Word: novelized
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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...
...seems a ripe time for novel podcasting to grow. Traditional book publishers are struggling. Book sales are down; MacMillan has laid off employees, as have Random House and Simon & Schuster; and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has suspended the purchase of most new manuscripts. With advance money drying up as well as contracts, Terra says that aspiring writers now feel that "maybe I should try something on my own" and build an audience online...
Scott Sigler of San Francisco also missed out on getting his first novel published, with a deal collapsing in late 2001. But like Hutchins, he built a big Internet fan base on novel podcasting, 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...
...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 by 15-year-olds.") Even David Moldawer, the associate editor who helped sign Hutchins to St. Martin's dismisses novel podcasting's growth. "It's a very small community," Moldawer, who now works for Penguin Books, told TIME. "I think the podcasting thing in general has definitely flattened...
Aside from the put-it-out-for-free model, the marketing angle of novel podcasting is what separates it from bricks-and-mortar book-selling. Sigler and Hutchins continue to use the online world to campaign. But how far can this niche truly expand? Most of the copy is generated by tech-saavy, sci-fi loving males, though romantic novels and military fiction are also becoming popular. Mur Lafferty, 35, a novel podcaster who lives in Raleigh, N.C., concedes "there's a lot of guys," but she finds a growing number of listeners are women. What ultimately stands...