobooks its own category (or categories, long-form and short-form, as there are a number of casts that do full-cast short stories). Bring us full-cast producers back into the fold, with a category where we compete on the merits of our own form, rather than being artificially forced into a category with equally excellent, but fully distinct, Audio Dramas.

Thank you for your time.
-J. Daniel Sawyer
2009 Parsec Finalist, Best Newcomer, Predestination and Other Games Of Chance
2009 Parsec Nominee, Best short story, Sculpting God
2010 Parsec Nominee, Down From Ten

P.S. This email also will appear later this evening as a blog post at http://www.jdsawyer.net

1) You’ll need a good recording device. The most cost-effective and technically simplest way to do it is to pick up a Zoom H2 recorder. It has gorgeous microphones that make almost anyone sound good, and can
operate as a USB mic, but it also records uncompressed audio straight to a SD card. I recommend the latter method for simplicity. Get the Zoom, a pop screen, and a basic mic stand (~$140 for the recorder + ~$30 for the pop screen + ~$20 for the stand) and set them up in a quiet, dead room. (Dead = no bare walls. You don’t want the echoes from your living room or bedroom walls. A library is the best environment that most authors have, as books provide excellent baffling. Otherwise, a closet hung with moving blankets can work, or a bedroom with blankets hung on the walls).

There are a lot of good reasons to pick the Zoom over most USB mics out there–they bear directly on sound quality.

2) Read your story. This may take some practice if you haven’t done voice work before. Your vocal technique, characterization, and intonation are what’s more important here. Don’t worry too much about
precision. If you flub, just snap your fingers and re-take the line. The snap is important–it’ll show up in editing and make your flubs easy to find. Aim for a reading pace of between 100 and 140 words per
minute–no faster. Enunciate clearly for the narration, as if you’re talking on the phone–most people’s normal speaking voices are pretty sloppy, and that can make your words sound muddled on a recording. Vary your pace, pitch, and volume for emphasis and mood.

While you’re doing this, be sure to record thirty seconds or more of room tone (silence in the room you’re recording in). You’ll need this for editing.

3) Copy the sound file (.wav or .aiff) to your hard drive (be sure to *copy*. Don’t delete your original until you’re done, just in case you make a mistake and have to start over). Open it up in Audacity (a free
program for all platforms–download from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ). You’ll see a waveform. Start
listening from the beginning, and edit your file for pacing and performance. Use your room tone to create spaces–do not insert digital silence, it’ll sound clunky and distracting. Save your work as you go–nothing sucks more than a program crash where you lose an hour of work.

There are good ways to do noise reduction in post, but do NOT use Levelator. There are quicker, easier ways that sound better–if there’s sufficient interest I can do a post on noise reduction.

4) Once you’re satisfied, you’ll need to record an intro and an exit (like the title sequences on tv shows). These can be as short as three or four seconds, just enough to orient your listeners so they know what
podcast you’re listening to. Some people (like me) get elaborate, with fancy intros and then post-story chat where the author talks about how he came to write the story, his upcoming public appearances, responds to listener feedback, etc.

5) When that’s all done, export the open/close sequence to a wav file and import it to your original project, then put it in front of and behind the story. Export the whole thing to a 44.1khz joint-stereo
encoded MP3. Upload it to your website. Make a blog post, add a podcast enclosure, and hit publish.

6) If you want to release on podiobooks.com as well, follow the guide at www.podiobooks.com. It’s pretty easy stuff You’ll also want to do id3 tags, but that’s another blog post (which I’m happy to do if you guys want me to).

7) Be sure NOT to export to mp3 until the very last step. Otherwise, you can introduce audio artifacts that sound tinny.

That’s it Chime in with questions or corrections in the comments.

If you find this post useful, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.

New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.

What does this mean for you?

Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.

It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).

Time to crack the champagne!

My friend Danny Schade has now soundtracked two and a half books for me over the last couple years. For Predestination, he composed upwards of nine hours of music, and it made such an impression that people started immediately clamoring for versions they could listen to without the story talking over it.

A year ago, Schadey came out to ArtisticWhispers where he and I brought in veteran producer Mary Mason, and the three of us proceeded to rework the music into an album. In that first glorious weekend, we culled those original nine hours down to nineteen emblematic tracks with a running time target of between fifty minutes and an hour. Then, over the year since, in stolen moments, Schadey composed and recorded new material and arrangements at his home base in Colorado, while we here in California re-mixed, produced, sweetened, polished, and sometimes re-orchestrated the original material, blending the old with the new to bring Schadey’s audio vision snapping to the fore. The result is one we now proudly present to you, for the first time anywhere: A one hour instrumental genre-spanning rock opera. Predestination: The Soundtrack.

Available now as a DRM-free MP3 download.

Also, don’t forget that the novel which started it all is now available as an ebook, with all new scenes and other material to deepen the world and set you up for Free Will, which is coming in June. Get it now for Kindle, Nook, and for all other readers on Smashwords. And, of course, if you like the artwork, you can get a signed and numbered limited edition poster print for your private gallery.

And remember…
…It isn’t whether you win or lose. It’s how you rig the game.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the problem!

Welcome to the first of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode eleven of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty NicIaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:

Poirot
Stargate SG-1
Sir Apropos of Nothing
The Name of the Wind
Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
The Gap Cycle
Cozy Mysteries
Agatha Christie
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Law vs. Morality
Unconventional relationship structures
Stranger in a Strange Land
U.S. Regionalisms and prejudices
Polyamory Weekly
Free Will (announcement)

Well, I’ve been writing and producing an album. Wish there was a sexier answer, but there it is. And it is fun

I’m going on pod later today to record some special episodes – one will contain Down From Ten bloopers!

The other one is the occasion for the post. I’m going to be recording a special episode about guns. Particularly, about how to deal with guns in fiction, geared for people who don’t have extensive first-hand experience with them. I’m going to be covering vocabulary, safety, different types of firearms, popular myths that come from movies, and other stuff that can shoot your credibility in the foot. To this end, if you have questions, please post them to the comments here, so I can be sure to answer them.

See you on pod soon! And fear not. The Balticon Adventure and Principles of Contracts both return next week.

At this point in the narrative, I’m forced to chose between one of two roads. I could go along the chronology, skipping the boring and blackmail-worthy parts along the way, or I could chose a theme and tell its story…or I could jump back and forth between each as my fancy strikes me.

Guess which one I’ve picked?

It wasn’t until my appearance on Litopia last December that I began to realize the Power of the Hat ™. First, there was the encounter I recounted last time with Kim the Comic Book Goddess (who insists she’d have recognized me without the hat, but I have my doubts). Then there was the fact that Scott Roche and Sidfawu accosted me based solely upon the Power of the Hat, and we wound up sitting in the bar for several hours on Friday night talking Down From Ten, writing, and what passes for politics in my demented corner of the universe.

But before all that boring stuff, you’ll want to hear The Good Parts.

Much to my surprise, I arrived in time for my appearance as a guest troublemaker…um…panelist on The Good Parts, during which time we talked with great seriousness and deliberation about the influence of Catholicism on Erotica, Erotica markets, why Erotica writers are more conservative than mainstream fiction writers, and why J. Daniel Sawyer can’t resist telling a bad Vatican joke whenever he gets the chance (ok, we didn’t talk about that, but I’m sure that’s what you’ll be wondering after you listen to the ‘cast). The terrifyingly intelligent Kathryn Lively of Logical Lust/Mundania Press joined me as a guest and mutual foil to Nobilis and Cynical Woman’s normal crosstalk. It was a lively session indeed (pun intended), but I did manage to escape with my politically-incorrect (from any point of view) skin intact to take refuge once again in the bar, where I was accosted by the aforementioned shady characters. Gail found me there, drowning my sorrows in iced tea and talking epistemology, and while she and I sat talking Mur Lafferty wandered by.

The host of I Should Be Writing and editor of Escape Pod — drawn by the power of the hat (okay, the fact that I had her favorite ever show guest on my arm probably didn’t hurt, but it’s my hat and I can fetishize it if I want). After a delightful introduction, Gail and Mur flitted off with the New Yorkers to talk shop, while Nathan Lowell and Scott Roche introduced me around.

And this, dear reader, is where the Hat shows its true power. I was shaking hands with…Mae Breakall, I think? I can’t remember who, honestly, because I heard behind me “Oh my god it’s Dan Sawyer!” I turned around just in time to catch a short grey-shirted bundle of energy running up to hug me to death. Once I was satisfied that death was not in the cards, I collected enough of my wits to introduce myself to, it turns out, Heather Welliver, whose voice (I’m proud to admit) stole my heart in the intro to Pieces, and who graciously appeared in Predestination as Shayna Takahashi, and who is every bit as fabulous in person as she is on pod.

My welcome the rest of the con was similarly warm (thankfully, not in the thermal sense – the air conditioner was a life saver) and shocking, but none of it was matched by the dirty, foul, evil prank played upon me by podfather Tee Morris, he of the shameless self-promotion. Tee, in what I can only assume was an attempt to keep me on my toes, put out a twitter bounty on my hat. Over the course of the con, a number of people hunted me down specifically to STEAL my hat.

Let me say that again.

THEY STOLE MY HAT.

And then forced me, when I had a camera handy, to take their picture while wearing it. Theft and extortion, all in one package. And I have only one thing to say about this:

Your ass is mine next Balticon, Ubernemesis!!!

And yes, I’ll be posting more pictures from the Great Hat Heist in coming blog post.

Believe it or not — this only covers up through Friday night. Saturday was a whole other adventures.

Next time: Ponfication, Panels, and Parties

I normally travel with carry-on baggage only, but it’s not because by the end of a plane ride there’s nothing that gives me greater relief from coach seat-cramp syndrome and DVT than sitting down in another small seat in a moving vehicle. Nor is it that the prospect of walking around an unfamiliar building filled with carousels from deSade’s worst dreams fills me with nauseating dread.

The reason is that if I’m traveling by air, I’m interested in getting where I’m going. Car trips are for taking in the scenery – plane trips are for getting somewhere as fast as possible. Airports, with a few exceptions, are incredibly dull places. Let me put it this way: When was the last time you fond a jacuzzi full of literary intelligentsia well-plied with alcohol in an airport? If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while, and when I’m traveling from home to a convention (two locations highly likely to involve the aforementioned flavor of decadence), there’s precious little an airport can offer that I find the slightest bit interesting (aside from, you know, the plane).

This time, however, I was going to a my first general interest science fiction con entirely as a pro (rather than as a part-time fan), so I thought it important to dress up. I brought a nice sport coat, a pullover or two, some mandarin-collar semi-formals, and threw a mess of more knock-around clothes in for good measure. This put me well over my bag limit, so I had to concede to the eventuality of baggage claim.

I should have brought scuba gear instead.

You see, the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is one long swamp stretching from southern New Jersey right down to the tip of Florida, and swamps are peculiar places. Where most land environments have an atmosphere of air with a little bit of water dissolved in it, the atmosphere in a swamps is basically an above-ground lake with a higher-than-average dissolved oxygen content. The reason H.P. Lovecraft set his stories on the East Coast is because it’s the only place in the U.S. outside of Bayou country where Cthulu could breathe above the ocean surface.

As such, the humidity content on Friday afternoon was such that I could have done far better with gills than I did with lungs, and walking out of the sliding doors at Dulles into the afternoon heat I felt rather like a cheerio left in the bowl overnight on the counter top as the milk curdled around me.

Fortunately, I had swimming alongside me the equally bedraggled Gail Carriger (whose book we found in the Dulles bookshop as well – no wonder she hit the bestseller list!). Despite Gail’s public reputation as a genteel woman of breeding, she gives me a run for my money in the obscenity department when dealing with suspiciously titled “customer service” reps at rental car agencies. At such times she is a veritable font of snark, which more than made up for the sanitized films on the flight. Between that and the silly sing-alongs on the Beltway, one couldn’t ask for a better traveling companion.

An hour and a bit later we rolled happily into the hotel parking lot, both changed clothes in situ in the cab of the teeny rental car, and strolled triumphantly through the gathering dusk to register as both hotel guests and program participants, meeting Kim The Comic Book Goddess on the way in. This was the first of many instances that night where I was identified primarily by my hat — bur more on that later.

Next Time: The Saga Of The Hat

Due to some unforeseen production hiccups, some involving my own life, some the lives of our rocking cast members, DF10 isn’t finished yet and there hasn’t been an episode in seven weeks.

This situation is now about to change.

In my hot little hands are two near-complete episodes – 19 and 20. 19 will drop tonight. 20 will drop either Friday or Saturday. If all goes well, I’ll be able to drop two more episodes next week, and then the final 3 the week after.

For those of you waiting eagerly for Free Will to return, don’t worry — it’s coming too. I’m making good progress on the manuscript and am anticipating a relaunch date of May 1 – enough time for me to get the book done and get enough audio pre-produced that I can keep up even with Balticon and other early summer craziness coming up.

My many apologies for the delays – I hope the story turns out to be worth the wait!

-Dan

With all the talk of the podcasting revolution a few years ago, I wonder how many people truly grasp the potential enormity of what we’re doing. Just like good old Mr. Ballantine who invented the paperback, we podcasters are creating new kinds of intellectual property. However, unlike Mr. Ballantine, we don’t fully appreciate what we’re up to.

As a culture we value the Creative Commons, which is (in my opinion) a net good for both our work and for the broader markets we’re trying to engage. However, viewing the CC as the whole picture of intellectual property is, in my estimation, an error.

More importantly, as those of us who have been in the game get more sophisticated about how we do things (using custom-composed music, guest voices, licensing music from other commercial sources), we’re wading into more complicated legal and business territory. Some of us, such as Philippa Ballantine, have gotten broader distribution deals on Internet or satellite radio – others of us struggle ever to get noticed beyond the very niche podcast fiction community.

The bar-raising we’ve been doing is pushing podcast fiction, and perhaps podcasting in general, out of the realm of a hobbyist community and into the realm of being a true grass-roots industry. There will always be hobbyists, of course, and I think we should encourage them every inch that we can. But the last couple years have opened up vast new creative, legal, and business territories that few of us are properly equipped to deal with.

This leaves us vulnerable to the kind of exploitation that went on with musicians in the 1960s. At the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, most of the groups we identify with the hippie movement were signed to record deals. It was, for them, a dream come true – they suddenly had distribution – someone was paying them for their art! The community’s revolution was going mainstream, and the days of begging and busking and eating brown rice to get by were over!

Except that the hippe community, much like our own, had always worked on family trust and handshake deals, so when faced with something on a larger scale offered by people who spoke the right language, they signed up. And most of them got taken. They generated fortunes they didn’t get to participate in, they got locked into indentured servitude-like obligations, and they lost creative control of their own work and catalogs – and they had no one to blame but themselves. They signed the contracts without doing due diligence, and they were so happy at any opportunity for exposure that they literally didn’t look at the fine print.

We don’t want that kind of thing to happen to members of our community/industry. Whether friends or rivals or enemies, I know of nobody on whom I would wish that kind of misery, and I suspect most people in the industry feel the same.

At the same time some of us are scaling up to other opportunities, the gulf between those who have established audiences and those who are new to this is getting pronounced, and it’s getting harder (very subtly) for new voices to find the coaching and advice they need on anything but the most basic issues. Sure, there are a lot of resources about how to use Audacity, or where to find a good USB mic, but there’s very little newbie-accessible information on nailing down advertising deals, or improving one’s mic technique or audio engineering, or making the leap into full cast audio, or creating good working relationships with beta readers or voice actors. Or what about a place to get boilerplate contracts, or marketing strategies, or (for those faced with opportunities they’re not prepared for) good basic business resources?

I think the time has come for us to create an industry association for New Media creators, starting with podcasters. Over the next couple months, both Allen Sale of Astral Audio and I will be working on pilot projects and keeping hold of the resources we generate from them – contracts, tutorials, strategizing, a compendium of podcasts that are friendly to publicity interviews, basic legal and business information that we learn or employ along the way – and we will start packaging them for use by other content creators. When we’ve hit a critical mass, we’re going to look into forming a non-profit with the aim of becoming the SFWA of podcast fiction and YouTube video.

Some very good resources, such as the Podiobooks Mentorship Program, already exist, and what they do is vital. But it’s not enough, not if our industry is to grow beyond its little ghetto and more reliably generate opportunities for us in the broader world. We’re looking to augment what already exists, rather than replace it, and create a resource available to everyone to enable them to play in this sandbox at whatever level they want to, whether it’s as a hobby, a podiobook author, a multimedia producer, or a serious powerhouse transmedia content business. Our community has gotten big enough that it has the potential to get in its own way, and our visibility is still rising and generating opportunities many of us simply aren’t prepared to negotiate.

I think we can do better than the hippies did. I think, if we put together a definitive educational resource pool, the individual artists in our community might be able to transition upward without getting ripped off.
As Allen told me when we talked about this project: “We don’t want to fit in – we want to find ways to stand out so that we can’t be ignored.”

Let’s rock.

Related post from Allen Sale

[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]

The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”

The Gospel of Free has been pinging around the internet for a while now, it’s even got its own official book. There are folks in the fiction space – like Doctorow and Sigler – that have made it the cornerstone of their publicity strategy and turn a consistent profit at it. The use of free content in career building is a well-established promotional strategy, but it’s a difficult tool to use, and suffers from the reductio ad absurdum that most people hear when they first encounter the message, no matter how subtly it’s preached: “If you build it, they will come.”

So if I just put my stuff on the web I’ll find an audience? Well, no. You might find an audience, if you get yourself seen by the right people (and by “right people” I mean people who are prone to telling everybody they know about their latest new and great thing). You might even find a good audience – but you have to bear in mind, “Free” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Let’s take what I do for free (well, free to my audience): I use a segment of my professional time as a writer and as a sound engineer to produce full-cast audiodbooks. I pay for this – billing my professional time out at normal rates, and factoring in what I pay my actors in trade (whether they’ve collected on it or not), my cost (not including what I should be paying the author) is in the neighborhood of $10-15k. Now, am I out of pocket that much? No. I do go out of pocket a little bit, but not a lot – however, that’s all time stripped out of my life that I could be billing at that kind of rate. If you’ve wondered why I do less in the way of publicity than some other podiobooks authors, now you know – the time is my main expense, and I have a life and a business. I intend, eventually, to have my writing income make up a greater-than-fifty-percent share of my household budget, but I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere near. This is what is called a loss-leader.

In business terms, a loss-leader is the bait on the hook – the hook is what gets the audience to spend money. Matching the right bait to the right hook and fishing in the right water is a learned skill set, and it relies somewhat on how fast one learns from experience, how lucky one is, and (in the writing game) how good a lawyer one is and/or has. There’s a reason more than 75% of authors wash out of the game after their first book contract runs out, and why only a minuscule percentage of people with authorial ambitions ever get even that far – being a good writer is not the same as being a successful author. It’s even possible to be a successful author without being a good writer (for example, Dan Brown), but I wouldn’t bank on it and I know damn few successful authors who would, particularly over the term of a career. Craft does matter – it’s just not all that matters.

If podcasting is your loss leader, what’s your endgame? If all you’re trying to do is get your voice heard, podcasting or blogging your novel is a perfectly fine idea. If you’re looking to get published, it might help, or it might be a distraction or a detriment, depending on your approach and a host of other variables. If you’re looking to build a sustainable long term career as a professional author, it’s time for you to stop and think about a few things before you go into podcasting:

1) What will podcasting give me?
2) What is my professional time worth – and if I were to bill myself for this, how much of a loss will I be taking?
3) What kind of author do I want to be?
4) Why do I think “getting published” is a worthwhile goal?

Why should you stop to think about these things? Because I guarantee you that your answers to at least one of those questions is wrong enough to set you up for some serious disappointment.

What will podcasting give me?
Podcasting will, if you stick with it and actually produce a decent product with broad enough appeal, give you an audience ranging anywhere from a few hundred to maybe twenty thousand regular listeners. If you’re very innovative in evangelizing your product beyond the established fiction podosphere, your chances for good numbers go up. If you host in a high visibility place like Podiobooks and leave your content there for a few years, your numbers will climb over time due to the long tail effect.

Podcasting may also help you learn the market in terms of audience. This is the primary reason I started fiction podcasting: Market research. I was looking to find out what kind of people would enjoy the stories that I’m interested in writing, so that I could figure out how to find and deliver to that market that, in the long term (and I’m talking about a time scale of decades) I will be able to consistently turn a profit on. Notice I said “stories”, not “books” – that will become important later.

Podcasting may give you a creative community – this isn’t something I was looking for, but I have made some friends through the process as well as more than a few good business contacts that have been helpful along the way.

Podcasting (if you’re good at it) will win you respect and accolades as well as the adoration of at least a few fans along the way, and this feels really good. Just remember that, as encouraging as it can be, it’s a limited kind of street cred. Audience tastes change, and what they love about you today they may hate about you tomorrow. Glory feels wonderful, even in small doses, and can put an extra bit of shine on a life well lived, but it will never make up for insecurity or the need for the kind of relationships you can only have with people who really know you.

Podcasting may give you pleasure – if you enjoy the process and enjoy interacting with people, it’s something that you might like even as a hobby.

But unless you are supremely lucky and very canny, there is something podcasting will not deliver: a paycheck of any substance. If you’re expecting to be have your audio audience put you on the bestseller list once you get that book deal, good luck to you. A few people have pulled it off. Those people are, without exception, people that – by chance or by cleverness – wrote exactly to market. They were selling stories that resonated perfectly (or at least well enough) with the public that a larger-than-average segment of their fan base wanted to own a physical copy, and the same larger-than-average segment went out of their way to pimp the shit out of the books to their friends, family, and strangers who might not even own iPods. A few others have pulled it off by their books being noticed on a site like Podiobooks, and subsequently selling film options.

If you want your book to perform well enough to get to your next contract, you need a publishing house that will throw its weight behind you, a print run that is realistically scaled to your book’s performance, and a property that is going to sell in the current market. If you don’t have at least the latter two of these three things, then (again) good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

How Much Is My Time Worth?

I hate to sound like a schoolmarm (or worse), but time that you’re podcasting is time that you’re not doing four other things, all of which are arguably more important. It’s time you’re not making money at whatever your profession is, it’s time you’re not spending with friends and family building the memories that make life with living, it’s time that you’re not learning, and it’s time that you’re not writing.

If you intend to write fiction for any significant fraction of your life, you need to be doing all of those things. You have to write to grow as a writer, and you have to make money to be able to live while you’re writing. But if you have a life that isn’t worth living – say, a life without significant relationships or learning and enrichment – then it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have anything interesting to write about (and you may be too depressed to write about anything at all, except stories about depression).

Every hour you spend podcasting is billable time – somebody’s paying for it, and it isn’t always just you. Don’t cheat on your mental accounting sheet – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even in a down economy, your time has a dollar value attached to it – figure
out what that value is, and then keep track of what you’re spending. If nothing else, being aware of the cost will help you keep from feeling cheated at the far end if you wind up not getting a good return on your investment, because you’ll be spending on purpose.

What Kind of Author Do I Want To Be?

If you’ve been in and around the writing business for any length of time, you’ve heard the old saw “you can’t make a living as a writer unless you’re in the top 1%.” This bit of conventional wisdom is what lies behind the blockbuster mentality on the part of authors: you want to have a brand name, you want to be the biggest thing ever, and you must relentlessly self-promote (the blockbuster mentality of some publishing houses is another animal entirely, and Charles Stross and Dean Wesley Smith have both covered it very well on their blogs recently).

If you’ve heard that and are still intent on trying, then you are either mind-numbingly stupid, a heroically-minded risk junkie, a hobbyist, or someone who actually has a clue about business and doesn’t listen to the conventional wisdom of creative people (in which case, good for you).

So you want to be the next Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer? You’d be better off going to Vegas – that kind of trend really is a game of chance, and depends largely (though not entirely) on unforeseeable market forces. That said, there is a whole swath of writers who make a living on their names, which they worked very hard to establish, and who aren’t blockbusters (and yes, Scott Sigler is one of them. He might be a blockbuster by our standards, and his ambition is to be the next Stephen King, but by broader market standards he’s a respectable front-lister, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that).

But blockbusting is not the only way to win this game, and here’s why:

Most authors who make a living at it don’t make a living on their book advances. Oh, the advances help, but they’re not even close to the whole pie. Subsidiary rights sales, foreign rights, royalties from the long tail, article sales, and commissioned work for other commercial ventures (such as being tapped to do a Star Trek or a Dragonlance novel) make up a large part of the income flow, with investments helping keep the rent paid during lean years. These authors generally (though not always) sit solidly on the mid-list, and some of them write under a variety of names for different markets. I know and have known (personally) at least a score of authors who make their living with their words, and the two qualities that distinguish them from the authors I know who haven’t been able to pull it off are: 1) insufferable, bloody-minded perseverance, and 2) continual growth in craft and breadth. In other words, these authors actually treat it like a career, rather than a brass ring.

The truth is that most people who get counted as “authors” in surveys of author incomes are people who publish a single book, or who have a book they haven’t sold. They’re not career writers. They don’t count screenwriters, ad copy writers, stage play writers, or other such folks. In other words, this bit of conventional wisdom is horse shit because it counts every dilettante, aspiring amateur, and washout as an “author.” Authors such people may be, but professionals they ain’t. Some of them will become professionals (I must hasten to add, I’m on this tier — I’m not prolific enough or churning enough cash enough yet to be called a professional, but I’m heading deliberately in that direction) – others are hobbyists. I daresay that if such a survey were taken of all the auto mechanics in the world, with hobbyists and people that change their own oil counted with the same weight as ASE certificate holders, the numbers for auto mechanics wouldn’t be dissimilar to what we hear about with writing.

If you’re looking to do this for a living, writing is a professional business (i.e. a business that relies on being an expert in a particular domain), with all the problems that implies: It relies on individual expertise, a broad skillset, at least a vague awareness of market dynamics, a certain legal acumen, the ability to adapt to contingency, a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and a little bit of luck. You know, just like any other non-franchise business.

Why Do I think Getting Published is a Worthwhile Goal?

More than any other question, the answer to this gets to the heart of the matter for an author who is thinking of podcasting their work, because in answering this you’re probably going to answer a significant portion of all the other questions.

My answer to this one is simple: It’s a step on the road. I got a huge thrill with my first short story sale – now, after only a couple more, it’s an exercise in contract negotiations and another tick on the scorecard. It’s fun and exciting, but it’s not the life-affirming experience that the first sale was. Why? Because my sights are on the next set of goalposts, and I need to get to those so I can see the next set, and so on.

But my self-worth is not wrapped up in this. This is business. If I can’t make it work one way I’ll make it work another, and if, in the end, I turn out not to have the chops, I’ll shift my focus and continue writing as a hobby to whatever extent I can justify it. Yes, I am one of those rare people who will write no matter what – it’s the reason I’m making a go of turning it into a profession. But that doesn’t mean that everything I do will be available for free. Some things will, some things won’t – just like, right now, some things are and some things aren’t. My time is billable hourly, and my free stuff is there so that I can 1) build my audience, and 2) learn how to navigate in my marketplace(s). It’s an investment I’m making because it seems sound to me – I know what it costs, and for me the price is right.

Is the price right for you? Think hard about it. I daresay there will always be hobbyists in the podcast fiction space, but if you’re a pro or an aspiring pro, look at it as a business investment. It’s not a magic bullet, and it’s not a shortcut. Even podcasting’s biggest success, Scott Sigler, doesn’t see it as either of those things. Scott needed a platform to prove that there was a market for cross-genre horror, so he essentially invented one. His focus now is on figuring out where the next place to grow his audience is, and what books will be best to write next. There’s a reason he’s made this work, and it goes a lot deeper than “he writes in a popular genre” (although that also is very important).

Wrapping It Up

The Gospel of Free is a pernicious little meme that’s burned out some talented people and seriously burned others, but it’s not a new one. Every get rich quick scheme, every investment bubble, every motivational speaker that comes along has the same basic blend of bullshit and wisdom: “Look at this new thing – it’s no-lose! Look at its merits! Imagine how much you could do with this!” Network marketing, real estate flipping, dot com stocks – there’s always something, and it nearly always takes a pretty clever idea and isolates it from all good business sense.

Don’t fall for it. Free has always been with us, and it’s always been good business when done right. New tools, new media, and new toys are great, but excitement about the opportunities they present can easily obscure the most basic thing about business: supply and demand must meet, and they must trade. If they don’t, then at best what you’ve got is a rewarding hobby, and at worst you’re in a financial disaster. There is no such things as a fast buck except at the craps table, and there is never any such thing as a free lunch.

Me? I’m in this for the long haul. I’m building a business, with all the risk that implies. Right now, my business model includes podcasting. Will it in three years? It depends on what happens between now and then.

So, in sum, my advice to other writers and podcasters, for what it’s worth: Podcast what you will. Keep track of what it’s costing you. Cut your losses if it’s not returning what you need for it to be worthwhile. Above all, don’t buy the bullshit that motivational speakers and other sharks shovel. Celebrity status might be useful, but it’s like Monopoly money: not negotiable currency outside of the small circles that generate it.

For fans of mine and other’s podcast fiction: remember that while this is free to you, it’s not free for us. Your feedback, your cash in the tip jar, and your evangelism are much appreciated. We podcast authors know that we’re being wasteful and reckless – and not all of us will stay in this space forever. For now, I at least am getting what I want out of the bargain, and I do enjoy entertaining you all.

For everyone reading, remember: Life is precious. Don’t forget to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and treasure the memories it gives you. Treat your time like an investment, and savor what you buy with it. In the end, the moments are the only thing we have to make a life out of.

You that listen here regularly know Tee from his starring role as Amos in Down From Ten, or perhaps you heard his voice as Marian’s boss in Predestination or from the Predestination exit interview, but the story of Tee Morris is quite a bit more colorful. Tee invented podcast fiction, co-founded podiobooks.com, and is thus created the industry which launched the careers of myself, Chris Lester, Philippa Ballantine, Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, Christiana Ellis, Mur Lafferty, Nobilis Reed, and many others. He’s also directly helped many of us, and many others, with encouragement, advice, and lending his voice to our worlds. He’s also become a good friend to many of us, apart from a professional association.

Odd as it sounds, there are three things in this modern world that are more expensive than any other – being born, dying, and death. Natalie Morris’s death was sudden and unexpected, but it has left Tee with a raft of expenses he must meet immediately, and this as an unexpectedly single parent. Because of this, I have a special request for you – if you were planning on sending me a tip in the next week or three, send it to Tee instead.

Below you’ll find a widget for the chip-in account that Philippa Ballantine has started to help get Tee and Sonic Boom through the crisis time to calmer waters. Please click on it and toss a couple bucks in if at all you can.

Philippa Ballantine’s DIGITAL MAGIC, J. Daniel Sawyer’s FREE WILL AND OTHER COMPULSIONS, and Chris Lester’s METAMOR CITY SEASON 2 have been unleashed upon the world. You’ve heard the first episodes, now talk to the authors. We will all be live on Talkshoe this evening, 6pm PST, taking your calls and chewing the scenery. Contests will be had — prizes will be given — insanity will rule the day.
Here’s the timeline for the rest of the Triple Threat (so far):

Thursday, 11/12/09:

6 PM Pacific Time: Dan Sawyer & Pip Ballantine begin the LIVE Triple Threat Launchcast event at TalkShoe <–link leads to the show.
8 PM Pacific Time (est.): Chris Lester joins the Launchcast.

The Launchcast will include…
* Live call-ins from fans
* Trivia contests
* Prize giveaways
* Sneak peeks at the upcoming podcast seasons

Sunday, 11/22/09:

7 PM Pacific Time: Chris Lester, Dan Sawyer, Kitty Nic’Iaian and Gail Carriger record the first feedback show of the new season of Metamor City! Send in your responses to the new episodes and we’ll include them in the show.

It’s all on- so hope you can join us!

(some text pilfered from Philippa Ballantine)

Anyway, Brian has this to say about the words of your humble narrator:

“The current novel Down from Ten which has been describe as The Shinning meets “Clue” is a great story and the cast is doing an outstanding job. Warning – it is an in-flight podcast so when you catch up with the episodes you will be dealing with “cliffhangers”!

Though it is his other podcast novel I really wanted to mention, The Antithesis Progression: Predestination and Other Games of Chance, first the title is just plain awesome, I am aware that for the sake of “selling” the novel the title will be tweaked to be more approachable, which is only sensible; however, the Lit geek in me states firmly that the title is perfect and should be left alone. Okay, that said the title isn’t the only awesome thing here. The story is fantastic, driven by a cast of characters with powerful agendas that makes this space – spy – political – thriller come to life unlike any other podcast novel I have listened to. Take the time to check it out.

Something to keep in mind both novels are definitely for adults, not kid or office safe content.”

Thank you Brian, for the review. Those of you who don’t read Brian’s blog, it’s worth a gander. Check it out.

Predestination is a parsec finalist. Officially we’re up for “Best New Speculative Fiction Podcaster/Team,” and, while it’s only *one* of the nominations I was hoping for, if i had to pick only one this would probably be it. Why’s that? Well, this one has the advantage of being a shared award. I don’t know how many physical awards they give out, but if they give out multiples one is definitely going to Danny Schade, whose music made the world complete.

Thank you — all of you — for a hell of a first year doing this. Next year is, I hope, going to be even more exciting — I’ve gots me some plans!

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!

For Predestination, I’ve been nominated for:
Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novel Form)
Best Audio Drama (Long Form including Independents)
Best New Speculative Fiction Podcaster/Team

And for Sculpting God, I’ve been nominated for:
Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form)
Best Audio Drama (Short Form including Independents)
Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology Podcast

There’s obviously a lot of genre bending that I’m doing between fiction/drama, so that may work against me. Who knows? The only down side of this is that I have to send in samples, which is one more thing on my overlong to-do list. Even so…

Being nominated for the Parsecs f*cking rocks! Thanks guys, you are all fabulous!
-Dan

Which is what this post is about. Christiana Ellis’ hysterical send up of epic fantasy, Nina Kimberley the Merciless is now available on Amazon.com. I *LOVE* this book — very clever, loads of fun, and written with a genuine literacy that’s very refreshing in any kind of Fantasy, let alone comedic fantasy. Download the ebook here to read on your computer or portable reader, subscribe to the podcast here, and support the author’s print debut by heading over to Amazon and buying today.

We take a break from the constant sex talk to go over the latest feedback and…oh, yeah…talk about sex a bit. And geekiness. And all other manner of insanity. Stay tuned at the end where we announce the winner of the iTunes review contest.

Enjoy!

P.S. My illness has settled into my chest, so still no recording. Damn you, Lester!!!

Cold Duty: Selected Readings from the Diary of a Gelusian Repairman is the tale of a stable boy who gets caught working on a steam engine, which lights off an adventure in the big city and a 100-years too early scientific and technological revolution. Steampunk memoir – and a tale very close to my heart. If you haven’t heard it yet, I hope you’ll give it a listen.

This is a full-cast, full-production podcast novel. Danny Schade wrote the original score, and you’ll find many other familiar voices here: Philippa Ballantine, J.C. Hutchins, Chris Lester, Steven H. Wilson, and many other gifted voices from across the podosphere have helped bring this story to life.

You’re already a Junkie. Now, join The Resistance. This is more crack for your ears. Subscribe here.

Enjoy!
-Dan Sawyer

Playing For Keeps is different. Mighty Mur has delivered The writing is smart, the characters are well drawn and have surprising depth, and she sneaks in the thought-provoking concepts in sophisticated, subtle ways, teasing the moral, ethical, philosophical, and emotional implications of her universe out one thread at a time. It’s the kind of book that is a good, fun read the first time through, and then you find yourself turning it over again in your mind a week or two later, until you decide to go back and read it again to find out what it was that you missed. Something hooked your subconscious, and you don’t know what. Playing on three levels: the superhero story, but delightfully satirized, the human story of social rejects getting revenge, and the philosophical level where the reader is invited to ponder what simple concepts that we encounter ever day – such as ownership and respect – really mean when you dig down into them, Playing for Keeps delivers depth and challenge wrapped up in pink spandex. Funny as hell, witty like Wilde, and filled with cliffhangers from start to finish, this is one book you shouldn’t allow yourself to miss.

Mur’s making her run on Amazon today – - not tomorrow, as I mistakenly said in the latest Antithesis episode — so if you can order today, do so. If you can’t, do order as soon as you’re able. This is one talent that the world deserves to discover, and pushing her out into the limelight with her first novel here is a big step towards that discovery.

This week, the multitalented Steven H. Wilson, author, director, and star of The Arbiter Chronicles, joins us this week for a painfully brief one-line performance introducing one of our major characters. He’ll be back, and back, and back over the coming weeks in a number of different roles. If you haven’t found his series yet, check it out – and also check out his book Taken Liberty, available on Amazon and in a tamer version on podiobooks.com. He writes like the love child of D.C. Fontanna and Robert A. Heinlein; his stories are light and entertaining with a well-hidden but very sharp, serrated philosophical edge.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):

Steven H. Wilson

Erin Ballibanian as Ali

Brian Levy as Jim

Stephanie J. Sawyer as Cassy

Kitty Nic’Iaian as Airport announcer

Okay, I know, it’s late again. I’m really trying to get ahead on these and they keep kicking my ass, as real life bears down on top of me. Hopefully, next week will actually be on time.

This week, we find out what happens to Joss after he escapes the Hartmans, learn about oranges in the sky, and meet a couple new characters as the camera pulls back and we get to see more and more of the universe our characters inhabit. Turn down the lights, lean back, and enjoy!

This week, the incomparable Seth Harwood, author of the excellent Jack Palms crime novel series, the spinoff Young Junius, the short story series A Long Way From Disney, and the host of CrimeWav, brings us The Story So Far as only he can.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):

Robin Hathaway as Marian Shelley

Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal

Michael Lemonjello as Hakim and The Second Drunk

Kitty Nic’Iaian as The woman in the bar

George Chlentzos as Doug Reeves

The second episode of the Antithesis series is now live, and the adventures of Joss Kyle, Alyssa Hartman, Jim Hartman, and Alex Hart continue. They’re joined this week by two new characters, each of whom seem to dislike their job and have definite ideas about how the world should work.

Uber-Nemesis Tee Morris is with us this week, bringing us The Story So Far. If you didn’t do so already, check out his book The Case of the Pitcher’s Pendant at Amazon.com and buy or listen to his previous books at Amazon and Podiobooks. This is the guy that invented the podcast audiobook – without him, the rest of us wouldn’t be here.

Finally, what would the episode be without our capable cast?

Cast this week (in order of appearance):

Erin Ballibanian as Ali

Brian Levy as Jim

Feel free to comment here, and do check back from time to time over the next two weeks as we get the rest of the content in place and put up the pretty pictures.

Welcome one and all!

-Dan Sawyer

Bonus Content coming to the feed soon..
Antithesis series and have waited patiently. So now, I give you the debut of Predestination and Other Games of Chance, along with a promo to put on your own feeds. Please distribute widely…

Until then, here with a whimper instead of a bang, is Episode 1.
Enjoy!

Well, look no further. You can find my collection of fantasy, science fiction, and erotica stories here. It’s called Sculpting God and it’s chock full of adult-oriented bedtime stories, with a new two-parter coming next week.

The first volume of my podcast novel Antithesis – costarring the lovely Chasing The Bard author Phillipa Ballantine – will be posting shortly. There is a feed up right now, containing the promo, and episodes will start dropping before the end of the month. We’ve already got a couple of them produced – a couple more and we’ll have a comfortable buffer lined up so there won’t be any story interruptions once we get it started. In the meantime, you can read the back-of-the-book summary here, and watch the Sculpting God feed for more details.

Those of you who are of a vaguely intellectual bent might also enjoy my nonfiction podcasts, The Reprobates Hour (soon to enter its third season), and Apologia, a philosohpical roudtable discussion about matters of ethics, secularism, religion, and epistemology.

Feel free to poke around, read my older posts, and check out my photography work if you’re looking for some good desktop wallpapers.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sit down, stay a while, leave feedback, grab a drink and a cigar. Mi casa, tsu casa!

This is one of the better Apologia episodes we’ve done, and will leave you scratching your head either with thought provocation, or in a desperate attempt to figure out what the hell we’re talking about anyway.

Enjoy!

His points on point on #1 is well worth listening to, but they’re hardly original, and there are an increasing number of ideas floating around for the so-called “Podcasting 2.0″ delivery system.

But, even as it stands, is podcasting really a failure, or is it failing as a phenomenon? I think not. Rather, I’ll wager heavily that Ian Lamont’s radio background is impeding his prognostication abilities. He commits a basic category error when evaluating podcasting as a medium. Podcasting is not a failing medium. It is, As Seth Harwood recently said in a Q&A I filmed and helpt conduct with him on Google video, a medium without a business model. All that exists at the moment are small-scale ad sales and donations to defray costs, except in the case of podcast fiction authors, who also have the Sigler business model: build a community that generates enough of a buzz to make a run at Amazon’s bestseller rankings and attract big publishing deals.

The radio format as it exists today is based around three practical realities:
1) radio production has historically been stratospherically expensive
2) after the advent of television, radio’s audience profile changed and long format fiction and similar in-depth long-form interest shows lost audience, while music and short-segment interview and news shows gained audience share.
3) as a consequence of number 2 and an increasingly transient urban population, the programming on radio – particularly talk radio and talk/music hybrid programs – must reflect the rhythm of the workday to remain lucrative.

Because of this, over the last forty to fifty years the radio business has consolidated around the commute rhythm – exciting, ostensibly edgy content in the morning drive time giving way to banal, background-noise content that demands little from its audience for the duration of the workday, and back to a more laid back but engaging format at the end of the day.

But podcasting is not radio, nor should it be. Although it does work as an excellent way to time-shift radio programs, it does something far more useful and important: It provides a platform for a variety of formats and format experimentation, from underground music programming to the miraculous resurrection of the once dead-in-the-U.S. radio drama by groups such as Greg Taylor’s Decoder Ring Theater, to the innovative loss-leader distribution of fiction innovated by Mark Jeffrey, Tee Morris, and Scott Sigler. There have also been a number of other formats tried with various degrees of success – audio blogging, a’la “Tag in the Seam,” business tutorials, a’la The Survivor’s Guide to Writing Fantasy and Answers for Freelancers, and, of course, there are a lot of formats and podcasts that simply don’t work. The low barrier to entry means many – perhaps most – podcasts will suck. They’ll never make it past a few episodes, or attract more than a couple dozen listeners.

Will podcasting find a business model? No. What will more likely happen is that different sorts of podcasts will find different business models that work for their targeted demographic. Some will doubtless be advertiser supported, some will be hobbies, some will be loss-leaders, some will be
maintained by patronage and swag sales, and there will probably be a few more ideas rolled out by innovative podcasters over the coming months.

There is another market force coming into play that also will lower the entry bar for podcast customers. At the moment, the aggregate podcast audience is a tiny fraction of the potential audience (i.e. those who own Personal Media Players). The reasons why are not hard to divine: listening to a podcast requires a podcatcher, a PMP, and a little technical acumen – IF you want to listen to it on your earphones while you’re at the gym. Unfortunately, most people do most of their audio listening in the car, and earphones in the car are a big no-no. If you want to listen in the car, you must either buy a short-range FM transmitter, get a car kit tape adapter, use external speakers, or replace your in-dash receiver with a model that accepts aux input. All four of these, for the average Joe, are unacceptably troublesome and/or expensive.

These barriers to in-car listening are disappearing. Car makers are starting to offer in-dash receivers with Aux-in, and an increasingly large share of the PMP market ships with a minijack Aux cable. This little market force, gathering steam, will open the podosphere up even more. If/when Podcasting 2.0 arrives, it will further streamline the delivery stream.

Podcasting’s central problem is that it is retrofitted onto RSS, a brilliant technology that had not yet become ubiquitous and may never see near-universal adoption on the client side. However, podcasting’s roots need not determine its future, and as podcatchers become less cumbersome or (better yet) bundled in with browsers or email clients, the barriers for entry will continue to fall away. Its rise isn’t as meteoric as the adoption of YouTube or the iPod, its path is so far much more analogous to television. The cultural potency of this method of distribution is already proving itself, and it will grow far more obvious in the coming years. This isn’t a statement of faith, but a statement based on a basic incentive-based assesment of Podcasting on its own merits.

Contra Ian Lamnot, Podcasting is not failing. It is merely failing to be radio.

You’ve heard the story of Adam and Eve? Don’t be so sure. The Bible doesn’t tell the whole story, but if you look closely you see where something has been removed. First, God creates “man” male and female, and then, a few verses later, he creates woman again, this time from Adam’s rib. Where did the first woman go?

If you’ve ever read the Babylonian Talmud, you know. She was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for not being properly defferential, and she went on to become quite notorious in her own right. A sexual predator, a dark goddess, a spurned woman, and the first feminist, this is her story in her own words.

Lilith.

Guest voices this week:
Stephanie Sawyer
Kitty Nic’Iaian

Promos this week:
Hutchins and Harwood explain why you have only three days left to buy Scott Sigler’s excellent novel Infected

First off, the new episode of Sculpting God is up on the feed. For this episode, I take you way, way, way back to the very beginning of the world, to tell you the REAL story of what happened with a certain apple in a certain garden. From the lips of the woman who was there to witness it all, you’ll hear the story of Lilith, the world’s first woman and first feminist. Listen to this one without your kids in the room; it’s sexually explicit.

Secondly, and in the long run perhaps more important, there’s only a few days left to pick up Scott Sigler’s Infected

If you haven’t heard the podcast, you’ve been missing out. I’ll be posting a proper review in a couple days when I have time, but for now suffice it to say that even if you don’t like horror, you’re probably going to enjoy this book. Check out the Amazon reviews and get your copy – and try to get it before the 14th of April so that your purchase will count towards the New York Times Bestseller list. If Scott can make the list, it’s going to mean good things for ALL podcast authors – Sigler, Harwood, Lafferty, Hutchins, Wallace, myself, and all the others who are creating excellent free content for all of you guys out there in podcastland.

If you don’t want to go to Amazon, hit B&N.com or go to a local brick-and-mortar store and look for the book with this disturbing cover:

Enjoy!

Meet Rick. He’s a scurrilous, irascible scoundrel, with a heart of gold. Not in the sense of being warm and fuzzy and good underneath, but in the sense of having a heart totally devoted to gold. His favorite goldmine is his shop, an entertainment venue where he vends virtual reality and manufactured novels to his latter-day escapist customers. He runs a tidy shop, he keeps his customers happy, and he always knows the right party to hit to find a pliable college girl with more cocaine than sense. Life is good. But life has a way of doing unexpected things, and the world has a way of changing around the most adaptable people.

Take a step into Rick’s parlor. Don’t mind the bell on the door or the old fashioned cash register. Buy a manufactured novel, fresh from the computer, a first edition. Sit in the easy chair or lay out on the sofa. Strap on a helmet and a skinsuit and take a swim on Europa. He can be trusted, really. It says so on the door. He’s completely upfront with his advertising. In ten foot high letters, right above the shop front, he tells you what they do in his place:
“We Create Worlds.”

And he does it on the cheap.

Warning: This episode of Sculpting God is intended for adult audiences, and has content that is probably unsuitable for children and the easily offended. Strong language, dirty euphamisms, sexual themes, and disturbing subject matter.
Direct Download Link
Podcast Link

Special thanks to the Reason Driven Podcast and to the Going Linux podcast for running our promo. Enjoy!

So, come on over, take a listen, and learn what Babylon 5, Nazi Rallies, Megachurches, and Rock and Roll concerts have in common!

Check out “Train Time”

For the rest of you, you’re all very well appreciated and there are some cool surprises coming in the weeks ahead, methinks. More articles coming, as well as some exciting new stories on the cast. For the moment, to hold you over, here’s the new audio promo for Sculpting God, which is going to run on J. C. Hutchins’ 7th Son podcast in the allegedly near future.

So, please spread the promo far and wide, and tell your friends and lovers and enemies.

More soon…

And, if you DO follow me, get your arse on over to the Sculpting God homepage and subscribe to the feed, or do it the lazy way and grab the mirror in the first column to the right.

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell people you hardly know and would never want to! There is a new weirdo on the block – - I have a gothic anthology here and I’m not afraid to use it!!

In other news, the first episode of Sculpting God is all recorded. I have a bit of post production to do on it, and then it’ll be ready to go up. Another episode will be ready about the same time. One more beyond that, and I will start the podcast – at this point, it’s looking like Sept 21 or thereabouts will be the beginning. More updates on that soon.

Predestination update:

73,860 / 125,000 (59.1%)

Despite what the word meter tells you, I should actually be done by November. This draft is a polish draft, and most of what needed polishing and fixing were the first three sections, and that’s about done. The rest is bringing the balance of the novel into stylistic conformity with the rewritten first half. It’s going along gangbusters, and we’ll start the podcast for it in December – consider it a Christmas/Solstice/hey-we-get-this-time-of-year-off-for-some-reason-let’s-get-drunk present.

In other news, I’m teaming up with my friend Zoe Winters to do a competitive NANOWRIMO this year. I have a SF/Fantasy/horror/romance story that I’ve been thinking about writing for a while now, and it seems like the right time to do it – it’ll give me a good break from the Predestination universe before I dive back in in January to write the sequel: “Free Will and Other Compulsions,” which I’ll need to have done by July so I can start podcasting it next fall.

Watch this space for more news – there is a LOT upcoming guaranteed to warp your brain and make you think about all those things your mother used to smack you for.