Click here to view the embedded video.

Audio podcaster and novelist Seth Harwood is pulling out all the stops, celebrating today.

No, not the typical americanized Cinco de Mayo revelry. Today commemorates the publication of Harwood’s crime novel, Jack Wakes Up, by Random House.

This is his first novel to be published by a major publishing house, but Harwood is no stranger to publishing. He has been serializing his novels, and sharing them, via podcast, with his readers.

While Jack Wakes Up is the first traditionally-published installment of Harwood’s Jack Palms series, Harwood has actually written and published as a podcast three Jack Palms books, the latest being a “prequel” story.

We tracked down Harwood earlier this week, to talk about today’s book release, and about the role that podcasting played in his current success.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: You have a lot of pieces of fiction to your name. Have you always been a writer?

Seth Harwood: Strangely enough, no. I was an economics major. I didn’t really get into English and literature and writing until my last year or two of school. After school, I worked in New York in commodities trading.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So how did you get from dealing in commodities to writing crime fiction?

Seth Harwood: While I was in New York, I started writing more – working on a novel. Once I had a habit of writing on a regular basis, I was pretty hooked. After 15 months, I quit my commodities exchange job to focus more exclusively on writing my novel. [Laughs] I did three years of temp jobs and writing, submitting my work to journals, trying to get my writing in front of agents — all with no luck.

Eventually, I moved back to Cambridge (Mass.) and got into some continuing education creative writing workshops at Emerson and through Harvard Extension. I had to read great short stories (Carver, Richard Ford, Flannery O’Connor). The students in those classes were terriffic. I spent two years in Boston working on writing, then got into grad school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Literary short stories are a pretty far cry from crime novels. How’d that happen?

Seth Harwood: [Laughs again] I moved to California.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: How do you mean?

Seth Harwood: I moved to California in 2005, got married, taught part time, and wrote the rest of the time. I  tried to write a crime novel. I drew from all the movies, the games and the novels I liked. I threw out the formal literary influences I’d used in my previous writing. Had a great time writing it – and suddenly agents were interested in it.

My writing got better, because I was having a better time writing the stuff.

So, finally, I had these two agents were kind of interested in working with me, but somehow they weren’t quite sure. I worked with them for about 5 months. We went round and round, and then, all of a sudden, it was like they both just backed out, disappeared. Man, I was so frustrated – after all that, to have to go back to square one. I wondered whether there was something else I could do with the book?

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So how did you figure it out?

Seth Harwood: Around that time, I had published a short story online, and got great feedback and felt successful about that. I thought about doing a novel online, but I thought the audience might not do as well with it as an electronic text-based book. When I was teaching back in Boston, I always had liked books on tape while commuting. All these pieces kind of came together.

What cinched it was, a friend in Boston was a huge fan of Scott Sigler and his science-based horror podcast novels. My buddy told me about Sigler, and it just clicked. I decided podcasting would be a great way to get my writing out to an audience.

My friend, the big Sigler fan friend emailed him – Scott has always been very available to his readers and his listeners, and in return, they are crazy about him. And Scott was just incredible about getting me going. He helped me set up my podcast, showed me how to do everything via iChat. He listened to my early episodes, helped me figure out levels and editing and all of that.

Oh, and I’ve just got to be sure to mention – Podiobooks.com also was instrumental in helping me get going with my book podcasts. Evo and those guys do so much to help writers, and to get our work into listener’s hands.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So how did you turn your podcast novel into a traditional publishing deal?

Seth Harwood: I was able to get Jack Wakes Up published by a small press, Breakneck Books. By the time I went through all that with the different literary agents, I thought I should tell them about my podcast, show them my audience size.

So I did what Sigler did, I “bum rushed” the  Amazon sales charts. I chose Palm Sunday last year as the big day, becaue my main character is named Jack Palms. I asked all my podcast listeners to please please buy my book on that Palm Sunday, to bump my sales numbers. Wouldn’t you know — we hit #1 on the Amazon charts in crime and detective books on that Sunday.

My agent wanted to sign me by 8am the next day. And then, the first publisher they pitched to wanted to sign us and publish us. We sold the rights to the book in mid April.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: What role do you think podcasting has played in your success as a writer?

Seth Harwood: One of the great things being in podcasting – really great – is the community of helpfulness we seem to share. That’s something that definitely wasn’t there in grad school. In grad school, you’re surrounded by other serious writers, who are all dissecting your work. You get good constructive comments — but you also get ripped apart. It can wear you down, make you unsure whether your writing is any good.

Now, I’ve been enjoying the warmest response from my listeners, and from other podcast novelists as well. I’m getting all these congratulations emails and things from other podcasters, wanting to help me by promoting my book on their sites and their podcasts….

And podcasting has opened up so many other opportunities for me — and given me situations to help other podcasters, in fact.  Now we’re teaching a class, Scott Sigler and me, taking writiers in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And soon we’re going to start in NY, and at Stanford University in the fall. We take writers, and we show them how to record their work, edit it, publish it on their blogs, get it listed on iTunes. It’s called AuthorBootcamp.com. We started that in February, and are doing another one in June. The one in Stanford this fall will be a two-Saturday seminar. By winter, we’re looking at doing a Stanford class online.
The more people do this, the better off we all are in the long run. The world is big enough for an audience for everyone.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: What do you do on the day your book comes out?

Seth Harwood: Emailing everyone I’ve ever met, telling them to please buy Jack Wakes Up. I will probably have a party all day on Twitter, be in touch with everybody, and then go out and really celebrate that night.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: What else do you want to be sure our readers know about you and your work?

Seth Harwood: I can’t say enough about the lift that the relationship with my audience on line has been. It’s been such an energy boost for me as a writer. To have hundreds, thousands of people reading my stuff, hearing my stuff, it’s enabled me to do better work, and more work, than I ever would have otherwise.

I want to encourage everyone with my experience. It all really started when I tried to find my own way to get my story out. When I opened up to those possibilities, it all happened.

It is hard to suffer rejections and not feel like you should keep revising and changing. For me, the thing that’s worked so well, is showing it directly to an audience (of people who aren’t related to me)….. They are honest with me, but honest with their positive feedback along with the constructive stuff.

That audience appreciation and feedback was so validating to me as a writer – that’s what has inspired me to keep doing that thing I do. I can’t thank my listeners and readers enough.

Their dialogue with me has enabled me to keep writing, not feeling like it would have to be revised over and over in order to ever reach an audience.

Don’t be afraid to give yourself away for free. It doesn’t preclude publishers from wanting to sell your stuff later on. I was giving my pdfs and podcasts away like crazy. I still got a great book deal. It’s all good.

Oh! And one last thing — Also, I want people to see the little video I did on YouTube. It’s like three minutes, an overview of how I podcast my books – and how you can too. [The video is embedded, above.]

Publishers Weekly magazine reports today what may be the first offer of its kind from traditional publishing. Book publisher Thomas Nelson has launched “NelsonFree,” a program which gives readers their content in several different formats – as a hardcover book, an e-book, and an audiobook, all for the purchase price of a single volume.

Thomas Nelson is the world’s largest Christian book publisher, specializing in Bibles, inspirational works, and “conference faith events for women and teen girls.”

The first book to reach the marketplace as NelsonFree offerings are Scott McKain’s Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails, and Michael Franzese’s I’ll Make You An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Insider Business Tips from a Former Mob Boss. The two books go on sale later in March, with ten more books to be released in this format throughout the rest of 2009.

Says Lynn Andriani in Publishers Weekly:

Once readers purchase a book with the NelsonFree logo, they are directed to a Web site where they register and answer a security question. They then can download an audio MP3 file and several types of e-book files, including EPub, MobiPocket and PDF. Joel Miller, v-p and publisher, business and culture, said Nelson currently has plans to release a dozen format-free books in this and related categories, and will monitor consumer response to determine whether or not it adds more titles. He also said Nelson will not raise the price of hardcovers in the NelsonFree program. “I only see the price going up if a particular project has unique added expenses in producing the audio and digital books.”

This is a welcome gesture from a publishing house. It pleasantly flies in the face of Amazon’s recent announcement that they are disabling the new Kindle’s text-to-speech functionality for some titles (so as not to negatively impact those book’s audiobook sales).

Podcast fiction enthusiasts are no strangers to the idea of receiving their books in multiple formats, many of which are free. Pioneering podcasters J.C. Hutchins, Philippa Ballentine, Mur Lafferty, Tee Morris, and Scott Sigler have been distributing their fiction in serialized (free) podcast form for many years now. These authors give their readers the advantage of advance access to their stories via their podcasts, and also generate future (paper) book sales among their dedicated audience.

Take a look at our interview with podcast author Scott Sigler, in which he says of the future of publishing:

A lot of what’s coming is the kind of things like I and the other podcast novelists are doing, or the people over at Podiobooks.com are doing, which is just give it away. Give the audience a chance to get to know you as a content creator, and as a performer, and know whether they like your stories. Then, once the audience develops that relationship and that affinity for you, then they’ll go out and buy your books, knowing that it’s going to be money well spent. They know what they’re going to get. So you’re allowing people to try it before you buy it.

And the other thing that’s really going to come into play heavily is story extensions and expansions. You’ve got your core story, which will be in the hardcover book. You’ll probably be having to give that away as a podcast, just to compete. But then there’s a lot of other things you can do. You can do the “back story” of your characters. You can do all kinds of background information. You can combine the extra podcast content with wiki content, with links to websites. The book sort of becomes the “gem in the tiara of entertainment,” if you will, instead of just the whole crown all by itself.

We are eager to see whether more traditional publishing companies will follow Thomas Nelson’s lead, and begin making their titles available in multiple formats, to accommodate readers’ (and listeners’) interest in audio and e-reader books.

Thanks to Philippa Ballentine for pointing out this news.

Photo: “On The Platform, Reading,” by moriza

Time magazine has published an article today about podcasting novelists. In the article, they note that podcasting could be publishing’s next wave:

Scott Sigler of San Francisco missed out on getting his first novel published, with a deal collapsing in late 2001.

But he built a big Internet fan base on novel podcasting, which led to a 2007 deal with The Crown Publishing Company (a division of Random House), one believed to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sigler reached a milestone this month by cracking the New York Times Hardcover Fiction bestseller list withContagious, a first for an author emerging from the podcast genre. The print run for Contagious is 80,000 copies and it has made the bestseller list despite Sigler’s getting his reluctant publisher to allow him to put out PDF files and podcasts of chapters of the book for free on his website.

The article is interesting – but it would have been a lot more interesting if it had been published in 2006, when podcasting novels was news. 

Any mainstream coverage of podcasting is good for podcasters.

But you have to wonder if magazines covering trends like this –  three years after they were covered online – is just another reason why magazines are dying.

Yesterday’s article, about the newly-launched Vatican channel on YouTube, reminded us of a favorite Monty Python sketch, “The Pope and Michaelangelo,” which we embed here for your amusement.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Look – I’m the bloody Pope, I am! I may not know much about art, but I know what I like!” Priceless.

It got me off on a tangent, thinking about the different ways in which people and organizations are using YouTube and other new media to expand the reach of their “brand.”

This “Pope” video is on the “From the Vatican” playlist on the Monty Python Channel on YouTube. While their content is something completely different from what you’ll find on the Vatican’s YouTube channel, Python is an excellent example of someone turning a vast storehouse of old content into a new revenue source.

Monty Python took classic old skits from their “Flying Circus” television show, scenes from the “Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” movies, and bits of their Amnesty International “Secret Policeman’s Ball” performances. They added recent video commentary from troupe members, and offered the entire caboodle for free.

Their reasoning?

“For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.”

The group exercise control over their own evergreen material, and in offering it for free, imply an informal agreement with the viewer:

“We want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

The strategy seems to have worked. Through the YouTube click-to-buy e-commerce platform, and links to buy Python regalia on Amazon.com, the comedians raked in the big bucks. According to the YouTube blog, the November 2008 launch of the Monty Python channel spurred a huge jump in Python DVD sales at Amazon, where they “quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.”

Mashable points out that the make-money-with-free-giveaways method is working for a number of businesses.

Trent Reznor released the Creative Commons-licensed [Nine Inch Nails] Ghosts I-IV albums as a free download. The freebie albums’ popularity spurred a boom in purchased copies at Amazon.com, which declared it the site’s best-selling album of 2008. The $300 super-deluxe boxed set (with vinyl LP’s and remixable tracks) sold out.

In print media, authors offer their new books for free (as text or pdf downloads, or, as Scott Sigler does, as episodic podcasts), then reap benefits as reader/listeners purchase their own hardcover copy of the story.

Monty Python differs from NIN and The Dark Overlord, though, in that they are not offering free new downloadable material. The skits on YouTube are, in many cases, over thirty years old. Chances are, most of their viewers have seen these snippets (many times!) before. But that back catalogue of old comedy sketches is really good stuff — good enough to make you want to spend money to have your own boxed set copy.

Makes me wonder: what other “brands” have a treasure trove of great content (music, video, lectures, stories) that is languishing in a file cabinet somewhere? What would it cost them to share old treasures? And what might it benefit them (in new customers, in increased sales, in greater visibility) to do so?

James Melzer, creator of the podcast novel The Zombie Chronicles, has landed a three-book publishing deal with indie publisher Permuted Press.

In one of the most heartfelt and gracious announcements I have ever read, Melzer says:

“I will treasure this moment, the moment I put pen to paper in order to finalize the deal, for the rest of my life. When I think back on it I will not only think back on all the hard work it took to get here but also on all of you for helping to make my boyhood dream come true.”

Permuted, a self-described “horror and apocalyptic book publisher,” has inked an agreement that Melzer says “is a first for podcast fiction,” because the first book in the trilogy “isn’t even finished yet!” The publisher bought the series based on the initial episodes of the story podcast.

Melzer is the latest example of podcast producers who have parleyed the success of their podcast into opportunities in other media. Scott Sigler is turning his podcast novels into hardcover books (via Crown) and movies. Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine have published an Ask-A-Ninja book, and will be writing and directing a remake of a classic movie. Michael Geoghegan’s Grape Radio wine podcast garnered a prestigious James Beard Award and has been contracted for use on American Airlines.

Publication date of the first volume of The Zombie Chronicles has yet to be determined, as the book is not finished being written at this time. In the meantime, the feed to subscribe to The Zombie Chronicles is here.

Scott Sigler, one of the first authors to publish his fiction exclusively as a serialized podcast, has more recently been one of the first podcasting authors to land a (paper) book publishing contract. His book Infected was released in the US in April, and was published in July in the UK.

In this exclusive interview, Scott talks about his experiences and shares his views on podcasting, social media and the future of book publishing.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Lately, it seems like you’re all over the place. I heard you on National Public Radio, and saw you profiled in The Washington Post. Do you want to trumpet what it is you’ve done that gets you all this notoriety, if not infamy?

Scott Sigler: Sure, I give away my fiction novels as free podcasts, as serialized audio books, and that has resulted in enough listeners to get me a publishing deal with Crown Books. And Crown just released the hardcover of INFECTED, which is the first book in their five-book deal, and it just came out April 1st. And their media people have done a great job of pushing the podcast-to-print story, which has resulted in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, NPR– even got reviewed in Entertainment Weekly. So it’s just crazy.

On Pioneering the Podcast Novel

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: That’s exciting and fun, too, for your fans. You have an incredible, very active, very devoted fan base, and you’ve successfully pioneered the use of podcasting and new media to promote your work.

As far as I know, you were really the first author to start to really actively promote new work as downloadable, serialized podcasts. Was there anyone podcasting their books before you did?

Scott Sigler: There were three people who kind of came up with it at the same time. We didn’t know each other then, but we’re pretty good friends now, and that’s Tee Morris, who did a book called Morevi, Mark Jeffrey who did a book called The Pocket and the Pendant, and myself when I put out a book called EarthCore. And Morevi and The Pocket and the Pendant were already in print.

The unique angle for me was that the only place you could get the story was in the podcast. You could not peek at the end, you couldn’t get it, you just had to wait every week. And that got kind of a kind of core audience rolling along with it. And then I rolled into the next book, which was Ancestor, and then Infected, and then a couple more after that.

And it’s just- it’s really been growing since then. So that’s become the default model for me, to give it away as a podcast first and then to follow up with a print book.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So you had enough of a dedicated fan following that Crown Books took notice of you. Was it a coincidence that the book came out on April Fool’s Day, or was that a special contrivance?

Scott Sigler: Well, I put out a book previously with a small indie press — the book was called Ancestor– put that out last year on April 1st. We picked April 1st because it was a good marketing day. If you asked anybody, “When’s St. Paddy’s Day, when’s Memorial Day?” you don’t really know, you have to look on a calendar. But for like, “When’s- what’s April 1st?” everybody knows it’s April Fools. So it sort of sticks in the head.

What we were trying to do was get people to go buy the book Ancestor all at the same time on Amazon.com, to kind of “game the charts” there. And we didn’t know that it was going to do as well as it did. It hit number seven overall on Amazon which really– that’s what showed the power of the social media community, that you could get a significant number of people to act at the same time, in a very coordinated, concerted effort.

And that’s what Crown saw: this small, independent book with no advertising, no publicity, no media coverage of any kind, zero dollars in marketing, hit number seven on Amazon, which is something that they can’t do 99% of the time. So that’s why they wound up signing me to the bigger deal, and from then on I just- we’ve kept April 1st. That’s the day my books are always going to come out, on April 1st, because now the fan base, “the junkies,” identify with that and it’s like a national holiday now.

Using Social Media To Build an Audience, and To Create and Promote Books

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: There was a lot of excitement, not just through your website but also through Twitter and other social media. You use a lot of different online media to mobilize people, and even to create characters for your books by soliciting input. Tell me about all the different social networking pieces that you use and how they fit together.

Scott Sigler: Well the biggest pieces are probably the social networking platforms; MySpace, Facebook and Bebo are the ones that I use, and Bebo should become more significant as my books start to be released in Europe in a couple of months. But right now it’s primarily Facebook and MySpace.

I do several promotional videos around the book, like book trailers, and those are up on the pages and so are the audio trailers for my books. So as soon as people stumble onto my page, they’re getting exposed to what the podcast sounds like, getting exposed to the story, they’ll see the video, and it makes it really easy for them to communicate and interact with me. All my handles [usernames] for all my social media stuff are up on my website. People can just reach out to me anytime they want, also via email and via other instant messaging.

What I’ve found is that this is not something that most authors do. People will read the work or find out about the work, be curious enough to ask the reader a question, even if it’s just “are you really out there listening?” And I reply to absolutely everything. Everything gets responded to; every instant message, every email, every tweet, everything. And that, combined with the social networking sites, makes such a strong connection with the readers. They really feel like someone actually took five minutes just to reply to them, and even if they only email once, it’s totally locking in fans for life.

It’s a really phenomenal thing. I think it’s just that in most of our entertainment culture, a fan can reach out to the stars of a TV show, or directors or authors, but they’re never going to get a reply back. But in our social media world, you can get a reply back. And when you get that reply, it means a lot.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Well not only that, but you’ve actually actively solicited the participation and the input of the people who listen to you and read your books. We wrote an article at one time about “Scott Sigler wants to kill you.” It was amazing to see how people responded to that. Can you talk a little about that particular project?

Scott Sigler: Yes, it’s kind of a twofold thing; primarily it’s trying to keep track of my fans and be able to motivate them to go do whatever I need them to do. We have– ScottSigler.com is a full-blown social media site. There’s a wiki where the fans are listening. All the information on the characters in all the books? I don’t do anything with that. There’s chat rooms, there’s forums, and that’s where people really communicate a lot, and people who are signed up there and have their profile filled out are eligible to get killed in one of the books.

So when it’s time for another corpse to show up in a book, I’ll go into the website, find a profile of somebody who’s been having fun and being active in the community, and just put him in the book. We recently checked with Crown’s, my publisher’s, legal department, and we can keep using those names, because people have “opted in” on the site. So therefore, once you are picked as a corpse in a story, it’s going to go into print, and the fan’s name is going to be forever immortalized as yet another body in the long body count that is my books. So there’s that part of things, getting people to participate and spread the news, be on the site.

The other part is, when I first podcast these books, they are [only] about 90% finished; but for that last 10%, I tend to get a lot of feedback from the fans. I’ll find that certain characters were way more popular than I thought they would be. I have a huge amount of fact-checking that goes on among my podcast listeners. I put out the podcast episode, and then I’ve got cops, firemen, military people, doctors, scientists. All these people will start emailing me about anything I got wrong.

It winds up letting me kind of market-test the book in a way, see what plot points and characters are really resonating, and maybe blow them up a little bit more. And it also helps me get a lot of my facts straight. I write hard science thrillers. There’s only so much that I can actually know, because my primary focus is the story, and then that gets out to fans who really know all this stuff. They correct me when I’m wrong.

Drawing on the Skills of 30,000 Experts

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Unlike Michael Crichton, you don’t spend the first third of the book trying to really tell me about virus theory and things like that; for which I really I say thank you.

Scott Sigler: Yes, I’m very much into the science side of things and all my plots are heavily grounded in science. And the basic concept of a Sigler book is, when you read it, you could say to yourself, “I could see this happening.” You know it’s fiction, but you could see– it’s not like a ghost story or vampires or werewolves where it’s more supernatural.

But at the same time I’m not a professional scientist. I don’t bury myself in the journals and I don’t profess to know all these things. So the science functions for the story and provides the foundation and makes it more realistic, and then I tap on a lot of fans to go out for the more hardcore science stuff.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Do you have a formal science background, or is it just a lifelong passion? How do you marry your fiction with your fact in your books?

Scott Sigler: Well it’s more of a lifelong passion. I almost went into Biology. But I’ve taken English at Washington State where I was [inaudible]. So I went into Journalism instead. So really it’s mostly been that I watch all the science shows, I read a lot of science magazines. Most of the time that just gives me ideas for stories. I’ll see something on genetics, and in my imagination I’ll combine that with something on evolutionary theory, and something on population behavior, and how all three of these things could go together. I’m like, “ooh, that would be really cool.” So I kind of take the popular science stuff that’s out there that you’ve probably already heard of, put it together in a unique way. Then I’ll go back and I’ll fact-check everything with actual scientists who will either tell me that would work, or that it’s crazy, you’re going to have to change that.

“I wouldn’t have a publishing deal if it wasn’t for podcasting.”

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So tell me about the podcasting angle of this. Has podcasting, do you think, enabled you to do things that you otherwise might not have been able to do?

Scott Sigler: Yes, absolutely. I mean, (a) for all of the fact-checking information, that I said earlier, there’s no way I could have 30,000 people checking my story for me, to make sure there’s no errors. That’s the first thing.

And (b) the second thing is, I wouldn’t have a publishing deal if it wasn’t for podcasting.

I was doing this for 12 years before I started podcasting. I had well over 100 rejections. Because my stuff’s a combination of suspense, thriller, horror and hard science fiction, none of the publishers would touch it. They didn’t know what shelf to put it on, what category to put it in. That was the line I kept getting, they didn’t know how to sell it.

So when I started podcasting, it built up an audience; it also showed that audience would actually go out and buy print books. That enabled me to get to the point I’m at now, which is being a “majorly featured” hardcover, at the front of bookstores and all this crazy stuff, in airports even. It wouldn’t have happened without podcasting.

On The Future of Publishing

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: How do you see podcasting as one of a lot of media fitting into publishing overall, book publishing in particular?

Scott Sigler: Well, I think book publishing is heading for a very serious change. You go back to the heyday of publishing which was maybe 20, 25 years ago, when you had three channels on TV, four if you count PBS; you had no Internet, you had no videogames. All of these new entertainment options are being put in front of the customer. That’s why readership could be down: there’s just better options available for some people. So publishing needs to learn how to compete with that…. well, maybe not compete with it, but somehow merge with it and embrace it.

So a lot of what’s coming is the kind of things like I and the other podcast novelists are doing, or the people over at Podiobooks.com are doing, which is just give it away. Give the audience a chance to get to know you as a content creator, and as a performer, and know whether they like your stories. Then, once the audience develops that relationship and that affinity for you, then they’ll go out and buy your books, knowing that it’s going to be money well spent. They know what they’re going to get. So you’re allowing people to try it before you buy it.

And the other thing that’s really going to come into play heavily is story extensions and expansions. You’ve got your core story, which will be in the hardcover book. You’ll probably be having to give that away as a podcast, just to compete. But then there’s a lot of other things you can do. You can do the “back story” of your characters. You can do all kinds of background information. You can combine the extra podcast content with wiki content, with links to websites. The book sort of becomes the “gem in the tiara of entertainment,” if you will, instead of just the whole crown all by itself.

Defining Success: “You don’t even need a print book at all”

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: That was kind of going to be my next question. Do you think that publication of an actual paper book is the be-all, end-all piece, or could you define fiction podcasting success without an actual printed book?

Scott Sigler: Yes, you can definitely be successful at it without a printed book.

Here’s an example: Right now I’m hosted on PodShow, and PodShow is generating some advertising revenue for me. So for 2007, I made more in advertising revenue. And I think it’s somewhere like 90% of the advances that are paid to authors, those authors usually never earn out the advance. You’ve got to keep in mind that the vast majority of books published don’t sell for crap. So somebody might get a $5000 advance, which is great. But that’s the only money they’re going to see from the book for five or six years, until the publisher makes that back.

So right off the bat, the advertising revenue that PodShow is bringing me is more financially lucrative than a print deal for 90% of the people writing a book. That’s the hard reality of what’s going on. So the potential to make it the focal point– and if you measure your success in dollars, then yes, definitely there.

And a lot of people who don’t have the book deal aren’t necessarily pursuing it, either, because their enjoyment is creating the book and interacting with the audience. And as podcasting becomes more of a supporting mechanism for videogames, for movies, for TV shows, when you’re doing original stories in there, then yes, that can be the whole thing. You don’t even need a print book at all.

But I don’t really see it as one or the other. I see writers going forward with the idea that it’s the author’s job to put the content out in as many forms as possible– print book, e-book, podcast, even putting the text on the blog, into email, whatever the customer wants– then let the customer come find you and get it that way.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So do you think your experience, which really by all accounts is extraordinary, is that something that you think others can repeat?

Scott Sigler: Oh yes, I think I’m just the tip of the iceberg. The success I’ve had has been a combination of right place, right time, a combination of really strong storytelling and being a good writer, and having a marketing background.

A lot of what I’ve done has just been instinctively knowing how to capitalize on things to get more ears listening to my podcast, knowing that it’s a numbers game. The more people I get to come listen, who listen for free, a certain percentage of them I’m going to lock in as fans; so it’s just a matter of getting it out in front of as many people as possible.

But now we’re starting to institutionalize the processes a little bit. When I started out, there was no Podiobooks.com. Now, somebody can put their book on Podiobooks.com, and potentially have 40,000 listeners the next day. So it’s a whole different ballgame that’s going on. So, absolutely, other people are going to be able to repeat the success I’ve had.

I think the next “big thing” to come out of podcasting will probably be some 18 or 19-year-old author, because they will have grown up with social media. They’re so intuitively connected to social media, that when the audience, who’s primarily of that age group, finds out that one of their own is doing something like this, I think that person is going to have huge success.

So I’ll probably be– I’ll be dwarfed in a couple of years, I’m guessing, but for right now– I’m the fair-haired child now but it won’t last, somebody else will do it.

Elisabeth: And then you’ll be the venerated father of the medium.

Scott Sigler: Yes!

Encouragement and Advice For Writers and Podcasters

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: So what’s your routine for writing? Do you make yourself sit down every day in the midst of book tours? How do you knock out a book in just four months?

Scott Sigler: I don’t know yet because I’ve never done it. It usually takes me two years to write a book. So I’m a bit under the gun now. My wife and I have, we’ve gotten together and worked out a schedule, a plan. I’ll be writing five or six hours a day, every day, for the next 2 months to get through the first draft. And hopefully that’ll go okay. It remains to be seen. And yes, but it’s just right now it’s a combination of factory line, assembly line, this has to get done, and trying to combine that with making cool stuff that my fans, some expected and some things they won’t expect so they’re surprised.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: What would advice or encouragement would you give to aspiring writers and podcasters?

Scott Sigler: Well, for writers the main thing is the story is the boss, and [your] two bosses are the story and the fan base. So lose your ego and make sure you’ve rewritten the book a few times. There’s a few people who are podcasting first draft stuff. For some formats that works out okay, but I think for most people, you’ve got to make sure the book is good.

I get a lot of emails from people asking, like, “I’m halfway through my book, should I start podcasting?” No, finish your book, revise your book, get it edited. Come to the market with the best product that you can bring to bear. And then when you do publish it, make sure you consistently put the whole book out. Work with the people at Podiobooks.com. They have a full FAQ on what you need to do to put out a fiction novel. They’re awesome, they’ll take care of everything you need, and that’s all totally free.

And in general for podcasting, oddly enough, [my advice is] consistency. The more frequent– if you podcast every week, then at the end of three years, if you’ve done it every week, you’re going to have a sizable audience. The people who lose audience podcast once, skip a month, come back, podcast two more times.

The audience depends on your consistency, just like they watch their weekly shows on TV or they get their daily newspaper. The quality of content is entirely subjective. There are shows I listen to that I think are just horrible, but that have huge audiences. There are shows I listen to that are phenomenal, and no one’s listening to them. It’s all up to the marketplace. Just put out what you want to put out and just do it consistently.

Siglermania, Big Boy Numbers, and Some Final Words

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: I want to hear a rundown of all the stuff that’s going on for you now and all the stuff that’s coming up next. If you look at ScottSigler.com, there are several different serialized books that you’re juggling episodes of. There’s the new hardcover book– and a book tour. You’ve got a blog on AMC writing about scary movies.

So run down the brag list of what you have going on right now.

Scott Sigler: Well the primary thing is Infected coming out in hardcover as a featured title. So that came out April 1st.

We’re also giving Infected away as a free podcast, the whole thing, unabridged, at ScottSigler.com. And we’re five episodes in [in mid-April 2008] and that’ll continue for about another two or three months, depending on how long it lasts.

We just did a book tour to support Infected, which took me to Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and then finishing up in Houston. And Houston, by the way, was a location selected, voted on, by the fans at ScottSigler.com, and we had 75 people there.

Elisabeth: And you had a guy that came all the way from Minnesota to Texas.

Scott Sigler: He flew in, he flew in from Minnesota.

Elisabeth: Which is, it’s a hell of a long trip for a book-signing.

Scott Sigler: Yes, it was pretty crazy. He flew in, and a lot of people drove four and five hours to come to that Houston thing, which was very humbling. So the book tour was a huge thing. We averaged 50 people a bookstore.

We sold an average of 45 books which, from what my publisher tells me, is “big boy numbers,” that’s really strong. For even an established author that’s really strong. For somebody new like me it’s ridiculous. And that’s from the involvement and support from all from the community.

So we’re finished up with that now and then we’re also in the middle of a book called Nocturnal, which is the next book that I’ll have out with Crown on April 1st, 2010. So giving that away as a podcast.

We’re blogging at AMCTV.com. There’s a couple of different blogs going on at ScottSigler.com, including Sigler Science, which is wherever anything pops up that even remotely reflects anything I’ve written about, I take full responsibility for it. I claim everyone in science is ripping me off and I put it on the blog. So that’s a lot of fun. There’s all those things, and then potentially working on a videogame deal to write for somebody else’s videogame, hopefully in the next year. We’ll see how that turns out soon.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: And isn’t there also a movie?

Scott Sigler: Oh, yeah, and Infected has also been optioned by Rogue Pictures, who are the makers of Shaun of the Dead and Doomsday, and they’re actively trying to get that turned into a movie right now. So that’s about a 50/50 shot, which is really strong. When your book is optioned for a movie, to have a 50/50 shot is about as good as it gets. So there’s all that.

And then right now, I have four months to write the sequel to Infected, on top of doing all that other stuff. And the sequel is called Contagious.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Any other parting words that I need to tack in here?

Scott Sigler: Just that Infected is available in hardcover. It’s in pretty much every bookstore in America now, and in the U.K.; including England, Australia, New Zealand. It’s coming out in Russia, Bulgaria and Japan and Denmark by the end of the year.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Shall we lobby Crown to send you on a book tour in Europe and Australia?

Scott Sigler: Yes, that’s what I’m working on right now, is trying to figure out how to [convince] my publisher to send me to Europe to support the book.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Thank you very much, Scott.

Scott Sigler: Thank you.

Mainstream media is getting savvy to the way podcasts are being effectively used to promote authors and their work.

A Washington Post article looks at how Scott Sigler, J.C. Hutchins and Cory Doctorow are using podcasting an Internet media to get noticed:

Horror writer Scott Sigler, one of the pioneers in this area, began regularly posting readings of his first book in March 2005. “EarthCore,” broken up into 45-minute chunks that he posted on a weekly basis, won an audience of 10,000 listeners. His second book, “Ancestor,” did even better, scoring 30,000 subscribers. A small Canadian publisher signed on to release his third book in a small paperback run.

This month, Sigler’s fourth book debuted in a hardcover release for the first time, from Crown Publishing Group, an imprint of Random House. Crown has printed an initial run of 100,000 copies of “Infected,” Sigler’s bloody tale about a parasite that turns its human hosts violently insane. That’s a high figure for the book industry, where mostly unknown authors usually get an initial print run of only a few thousand.

Sigler’s latest novel is racing up the best-seller list at Amazon.

“It proves that there are smarter ways to getting published than just sending a manuscript over the transom to a publisher,” said Cory Doctorow, a sci-fi author who is also well known as an editor of the popular blog BoingBoing.

As people’s attention moves away from broadcast media to on-demand media, authors and publishers will have to follow.

The SFGate has a profile of podcasting novelist Scott Sigler that looks at how he’s used free podcasts to promoting his writing career:

Before Sigler revealed podcasting as a new frontier for book promotion, the San Francisco author was rebuffed hundreds of times by major publishers. Sigler’s science fiction-horror thrillers attracted little attention.

That changed in 2005, when he offered his first novel, “Earthcore,” as a free, downloadable 22-episode podcast on iTunes and his own Web site, www.scottsigler.com. A few hundred early listeners soon swelled to 5,000. By the time he posted “Ancestor” and “The Rookie,” his second and third books, which he also narrated, he had 30,000 digital disciples.

Sigler refers to these loyal listeners as junkies because they keep coming back for more. It was the junkies who helped him land a deal with Dragon Moon Press, a small Canadian fantasy and science fiction publisher that liked the idea of a newbie author with a sizable following. It was the junkies who helped Sigler’s “Ancestor” climb to No. 7 in overall sales on Amazon.com, which played a role in landing him a deal with the Crown Publishing Group.

On Tuesday, Sigler’s latest book, “Infected,” a tale of biological possession, was released by Crown. A free digital manuscript of the book was downloaded 45,000 times in just 100 hours since the Crown book was released, according to the publisher. And while Sigler still offers his novels as free podcasts, he is confident that the junkies will shell out $24.95 for a fix they might already have tried.

“How do I get them to buy a book they may have already listened to?” Sigler said. “I ask them to.”

Scott’s publisher at Crown, Tina Constable, suggests that podcasting and new media are essential tools for publishers.

“The wave of the future is how we harness the Internet to find these new readers, and we are devoting an enormous amount of energy and resources into this effort. The traditional model for publishing our books is quickly becoming obsolete and we recognize that creative Internet strategies are necessary if we want to remain competitive.”

Pioneering podcast novelist Scott Sigler saw “a dream come true” yesterday, April Fool’s Day, with Random House’s publication of a hardcover version of his book, Infected.

Sigler, one of the (the very?) first writers to offer their fiction in podcast format, began back in 2005 with his science-fiction/horror book Earthcore. With a bevy of devoted fans (“junkies” , subsequent books have each boasted tens of thousands of subscribers. Sigler cultivates a strong rapport with his reader/listeners. In a recent writing project, fans willingly submitted their names to appear as minor characters, to be killed off in the course of the story.

Infected was offered as an audio podcast and an .mp3 before its hardcover publication. In a note last week to subscribers, friends, and colleagues, Sigler said, “This novel is a lifelong goal of mine.” He describes Infected as “hard-science/horror, a thriller that’s a cross between Stephen King and Michael Crichton.”

Sigler is already on a multi-city bricks-and-mortar bookstore tour to promote the book (west coast this week, east coast next), and was excited to be interviewed over the weekend on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition.

But wait, there’s more: “I’m going for all the marbles right out of the gate, trying to hit the New York Times Bestseller list. INFECTED has already been optioned for a movie by Rogue Pictures (the makers of SHAWN OF THE DEAD). If the book hits the Times list, it might be on the big screen as early as Winter 2009.”

Pioneering sci-fi podcaster Scott Sigler, creator of the EarthCore and Ancestor podcast novels, wants to kill you.

He’s working on his latest novel/podcast, Nocturnal, and he needs some people to kill off. Here are the gory details:

“I’m running a contest where your name can be the name of a victim in NOCTURNAL. All you need to do is go to the brand-new scottsigler.com and register a full profile,” explains Sigler. “Only complete profiles are eligible to get ‘dat ass killed and be immortalized in the pages of NOCTURNAL when it’s printed in 2010. “

You can find out more in with the promo, below, or at the Scott Sigler site.

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