Podiobooker
News from the Staff of Podiobooks.com

Greg Crites today launches his third book on the site, Dunkin the Vampire Slayer. The author has requested this be listed as an Adults-Only title, so consider yourselves warned:

What could possibly bring together a 450 pound vampire slayer, a drunken, acid-tongued detective, a good natured carpenter, bureaucratic vampires, giant anacondas, mutant vampire bats, Ho Hos, Twinkies and more one-liners than a night at the comedy club? Dunkin, the Vampire Slayer blends all this discordance and more into a hilarious adventure that moves from the muggy heat of Florida to the muggier heat of the Amazon. ….If Carl Hiaasson, Tim Dorsey and Dave Barry collaborated on a vampire story, it may have turned out like this absurd romp…. This is part one of a trilogy.

Hey! This is book one and the introduction of Devlin, hero of three other novels I have perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Book two, Dunkin the Vampire Slayer: Death Rides A Pale, Pink, Porcine Horse is available at www.veinarmor.com. Book three, Dunkin the Vampire Slayer: It Ain’t Over Til the Fat Man Stings is currently undergoing final hackery by me–The Hack!

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s getting a little crowded around here. Well over 200 books, with plenty more in the works. Some of you have been around here from the beginning, and a handful might have actually listened to everything we’ve made available. You’re crazy, but that’s beside the point.

But for the overwhelming majority of you, you probably could use some help in figuring out a good book that fits your tastes. I’d like to draw your attention today to one of those sources, Geek Radio Daily.

Geek Radio Daily is a 15-minute daily podcast (because the founders are clinically insane), focusing on a different topic every day of the week. Monday is box office results, Tuesday is new DVDs, Wednesday is new comics… but Thursday is the day you need to pay attention to. Every Thursday, the hosts of the show cover podcast fiction, much of which you can find right here at Podiobooks.com. Oh, and Friday is new movies.

So the next time you need a podiobook fix and aren’t sure where to turn, check out my friend The Vicar and his buddy Billy Flynn and see what they think on Geek Radio Daily. It’s 15 minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but you may find something fun to listen to. At least on Thursdays.

It seems like more and more media producers are seeing our growing stable of authors as an important talent pool. Kimberly Steele, the author of Forever Fifteen writes to tell me:

… a wonderful director in Canada, Eva Madden, plans to adapt [Forever Fifteen] to script and within a few years, my book may become a movie! She’s worked on the sets of many famous films and TV shows and has won awards for her own films. She’s also very sweet and kind.

Kudos to you, Kimberly! Eva seems like one who has worked her way up through the ranks of production to writer and director status. Well done!

Theodore Isaac Erski starts us off on a good note this week, providing you with all 11 episodes of his audiobook, Salavandra: A Coffee Tale:

Salavandra is an isolated Caribbean island. Its products-coffee, lumber and flowers-are controlled by Penkava Inc., a New York based multinational commodity corporation. After discovering that Penkava is responsible for his father’s death, as well as the abysmal working conditions on the island, coffee farmer Antonio Richards ignites a revolution in the midst of a harvest season. Branding his infant insurgency The United Front for the Liberation of Salavandra (UFLS), he begins fighting the unbridled capitalistic forces controlling his country.

The nominations for the Fall ‘08 Podcast Peer Awards have been announced, and Podiobooks.com authors make their strongest showing yet. OK, so the deck is sorta stacked in our favor. Since their second program, they’ve had a category just for those doing long-form podcast fiction. But this time around is special. A new category — Best Production — has been added, and two of the three nominees are from our own stable of authors:

• Phil Rossi’s Crescent

• Murder at Avedon Hill by P.G. Holyfield

Add to that a five-out-of-six domination of the Best Podcast Novel category:

• 7th Son, Book Three: DESTRUCTION by J.C. Hutchins

• MOREVI: Remastered by Tee Morris
• Scott Sigler’s Nocturnal
• Another nod to Murder at Avedon Hill by P.G. Holyfield
• Playing For Keeps by Mur Lafferty

… and you’ll see that yes, it is good to be the king. Oh, and the one show that was also listed in both categories but isn’t currently available at Podiobooks.com? Metamor City. And from what I’ve heard, we’ll have it over here when complete. Hooray for us!

Tobias D. Robison joins our list of fantasy authors, today starting the release of his book, Raven’s Gift:

When Raven comes to Redthwen to meet her mentor Orvannon, she encounters a vicious traveler, a hag with an extraordinary Voice of Command, and that hag’s charge, a mysterious little girl. By the time Orvannon arrives, Raven will have learned too much about these strangers, and she will have discovered a dragon with the ability to put people into a swoon.

Orvannon’s instructions start Raven off on an epic adventure. She will master the greatest bit of nose-magic in all of her native Ausland. She will face the dragon in combat. And she will have to deal with the hag while totally under control of that woman’s power. These adventures lead to more, as Raven discovers how the great city of Shelton is under attack. She must use all her persuasion to bring a powerful wizard to the city’s aid, and she will find that facing up to the attacking army is not enough.

Raven explores the magical caves created by three great wizards, eventually discovering the greatest evil of her time. Victory in the “big boss battle” is not enough. When the evil magic is destroyed, Raven and her friend must avoid starvation, and face the lightning bolts of yet another mage, to have a chance of staying alive in peace.

Raven’s Gift is set in a magical, pastoral medieval world. Raven has a strange ability that is as much a curse as a gift. Trouble follows her every step, and danger approaches at every turn. She begins her journey with only her wits and her nose, but though her past haunts her, she finds companions who help her make amends for a terrible mistake.

Raven’s Gift is a dramatic fantasy with an unusual heroine and intriguing magic. With Raven’s deep bond to nature and her pragmatic attitude toward the obstacles in her path, she manages to find her place as destiny’s unsung hero in her dangerous world.

One reader has said that Raven’s Gift is like South Park mets James Bond meets Dungeons and Dragons. Although there’s combat and even a military campaign in this novel, much of the action occurs in lively conversations. Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is impossible to imagine making Raven’s Gift into a movie — for an unusual reason — but if such a movie could be made, some parts of it might earn an R rating for being a bit earthy.

 

 Raven's Gift promo [1:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Double Share, the fourth book covering the travels of young Ishmael Wong, written by the machine that is Nathan Lowell… is ALREADY complete.

Holy cow. I don’t want to hear ANYONE griping about not having time to finish one episode a week. Seriously.

 

 Double Share promo [1:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thanks for Scott Farquhar for bringing us another work from the public domain. He’s compiled three tales by John W. Campbell into one anthology called Black Star Passes:

Follow along with Arcot, Morey, and Wade as they discover a revolutionary form of propulsion, visit our neighboring planets, and go up against aliens from a rogue solar system that passes close to our own. These three stories (Piracy Preferred, Solarite, and The Black Star Passes) were originally published as a serial in Amazing Stories magazine.

The interwebs are once again spreading the Good News of yet another company (this time an audiobook retailer) eschewing DRM in favor of .mp3 files. And once again, it seems that few of the news sources haven’t bothered to look beyond a press release and actually see if the claim holds up under scrutiny. In this case, it doesn’t for anyone on a Mac.

So I’m making this proclamation: The audiobook business is broken. Sure, you can point to thousands of happy customers who are unaware of just how broken it is, but that doesn’t change things. And believe me, things need to change. As I see it, there are (at least) four things wrong with the audiobook industry.

1. Availability
   Call it “The Tyranny of the Trees” if you will, but almost any book you want is available in printed form — even those out-of-print if you look at the resellers. But only a relatively small percentage of printed books ever make it to audio form. Why? Simple. Publishers aren’t willing to make the additional investment required to turn every book into an audiobook.

   Now I know it’s hard for a guy distributing well under 300 books to criticize the industry based on scale, especially when there are places boasting 40,000 available titles. Well… we’re working on that. And we don’t expect to bring about this change in thinking through our site alone. Our goal is to leverage something the other audio houses haven’t thought of or are only experimenting with — letting the authors do much of the heavy lifting. No, it doesn’t always sounds as well as paying professionals. And I have no beef with pro audiobook narrators and producers. Love ‘em to death. But faced with having no audiobook at all, author-read/produced seems an acceptable alternative, significantly lowering the cost of production.

2. Usability
   The act of listening to an audiobook is, well, difficult. CDs are great delivery devices for a 90 minute album, but what about 20 hours worth of a single story? That’s a lot of disc-changing and not at all conducive to most peoples’ on-the-go lifestyle. Better for that are downloadable files that play on computers and portable media devices. But these are plagued by their own problems. DRM doesn’t stop illegal copying of files, but it does make it nearly impossible for legitimate users of downloads to enjoy their purchases in more than one location or on more than one device — if they can get it to play at all. True, some sites are eschewing DRM and I hope that trend continues. But I’d like to see the next advance not require special software to “manage” the download. Thanks all the same, but my computer handles downloads just fine, to the tune of thousands of files, links and images every single day.

   But if you do successfully manage to navigate through the needlessly cumbersome process of a digital download, you’ll likely be disappointed in the audio quality of the product. Low bit rates are the norm in the download space, and it’s really unnecessary in a world where bandwidth and storage space are anything but scarce. Digital downloads sound like a good idea. But there’s no reason that the final product should not come with a comparable quality to that which you get with shiny plastic discs. (Of course, allowances should be made for lower-speed connections.)

3. Accessibility
   It’s not uncommon for audiobooks to cost more than twice their hardcover counterparts and be an order of magnitude higher in price than the paperback version. To combat this, leading audiobook retailers have taken up a sort of “book of the month club” approach to the market, charging a recurring monthly fee, giving you “earned credits” and discounts for purchases… anything to make it seem less expensive. And for some, perhaps it is. But it sure makes it hard to try anything out and locks you into a commitment. Thanks, but not for me. Things are different for disc-distribution. It may cost more to stamp out 20 discs than it does to print 400 pages. But when looking at a digital download, the cost to distribute approaches zero.

4. Profitability
   If you’re an author fortunate enough to have your publisher produce an audiobook version for you, you’ll likely enjoy compensation on par with that which you already receive for your dead-tree version. And that is what it is, which kind of stinks (published author speaking here). But what if you don’t get that offer (see “Availability” above) and are on your own, ready to invest in the equipment/time/resources to produce your own? It’s an abomination that major audiobook download companies pay out a similar terrible rate — 15% to 20% of sales - for a book that they didn’t pay to have produced. And for a product that has no intrinsic “cost” for each unit sold — it’s a digital download. The cost to carry these titles is incredibly small. So why not pay out more?

So… how do those problems get fixed? Looking back over my list, the last three seem like easy fixes:

• Stop the Quixotic file-hobbling.
• Get with the times and improve quality — easier without your worthless proprietary software that is costing you needless cash to support.
• Use some of that cash to pay out better rates.

I’ll grant you that #1 is the biggest challenge. Yet plenty of authors are already changing that on their own. I like to think we’re helping with that.

The good news? I honestly think it won’t always be like this. Not because we’re going to run everyone into bankruptcy by offering a few hundred serialized audiobooks for free. Heck, we’ve got our own problems with people not understanding how our file downloads work (working on that). At this point, I just want us to be an alternative to authors, distributors and listeners. If I’m right, like minded people will follow along, and our interesting novelty of a site may become part of a larger movement. Now where did I put those signs and banners…

Brian Holtz adds to our “Family Friendly” collection with his new story, Collapse at Hidden Verse Three Three Two:

The Multiverse Generator is failing. Dimensions threaten to collapse and entire populations will cease to exist unless it is reset. One being from each of more than five thousand verses has been acquired, and their DNA verified. Only one remains. His name is Timothy Rayburn and he is a resident of Earth. The Consolidation of Organized Systems has sent a ship to retrieve him.

Timothy is a teenager failing speech class due to a paralyzing fear of public speaking. He soon learns that his problems are quite small compared to the impending collapse of all existence. He must overcome his fear if he is to survive not only the dangers of space travel and multiversal war, but himself.

 

 Collapse at Hidden Verse 332 promo [0:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download