Author: Carolyn Steele

Carolyn writes websites, copy and nonsense about emigrating. She also occasionally ambles off to do something daft in case it’s interesting enough to write about. Her latest book grew from the blog Trucking in English, and you can learn more at her blog and her Amazon author page.

The Hubris of the Long-Distance Podcaster.

Ears like this would help.

That pesky podcasting journey. We left off last time as I burbled confidently about the software required to record author interviews. I seem to recall mentioning that familiarity with the geekery was all it took. It turns out though, that you have to make a few more mistakes before all is well in the poddyverse. Just in case you fancy popping some interviews on your website for fun, traffic and interactivity, here are some of the things I learned the hard way.

I had already made a few decisions about the interviews themselves. I’ve been interviewed enough myself to know the frustrations of being asked all the wrong things by someone who clearly hasn’t read the right book, so I wanted the end result to be pleasing to the author. At the same time, I wanted to get a little beyond the usual verbal press release. I hoped to find areas of common ground, get a bit psychological maybe and of course have a fine old chat and a bit of a laugh. That’s a tall order with someone you can’t see and have never met so I plumped to semi-prepare us. Continue reading “The Hubris of the Long-Distance Podcaster.”

Who do you love?

Guess he’s probably going to make it.

“Some of your characters leap off the page,” favourite beta reader told me, “but some are really flat.” I was miffed. This was a work of non-fiction, I was merely introducing the reader to people I bumped into on the road, why should that need any work?

I requested clarification, a little archly. She told me how much she liked Ooooors’la, the tiny lady who pronounced her own name as though she were unwell, and who drove her forklift truck with a pinkie finger raised as thought taking tea with the queen. I giggled, “Oh she was funny, I liked her…”

Then she listed the people she couldn’t quite see, the ones who stayed resolutely non-dimensional. “Well, I didn’t want to be nasty because I don’t want the book to be a bitch-fest.” As the conversation progressed, we twigged that the all the people I’d liked leapt off the page and the ones I’d hated stayed put, resolutely indistinguishable from each other. Continue reading “Who do you love?”

Why not podcast your book?

Author Carolyn Steele
Author & Podcaster Carolyn Steele

I have accidentally become a podcaster. Looking back, it was probably inevitable. I’m a talk radio fanatic anyway, I like to think I’m an animated story teller and I have a great face for radio. All I needed was to realise that in the free and open, peer-to-peer world of blogging and youtube, there are no gatekeepers to radio either.

It began when I was given a book. The Best Laid Plans, a humourous look at politics by Terry Fallis, another Canadian. No-one wanted to publish it so he recorded himself reading episodes and uploaded them as podcasts. People liked them, he won prizes. Brilliant, I had a book to publicise, I was going to learn to podcast.

I bought a microphone and asked everyone I knew how to get started. I struck gold with a pal who produces videos for Youtube. He told me to download Camtasia Studio and work with the ‘record narration’ option, then produce the file as an mp3. I had a starting point but I learned upsettingly slowly. Recording 10 minutes of speech requires some serious preparation. Gradually I settled into a routine…have a glass of water handy, blow your nose before you start, print off the script so that you can see it as well as the computer screen. If you fluff, leave a sizeable silence before you repeat the sentence so that it’s easy to find when editing. If you’re not sure what intonation to use for a phrase, repeat it different ways and select the best option later. Don’t speak while you shuffle papers! Continue reading “Why not podcast your book?”

Who Knew?

Author Carolyn Steele

Writing a decent book takes work apparently, I’m gobsmacked. No, really. I mean, you go off for a couple of years Having Adventures, you blog about it as you go, then you tack the blog posts together and call it a book…that should be enough, right?

Then, when you send the book to your favourite editor he writes back, “This is just a series of events.” Well, duh, that’s what I wrote, it’s what happened. He goes on to tell me stuff that should only apply to fiction writers, and moreover, the sort of fiction writers who haven’t read Lin’s Breaking the Rules series. “People like to read about conflict and resolution, you need some more structure and direction and a lot more internal motivation. This has to be about your psychological journey.” Continue reading “Who Knew?”