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| Murder Must Advertise |
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Getting New Readers Through Podcasting Seth Harwood is the author of the Jack series and presenter at the Author Boot Camp workshops.I’ve been writing fiction for about 10 years now. For a long time I was writing short stories. I’ve taken creative writing classes in Boston, Montana, and then at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I earned my MFA in 2002. I published about a dozen stories in various literary journals, mostly print and not online. For a long time I thought this would be how I’d get noticed, but after about 10 published stories, hundreds of rejections and no agent willing to come within a mile of my collection, I began to lose hope. At the same time, my attempts at writing a literary novel weren’t going so well. Basically, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. So I started writing my first crime novel, Jack Wakes Up and had a ball with it. I’ve always loved action, thriller, and kung-fu movies and shows like the Sopranos, Dexter, and The Wire, but I was never willing to let these loves figure into my writing. With Jack Wakes Up, I decided to use all of the things I like. I gave myself a deadline, finished the first draft before that, and then ended up spending the better part of 6 months revising the novel. Around this time, a friend suggested that I try podcasting. I didn’t even know what podcasting was, but he introduced me to a few fiction podcasts, showed me the number of listeners some were drawing (over 20,000), and introduced me to Scott Sigler, the daddy of them all, who helped me work through the technical issues of production. I made a website, and in July of 06, I started podcasting Jack Wakes Up. It just felt like a better process than spending my time sending out more submissions. I figured it would help me put the book behind me, read through it for final edits, and that once I had some listeners and success, it would only help my agent query letters. I felt like it was a way I could move on from the novel and start writing something else. When I got through the 20 half-hour (at least) episodes of Jack Wakes Up in late fall, I’d learned A LOT about computers, site hosting, and sound production. I’d also drawn some recognition and close to 1,000 listeners. I did this by getting help from other podcasters who ran promos for me, and by joining the site Podiobooks.com, which acts as a sort of library for podcast fiction. And I was hooked on podcasting my work. Here’s the great thing I found: during Jack Wakes Up, listeners started writing in, contacting me to say they really liked what I was doing and that they wanted more. That was the coolest thing that’d happened to me as a writer! For the first time I was actually getting consistent positive feedback from an audience. Podcasting became instant promotion, a hard line relationship with an audience, and something that I was doing with writing that was fun! Then, after podcasting Jack Palms II: This is Life, I found a publisher, Breakneck Books, who was willing to publish Jack Wakes Up. We brought it out in a print on demand release, and on the first day it hit Amazon, March 16 (Palm(s) Sunday), it hit #45 in books on Amazon and #1 in crime/mystery, all on the strength of my podcast listeners going out and buying it. After that, I was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/ZCYR) and then a follow-up article later in the week. With the help of my newfound agent, Byrd Leavell, we pitched the book to publishers and sold it to Three Rivers Press! I’ve now podcast two collections of my short stories and three novels in the Jack Palms Crime series, and am currently putting out a fourth novel, Young Junius, that takes one of the characters from Jack Wakes Up back into his teen years in the 80s in Boston. Jack Wakes Up is due to come out this May 5th from Three Rivers Press (Random House) and I couldn’t be more excited about my first major-release novel. I feel like I’ve learned a great deal about online promotion working with my podcasting and I wouldn’t trade my relationship with my fans for anything. Now I’m working with two private publicists in trade for what I can teach them about my online success and my meetings with my publicist and marketer at Three Rivers Press are really a two-way street. More than that, I have my own plans for what I want to do to publicize my book. This month Scott Sigler and I are teaching a class (Author Boot Camp) to help other writers take control of their careers and their book submission process. When all I could do was pitch to agents, it felt so much better to see an alternative: a way to show my writing to a waiting audience and let them decide for themselves. This worked for me and helped to empower my career. I want to show other writers how to do the same things I did. It definitely takes work to produce a serialized audiobook yourself and to podcast it, but I decided I’d rather spend my time working on that, knowing if I attracted an audience by giving my work away free that it would pay off in the end. It has. And I’ve felt better as a writer the whole way. Seth Harwood can be reached at www.sethharwood.com
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| Site sponsored by
Jeffrey Marks. |
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