Podiobooks.com - The latest thing for the MP3 Generation

I first heard about Podiobooks.com from a fellow writer.
Basically it is a free site of serialized audio books in MP3 format. For authors it is a means to have their books placed in a medium that can be used for promotional purposes. Which is why I took the plunge. The hope would be that if people listened to the book and liked it enough, they might go ahead and buy it.

Since I come from a small press, anything I could do for exposure was good by me! And it served a dual purpose as well, it would get me acquainted with the whole MP3 experience. (I don't even own an IPOD, let alone used an MP3 player before this. And I think I'm pretty geeky!)

This did turn out at first as the Cursed Project from Hey! Aside from having to set up certain parameters and criteria to the software, and starting out on my end without a clue on any of this stuff, some of it would not even work as it was supposed to. I was pretty sure for a while I would get dropped from the project just on my making them pull their hair out in frustration at my inability to get things right! lol.

Eventually though I got Audacity set up correctly and what it's limitations were, knew what to do and change in ITunes to get the MP3 to turn out correctly and have the correct standardized info, actually figured out how to record my readings and then edit them, and now finally have a modicum of confidence in what I am doing. (Despite more horrid problems like when I changed one digit in the title so they would not upload, when Audacity ate half of the final file and I didn't notice, plus a myriad of other little problems geared to drive one insane.)

Currently, In The Service of Samurai is up to chapter 28 and seems to be doing well. While I've sold probably a 100 or so copies of the book using regular marketing, at the moment I have about 737 who have now heard about it and have listened to at least some of the work. So though it does take a nice chunk of time to get the files done, it seems to be working. I hope people are also enjoying listening to the story in this different medium.

I would say MP3 readings are a nice up and comer as a marketing tool. Podiobooks.com reached over 1 million downloads a couple of weeks ago. It's mind boggling!