Podiobooker
News from the Staff of Podiobooks.com

There’s a great story on Time.com that talks about the changing face of book publishing.
It’s been widely reported and/or speculated that the print industry is dead or dying. Is it?
…publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s [...]

That’s the general theme that Jane Lindskold writes about on the fantastic new Tor.com site (Note to self: write future blog post praising them for how they’ve embraced new media with this new site.)
Independent author have a different struggle. Where publishing companies pay someone to design the cover of a book, indie authors are footing [...]

If you’re a fan of free audiobooks (and no, not just those we help distribute), vote for your favorites today! There’s a contest going on over at Goodreads, as social network focused on books. There are 47 different books you can vote for, most of which are available as free serialized audiobooks here on Podiobooks.com.
Goodreads [...]

The new iTunes 8 has launched and fans of audiobooks couldn’t be happier. Prior versions of iTunes kept the Audiobooks section under lock and key. The only files that would display in the Audiobooks section on your iTunes or iPod were books purchased from the iTunes music store. Not very handy to people who buy [...]

There are some changes sweeping the publishing world, and they have a lot of people nervous. One was recently reported in the NYT. It seems that HarperCollins is contemplating not paying new authors advances for their books:
Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that [...]

Assuming the gang at Tech Crunch aren’t pulling our collective legs:
In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.
Read that again if necessary. Composed on a mobile phone. Not read. Composed. That lends further evidence to my hypothesis that we [...]

J.C. Hutchins, author of the successful “7th Son” podcast novel trilogy, has accepted a book deal to publish “7th Son: Descent,” the series’ debut novel. The thriller is scheduled for a 2009 U.S. spring/summer release by St. Martin’s Press.
“7th Son” is the story of seven strangers who have been brought together after the recent assassination [...]

For aspiring podiobook authors who want to even out, normalize, maximize and generally improve their raw narration tracks, I highly recommend getting the latest copy (recently revised) of The Levelator.
It’s a free download that works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, so just about everyone can use it. Some of the hard-core audio engineers [...]

Here’s a statistic for you:
“From 98 to 99 percent of all books ever published are now out-of-print, so they don’t show up in traditional bestseller lists.”
That comes from Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder.com founder. I pulled that from a post on The Book Standard if you want more information.
But I don’t. I’m a little disgusted. [...]

I’ve seen a couple of blog posts recently about this new thing called Shrink My Tunes.

The reality, at least for Podiobooks.com, is that MP3 files are getting larger. Back in the day, many of us were concerned about the size of a file, for both storage and bandwidth reasons. Fast-forward a couple of years and [...]