Category: Staff Articles

Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.

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?”

Fear and self-loathing, sober on my couch

Writers are sensitive folks, generally. This is good. Empathy is important and all that. This is also bad. Lots of us kill ourselves or drink ourselves to death, etc. I was thinking about this today because I started feeling really bad about myself, and then I had an epiphany.

See, I write a lot of things and some get ignored and some blow up and some just kind of exist, taking up internet space. So, anyway, what got me all bummed out was looking at my stats on Amazon. (I have yet to figure out that Jim Devitt trick that would make me the #1 bestselling writer named JD Mader or something – I love you, Jim – this isn’t about you, you’re awesome – and I WILL figure it out).

So, I was looking at my stats and I started feeling crappy. I did the KDP select program with one book (more about that on Thursday). My reviews are good. I’ve done pretty well, but it felt shitty. And then I stopped and mentally bitch-slapped myself for a moment. In far less time than it took to endure middle school, I have self published two novels, gotten this IU gig, started some blogs which I now pretty much ignore, started BlergPop with two writer friends, wrote Bad Book with Hise and Brooks, started an advice column (I have only done one so far, but people are digging it), just published an article with the biggest online fishing resource, and started a Freelance writing business. So, thought I to myself, why are you tripping you gorgeous nimrod, you? Continue reading “Fear and self-loathing, sober on my couch”

DRM: Yes or No?

For an updated article on DRM, please check out Just Click No for DRM.

Will Technology Drive Readers to Demand More?

It rarely happens, but this year, I had the opportunity to go somewhere nice on vacation. Not only was it somewhere nice, but it was on a river cruise, a “cozy” setting where I had a week to get up close and personal with 140 people, pretty much all of whom had disposable income, at least one variety of electronic reading device, and no shyness about whipping out their TBR lists. Continue reading “Will Technology Drive Readers to Demand More?”