Word: authors
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...Hutchins joined a fledgling community of primarily unpublished science fiction authors who turned their works into audio recordings and posted them online. The authors released their work in 30 to 45 minute episodes - free of charge. They aggressively marketed their work with the help of word-of-mouth and cross-author promotion. Over time, tens of thousands of listeners downloaded podcasts of Hutchins' 7th Son. By 2007, St. Martin's Press, a division of MacMillan, was intrigued enough by his success and soon Hutchins scored a book deal. He has just co-authored a book in a new series called...
Unlike audiobooks, novel podcasts are truncated into segments and may include ambient sounds, music as well a cast of voices playing different characters. While successful authors pitch their works on their own Web sites, many newer writers are posted on Podiobooks.com. Evo Terra, the co-founder of Podiobooks.com, says 45,000 episodes are downloaded each day. The success of novels is democratically decided: word of mouth leads to more downloads. Voluntary donations to authors (the web site keeps 25%, with the rest going to the writer) are another indicator an author's popularity. In the future, Terra sees authors...
...which led to a 2007 deal with The Crown Publishing Company (a division of Random House), one believed to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sigler reached a milestone this month by cracking the New York Times Hardcover Fiction bestseller list with Contagious, a first for an author emerging from the podcast genre. The print run for Contagious is 80,000 copies and it has made the bestseller list despite Sigler's getting his reluctant publisher to allow him to put out PDF files and podcasts of chapters of the book for free on his website...
...Sigler's and Hutchins' success, there are critics who downplay the significance of their "pioneering" work. When serving as vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America two years ago, author Howard Hendrix, in a blog, dubbed these authors "webscabs" who are turning the role of writer into a "pixel-stained Technopeasant wretch." (Hendrix later admitted, in a "debate" with Sigler in Sept. 2007 in San Franciscio, that his comments were "incendiary," but also said, "In the long run, what you may end up with is a vast digital slush pile" and "a mass of novels written...
...past two weeks another similar case has emerged, after Brazil blocked the extradition to Italy of leftist Cesare Battisti, convicted of four murders in the 1980s. Battisti had also long taken refuge in France, where he became a successful author of mystery novels, and a cause celebre among Parisian leftist intellectuals. He was arrested in 2007 by French police, but managed to flee to Brazil. Italian media reports last week claimed that during the French First Couple's recent trip to Rio de Janeiro, Bruni had lobbied Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to block the extradition...