• Emeril cooking up 10 more books
  Of particular interest is the fact that this deal falls under the new HarperStudio banner, meaning, yes, modest advance and higher royalties. Emeril might have to work harder to promote his books, but he stands to do fairly well, financially.
• Romancing the Phone
  We like the new free book promotion Harlequin is running to introduce ebooks to iPhone users, but, like Barbara Vey, we were underwhelmed by some of the challenges posed by the Fictionwise app. Yes, it will get better.
• Print Run Continues to Rise for ?Hockey Mom?
  Of particular interest to us is the use of Lightning Source as the printer of first resort.
• Beaufort Said to be U.S. Publisher for ?Jewel of Medina?
  Beaufort, hoping to once again capitalize on the loss of others, takes on this year’s controversial novel (or, rather, appears to be doing so).

When I started working in the Booksquare mail room, I mistakenly assumed it was going to be some kind of a dream job. Blogger’s hours, free books, and plenty of wine. What could possibly be better?

Little did I realize the Booksquare wine cellar is NOT for Booksquare employees. Sure, we’re welcome to bring our own from home, but the BS corkage fee makes it cost prohibitive.

And now that I’ve been here a while, I realize that blogger’s hours aren’t so great. Especially when you’re not the blogger.

But there are always those free books. Yep, plenty of free books.

Let me tell you about the free books.

I’m drowning in them. Literally. The Booksquare mail room is inexplicably tiny. And we get a LOT of books. Some of which I would never read in a million years. Sad but true, most of these books aren’t fit for lunch in the servants quarters.

Why are you sending these books to us? What on earth makes you think we will read them, let alone review them?

I thought to ask one day how this all got started. It’s quite an interesting story, actually. Apparently we expressed interest in one or two books over the years. That’s all it takes to get yourself labeled as a “book lover” and once that’s happened they put your name and address into some sort of database.

Eventually mailing labels are printed. And reprinted. And reprinted again.

You people are printing a lot of mailing labels! And stuffing a lot of boxes. Well, they aren’t really boxes. Most of them are the most annoying corrugated cardboard, sealed tightly with some sort of super-glue that makes them nearly impossible to open. I can’t tell you how many nails I’ve broken on your damn book packaging.

How much do you people spend on postage? Seriously?? Not to mention printing. And labor. Someone has to put all this stuff together.

Will someone please assure me that child slave labor is not involved?!

Some of you — mostly thoughtful authors — think to ask before sending your books. That’s nice, but in many cases equally annoying. In addition to handling the Booksquare snail mail, I’m also responsible for fielding all of the unsolicited email inquiries we receive. You wouldn’t believe some of the queries we get.

Like this one, received just yesterday (altered ever so slightly to protect the identity of the author).

Dear Sir,

As a book lover I know that you will want to read and review my new book. It’s a civil war adventure about a time-traveling bishop and the women who love him.

The early reviews have been very flattering. As one critic noted “the story moves along surprisingly briskly for a 1,239 page novel.”

I am currently waiting for a shipment of books to arrive from the printer. I will send you a copy as soon as it is ready. Please reply with your mailing address.

Also, please be kind enough to confirm by email after you have received my book.

Sincerely,
[Name withheld to protect clueless but well meaning author]

Clearly [Name Withheld] didn’t bother to read Booksquare before sending this very personal message. Unfortunately we are simply not prepared to send out automated rejection letters. And if we were, it would only depress you.

Believe me when I say that I understand your enthusiasm for book blogs, what with the death of newspaper book reviews and all, but you’ve got to understand how this whole blog thing works. You can’t just go mass mailing every “litblog” in the world willy nilly. In the mail room that’s what we call SPAM.

But enough of my complaining. I do want to see you people succeed (why, I am not entirely sure). So, here are a few helpful tips from the Booksquare mail room intended to provide you with better book coverage, and me with more free time. Time that I can use to read books that I actually want to read.

1) Stop sending physical books. What, are all of you made of money? We have this thing called the Internet. Use it. Trust me, your reviewers know all about the ‘net, as they call it. Find out what formats each reviewer prefers and arrange for digital transfer (if you don’t know what that means, please find someone who does and explain your situation).

For you authors out there, this should be easy. I mean, after all, you wrote the book. I assume you can make a PDF file. Think of the money you’ll save on postage, printing, and packaging.

2) Target your pitch. Send your book to the right publications. And by right publications I mean, a) blogs and websites that actually review books, and b) blogs and websites that actually review the type of book you’ve written and/or published. Booksquare is simply not interested in time-traveling bishops.

3) Think beyond the review. There’s more to promoting your book online than just getting reviews. For example, you may have noticed that authors frequently guest post right here on Booksquare. It’s easy for authors because, well, they’re writers. It’s good for the BS Lady because she’s intrinsically lazy. That’s what we in the mail room call a win-win situation.

4) Get some help. If you are at all baffled by any of the other things you can do to promote your book online (besides mailing physical copies to every blogger and his brother) you might want to get yourself a little education.

I could go on, but saving the publishing industry is not part of my job description. Besides, it’s closing time and I’m late for happy hour.

[BS: I'd like to thank Bernadette for feeling so comfortable in her job that she's able to speak her mind so openly. She has a few good points. Especially the part about the wine -- she's welcome to hit the $2.00 jug wine whenever she wants. She's also right about the laziness. Think beyond the review. Most especially, she's right about the physical versus virtual books. The mail room is not nearly as spacious as the above rant indicates. The Kindle, however, is huge and ready for more books.]

Case in point: When I was getting my MFA, a classmate of mine won the Associated Writers Program contest for his collection of stories, and it got published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The person who was the contest runner-up, and who therefore didn’t have his collection published, was a young writer named Tom Perrotta. Now, if Tom Perrotta had won that contest, would you know who he was today? Possibly not. The writer who did win that contest, though he subsequently published a novel with a trade press, you likely haven’t heard of. Or, if you have, it’s because he’s made a name for himself in the blog world and has gotten a book contract as a result of that. In other words, to the extent that he has succeeded (and he’s a good writer), he has done so despite his having had his story collection published, not because of it.

Back to Matrimony. With a first novel that had weak sales as her ammunition, my agent, who’s both respected and powerful, had trouble selling Matrimony (In the case of Swimming Across the Hudson, she sold it in less than a week, based on the first fifty pages), and were it not for the fact that someone very high up at the house she eventually sold it to loved the book, it might not have sold at all.

In the end, I’m one of the lucky ones. Matrimony was published by Pantheon, a terrific publishing house, and I had the considerable support of a great editor, publisher, publicist, and sales force. The house spent money on coop and advertising and sent me on a long book tour. The reviews were well-timed and very positive. Within ten days of publication, Janet Maslin reviewed Matrimony very favorably in the daily New York Times. Two weeks after that, Jennifer Egan did the same in the NYTBR. At the end of the year, Matrimony was named a New York Times Notable Book.

All these things had a marked impact on sales (I know: I follow the numbers very carefully), as did the fact that I spent much of the past year and half putting the writing of my next novel on hold so that I could help publicize Matrimony. You don’t go visiting sixty book clubs for the mere fun of it. It takes you away from your family and friends, and from your next novel. And, in my case, book groups weren’t even the half of it. I lived on the Internet, guest blogging, getting my book out to bloggers big and small—all, it’s been clear, to Matrimony’s benefit.

Matrimony, let me be clear, is not a sexy book. It’s about the fifteen-year history of a marriage, and it’s character-driven and quiet. There are no pyrotechnics in the novel. It’s a book that easily could have gone nowhere without a lot of hard work on the part of Pantheon (and now Vintage,) and some additional leg work from me. In the end, Matrimony sold a good deal more than five thousand hardback copies and Vintage has high hopes for the paperback. And yet it didn’t sell astronomically. It did more than respectably, but if my publishers were relying on me to pay the bills, they’d be in trouble. I say all this because, if anything, the relative success of Matrimony is a testament to how tough the book business is. It took everything—a publisher that really got behind the book, great reviews, a really good cover, an author willing to drop everything else to help with promotion—in order to get the book to do even this well.

Which brings me back to my original concern about our feast-or-famine book culture—and, ever so indirectly and in the name of making this conversation at Booksquare an ongoing discussion, to the question of the demise of the LATBR. I have read with interest both what Steve Wasserman and what Kassia have written on the subject. I know much less than either of them do about the book review section. I live on the East Coast, and I never read the LATBR regularly. I wrote one review for Steve Wasserman and one for David Ulin, and both my novels were reviewed in the book review’s pages. I agree with Kassia that there’s good and bad criticism in print just as there’s good and bad criticism on the web. And it may very well be that the LATBR had it coming to them. And newspapers, it is true, are a business in trouble, and a sense of entitlement isn’t going get a book review section to come back.

All that said, I think there’s something that a book review section at a major newspaper offers that may be harder to find on the web. That’s the all-important inadvertent reader. Someone, that is, who would never buy the L.A. Times for the book review section but who nonetheless is stuck with it when the paper arrives. He ends up glancing at it and discovering a book he hadn’t known about. And seeing it next time he’s at the bookstore. And maybe buying a copy. What I’ve been trying to argue in this post is that it’s the inadvertent reader and the inadvertent book buyer who’s crucial, particularly for literary fiction, where the number of potential readers is so small and needs desperately to be expanded. This is why coop is crucial, why independent bookstores are crucial, why book review sections are crucial. They’re all avenues for making us aware of books we otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.

Now, the web can do this too, certainly, and a lot of the literary blogs have done a great deal to call attention to books that otherwise wouldn’t be known. But I think inadvertence occurs much less frequently on the web. Yes, a person who loves literary fiction might learn about a book on The Elegant Variation that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, and that’s no small thing. But what about the person who doesn’t love literary fiction—or, more to the point, doesn’t realize that she in fact would love literary fiction if only it were placed in front of her? If you’re reading The Elegant Variation, you’re already part of the choir. But the choir is going to have to get a lot bigger if writers of literary fiction are going to make a go of it.

We all need inadvertent readers. In the same way that Michael Chabon developed a strong gay readership when, as a result of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, people mistakenly thought he was gay, I’ve gotten some inadvertent readers based on the title of my novel. Someone sees a novel called Matrimony and they might think they’ll be reading Jodi Picoult. Then they read Matrimony and discover it’s the farthest thing in the world from Jodi Picoult. In certain cases they’re angry—they feel duped—but in other cases—this is what a writer hopes for—they discover that there’s more to life than Jodi Picoult. That is one of the things I’ve been doing in visiting book groups: expanding my reader base and, in the process, trying to educate people who might otherwise be reluctant to leave their comfort zone about the pleasures of literary fiction.

In any case, it’s not an either/or proposition, and in this publishing climate, the loss of every book review section, every independent bookstore, every book blog cuts deep. The publishing world knows how important the New York Times Book Review is, which is why publishers continue to advertise there even when it’s not seen as cost-effective. The fact is, it is cost effective, certainly in the long run, because the loss of the NYTBR would be a huge, almost unfathomable blow.

I believe individual readers should have the same attitude toward writers that the big publishing houses have toward the NYTBR. Protect what you value. Buy books. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “I loved your book so much I lent it to five friends.” This is flattering, but it doesn’t help me with Bookscan. Every time a used copy of Matrimony gets sold on Amazon, that’s another sale that doesn’t get counted. People who are committed to books need to support writers because if they don’t there won’t be any of us left.

OK, at the risk of having ended on a preachy note, I want to thank Kassia again for having me as a guest blogger, and having allowed me to be so long-winded!

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

Thank you to Joshua Henkin for this great two-part look at book clubs, sales, and the industry.

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Kassia, for lending me your bully pulpit. I’m here to offer a novelist’s perspective on the publishing industry on the day (at least the day that I’m composing this) that Oscar Villalon seems to be out at the San Francisco Chronicle book review, a section that may soon suffer the same fate as the LATBR.

My novel Matrimony has just come out in paperback, so I’m starting up the second round of book touring and publicity. In that connection, I was recently asked the following question by an interviewer: “What do you believe is the basis for this country’s love for literature and books?” Were we living on the same planet, I wondered, much less in the same country? In fairness, the question was about book groups, and according to a report of the Independent Book Publishing Association, over five million adults belong to a book group.

I don’t know whether those numbers are accurate, but there’s no doubt that the proliferation of book groups has been a boon to publishing. Certainly Oprah has helped keep the industry afloat, and the myriad book groups across the country have risen in no small part thanks to Oprah. I talk about book groups from personal experience. Since Matrimony was published last October, I have participated in close to sixty book group discussions of Matrimony in person, by phone, and online, and I expect to do many more now that the paperback has been released. I have never been a member of a book group (as a novelist and a professor of fiction-writing, my life is a book group), but I can safely say that I now have had more personal experience with book groups than most people on this earth.

I have written elsewhere about my experience visiting book groups, but in short, though I approached the endeavor with a good deal of wariness (I started out thinking of book groups as a kind of Ladies who Lunch and I expected my own experience to be If it’s Tuesday it Must be Darien), I have been pleasantly surprised. Not every book group member is a sophisticated reader (not every MFA student is a sophisticated reader, either, nor is every book critic), but quite a few are, and they are passionate about what they read. More important, book groups are creating new readers. People usually join a book group for social reasons, but reading a book is part of the deal, and so a reader is created out of someone who wasn’t one before.

But the news is not all good. I was struck by the fact that most book groups are reading the same twelve books. Water for Elephants, Eat, Pray, Love, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Kite Runner. I’m not casting aspersions at these books, a number of which I haven’t even read. But even if you love these books, they certainly aren’t the only good books out there.

In any case, what interests me more than the popularity of these books is the manner in which they get selected, because the process says a great deal not just about book groups but about American book-buying in general. I’ve seen it so many times it has become a ritual. 9:30 comes, sometimes 10:00, even 10:30. The book group members are getting tired. Husbands are waiting at home (yes, it’s true: book groups are populated almost entirely by women), and everyone needs to wake up early in the morning. When’s the next meeting, and what book are we going to discuss? People have to choose quickly before everyone disperses. Does anybody have an idea?

Someone says, “How about The Memory Keeper’s Daughter?”

Most of the people in the group have heard of it. One person knows someone who loved it; another person knows someone who hated it. But it’s a known entity. Does anyone have any other ideas? People are unsure, silent. Someone glances at her watch.

“O.K., then: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter it is.”

I’m not saying this is how it always happens. But you’d be surprised how often it does. If people haven’t heard of the book they don’t want to read it, so name-recognition rules. Oprah chose it, so we’ll choose it. It’s not even as thought-out as that. In a world with too many choices, people choose what’s familiar. It’s as true of books as of anything else.

This is why, though writers hate negative reviews, a negative review is much better than no review at all. The old adage is true: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Two weeks after the review has come out, no one remembers what the review said, but when a person comes across the book at the bookstore, he says to himself, I know I’ve heard of this somewhere, and the writer just might have himself a sale.

But “comes across the book at the bookstore” is key. There are too many books competing for too little space. As readers of this blog no doubt know but startlingly few others do (I discovered this first-hand from talking to book groups), the space in the window and on the front table at Barnes and Noble and Borders is bought by the publisher. It’s called coop, and because books tend to be impulse buys, if you don’t have coop for your book, you’re going nowhere. The reason that the average hardback book has a shelf life of six to eight weeks isn’t that people have short attention spans. It’s that the book quickly gets restocked to the back of the store, and, shortly thereafter, it’s returned to the publisher. Once your book is out of sight, you’re only going to sell copies to people who walk into the store intent on buying it.

It’s for this reason that if a writer were given a heap of money and told she could spend it however she wanted to market her book, I’d recommend that she spend part of it focus-grouping different covers (I’m astonished that publishers don’t focus-group their covers; the cover is the single most important thing in getting someone to buy a book, and you have only a nanosecond to attract a reader’s attention), and I’d have her spend the rest on coop. (Remember, this is a hypothetical. With rare exceptions, authors have little to no say over their covers, and coop is prohibitively expensive. Even if the author could afford to pay for it, he wouldn’t be allowed to because publishing houses have a limited number of slots and are therefore forced to choose which of their books get coop.)

In any case, the placement of your book in the bookstore is probably the single most important determinant of its sales, as Borders recently discovered when, as an experiment in some stores, it started stocking fewer books but placing more of them face-out. The results were startling (though they shouldn’t have been): Borders sold many more books. In fact, as I’m writing this post, I just clicked onto the following from Reuters: “The Borders Group, the bookseller, posted a lower-than-expected quarterly loss, helped by TIGHTER INVENTORY and lower costs.” [emphasis added].

There you have it. The way bookstores make money is by stocking fewer books. This, of course, is bad news for writers, especially for those writers who haven’t yet established themselves. In Los Angeles, the loss of Dutton’s is reflective of what’s going on everywhere—independent bookstores are hemorrhaging nationwide. This is a huge problem because independent bookstores were an important stopgap against the problem I’m talking about. At a place like Dutton’s, what’s at the front of the store is not as crucial as it is at the chains, because you have booksellers who know books and can recommend something to a customer. What’s more, these booksellers help determine what gets placed at the front of the store.

In the same way that we buy coffee from fewer and fewer stores, we buy books from fewer and fewer booksellers. Our choices get constricted, our taste gets streamlined, so when a book group decides what to pick next, its members choose one of the ten or so books that come to their minds, which are the same ten or so books that come to everyone’s mind, whether they’re in Hoboken or Fayetteville or Evanston or Anchorage. As with the economy at large, the book industry is feast-or-famine. Nowhere was this made more clear to me than in Rachel Donadio’s endpaper “Promotional Intelligence” in the New York Times Book Review a couple of years ago. Donadio noted that in 2005 “almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the 20 best-selling books.” That’s an astonishing and disheartening statistic.

Take my own case. When Matrimony came out last October, I was essentially an unknown writer. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had come out ten years earlier and did well critically but sold only about five thousand copies in hardback. My graduate students think that selling a first novel is hard, but selling a second novel is even harder, unless you’re one of the handful of writers whose first book takes off. I have quite a few friends who have written really good second novels that they can’t sell because their first novels sold poorly. Prior to Nielsen Bookscan, agents could fudge their writers’ numbers. Now those numbers are incontrovertible, spat back from a computer.

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

I was relieved to learn I wasn’t crazy, that the unorthodox cover worked, but once that relief wore off, I started to realize that far more reader interactions like that are necessary, that the conversation about books that goes on in our culture now, gorgeously exemplified by Jeff’s house here, needs also to be going on much, much more in the whole apparatus that surrounds the words, houses the words, frames the words, makes it more or less likely you’ll read the words. I’m sure most folks don’t want to see inside the sausage factory, but I’m betting there are far far more than we’re currently admitting to the sausage factory, and if we expect y’all to eat our damn sausages, we’re going to have to spend more time with you guys figuring out how best to make them.

• “The Customer Is Always Wrong” - Richard Nash (blogging at Jeff VanderMeer’s place)

It’s insanity to suggest someone should carve these rights in stone now.

It is not how the artist creates the work that defines the experience: it is how the viewer/reader/listener/casual observer interacts with it that matters. Every time you reread a book, aren’t you having a different experience? Is every word, every phrase, every insight exactly the same the second, third, eighth time? Why authors want to define our experience is beyond me — authors should want that experience to be as rich and varied as possible. Once the book is published, it is no longer the author’s to shape.

Terry Goodkind has recently elected to have his works published in electronic format. While one source says he’s held back those rights, just as JK Rowling did, because of his insistence of maintaining the integrity of form and format, the announcement in Publisher’s Weekly puts a more financial spin on the deal:

When asked why Goodkind opted to be published in e-book by an independent, in Rosetta, Goodkind’s agent, Russell Galen, said Rosetta “offered us much better terms.” [Arthur] Klebanoff [CEO of RosettaBooks], who negotiated the Goodkind deal with Galen, added that he thinks the size of a publisher is also less important in e-book publishing. “Obviously Random House has a compelling argument when it comes to what it can do [in publishing] a phsycial book,” he told PW. “But in e-book [publishing] the people selling the books are Kindle, Sony Reader and various other e-tailers. So, whether the title is fed by Rosetta or Random House makes no difference.”

The second part of that paragraph is fascinating and very much the topic of today’s thoughts. Why should an author give over his or her epublishing rights to a traditional print house? What advantage comes from this sort of arrangement? I am not asking a rhetorical question. In a new distribution landscape, what advantage does a traditional, print-based publisher offer?

First, let us begin with a truth: because Goodkind held back his rights for so long, he created an underground market for his works. Keeping these rights close doesn’t keep ebooks from being created and distributed. Witness the Google results for Terry Goodkind ebook. One surefire way to combat the pirates is to make legal editions easily available at a reasonable price through legitimate retailers…and then do everything in your power to make sure those search results appear first, before the pirates. People are lazy, don’t make pirating a more attractive option than buying legal.

That ought to be the first law of digital media: Make legal products easier and more cost effective than pirated products.

As some publishers tell me, a major challenge to their digital migration is getting authors and agents on board with this new distribution channel (and that’s all it is, a new distribution channel). I can see why, but look at the example above for the obvious drawback in holding back these rights. The reason Goodkind’s agent stated for choosing Rosetta Stone over Random House: it’s the money, stupid. And that’s something publishers, traditional publishers, have to face.

The competition is not located in a shiny Manhattan office building. Publishers are no longer competing just with each other, announcing pre-empts and huge advances. As the market moves online, the money has to change. Goodkind and authors like him have the power to do it — if and when Rowling enters into the ebook market, if her agent is half as good as reputed, you don’t think she’s going to settle for relatively small royalties, do you?

As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as “out-of-print”, savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I’m a bit surprised this isn’t happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to renegotiate terms, especially as the digital market grows and evolves. While publishers love the idea of locking someone into 2008 rules, it’s a safe bet to say that this landscape will be vastly different in ten years.

It’s insanity to suggest someone should carve these rights in stone now, when the future’s so bright, blah, blah, blah.

Of course, digital rights and how they’re compensated are just a small part of the overall challenge. That’s another topic for another today. Yeah, just call me your little ray of sunshine.

On paper, this probably seemed brilliant. Amazon has great distribution. By working with BookSurge, a division of Amazon, print runs could be managed. The problem, of course, is obvious: not every book buyer shops at Amazon (in fact, most don’t, odd as it seems). The repercussions were great: Barnes & Noble cancelled their order (Borders stayed in the game, for what it’s worth). If you’re a small press hoping to make a decent profit, losing these sales is pretty significant.

Significant = painful.

Amazon wants to rule the world. They haven’t hidden that goal. Barnes & Noble, however, continues to own the face-to-face market. Chelsea Green, whose ability to find traction in the distribution chain is very much dependent on the kindness of strangers (including smaller bookstores, who are reportedly not happy campers), can’t afford to play favorites. One hopes, for the sake of their bottom line, that Amazon offered incredible financial incentive to the publisher.

Remember: most readers don’t give a flying fig about the delicate behind-the-scenes deals. They hear about a book, they want the book. If the book isn’t available at the retailer of choice for that consumer, it will take a powerful amount of motivation to force that person to seek out other retailers. Is this “exclusive” window worth taking that kind of risk?

Perhaps only those political books that are fabricated out of holey cloth are destined to top the bestseller lists (when, pray tell, are we going to see serious analysis of those sales figures?) and this book will garner respectable but not blockbuster interest. It’s near-impossible to predict the future*, but if there’s one truth about this new world we occupy, it is this: your fifteen minutes is much shorter than it used to be. You don’t mess around with initial distribution.

Granting an exclusive window to Amazon has certainly garnered headlines for Chelsea Green and its book Obama’s Challenge. But those headlines are, sigh, running in the industry press, not permeating the mainstream consciousness. This book has a limited shelf life (unless I’m wrong and it turns out to be one of the seminal texts on Barack Obama), and Chelsea Green made the mistake of choosing old school tactics over smart distribution.

After all, we’re living in a “give to us now, how we want it, when we want it, where we want it” world.

* - Big fat lie — we do it all the time here at BS.

It might seem understandable if the publishing industry comes to view digital books as a threat, since their business is currently based on the concept of one copy, one sale — a business model that will be obsolete once books go digital. But if we play our cards right, and can convince book sellers and publishers to embrace this new technology, we could end up living in a world where it’s actually easier for writers to get paid, and where any book can be accessed instantly from any place on the planet — universal access to knowledge. Hasn’t that been the aim of literate people since the invention of the printing press?

• What If the Kindle Succeeds?

Let me tell you: awareness of the Kindle, particularly, is great, and people show great interest in the concept when they see an ereader in the wild. I’ve been gone more than I’ve been home for the past few weeks, and I’m getting lots of curious questions. Number one, so far, is “can you make the type bigger?” I can, I say, I can.

Then there’s last week. Four women, four Kindles. I kid you not. Tell me, what’s the percentage of Kindle ownership in your peer group? I should note, four women from different parts of the country (at least one state in the middle) with different kinds of jobs. The ebook revolution is a slow but steady build, not a crazy now-you-don’t-see-it-now-you-do sort of thing. This is definitely a revolution that will not be televised.

Another conversation was about how ebooks are great, the Kindle is awesome, yet, damn, those prices. This one, started by a reader who gets her fair share of books free, yet would be buying even more if the prices weren’t so darn, well, insane. This is not an uncommon conversation. I know, I know, you think the prices are just fine, but I contend you’re living in the publishing bubble.

This coincides with an email discussion about the price of ebooks. Nobody knows the optimal price, but then I wonder how much of the conversation is sheer academics versus real life experience. I loaded up the Kindle before my journey, and, as I browsed for a good variety of titles, found myself price shopping (for books! I know.). I mean, even I look at the relative value of bits and bytes versus a product I can’t, for lack of a better term, recycle. This is a conversation that needs to be had on a serious level, involving real readers. Anyone ever ask us about ebook prices?

Then there’s the rather amusing piece from Persona Non Data about “Kindle Sex: Publishing Strategy” (not amusing as in the author is naive, amusing as in the topic is uncomfortable for some). Turns out there aren’t good numbers from Amazon about erotica sales for the Kindle. You have to love that this information is so very tough to find; heck, you can’t even get to erotica as a category when you browse using the Kindle. I go back to my peer group. Good sales numbers there. One publisher I spoke with suggested rocket launch-like trajectory since the launch of the Kindle.

Here’s a truth: ebooks sell far better than numbers from traditional publishers indicate. This is because there’s a huge market for erotica out there. Women buy erotic ebooks instead of purchasing physical books because, well, if you’re female and over thirty, you’ve been taught that good girls don’t go there. Actually, good girls do. They just do it under the radar. This is good and bad for the ebook industry.

Bad because there are powers dictating pricing and availability who are out of touch with real ebook consumers (granted there are those who are both in touch and responsive to these concerns — I salute you!). While I believe there are many factors that will contribute to the adoption of ebooks as a mainstream reading choice, I remain more convinced than ever that success is dependent on decoupling ebook prices from print book prices.

Reactions to ebooks continue to fascinate me. I have encountered a few “smell of books” people, but even they see the practicality of loading up a reader when traveling. “Oh,” they say, “that makes sense.” Especially now that airlines are more aggressively charging for overweight luggage. Have you ever had to redistribute your books at curbside check-in to reduce the heft of your suitcase?

That is all.

Seth honed his skills writing short stories and submitting them to literary journals. Despite modest success, he was unable to find an agent or interest a publisher in his work. Instead, he was caught up in an endless cycle of writing, revising, and submitting.

It turns out that graduating from a prestigious writers’ workshop isn’t always enough to launch a career.

It was only after Seth turned to the Internet that he started to find the success he was looking for.

Working with a group of like-minded authors at Podiobooks.com, Seth learned the basics of podcasting and began to serialize his first crime novel, Jack Wakes Up.

Seth’s podcast has become something of a magnet for fans. His large and growing audience eagerly awaits each new installment. Those same fans have become partners in crime, helping Seth develop his web presence and promote his book.

It was only after Seth had built a community of readers that he found an agent and publisher. By then he’d pretty much taken control of his own career.

Seth tells us the whole story in today’s podcast.

Click the icon above to listen to the interview, or read the transcript after the break.

Links from today’s podcast:

• Booksquare University
• Seth Harwood
• CrimeWav
• Podiobooks
• Podiobooks Author Guidelines
• Ning
• RedRoom
• Blue Snowball

Interview transcript:

Kirk Biglione: Tell us a little bit about your book first, and then explain; I am guessing you were a writer before you were a podcaster.

Seth Harwood: Yeah.

KB: So give us the background on your book, and explain how you decided to turn that into a podcast.

SH: Okay. I went to graduate school in creative writing. I was writing short stories for a long time. I went to one of the better graduate schools there is in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was really working on writing short stories and sending them out all over the place to try to get them published. I had some success with that; I got about a dozen or so stories published in little journals, which seemed like the thing to do.

Even with having done that, I was unable to get an agent, and I published finally a story online, with an online journal, that sort of seemed like the wrong thing to do to me for a while, but when I did that, I got feedback from that, and people are emailing me about it, and people could read it on the web in a way that they never could in these literary journals that no one could find, or I would only get two copies, and it was really hard for people to track these down.

With this, I was able to email my friends, and they could go right on the web and read the story. So I started to realize about two years ago that having a web presence was really something that could work well for me as a writer.

The thing that I was really trying to put out at that point was ‘Jack Wakes Up’, which is my first crime novel, which I wrote in the fall of 2005. I got to San Francisco and started writing this novel.

I have been trying to write a novel for a long time, sort of in a literary tradition, and finally just realized like, I want to write something fun and just give this a shot. So I wrote my first crime novel, which was ‘Jack Wakes Up’. By the spring of 2006, spring, summer, I had showed it to some agents, and sort of didn’t get what I wanted from them in terms of feedback, or didn’t get any feedback from them, I got blown off by them at a certain point, and decided that I really wanted to bring this out myself on the web, and it just seemed like with a novel, bringing it out in audio content made so much more sense than bringing it out in text.

Some people have had success with emailing sections of novels or bringing them out as a blog, but it just felt to me like to bring out a huge novel as text on the web wasn’t going to work as well as doing audio. When I found out that you could do podcast and that they would be distributed for free, that there was an audience for this — I have been a longtime listener to books on CD or books on tape in the car when I commute, and so this seemed like it really fit well for me.

So I started doing that. I got involved with Scott Sigler and some other guys at podiobooks.com, which at that point, and still is really sort of a very science fiction and fantasy heavy podcast community of writers. So there is science fiction, but also thriller, action, horror stuff, but there is really a science fiction bend to this, which I think sort of comes from the writers involved in it, and the people who are sort of tech-savvy, and some of the early adopters to some of the technology.

So I brought out ‘Jack Wakes Up’, which was the first podcast only crime novel ever, and I had some great success with that. I immediately started to find an audience who were emailing me. It was the first time that I had people emailing me that I didn’t know or wasn’t related to that were saying, we really like your stuff, we are interested in more from you.

I did 20 episodes of ‘Jack Wakes Up’, put out the whole novel in podcast form; basically learning how to do it as I went along, and sort of getting better at the technical stuff as I went through it. By the time I was done with it, I had probably over 1,000 listeners a week, people checking me out, people emailing me, and things took off from there.

Now I have done two series of story collections through podcast, and I just finished podcasting the third Jack Palms novel.

By building my audience through podcasting like that, I was able to interest a small publisher in bringing out ‘Jack Wakes Up’. We brought out ‘Jack Wakes Up’ this spring. Because of my podcast audience, we were able to storm Amazon, and we hit Number One in mystery crime on the day that it came out, and Number 45 overall on Amazon.

That led to me getting an agent, and then subsequently the agent actually bought back — we bought back ‘Jack Wakes Up’ from the small publisher and sold the rights of it again to Three Rivers Press, which is a division of Random House, and they are bringing it out again next summer in a much wider distribution.

KB: So that’s pretty much every author’s dream right there, is to get your book released with a major publisher, and you did this all on your own. You weren’t working with a publicist or anything like that.

SH: Not at all. In fact, what I was doing was working with other authors who were podcasting and were sort of — if I was at the head of the curve, they were a little bit — couple of months ahead of me on the curve, and just sort of telling me what they were doing and watching what they were doing.

KB: Well, that’s another interesting point, you mentioned Scott Sigler and there are quite a few of them; J.C. Hutchins and some other authors. This is not a fluke what you did, this is — I hesitate to call it a trend, it’s more of a movement of literary podcasters who were then going on and getting serious book deals as a result. This is like a legitimate career path at this point.

SH: Yeah, I mean — well, it’s legitimate but it’s — there is probably less than five of us who have gone on to do it, and land major publishing deals.

KB: But how long has this sort of approach been in progress; a couple of years probably at the most?

SH: Well, Scott was doing the same thing with a small publisher last year, for his second book ‘Ancestor’, and he hit Amazon on April 1st of 2007. He got to Number Seven overall on Amazon, at the same time as a lot of — he had already had an agent and editors already had his book in their hands, his next book, so once he did that, then he also landed a really big deal.

So yeah Scott, J.C., and I, Matt Wallace a little bit, and a couple of others, have been able to land great deals out of this.

KB: Between the time you podcast the book and the time you publish the book, are you open to changes, or is that something where — as you are reading, are you thinking, well gee, maybe I could have done this differently, and then going back and revising before the book gets published, or is it set in stone and done?

SH: No, definitely it’s not set in stone. With ‘Jack Wakes Up’ — ‘Jack Wakes Up’ was really as close as I could get it to done at the time when I podcasted it. So going through that, I didn’t have a lot of huge changes, but I had line edits that I found while I was reading it and stuff like that.

One of the cool things about podcasting is that you get emails from people who are experts in weird little things out there that you are not an expert in. So I have gotten advice on seals or sea lions in the San Francisco area. I have gotten advice on different parts of motorcycle, and whether a Ducati has saddlebags or compartments. Different car information, different gun information. Yeah, that’s great, and I can put that right in, and it’s sort of a cheap way to get research or copy editing.

KB: It’s the Wikipedia approach to research.

SH: Exactly, yeah. With some of the other books, I podcast them at a point where they are as ready as I can get them at that point, but I also sort of have a deadline of when I want to start podcast to get out there, because I want to bring it to the listeners at a certain time.

So I have also discovered things in podcasting in books two and books three that are maybe a little more along the lines of major revisions that I want to do, and yeah, absolutely, those aren’t in the pipeline right now to be published. I want to get them published, but no one is saying, this is the hard proof right here. So yeah, revising books two and books three is another thing that I plan on doing in the coming months.

KB: So would you say that your podcasting has changed your approach to writing in any way?

SH: Tremendously. Well, essentially what podcasting did for me that really changed my approach to writing is the audience has been really gratifying. Having an audience really has helped me to write, because I was kind of stymied before I was podcasting, in that, I wrote this book and I was starting another book, and I sort of felt like, if I didn’t get them accepted by agents, I needed to just keep revising them and revising them, so it felt really hard to keep creating new stuff, knowing that I had this sort of never ending revision process laying ahead of me.

So to start podcasting them, made me feel like there are people that wanted more of my stuff, so I was able to start writing again, and it also sort of gave me this outlet to realize, even if an agent isn’t taking this, on some level it can be done in a certain way when I podcast it. So there is a different sort of expectation from me, I am saying, okay, this piece is ready to podcast, I might still make changes to it later when it goes into publication, but I think this book is really good right now, and I am ready to put it out.

KB: How does someone get started; someone really is a novelist and they are thinking, this might be a good approach for them, what are they in for?

SH: I think the reason why podcasting has worked for some of us is that, there’s more good writers out there than the agents can read manuscripts in their sludge piles, or that the people in the publishing industry can really recognize. So what some of us have done is basically taken into our own hands at a point where we are so frustrated with the responses that we are getting, and we know we have a product that’s really ready to go out, to just sort of put it in front of an audience, say, look, this is free, if you like it, great, if you don’t, not a big deal. At that point when we were ready to make that risk, we felt really solid about what we were putting out.

So the first thing primarily for writers who want to give this a shot is to make sure that they have really worked through a novel manuscript. Spent a lot of time on revision of it. They have shown it to some people, they have gotten good feedback, and they feel really strongly that they are ready to go on to the next step.

So once that manuscript is really ready, and you have put in all the time with that, the podcasting stuff isn’t too hard. I mean, I think ultimately people are more scared of it than they need to be. Once you sort of wade into it, the people at Podiobooks, myself, and some other writers are really here and willing to help people out.

Scott was really helpful to me, helping me through IMs and chats and sort of showing me how to not kill myself over the first sort of month of this, and I how could avoid wasting a lot of time doing the wrong things, with bad equipment.

Ultimately it came down to me buying a USB microphone, called The Snowball, which I still use. I think going with a Mac computer was helpful for me, but I know podcasting writers like Mike Bennett, who has done great stuff and uses the PC, and he has got no problems with it. Maybe Mac makes it a little bit easier.

There is a great community at Podiobooks, and even sort of an upcoming Podcasting Writers Community there, who are listening to each other’s early demos, and helping people troubleshoot the sort of technical aspects of how to record and make good sound.

At a minimum, if you just make podcast and put them up on Podiobooks, you have exposure to an audience, you can create a blog on a number of websites out there on the Internet for free, and just start posting your podcast episodes into your blog.

I think it is a time commitment, in that, recording the sound takes time, and making sure that you have good sound, and finding a good program there that you are comfortable with. I use GarageBand which comes with the Mac.

KB: So basically it comes down to having a good story that’s well written and recording it.

SH: Yeah, basically that’s what it comes down to, and posting it on the Internet in a way that people can see it. One of the things that I did — basically the way that I built my audience was by connecting with other podcasters and saying, here’s a one minute promo that I made for my book, will you play it on your show? Then when their listeners were exposed to what I was doing, and some of them started to come over, I was able to attract more listeners from there.

KB: You were on a wide range of podcasts weren’t you, not just other literary podcast, so you really are extending beyond what you would think of as an audience that would normally be interested necessarily and listening to that sort of thing.

SH: Yeah. I mean well, when the book was coming out in print, I went on a ton of different podcasts, and by that point I had been around in podcasting for long enough and basically gone to some of these conferences like Dragon*Con and PME, where I met some of these people. But initially, just to attract my audience to get people to listen to ‘Jack Wakes Up’, it really came down to just getting my promo on a few of good podcasters, books, Scoot, J.C., and a few others, and getting it on Podiobooks, and people started listening there.

KB: So this I guess leads into this whole question about what publicists like to refer to as platform; authors building their platform before they actually release their book. I guess now it seems like more and more having a viable platform, being some notability before a publisher will even look at your work. It’s just amazing how — essentially that’s what you have done, you have built your platform with a podcast, as well as this other social networking.

SH: Yeah, I think the podcast has been huge for it, because if people know me on the Internet, that’s one thing, but if people have listened to my work or read the free PDF that I put out, that’s what I really want them to get to know. I want them to know my name, Seth Harwood, and to know my work as ‘Jack Palms Crime’ and some great crime fiction.

When I started all of this, I wasn’t familiar — I don’t use the word platform, but to begin all of this, I started just trying to build an audience. My original goal was to build an audience so that I could say in an agent letter, I have got 1,000 people listening to this, people who want to buy the book, and I thought that would attract agents.

Ultimately it didn’t, but in doing this I was able to build that audience and have people who want to buy the book. Ultimately publishers right now, their PR money for new books that they release is limited, they don’t do a hell lot of advertising. Some of what they do doesn’t really play very well on the Internet or with younger audiences, and so this is a way to get free advertising, or create your own free promotions and attract buyers, attract an audience. Publishers, when they see that you can do that, and when they see that you are doing that successfully, that takes a big load off of them in terms of what they need to do to sell the book that they are going to buy from you, and I think they appreciate that a lot.

KB: So now you have got this book deal, and I would imagine you are not expecting too much out of the publisher in terms of marketing, or are you looking to them for a different type of marketing, a more traditional book marketing?

SH: Well, I think yeah, I mean they will do probably more stuff with print advertising and with more traditional websites, like the New York Times Online or something like that, but I think at this point, the cool thing about it is that, my editor and I will be able to work on it together, and that he and I can talk about what I will be able to do on the podcasting and Internet, and then what they will be able to do on their end.

I have the same editor at Crown that Scott Sigler has worked with, and so I have seen what they did for Scott’s book that just came out. They did some things that I think were really good.

Also, I think Scott did some great things on his own that really helped the book release. I think in a similar situation, they know that we are going to work together, in that, there is a part of this that I want to do, and some of it that I think I can probably do that they can’t.

KB: I am looking at your website here and I am seeing, you have got this Promote section, where you have got an ISO you can download to burn your own CD. Is that a CD of the full book or there are just excerpts?

SH: That is a CD of the entire — so basically on my website, you can download the entire PDF of the whole book. I have had that on there for — I had it — it’s not so visible anymore, but I had it on there for about six to eight weeks, and it was downloaded over 40,000 times.

You can download the entire podcast of the first book on a CD. There is an ISO disk image that you can burn to a CD, and some of my listeners have done that and burnt those CDs and handed them out to friends.

A guy that I know, that has emailed me, recently did that, and handed out a bunch of CDs of the book at a conference that he was going to.

There is a way on here that you can email in and request a free CD, and I have a listener out there who has been nice enough to basically, whenever everyone makes a request for one of these, he burns it and mails it out for me.

Basically, in the way that this has snowballed or gotten bigger and better, a large part of that has come from listener involvement, and them helping me out, them helping me create the website.

The website now is created by two listeners. The one before that was created by this guy in Japan. This one was worked on by the guy in Japan and another guy in Germany.

If you go to the website and look under Promote also, and you see signs in San Francisco.

KB: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. The signs in San Francisco, now did you pay for those placement or — I am seeing bus stops and billboards and –

SH: Yeah, this was billboards and transit stations on the BART in San Francisco. Basically what happened with this is one of my listeners works for CBS Outdoor here in the Bay Area. It’s funny, like you have these listeners out there, and it turns out this guy has been listening to me since the beginning, and lives less than a mile from my house, it’s funny.

So one of the things that we did was have these pub crawls in San Francisco, and this guy came to one of the pub crawls and said, when your book comes out, I do the outdoor ad campaigns for CBS Outdoor, we have BART signs, we have billboards, we have everything, I want to make your book pop, I want to give this a real shot in the outdoor advertising media.

Basically, he was able to negotiate a price with me that I paid for it, but it was basically an offer that was so good, I couldn’t pass it up for the kind of publicity that it would get. So yeah, we had 30 of these 4×5 foot signs in eight of the major stations in the city. I think it was just fantastic.

The art for these signs and the actual sign creation was also created by one of my listeners who did the cover for the book as well.

KB: Wow, that’s amazing!

SH: It’s been great.

KB: That speaks to the value of community and having a relationship with your readers and your listeners.

SH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was just talking to a friend of mine who writes — I mean it’s not for all writers, I was just talking to a friend of mine who — the idea of answering reader emails as a regular part of everyday for her, was something that she would hate. But for me, getting emails from people out there who are listening to my stuff and writing into say that they like it, I love that, and that’s like a great part of my day is responding to them and sort of having that one on one connection, and being available for them to actually ask questions of and connect with. I think that really pays off down the road.

KB: Now, is this something that’s going to scale for you in terms of, if that volume increase dramatically when you have major distribution?

SH: I have already seen it changing a bit, in that, it takes more — if I put as much time into it — if I just open it up wide and spend a lot of time on it, I can spend a lot of time just emailing with them.

Part of the reason to have the social network side as part of sethharwood.com is so that, if there are questions that are asked frequently, the answers can be there on the site. Some of the listeners can talk to each other about some of this stuff, so that it’s not all me, and just a one-way street back and forth, where we are just talking — or a two-way street, but with just me interacting with one listener at a time. Now, I have the ability to talk to more than one of them at a time and get involved in the discussion, which I think helps that time.

Can I go back to one of them?

KB: Sure, absolutely.

SH: It’s interesting now about the new sort of economics of this. On one hand, if you look at all the stuff I have gotten for free for my listeners, in terms of art and web design and advertising space and stuff like that, its worth thousands of dollars, and still the question that I get frequently from everyone who first learns about what I am doing, and particularly from publishers and agents for a long time has always been, if you are giving away your stuff for free, how are you ever going to make money on it, or sell it? Here’s your website and you are doing this, how are you going to make money from it?

For me the answer to that has always been, the money will come as I build an audience. Wanting to get that book deal and having that as my goal, if I can build that audience and have them excited about what I am giving them for free, that’s going to pay off down the road. Already, with this contract, it is paying off, and with the web development and stuff that I have gotten from them, it’s paying off.

Ultimately, I am putting my time to make these recordings, but the traditional book buying model is based on a model where each product that you are giving someone, each book that you are giving someone, costs money and cost money to produce. But in the modern world, with PDFs and MP3s, I could create a PDF and if ten people download it on the Internet, or 40,000 people download it on the Internet, there is no change in how much that costs me to bring that out.

Similarly, with an MP3, once its out there on the web, people can copy that file infinitely, and there is no marginal cost per version of that. So where the production costs are free, it’s not so bad to have the cost of the product be free.

KB: Yeah. Actually there is a value associated with the people you are reaching, so arguably, while your marginal cost doesn’t increase with digital distribution, the value of the number of people who know about you and are familiar with your work, increases.

I am glad you brought that up, the free issue is a big issue, and I think that too many people would be happy to work in obscurity as long as they don’t give their work away for free.

SH: Yeah. I mean, I think the exposure is important, but also, there is good people out there, and they will be happy for getting something free from you. They will appreciate the fact that you have given something — if they have an hour long commute and they listen to your book for a couple of weeks and they really like it, they appreciate that, and they are eager at some point to give something back to you. When they see that you have a book coming out and they can buy it, and help to give back to you in that sense, a lot of them are enthusiastic to do that.

Also, maybe they have a friend who doesn’t listen to podcast, but they think would like the book, and so they buy the books. They are happy too.

We had an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and part of it was, the writer asked Scott how he gets the people to buy his book if he has already given it to them for free. His answer was simple, he just said, I ask them.

You are not going to get 100% of the people who listen, to go out and buy the book, but the success rates that advertising has, if you do an ad and 3% of the people respond and go out and buy that thing, it’s a really good return for advertising. But if we are able to get 15% or 20% of our listeners to go out and do something, it’s really a phenomenal return.

KB: Well, plus you are reaching people that would never have even considered buying your book to begin with, who will now consider it. Then the other part of that is, the flip side of that is, not everyone who downloads is going to be a potential customer anyway; a lot of people just download out for curiosity. So there is no loss there. Whereas in the old model of — even with promo copies that you send out; either CDs or books, there is a cost associated with that promotional distribution. So there’s really no risk.

SH: Right. In some ways it’s also sort of like a bookstore. If you walk into a bookstore, you can pick a book up off the shelf and start browsing it for free and read as much of it as you like, right there in the bookstore. Here you know, I am sending out the PDF to you, if you want to read the whole thing right there on your computer or print it out, that’s fine with me. Chances are you are going to do something with that book. Once you have printed it out and finished reading it, you are going to give it to someone else, you are going to tell someone that you liked it. Sort of similar to sort of what people do in bookstores all the time.

KB: We have been talking about all these great things that work for you. I am looking at your site here, and you are doing everything. You have got all these different profiles highlighted, you have got Facebook, you are doing Ning you mentioned, Pounce, you are in Twitter. What doesn’t work; is there something of all of these great tools that you have tried that really you have just kind of sat back and said, it didn’t work for me, that wasn’t worth my effort?

SH: Well, I think they work to varying degrees. I found the Ning was really helpful for me. I had basically a social site on Ning that was really helpful. Then what I wanted to do was just roll it into my site, so that it was all the same.

I think the piece of advice to really take away is to try everything. I might not go on Facebook all the time and update my profile that says what I am doing now, or I might go on a couple of times a week and answer the questions in my inbox or deal with my new friend request, and I might do the same thing with MySpace. On some level they are all working a bit.

I think the thing that comes out of it naturally, that sort of has to develop on its own, is that there is all these things out there; some of them are more user-friendly than others, some of them have more people on them than others, in terms of the way its going to fit me as a user, some of them work better for me than others.

There are writers I know out there who are on Twitter constantly and have a huge network of people on Twitter that they are constantly in conversation with. For me, when I am working on my writing, I don’t like to have external things sort of chiming at me or distracting me, I am not a big fan of distractions like that, so I won’t have Twitter on. But sometimes I will go on Twitter and put some stuff in, and Twitter has been really useful if I have a question that I need people to answer, or I need something in terms of like tech stuff, I will just go on Twitter and say, who knows how to do this? In a couple of minutes someone will answer, and I can get into a discussion with them, and they help me out pretty generally.

KB: Yeah. I think that’s an important point to make, is that, not every one of these tools is going to be right for every author, but I think it’s good to expose yourselves to as many of them as you can, so you can figure out which ones do work for you.

SH: Right. Also, your time is limited, and you are right, you do have to budget your time and think about what you want to — how much time you have and what you want to put that into. So sometimes I will take a look at one of these new networks, and its just not something that I have time for at that moment, so I don’t put a lot of time into it. Then other one seem really user-intuitive and so I will do more with that, or other ones I will have a user or a listener that says, you really should get involved with this, let me help you set it up.

There are just times where you want to play around with something and times that you don’t.

KB: Now, do you have any thoughts on any of these book social networks, there is several of them; Library Thing and Shelfari, and Good Reads. Have you spent any time on those?

SH: Limited. I have gotten on them, I have done a little bit about sort of what I read and what I am interested in there. One of the ones that you didn’t mention that I was on, that I have put a little more energy into is Redroom.com. It’s an author networking site that I think has been helpful. I like that one because I am able to post podcasts on that. It’s hard for me to say whether I have gotten much response or success from dealing with that, but basically, if I have the time to play around with one of these, and I hear about it, I will give it a shot and get listed on there, and then just kind of see what happens.

I mean, the reality is, with most of these things, it doesn’t cost any money. You can set it up in a short amount of time, and then, whenever you are interested in going to check on it, you can go over there, and if not, it can just kind of exist on its own.

KB: Yeah, if it fails, you don’t fail too badly, and there is nothing lost, and if it succeeds, the upside could be tremendous.

SH: Right, exactly. I mean, it’s all about where people are looking on the web, and what people are doing there. I do think without a doubt that one of the great places where things are going on and authors are really being recognized by readers and communicating with one another really well is podiobooks.com, which basically sort of serves as the library for all of us that are making podcasts.

It sort of is the library place where they are storing our files, they are putting these books there in a way that people can go look at them whenever, and subscribe to them for free. There is a lot of stuff on there. It’s gotten to the point where there is a lot of different kinds of books on there, and there is a lot of interaction going on.

KB: Do they charge you for storage or is that totally free?

SH: No, it’s all free, and there is a way that listeners can donate when they like a book. So they make a little money back on that, and the authors get I think 75% of what’s donated.

KB: So not only is that a great way for exposure, because anyone who is interested in audio books is going to be going there to check out what’s available for free, but as you were saying in the beginning, it sounds like you have got a community of authors there who are helping each other through this whole podcast thing.

SH: Right, absolutely. I think that Podiobooks is really the place to start — I have to say, this is the place to start for people out there who are interested in starting to do podcasts. There is a Ning community on here, at podiobooks.ning.com, which is the Podiobooks community. There is a group of authors on here who have done Podiobooks and who are answering questions and helping with that.

There is a section where people who are new to it can get involved in something called the Mentorship Program, where listeners and other writers will listen to early episodes and help you troubleshoot your tech stuff and your hardware, software questions. There are people out there who know a lot more about this tech stuff than I do, and they are on here answering questions for each other, and sort of helping each other to get started up, which is what I was doing with some of the other writers when I started.

So yeah, I think Podiobooks is a really great place to start, because there is a lot of people here who know how to do podcasting, and we have a lot of people involved in helping each other here. Yeah, I think this is sort of the premier place for this.

KB: So what’s next for you?

SH: Still I don’t think that there is enough exposure to crime fiction in the podcast world. I think the podcast world is great in that there is a good audience out there, its a great way for authors to do — if you can podcast a story and put it out there in the right place, you can essentially do a reading from home for free and have thousands of people, or at least 500 people listen to it. When do you get a bookstore reading that you are going to go into and have 500 people there? For a lot of writers, that’s just not possible.

So what I am starting this summer is a website called Crimewav.com; there will also links to it on my website, sethharwood.com, and what I am going to be doing is starting basically a series of crime short stories in podcast form by a lot of the crime writers in the industry that I have been able to meet. Who I think are writing great stuff and doing wonderful things, but haven’t gotten involved in the podcasting world yet, and so I want to sort of help them start to get exposed to that and start to expose their work to the podcast audience; I want to expose these writers work to them. So that’s the next thing for me, that I am bringing out this summer, is Crimewav.com.

Then I am working on another project that I would like to podcast hopefully in the fall or late fall. Another book; I have done three Jack Palms Crime books, and now I have another book that involves a character from ‘Jack Wakes Up’, and sort of his earlier story.

The next thing after that will be working on more Jack Palms, another Jack Palms novel so that I am podcasting that at the time the ‘Jack Wakes Up’ comes out next summer from Three Rivers Press.

KB: Well, thanks Seth, I really appreciate the time you have given us. This has been tremendous, tremendous insight into, not only podcasting, but social media.

SH: No problem. I am glad that we did this, thanks.