* My name is Dan Shaurette, welcome to the podcast.
- This is special sneaky-like-Santa episode #32, for December 23rd, 2006.
(Download MP3 - Listen to Streaming audio)

* To all my friends and constant listening audience, Merry Christmas! I had the chance to get Mark Levine's interview in this episode. Also, because of the terrible audio of the last episode, I have included in this episode "Baby Blue" by Ethereal. I included the Podiobook promos in this episode also.

Ever wish you had a buddy who was a lawyer who could take a look at that publisher's contract for you? Even better, do you wish you knew a lawyer who would critique about 50 contracts for you -- for less than $20? Mark Levine has done just that in his book, "THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING: The Contracts & Services of 48 Self-Publishing Companies -- Analyzed, Ranked & Exposed". Moreover, he's done it well, with tips and advice that every self-published author -- prospective or published alike -- should read.

DS: I found this book to be an excellent guide through the fairly overwhelming world of self-publishing contracts, of which I've seen a few myself.  Thank you, Mark for joining me for this interview.

ML: My pleasure.

DS: I wanted to start be saying that you were an attorney, and you are a self-published author. When did you write "Fine Print", and what was it that made you realize that this was a book that really needed to be written?

ML: I didn't really realize that it was a book that needed to be written until I wrote it, actually. About six, maybe seven years ago now, a fellow author who was also with me first publisher got my name and contacted me and said, "Hey I signed this really bad contract and I can't get out of it. I know you're a lawyer, can you take a look at this for me?" So, at the time I had not looked at a lot of publishing contracts, but I'd looked at hundreds and hundreds of commercial contracts, and that's really what all these contracts are.

So I take a look at this contract and the first thing that comes to my mind is that you'd have to be crazy to sign this thing.  In this guy's case, it happened that he licensed his copyright to them in the book for the term on the copyright. So the copyright lasts for seventy years after this guy's already dead. Now this guy also happened to be a professor at a very prestigious university out west. That's really what got me thinking that if this guy doesn't have any idea of what he's doing, then there has to be thousands of other people who really don't know and are so eager to have somebody validate their writing that they sign anything that's put in front of them.

So that's what really gave me the idea to write the book, and I didn't really know the impact the book would have in the self-publishing community until I started hearing from self-publishing companies who I just assumed had no idea who I was. It turned out that every self-publishing company has a copy of my book. The companies that were rated well, it was really increasing their business. The ones who weren't rated very high, it was killing their business.

So there were some publishers that said, "Hey, you weren't fair, and you didn't do this and you didn't do that, and we want you to fly out and see what we do and I'm going to prove to you that when you do another edition you will say something better about us."

DS: A lot of them have actually changed their contacts as a result as well, yes?

ML: That's true, well, eight pretty big ones, including iUniverse, made changes to their contracts. I said in the second edition of this book, which turned out to be the paperback version that you have, I sent an email to every publisher that I was going to cover a list of questions. After I reviewed everything, I then went back through their contracts and said, "Hey, if you don't do this, this, and this, I'm not going to be able to say anything good about your company. This is not an acceptable term for a writer in my mind." I think they all realized it, so they all made changes to their contracts.

You know, since then, I get emails and phone calls from people all the time. About 50% percent of them are thanking me for saving them heartache, and the other 50% say I wish I'd read this earlier because I'm stuck with XYZ and what do I do?

DS: Right and you did mention this is the second edition of the book. Did the first edition come with a PDF version?

ML: The first edition was only a PDF; there was no paperback. Though there was a lot of demand for the paperback, so that was really what facilitated me putting it out in paperback. You have to redo this book every year anyway, so it's worked out really well. I think the paperback version is probably better for the author who's buying the book, but for the guy selling the book it's not as good as selling an e-book. As you know, a non-fiction reference type e-book can sell for much more than the same book as a paperback with no cost. I don't know why that is, but that's the way it is.

DS: It is a fine book and it is easy to read through, and I think it's very handy to jump through it as a paperback book as well. I really enjoy e-books; I like the ability to be able to search through them, too. I was just curious if there might be an e-book version of the second edition.

ML: There is an e-book version, but it's just not available on Amazon. The e-book is only available through the website. People have an option where they can just buy the book, they can buy the book and the e-book, and book marketing tools, and certain discounts on our copyright service that we do for writers, artists, and musicians. So there are different levels that people can choose.

DS: O.K., good. Now, the title of the book is perfect because it tells you exactly what you are going to find in this book. But I wanted to make sure that I made it clear that this really does specifically deal with Print-On-Demand publishers.

ML: It does. It used to deal, in the first edition, with e-book publishers as well.

DS: That were just solely e-book publishers?

ML: That were just solely e-book publishers, yes. But there were so many publishers that were covered that I had to pare this down to have it in some kind of manageable size for the paperback.

DS: Oh, understood.

ML: I really think e-book publishing is waiting for some great e-book reader that looks and feels and smells like a book. Until somebody creates one, when that comes out, e-book publishing will be a lot different. But it's not where people are really going to publish.

DS: Well, they're not comfortable with it still.

ML: Right.

DS: What I thought was interesting, that some of the publishers that you mentioned in the book were kind of concerned that you mentioned that they were "Print-On-Demand" publishers.  Why do you think that is? Why do you think they want to be called "Self-publishers" instead?

ML: Well, I think that there is some bad connotation with "Print-On-Demand". They think it cheapens what the author's doing, or at least that's their perception.  What they didn't like being called was "POD publishers", because POD is associated with some of the shadier characters in this business. But as I mentioned in the book, I'm going to call them "POD publishers" to save space, and I'm trying to make this book as affordable as possible. I'm printing it as a Print-On-Demand book, so they're going to be called a POD publisher, and it's not a very big deal.

I also think that self-publishing has evolved so much and it continues to evolve that this is going to do -- and it is doing -- to the publishing industry what has many parallels to the music industry. These large publishing companies, what they can offer a writer starts to become less and less. If a writer knows how to market their book, then the only thing that they would need a large publishing company for is for some large-scale distribution. Even then -- and I talk to writers everyday and point this out -- even if you got into Barnes & Noble, you're going to be one book in a sea of a million books. I mean, they're not going to put you up in the front when people walk in. So authors spend a lot of time with the idea that they have to get into these bookstores and that's how they're going to sell books, and I don't really agree. I think that's kind of a waste of time. I guess that's kind of off the subject.

DS: Well, no, but it's a good point, and a lot of authors these days do still see that Brick & Mortar as the goal. I think as long as you are out there promoting your book and it's something that readers can get to easily, that's the key: making it available to people.

Now, not only have you listed the most of the prominent POD publishers in the book, you've ranked them into categories. Running from "Outstanding", to "Publishers to Avoid". But in the previous edition, you had them actually numerically ranked, is that right?

ML: That's right, and that became a problem, which is why I switched to this format. Because what was happening, and it was unfair to the publishers, the thing that differentiated a 9.2 from a 9.8 -- and I'm not saying it's totally trivial -- may be that I liked their website better that somebody else's, for example. It's the sort of intangible that comes from me making that judgment and it wasn't fair. The companies began using my ranking as advertising, saying we're the best, and then they started threatening to sue each other, going back and forth, and were copying me on the emails. That's why I decided to put them into broader categories.

DS: Yeah, and it helps make finding them easier, too.

ML: First of all, anybody who changed their contract automatically got into the "Outstanding" category. Anyone who really realizes and accepts that, hey, we have to do things to make ourselves more author-friendly, and they were willing to do it, to me that says a lot. Every one of those companies made it in there. Also, what I tried to do was, of all the big companies - iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford -- all of the real big ones, that people know, iUniverse is the best of that group. Do I think that they are better than some of the other ones in the Outstanding group? No, but if you want all of those frills -- all the bells and whistles, the slick website and all of the advertising, all of that stuff -- they're fine and they're not going to rip you off, and they're going to give you an O.K. product. I tried to put one big one in there, one Christian publisher in there; so I put the best in every category in there and the ones that changed their contracts. What I will say about iUniverse is that they have really improved their author-friendliness.

DS: That was one of the things I really liked that was your "author-friendly ratings" for each of the publishers, too. That really helps explain why you ranked them the way you did.

ML: To me, I think that's a great part of the book if you're choosing a publisher, and if you go through the part where I break down these contracts. Because everybody's contract, the general idea of them are the same. I think I did pretty good job of explaining this in ways that you don't have to have gone to law school to understand what these things mean.

DS: Exactly.

ML: You can look at a contract, and look at what I wrote, and figure out what they're talking about.

DS: Absolutely. Now, while the draw of this book is definitely those ratings that you give, you give a lot of good advice and you do go into some very good detailed explanation about the key parts of the contracts that can be missed when you are going through the fine print. You also spent a good deal of time listing what you consider the nine qualities of a good self-publishing company. That was very helpful as well.

ML: Yeah, I think that's important, and now on the website I have what I call "The Author's Bill of Rights", which anyone can download for free. That kind of takes those nine things and expands on those. When I do the new version of the book, of those things that a good self-publishing company has, those nine things are going to be changed a little bit. Because now I've discovered things that are even more important.

For example, I don't recall off hand if I said as one of the nine things that if you paid to have a cover done and a layout done that you have to own that material. That's in my Author's Bill of Rights, but I don't know if it was in my top nine, but that says a lot about the kind of company that somebody should work with. I mean, if I'm paying for you to do this and I decide to leave you, I should be able to get everything, swap out an ISBN, and take it anywhere else to print that book, because I paid for it. So the notion that I might own the cover art but you own the cover, I find to be insulting. That for sure will be in there. You know I mention a lot about what the print fees are?

DS: Yeah.

ML: The level that these companies mark up the print fees is outrageous, and that I'm actually going to cover in more detail, probably in the next round. What happens with these companies is that they tell the author, well you can buy the book at 40% off of the cover price which sort of implies that is what it costs to print the book. At least in my mind that is what it implies.

They don't tell you that when you are buying it at 40% off of the cover price, they still made 100% profit on the printing or 50% profit on the printing. They don't tell you that on the back end they're taking a royalty for not doing anything. I understand if someone is going to handle your fulfillment and those types of things, they certainly deserve money for that. But just giving you a page on their website that just goes to Amazon, of which they get a cut anyway, they mark up the printing on the front end, taking a royalty on the back end, and the only person making the money is the publisher. You paid them to publish, they're making it up front and on the back, and they're saying you get 75% royalty, but it's 75% of something they jacked up on both ends. So it's not a real number. In the new edition that will be covered in a lot greater detail with some real examples.

DS: Yeah, that was definitely something that stood out as something that I remember. Another important point that I remember, and I don't think it was one of your nine qualities, but it might have ended up as one of your Bill of Rights, was don't pay a dollar, until you can see the contract first.

ML: Oh, absolutely. When I go to a company's website in this industry, if I cannot download that contract easily -- that contract should be on the front page as if to say we have nothing to hide, take a look at what we do. If I can't find that and I can't find what you are going to charge me, and I can't figure out what I'm paying to print the book with you, those are problems to me. I was just on some company's website the other day that was not covered in the book, Dorrance Publishing, and when you go on their website, you can't get anything unless you give them your name and email address and let them send you packets and then you are on their mailing list for the rest of your life. That's not the way it should be. If I'm thinking of spending $1000 or $1500 on somebody, they should be happy to give me their contract; I don't need to be sold on anything until I know what it is that's going to happen when I sign on the dotted line.

I am the person who's buying the book. I am that author. I have fiction out there. THE FINE PRINT is probably not a great example because that has really taken off and it has a larger distribution and it's in the library market. I mean, it's a good example that if you have a good idea and a good concept that you can certainly sell a book. But it's probably not what the average writer is going to go through. So when you are the average writer and you have a World War II novel, it's that person that I feel the most protective of. Who I don't like to see ripped off, and don't want to be suckered into buying junk that is worthless like bookmarks and posters of your book cover. I mean that's all junk; it's worthless. Then they'll send your book out to all these people and market it. They're just sending it out and the thing is going to end up in someone's trashcan.

Anytime I hear from one of them and they tell me that I've saved them, or I get the call before they buy the book and they say "I'm thinking of going with somebody who's in my Publishers To Avoid list," the only thing I say is, "Buy this book and if you don't think it's the best $15 you spent, send it back to me and I'll send you the money back, but I promise you I'll be saving you a lot of heartache."

DS: I definitely think it's a very good investment for any author who's contemplating finding the right self-publisher to go to bat for them, basically.  I mean, they're working for you; you're not working for them. So, I actually had considered, when I was starting looking at contracts, I was considering having a lawyer review some of the contracts to help me understand what was going through them. So I think $15 is definitely worth it for everything you go through, picking apart the contracts and helping to make them very clear. That's my pitch.

ML: I appreciate that.

DS: OK, well, why don't you go ahead and tell me a little bit more about the other services that you do offer on your website. Besides the book, you've got Click & Copyright, and a few other services.

ML: Well, we have a copyright service, and actually, since the book came out, and I do not mention this in the book -- and I never will mention this in the book -- after I wrote this book I realized all of the things that I complained that these companies aren't doing, that they should be doing, that I could be doing. I mean, I published my own book, I've been very successful at it, I know how to market these things.

So, what we did -- my company is not just me and a computer -- we have a staff of ten people, so it's a growing company of about thirty websites. So what I did was I created a self-publishing company that does everything that I say these companies should be doing. So for obvious reasons I couldn't mention it in the book.

DS: That's plugging yourself.

ML: Not only is it plugging myself, but the honest truth is it is better than what any of these other people are doing so there would be no use for the book. The author pays the exact print cost that we pay. There's no markup in print, and there's no royalty on the back end. None. They own all the files. All of the things I say in my Bill of Rights, that's exactly what my company does. The way we can afford to do it is that I don't have sixty or seventy people on staff. I don't have to have these outrageous markups. What we do is make, for under $900 we do everything custom in-house, the layout, and original cover design. There's no templates, none of that. We do it exactly the way we do would do it for my own books.

So anyone who reads THE FINE PRINT and calls me ends up signing up with us because they know that it's everything that I talk about. My whole idea here is that if you are going to publish a book, and you want to market the book, in my opinion there's only one way that works to do this. That is to treat your book like a little e-commerce company. That is the way to have a lot of success.

For example, I just spent all day today with one of our fantasy authors putting together his online advertising campaign. So we build websites for authors that are very optimized, just like THE FINE PRINT one is. So those things will eventually rank high. We then put together online advertising campaigns. I have one person whose whole job it is to be on MySpace and the social networking sites to promote people's books and get a buzz going about them. Those three things together -- an optimized website, an effective online advertising campaign, and generating a buzz with MySpace -- are a much better way to spend money if you want to promote a book than anything any of these other companies could possibly do. Because it's the only way to get your book in front of the people who might want to read it. That's why I don't concentrate about going into bookstores. I mean all that stuff, about going to a book signing and there will be a whole line of people. The only way that's going to happen is if you start promoting your book and you generate enough interest that someday something like that can happen.

Even in my case with my novel, I had a woman about a month ago who found my book on MySpace -- through the person who works for me doing the promotion -- she wrote me and said she loved the book, etc., then she said she was going to get her whole book club to read it. She happened to be local here in town, and then ten people ordered the book in one day. Then I went and spoke to the book club, and when I was there, and then they started buying other copies that they wanted to give away for Christmas and the holidays.

DS: That's how you do it.

ML: That's why this thing works. I just got the new website up for my new novel. I mean it just finally went up, so I've been doing that, driving the right kind of traffic to it. I didn't even have the order page up, but I wanted to see if I could make a dent in the Amazon ranking. So last night was the first night that I had ads up for my novel, and last night I was at about 650,000 on Amazon, when I woke up today I was at 30,000. Now that may not be more than 10 or 15 books, but that's still a nice chunk of books.

DS: Absolutely.

ML: So that's something that I'm really excited about, I believe in it and know that it works. Any author whoever calls me, they can only find us because I only advertise online. I don't advertise in Writer's Digest. The internet is so targeted I don't believe that even if I advertised THE FINE PRINT in Writer's Digest -- and I get asked all the time why I don't -- it's because I have to hope that the person reading Writer's Digest sees my ad, happens to be thinking about self-publishing a book, then from that ad goes immediately to the internet to order the book. If that chain is broken, if they think this is a great idea and they rip this page and come back later, my chance of getting that sale just went down. Because it gets filed in a drawer, they pull it out two weeks later, and they say, aw you know what, forget it. Now look at all of the screenwriters that are reading Writer's Digest, there's all sorts of people reading it, that have no immediate interest in publishing a book, and I have to be in that magazine a whole bunch of times to even have any recognition.

Whereas I can go out and advertise so that when someone searches for AuthorHouse my ad comes up. I know that when somebody types in AuthorHouse there's a bout a 99% chance they are thinking about publishing a book. If they click on that ad, it takes them right to a page on THE FINE PRINT website that says, "Is AuthorHouse the right publisher for you?" So that is a much better way to spend money than putting an ad in even a writing magazine, which is extremely targeted.  So now when you think about it, if you are an author that is doing a western or a romance novel, you have to find creative ways to bring the people to you.

So, this is a new venture for our company, we hired somebody to run it who comes from the traditional book publishing world, so we have a lot of the ins to the book distributors and the book buyers. Her closest friend is a small press buyer at Ingram. So it has given our authors a lot of opportunities and we're able to put together things that make sense. Of course, the great thing about when you have a good website is that every day that thing is online it keeps aging. The more a website ages, it's like wine, it becomes better; it goes higher to the top. Even having a MySpace page set up, once it is set up, it is always working for you.

DS: Right.

ML: If you're not out there actively doing it, people are going to have to fall upon it. But when someone falls upon it, it's there. Those are the things that always work. So all the bookmarks, and book signings were only the people you invite are going to buy the book anyway, all that effort can be put into something where you can continue to market your book for a longer period of time for less money.

So it's something that I'm very excited about and I kind of wish I could talk about in THE FINE PRINT, but I couldn't in anyway that would make that book objective. I sort of see it as, if someone buys THE FINE PRINT and they never even learn about my company, they will have saved themselves the heartache of going with a really bad company, and any company that I say is good in my book is fine and you will get a book and they aren't going to screw you. So that's the only way I can do that and keep doing THE FINE PRINT.

DS: Wow, that's awesome.

ML: I should mention one more thing, my company just bought Published.com, which is a big free directory where writers can go and put their book covers and blurbs about their book online and links to their sales page all for free.

DS: Oh, excellent.

ML: The guy who used to own it was one of the first affiliates of Click & Copyright and we've known each other for years and one thing led to another and I made him an offer to buy it.

DS: Very nice.

ML: That's a free directory and anybody can go there and it's a very high-ranking site, so a link back to your own website is beneficial to the author if they have a website.

DS: Nice. I would like to learn a little bit more about your paperback novels that you have published.

ML: My first one, I did back in 2000 and it came out with a company called Bookbooters. They were one of the first people in this industry, and in fact, back then, they used the print on-demand technology, but nobody charged. I mean this company Bookbooters, they edited my book, and they did everything. I think I only had to pay them a $60 fee or something to cover some kind of cost. These kind of print on-demand publishing things had not really come to the surface yet. Bookbooters eventually became a print on-demand company and then couldn't make it and then went out of business.

But my first novel was a political thriller and the highlight of the whole thing was that Bill Clinton ending up reading the book when he got out of office. He's a big fan of political thrillers and he wrote a great handwritten note that will be on the website and is hanging on the wall behind me right now, where he really got into detail about why he liked it and all the bad guys were Republicans so maybe he was a little biased. It's a very funny note. But that was my first novel.

DS: What is the name of the novel?

ML: I WILL FAITHFULLY EXECUTE, which will be getting a second life up here, as it is on my list of about a million things to do. My second novel, SATURN RETURN, is the one that just was released in July, or spring/summer, and it was the first book that our company did. So I was the actual guinea pig of my own company.

DS: That's the way to do it.

ML: So I didn't go out and seek agents or anything. I know how to sell things online, so there was no reason for me to go out and do that. The website turned out great, the book turned out great, and people have really liked it. It's been selling fairly well. I expect it to sell a little better now that it has a website and I'm getting some advertising for it.  The only thing we were doing was the person working for me was marketing my book on MySpace. That's where all of the sales came from initially. Now that will be a little different, but that website will definitely be a good example for writers to understand when I talk about an "optimized website".

When you look at any of my websites, every page, every word, everything is there for a specific purpose. We build websites around the terms that people are searching for that coincide with my book. So like for instance, the tagline is that it's a novel about who you are, where you're going, and who you're meant to be with. So it's kind of a coming-of-age story and it follows some people in their thirties. There's a lot of dating and relationships. So I have these pages on my site, that say why reading SATURN RETURN is more fun than being on a Match.com date. I have something different for Yahoo! Personals, for another site JDate. I have a page "Fun Martinis to drink while reading the book" and "Songs to listen to when you've been dumped". So, it's a very irreverent site and it's a lot of fun and I needed that to show to a lot of fiction authors who are starting to come in here, because I can't just keep showing them THE FINE PRINT website.

So that's my second book, and I really don't know when there will be another book coming out of me.

DS: I bet you're very busy right now.

ML: I had that one and the second edition of THE FINE PRINT come out at the same time, that and running this company, it felt like I was back in school. Like I would get home and then I would have to start working on the books again.

DS: Right.

ML: I love them, and SATURN RETURN I started writing in '97 so it took a while to get it done. I know what the next book is going to be, I just don't know when it's ever going to be written.

DS: Is it another novel?

ML: It's another novel. I mean, non-fiction is a lot easier to write, I think. Especially a book like THE FINE PRINT. I mean, you're just doing some research, and if you know how to write, and put a thing together, and make it so people can understand it. It's not easy, but writing a novel is a little more difficult, I find. It's more fun, but a little more difficult.

DS: And when is the next edition of THE FINE PRINT coming out?

ML: The great thing about this is that all I have to do is write it, and upload it, and it's ready to go. You know, I don't have to wait. I just need an editor to go through it. I expect it to be maybe in the spring. I mean it's kind of a project where I'm going to have to have someone help me, to contact the companies, compare what I wrote last time to what they are offering now. So I'll probably bring someone in here in about a month or so and have that done, then write it and it'll be done. Then when someone comes to the website, the new version will be out.

DS: Is it going to have more publishers in it, do you think, or just more details?

ML: I don't know if it going to have more, but some of the ones in here will probably fall out. I'm going to spend some time concentrating on some of these companies like Dorrance and Wheatmark that I consider to be more book printers than self-publishing companies. But so many people use those companies and have asked me about them. So those types of companies will probably make it in. I'm also going to spend some time talking about how you can effectively market a book, beyond just signing a contract.

DS: That's just the first step.

ML: I also had the Alexa ratings in the book; I will not have that in there again. Most of their traffic is people looking to publish a book, not the people buying the books. Authors have to understand that you can't just put a book on Amazon and have people find you. The exception is a book like THE FINE PRINT where people are typing in a term like "self-publishing". The book used to be only called "THE FINE PRINT", but I changed the title to "THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING" when it became a paperback and it went on Amazon, because Amazon works like a traditional search engine.

DS: Absolutely.

ML: So I wanted that term to be in the main title of the book. So, a non-fiction book is a little bit different, especially in a niche area like that on Amazon, because people are actually searching for it. My Amazon ranking everyday is somewhere between 9000 and 30,000 which is pretty phenomenal for a book from not a major publisher. A lot of that is because people are searching for that type of a book. So when you type in "self-publishing", my book is #3 or #4 in the list that comes up. But if you have just a regular fiction book, you have to do something else, and a lot of people have no idea what to do.

DS: That's true.

ML: They buy into the "hey, we're going to send this out to all of the reviewers."

DS: That's all well and good, but that's not all of it.

ML: That's all well and good, except at the end of the day, you're going to get nothing out of it.

DS: Well thank you very much Mark, for joining me tonight. I wish you the best of luck with THE FINE PRINT and your other books and all of your projects,

ML: Thanks, Dan.

To find out more about Mark Levine and his book, THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING, visit http://www.book-publishers-compared.com/.
His latest novel, SATURN RETURN, can be found at http://www.Saturn-Return.com.
To find out more about his new Self-publishing company, Mill City Press, visit http://www.millcitypress.net/.

* PROMOS:
- Heaven by Mur Lafferty (Now in Season Two: Hell)
- The Rookie by Scott Sigler
- 7th Son trilogy by J.C. Hutchins (the other J.C.)
- Billibub Baddings by Tee Morris (Coming Valetine's Day 2007!)

* Michelle and I are working on a new website that is sort of a blending of many of the other projects we work on.
- The new site will be The Procrastinators' Guilde.
- Coming soon... or later...

* I don't know if and when we will be back on TalkShoe. I've not given up on them, but I've got to find a way to improve the audio if I am to keep using the service. vEmotion is a great program for sending music out over the phone line. But I've got to have more tests before going live again to make sure the audio level is right.

* I wrapped up the episode with "Play Like Children" by Ethereal.

** HAPPY HOLIDAYS! **

That wraps up another episode of Is This Thing On? Thanks for listening.

This Blog and Podcast are © Copyright 2006 by Dan Shaurette, under the Creative Commons "Attribution, No Derivatives" License. Some Rights Reserved.

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This is Episode #25 for August 14, 2006. Hey, Is This Thing On?
(Download MP3 or listen to the stream)

* My name is Dan Shaurette, welcome to the podcast.
- Michelle is home safe and sound from her trip, even though it was a hell of a time on Thursday.
- She was supposed to come home Thursday, Aug. 10th.
- The same day the U.K. terrorist plot was foiled, planes were grounded, and chaos reigned supreme at Logan Airport.
- We'll talk more about this on the next podcast.

* Music this week is provided by Magnatune Records.
-- We opened with "Erase" by The Kokoon.

John Buckman is the CEO of a record label, but he is definitely not evil. He is the founder and CEO of Magnatune Records, an independent record label that from the beginning embraced the Creative Commons license for the distribution of their music. Now he has a new project: BookMooch.com, a website that hopes to bring book lovers together to exchange their used books.

DS: John, thank you for this opportunity to chat with you tonight.

JB: You're welcome.

DS: While I do want to talk about Magnatune, I want to start out talking about your new project, BookMooch.com. Can you give us a quick rundown of what BookMooch is?

JB: Well, quite simply, it's a community for exchanging used books. So you take books that you've read and that you're not going to read again, and you send them to people who ask you for them. In exchange, you get a point for every book you send out and you can ask anybody else in the network for a book.

DS: Are you the sole developer of this project, or do you have people working with you on it?

JB: I'm the chief bottle-washer and floor cleaner and everything.

DS: All right. The site just went live. What has the response been to the site thus far? What challenges does it bring to you already?

JB: Well, I hit two of my friends up to blog it. I hit Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow up and both of them blogged it. Joi Ito on his and Boing Boing, which was nice. Then MetaFilter picked it up, and that's it so far. So far, in one day, we have had six hundred-and-some people sign up. More importantly, a little over than two hundred people have typed books in. So there's about 2,000 books in one day, which I don't think it is going to keep going at that pace, but I'm real happy with that.

DS: Right, that's a very good first day. There are a good number of other book-centric community sites out there, like LibraryThing, Listal, bibliophile.org, even BookCrossing. There are a few websites that make the exchanging of CDs and DVDs available. But why do you think nothing like BookMooch exists? Why has it not been done before?

JB: Well, the big problem is how to make money from it and it turns out I'm not that interested in making money for it. So that really helps. I just want to do it because I think it's a fun thing to do. A website like lala.com for example, that's an exchange for CDs. The way they make money is you sign up and they charge you a dollar per trade, and you also have to use their mailers which they send to you. So they make money from postage as well.

With books, well you don't know how much a book weighs, so mailers wouldn't work. And I didn't want to charge per trade because I just thought that would be an impediment. People wouldn't want to trade if they are giving me the money. Hell, I'm not even doing anything. They're just trading books directly. So there's a DVD club as well that works the same way with mailers and fees.

I love BookCrossing, the idea behind BookCrossing is that you leave a book somewhere in the real world and leave a message that you've done so and someone should come by and pick it up. Of course, I think that a lot of the time the book just gets thrown out. Which to me is a lot worse. I love the way the site feels. It's a great community and it's really fun. But, God, books getting thrown out -- that's just a bad idea.

LibraryThing is awesome, too. That's where you catalog your books, but they don't really make exchanging books possible.

DS: Right. So, with BookMooch though, you make a catalog of the books that you want to give away. That's all you can do, right? You're not making a catalog of books that you want to say is everything on my bookshelf but only this shelf is what I'm giving away. Everything on BookMooch is "have at it, folks."

JB: At least right now, I'm not going to do what LibraryThing or Amazon does where it knows what you already have but what you don't want to give away, and then makes recommendations. This is really about exchanging books and the reason is that it is a lot of work to type books in and LibraryThing is awesome. I'm not gonna compete with them on features to manage your book catalog. There's also Delicious-Monster, that does a good job of cataloging. So this is a website, it's a community. It's not about an application to manage your personal library.

DS: When did you come up with the idea for this, and was it just that you had a lot of books that you wanted to give away and you didn't have any vehicle before to do it, so you just decided to make it yourself? Is that what happened, and when did you come up with the idea?

JB: So I've been working on this for a year, which is kind of insane. I immediately knew I wanted an illustration. If you go to the site you'll see there's this crazy cartoon on the front. So, it's been a year, and it's been nine months of really active development. Like fifty or sixty hours a week which is a lot of fun when you are working on something new.

But to answer your first question, which is how did I come up with the idea, I was in a little town in the U. K. and there was a community center there that had bookshelves and couches, and it just said "Leave a book, take a book." People were sitting in those couches, pulling books off the shelves and reading them and seeing what was good and taking them home. Once they read them, they brought them back, and it was really working. Of course there were only three or four shelves and only a half-dozen couches. It just occurred to me that sense of community of giving and sharing was something that the internet is really good at, not to mention a much larger catalog.

DS: Right. You have basically created a large library from every member's bookshelves.

JB: Of course it's not a library because you don't have to give the books back. If you've got a book that you read and you liked but you want to get rid of it, someone else takes it and they could just keep it. There were many reasons I made this site. Another one is that, I've read a lot of books and it's a great book, like say The Tipping Point, and it's quoting a lot of interesting stuff, and then I go to the bibliography, and there's twenty other books that he quotes or refers to that looks really interesting. Well I'm not going to buy twenty books from Amazon just to see if I might want to look at them, and I don't have access to a university grade library that will get those books for me.

So I thought, "Hey if I could just mooch them all, then the books of those twenty that I really like, I'll keep those and then I'll give away the rest to somebody else." I also have some friends who are authors and their books are out of print and that's kind of sad. I have other authors who've got boxes of books in their closet that they don't have distributors for, this is a way to get rid of them and get other books. So, generally it just seems to solve a lot of the problems.

DS: Yeah, cool. Have you heard from any authors yet about BookMooch and what the site can do for them?

JB: Well, the suggestion, and I like it is, is that for each trade, if the author has contacted us, that there be a "tip jar" or a tax. My idea was that it might cost you a point to get a book, but if the author shows up and lets me know they exist, I'll give them half a point for every time their book is traded. So that way they would benefit from the used book exchange. Right now when used books are traded the authors don't benefit at all. That would be interesting because thanks to Amazon, there are a lot more small presses and independent writers out there and that would be a way to help them benefit from seeding a community like BookMooch.

DS: Definitely, that is a cool idea. I like that.

JB: I mean, let's say you have you own books and put them out on BookMooch, every time it's traded you earn a little bit more points. That's a good reason to do that.

DS: Well, just so you know, I do have a copy of my book up on there.

JB: I did! I saw that. I saw the Lilith book. What is that all about?

DS: It's a vampire romance novel, modern setting, in Phoenix, Arizona, that I wrote thirteen years ago. I self-published it. I thought it would be a nice idea to try and put it on the list and see if there was any people interested in it or not. It's print-on-demand that I have right now so it will cost me to put copies into BookMooch, so it may not happen a lot. The tip jar idea does sound good for us self-published authors to give that a try. But I'm always open to new avenues to get word out about my book.

JB: Excellent.

DS: So, how does your point system work?

JB: OK, well, more or less it works out that for every book you give away you get one. But, that's more or less, because it turns out that's just kinda doesn't work out really well. Like if you have to send a book out to another country, well that costs you more money. So I give you two points if you have to send it to another country. Also, you need to get points to start out and I want you to type books in. So for every ten books you type in, I give you a point as well. There's a couple other places, too. The idea just generally being that it's a community and since it's completely transparent, you can see every book that you've given and received and people can choose to honor your requests or not I kinda give away points fairly generously to good behavior like typing in books and sending them out.

DS: Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. For the listeners out there, I did list a few books, and I got a book from John. It's Cory Doctorow's excellent book that I've been meaning to read for quite a while, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom. I just got it today, so that was very quick turnaround. I liked the ability when you go into the website and you mark that it was received, you are also able to give a little plus or minus of how you want to rate the person you got the book from. So I was curious about how that will play out, if it does in points or not, if you rate somebody higher or lower. How does it affect them?

JB: Well, the main way that it affects them is that you've got negative points, people are likely to not send you books. So you have the points but you have negative feedback. So you ask for a book and the person absolutely can deny your request, and say "I don't want to send it, you don't look trustworthy." Which is kinda neat. On eBay, if someone bids but they have a shady reputation you still have to accept their bid. I never did like that. That's how that plays out. I don't know. I may do something but I haven't figured it out yet, if you have really good feedback then you should get a point and a half for every book you send out, because you are one of the super-duper people. I don't know, those are things I can play with.

DS: Absolutely. The site is absolutely free for people to put their books online. The requirement is on the person sending the book to make the payment for the shipping. So that's involved, but how does your website, if it's going to at all, to make any money to keep it running?

JB: Well, the main thing I'm trying to do is make a community where it's lots of fun and that's actually why I do it. Because I already ran a company that did well and I sold it, so I don't need to make a living anymore. So, that's the first thing. Secondly, to make a little bit of money just to pay the bandwidth bill and such, on each book there's a link to Amazon which is helpful for example if you want to read user reviews which is often the case, because I just have the book description. I don't have all of the Amazon discussion there. So if you click Amazon, or let's say you have a book on your wish list, and you've been waiting a few months, and the book hasn't appeared yet. So you click the Amazon link, well in those cases I get 5% back from Amazon, for you buying the book from Amazon, and that's fine. It doesn't cost you anything, it doesn't cost anybody anything. It's just kind of a transparent way.

DS: You also make it possible to give books to charity. How does that work?

JB: Well, since it is possible to earn a lot of points, for example I've typed in 250 books, so I've got twenty-five points. Which is a lot of points that I'm not going to use them up. I've worked so far with two charities, and there's also "John's Own Choice", so you can give points, for example to the library pool, and what I do is that when libraries approach me and they'd like to participate in the charity program, I give them an allotment of points, so that they can get books for free. So since public libraries have such a limited book buying budget, it's a good way for them to stretch those dollars a bit and get books that people want to borrow for free.

I also have a thing with a children's hospital, where a charity that works with the children's hospital can get books to the kids in the sick beds that they can read while they are hopefully recovering.

DS: OK, is that a system where they're able to get the books that people have listed, or is it actually money towards those charity organizations?

JB: So, it's just points, they're getting like anybody else.

DS: So that they can go onto BookMooch and then make requests.

JB: That's right.

DS: Very nice. Do you have any thoughts for any other similar systems like this, with CDs and DVDs? Is that rolling around in your brain? Or is that something you do not want to think about right now?

JB: Well, I mean the whole infrastructure system ties into the Amazon database, would work fine with CDs, with DVDs, and also with games. That would work fine. The thing is I have a real passion for books, and also I think "don't bite more than you can chew at once." For DVDs, I'm not sure if it would work or not, because every DVD you want is already at NetFlix. For CDs, well, people tend to pirate CDs, or pirate music. They would rip the CD and then send it off, and I'm not sure I want to be part of that. I'm not sure I want to invite the RIAA's wrath, either.

Also, I've seen a few sites that do that, that are CD exchanges. I have a friend who was running a company that was a NetFlix for video games, and it is still running but it hasn't been a huge success. So I know that the game thing could work, but again people mostly want first-run games. So the used games, the old games, don't get traded much. So it's not as obvious to the other ones. It's something I may do, but it'd be more if people just say, "God, I really like what you did with BookMooch, I love the feel, and the other places don't do what I want.

DS: So, let's talk about Magnatune.com. When did you start your record label and what was the reason behind that?

JB: Well, it's April 2003, so almost three and a half years ago. I started it because my wife had a really bad experience with her record label, and I just saw her not wanting to do music anymore, because the experience was so bad. I just thought, well, if musicians don't get paid and have these terrible experiences with the labels, and the labels can't even get the CDs in stores, then the future for a lot of the second-level genres, not the top-ten stuff, is pretty dubious. Indeed, it's not just classical music that's collapsed from 20% of sales to 2%, in the last twenty years, but also things like Electronica is very hard to find. When you go to your average CD store and they just don't have a very good collection. If it's not on a major label, it doesn't exist. So that was the idea behind Magnatune, to try and figure out some business model where interesting independent music could survive and musicians could get paid.

DS: You actually do a 50/50 split with the artists.

JB: Yeah, it's 50/50 of the revenues. So labels always do their calculations based on profits, which they can control. With Magnatune, the goal was if you pay $8 for a CD, or a download rather, $4 goes to the musician. And on Magnatune, you can choose how much you want to pay for a download, from $5 to $18, and half goes to the musician.

DS: And that is flexible for the purchaser. Do you find that most people are being honest and generous with the payments that they are making?

JB: Well, I mean everyone is honest if they're buying. So, not honest would be just downloading it and saying, "to hell with this, I can get it for free." So, they're already hitting the Buy button, so they're one of the honest people. On average people pay $8.50, and actually in the last year that's traded up from $8.10 to $8.50. So, that's kind of interesting. But, to hit the honesty thing, it turns out that the poorer countries like Mexico are typically paying more like $5, but the richer countries like the U. K. , Switzerland, and even Italy, are up around $10. So that seems pretty honest to me. They're paying what they can afford.

DS: That's true. That's awesome. So, you've also decided to make, at least some of your artists, "Open Source Music". How does that work? How do you make music open source?

JB: Well, if you can convince the artist to release the tracks, that's great, that's hard though. Also the software doesn't really support it. It isn't like source code that is standardized. But what I do is, what people think of as open source, they usually think of the GNU public license, the GPL, and in the media world the corollary to that is the Creative Commons license. All of the music on Magnatune is Creative Commons licensed. Which does allow a lot of open source values like the ability to pass the music on, the ability to make derivative works, the freedom from DRM for copy-protection so you can use it in any way you choose. And in fact, if you go to the Open Source Institute, they have a definition of what is "open source" with ten points, and nine of those points are things that Magnatune does. The one-tenth that I don't do is we don't allow commercial use of the music for free. We ask for a fee in that case because that's a way for musicians to make money, if it's in a TV commercial for example.

DS: Sure. If I may ask, how has the commercial licensing been going for your artists? Have you been finding lots of takers in the advertising and/or movie industry, or anything?

JB: The biggest success has been with independent filmmakers, and about thirty films a month license our music and use it.

DS: Really? Thirty a month?

JB: It's quite a few, and these are typically films under $40,000 budgets, and the film festival license is really cheap; it's $44 at Magnatune. So it's basically the cost of dinner lets you use the music and show your film at a festival. If you are picked up, which means you sell your film for big bucks, then there's an additional fee, and that's a couple thousand dollars, but then you can afford it. So we don't really charge the poor filmmakers much, we just get them onboard and it works out well.

DS: Very nice. So, your tagline for your company is, "We Are Not Evil." What is the evil that you see in the music industry that you are fighting?

JB: Well, there's evil all around. The industry is evil to musicians, it's the record labels themselves actually get a bad deal, and the whole distribution system is evil. I mean the most obvious one is when you buy music and you get copy-protection all over it, and then you have trouble playing your own music or they sue people's grandmothers because they think they are using peer-to-peer software. That's pretty obviously bad behavior and it's not helpful. Not to mention the systematic destruction of musicians' lives. I mean it's a cliché now of the musician not getting paid at all and committing suicide. It just happens so much. So, musicians getting ripped off with bad agreements; not being able to record anywhere else, not getting paid. That's another part, but also record stores like Tower isn't paying any of their bills anymore. They just decided not to pay anybody for any of the CDs. So, big surprise, people are stopping to send them CDs anymore. They've been doing that for a long time for independent labels, it's just that they recently did that to the majors. Which, you know, they're not quite as agreeable to.

So, the system is just lousy, and you know my favorite example is Sony getting sued by the government because they bribed radio stations to play their music.

You know, what's hilarious is, who would wanna have to pay radio stations to play music? It'd be much better if they just played it. So, they get sued, they get fined, by the government, and then what's funny is, they won't let podcasters play their music because that's piracy. Which of course is silly because podcasting is just internet micro-broadcasting.

DS: Right, and it's free advertising.

JB: It's free everything. It's free broadcasting, it's, you know music has to be heard to be sold.

DS: I find a lot of artists and some labels are starting to roll with the idea of making some tracks podsafe. In fact, Hungry Lucy just released a new album that is completely podsafe. Do you think that trend is catching on?

JB: Well, I mean, right below sort of the major indies and the major labels, there's absolutely no commitment to DRM. There's an absolute commitment to internet and internet sharing, and things like MySpace So, it's not so much a trend that's catching on, as much as everybody but sort of the top twenty labels thinks that the whole DRM/anti-podcast/anti-anything is just brain-damaged. And it is just a question of the smaller labels getting around to doing what they think is right on the podcasts. But everyone there is pro-podcast. Well, just get on eMusic and you'll see, you know eMusic is an MP3 subscription service and tons and tons of labels are on it, even though, hey there's no DRM. God, it's MP3s. That's because we know we can make money there.

DS: Right. When you started Magnatune, what was the current state of podcasting then? When did you decide to embrace making your music podsafe?

JB: Well when I started, there was no iTunes. So, there was no podcasting, there was Adam Curry out there maybe trying to make an RSS standard. But, you know because the music was Creative Commons, I thought it was podsafe anyway. But people were unsure about that and also I wanted to make it so that if you had a podcast that had, for example, some banner ads on the website, I wanted to say that was O.K. Which isn't necessarily clear with the Creative Commons license.

DS: That's true. It's kind of questionable on what is a commercial podcast.

JB: And a lot of podcasters are charging, but not making much money. They're trying to create a new business model. Or say it's a big podcast, like NPR. They're non-commercial but they don't think Creative Commons works for them, for whatever reason. So I wanted to create a license that just explicitly said this sort of podcasting is O.K. and in fact I even have a "Commercial But Poor" license so if you are charging but don't make much money, that's O.K., too, as long as you just stick an ad about us at the end of the show.

DS: What does a podcaster have to do if they want to play music from Magnatune?

JB: Well, they have two choices. One is they can just hit the "License" button on Magnatune, and then hit the "Podcast", and then they just agree to the legalese that's there that says how you're going to use it and then they can just download the music. Those are 128k MP3s, and that works fine. But generally I'd rather podcasters have the WAV file so that their podcasts sound as good as possible. So there's an email address there that they can send to and just send a URL of their existing podcast. We'll give the podcaster a dummy credit card number where they can buy all the music on Magnatune at no cost in order to include that stuff in their podcast, and we get dozens of requests every day that I have someone that looks at them and makes sure it's a real podcast to her and off it goes. You'll find plenty of discussion boards there talking about how they use Magnatune music all the time because of that.

[http://magnatune.com/info/podcast]

DS: Do you actively seek new artists, or do they come to you?

JB: Both. We get about 400 CD submissions a month, and then about 2% works out that we love. It isn't a percentage base, it's just based on what we love. And we also go after people, specifically typically friends of musicians who we already know are good. So for example, Drop Trio, which is this groovy jazz band, the organist in that band plays solo music, and does this intense rock thing with Jade Leary, and that's now we got a recommendation there. We found him and that works really well, and generally most of the time good musicians know other good musicians.

DS: Right. How many of the artists come to you with a finished product and do you offer services for those who don't have a CD for you to sell?

JB: Yeah, well I don't actually need a CD. All I need is an FTP upload or some WAV files on your website or MP3 files to listen to. I do need a CD-R in the end that I can duplicate if I accept it. So, you do need to have a complete album and it needs to sound good otherwise I just won't have time to listen to it with the other 400 things that come in. And if something is really just amazing but the production is not all that good we'll occasionally send it to one of the producers that we work with who want to help out and if they like it too they'll talk with the person. We've done that two or three times. But it's got to be something awesome. But it happens.

DS: Cool. What other projects are you working with, besides Magnatune and BookMooch that's keeping you busy? Or is that enough for you?

JB: Yeah, I've gotta take down my sleeping schedule there. Those are the big two things. My wife works on a bunch of things that you can see at RedMood.com. She runs the official site for J. S. Bach, which is the classical composer, as well as a bunch of web sites for some famous authors, like Doris Lessing. Those keep us busy, and I also run a website, that mostly runs on its own now, for the tango musician Astor Piazzolla. That's a lot of fun, and that's basically it. But right now that's stuff that doesn't take much attention. It's really BookMooch and Magnatune is what I focus on.

DS: What is your real involvement with Magnatune Records? I mean did you build the software from the ground up, or do you maintain that still? What is it that you do besides just running it?

JB: Well, I'm a coder, so everything at Magnatune is my programming. I have a graphics person that's a contractor that did the home page. But otherwise I do all of the graphics and layout on both BookMooch and Magnatune. I do a lot of recording engineering, too. So I do record both World and Classical music, and do all the engineering to produce those CDs. But that's only a dozen records a year. But that's a lot of work. So basically, I do most everything at Magnatune except I don't handle tech support, I don't handle the PR-end queries, and podcasting and other queries like that, and all the stuff about musicians getting paid and musician questions. And also the musician web pages gets done by Shannon who works with me. So it's kinda dropped down to mostly coding, planning, new ideas, listening to music.

DS: Hey it sounds like a good thing to me.

JB: It's the fun stuff.

DS: Yeah. So, one last question for you. I saw that you are also, what you would consider yourself an amateur musician?

JB: Yes.

DS: How come your music is not up on Magnatune?

JB: Because it's not good enough, and when there's other people who are just mind-blowing I can't say that mine is that good. So, maybe someday. It's not "John's promotional site." It's a site for really good music.

DS: Fair enough.

JB: Actually, the label that my wife was on, the people who ran it were promoting their own music as well, and that was always featured first, and boy did that anger us. So, I really don't want to do that.

DS: Fair enough. Alright, well thank you very much for your time tonight. Good luck with BookMooch and Magnatune, and whatever else you find time to work on.

JB: Thanks so much, and I hope I'll see you mooching more books from me in the future.

DS: Oh, I probably will. I bet you can guarantee that. So, thank you very much.

JB: Bye-bye.

To find out more about John Buckman, visit Magnatune.com and BookMooch.com, or his blog at http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/.

* We ended the show with, "Order" by The Kokoon, also by Magnatune Records.

That wraps up another episode of Is This Thing On?
Thanks for listening.

Technorati Tags:Podcast, Podsafe Music, The Kokoon, Magnatune, BookMooch, John Buckman

This Blog and PodCast are © Copyright 2006 by Dan Shaurette, under the Creative Commons "Attribution with No Derivatives" License. Some Rights Reserved. 

If you want to join us on the podcast, send a message to me on Skype at IsThisThingOnPodcast. If you have any comments about this podcast, feel free to drop a note at shaurette.net/podmail. Or, if you'd rather leave us some voice mail, you can call us at 1-206-350-7638 that's (206) 350-SNET. Music for this podcast was provided by Magnatune.com. The theme music came from the royalty-free collection at http://www.musicloops.com

I had the pleasure of interviewing Evo Terra of podiobooks.com and dragonpage.com, among others. Most recently he wrote PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES with Tee Morris. Click here to listen to or read the interview.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of "Is This Thing On?"

(Download MP3 or listen to the stream)



* On my last podcast, I talked a bit about podiobooks.com and how I'm planning to make a podiobook out of my novel.

- I also mentioned that I'd love to interview its founder, Evo Terra, on our podcast.

- Well he left me a kind note on the blog with some tips and let me know he'd be happy to join me on the cast!

- So, I'm happy to announce this podcast features that interview with him.



* Evo was in a band here in Phoenix a few years back called Serpent of Eve.

- It turns out that they just made some of their tunes available on the Podsafe Music Network.

- There were so many different styles of music, I had a hard time picking two for the show. But I think I chose two cool ones.



* The first song I played was a funky song called "Ride" by Serpent of Eve.



DS: Thank you very much for finding the time in your busy schedule to talk with me tonight.



ET: Yeah, you know my wife and I were just talking about time earlier. She said she wanted to go and find time to join an athletic club. I had to explain to her, "Honey, you don't make time. There's an exact amount of time between the time you get up and the time you go to bed. There's no more. Unless you can orbit the earth really quickly and somehow slow it down for you. It doesn't work that way. You can't do it, you just have to move other stuff out of the way." So, I'm happy to do it for you.



DS: Thank you very much. So I wanted to quickly run through some of your credits that at least I know of to get this started. You're the co-host of three different podcasts. Slice of Sci-Fi, Dragon Page Cover-to-Cover and Wingin' It. You are also the co-creator of Podiobooks.com. If that wasn't enough, you teamed up with Tee Morris, also from Podiobooks, to create a wonderful book called PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES, which was just released in November of 2005, right.



ET: That is correct.



DS: How many other projects are you working on and are they all podcasting-related? Or do you actually have time for other things?



ET: Oh well, believe it or not, you have to make time for other things as well. Oh, now I said it. "Make time." There's actually one podcast you didn't mention; that's my CultCast.



DS: Oh, you know I just found that one, too. So forgive me for that. That's your herbal 'cast, right?



ET: Well, no, that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I am a practicing herbalist. I am an herbalist, and I still say practicing because I have a handful of clients. But realistically, there is a lot more time I'd like to spend being an herbalist than I actually can. That's obviously not where the universe wants me to be right now.



So, no the CultCast, while it's housed on my herbal website right now has nothing to do with herbalism. It's really all about my philosophies on life, and they're fairly heavy. We try to divorce them from the sci-fi stuff. Lots of people said, "Oh I can't wait to see what a sci-fi geek's outlook on life is."



I gotta tell ya, it's not a sci-fi geek's outlook on life is. I'm not really that much of a sci-fi geek. I enjoy it, and I have a lot of fun doing the shows, but here's a chance for me to really, you know, speak some honest-to-goodness what I consider "truth" about the way the world works and how screwed up things tend to be sometimes.



It's interesting. I put a show out once every three to four weeks and it's not my main focus. When something strikes me as "I must speak about this now" I sit down, crank out a five-minute essay, and sit down and record it and push it out.



DS: Cool. I'll definitely have to add that one to my list then.



ET: Well, yes it is different than everything else that I do. That's for sure, so. But, yeah, I do tend to stay rather busy because outside of all of those things, I've got a full time job, I have a family, I've got a son who plays hockey 100 miles away. So, yeah, there's rarely a time when I'm not sitting in front of a computer doing something. But I'm always thinking about podcasting and what's the next thing we can do with that. That's really struck my fancy the most of anything in a long time.



DS: OK, so when did you start podcasting?



ET: Well, officially, we started podcasting on October 14, 2004. My partner, Michael R. Mennega, had sent me an email about this new thing called podcasting on October the 12th. Two days later I finally looked at his email and said, "Heck, we can do this." We were already doing our show, as an internet radio show -- The Dragon Page Cover to Cover - which was on internet radio as well as several terrestrial radio stations around the country and most of them, if not all, were taking our show on MP3.



We already had it up on a secured area. I had an RSS feed, because I'm using a blog to maintain this site. So, I had those two things. All I had to do was figure out how to somehow magically stick the MP3 file inside of there. I was using MovableType, and there's a great plug-in called MTenclosures, and literally it took me two days to do it but realistically it took about half an hour to get it ready.



So, we were podcasting out of the gate. But, we were cheating right, because we already had all of the heavy lifting done. It was just a matter of me making one connection between two points and we were there.



DS: That's sort of what happened with podcasting in general though, isn't it? It was sort of a "Hey, we can do this, and we have that, so if we just do this here, and Boom!"



ET: Oh, exactly.



DS: A whole media just sprang up out of nowhere.



ET: Well, there were a lot of nay-sayers out there, and you can still find them, about podcasting. You know, the big complaint they say is that podcasting is nothing new. You're right, this is nothing new.



People have been putting audio files, either as we were doing with our show, or as an audio blog, for a really long time. RSS is nothing new. Dave Winer, if you can believe that Dave did it, which I actually do, made the Enclosure plug-in work to help things out. Adam Curry, of all odd people wrote the first script that somehow sucked it out and moved it around for you automatically. It's just bringing together pieces. So you're exactly right.



The forerunners of podcasting, those of us who from July to say November, we were all using other pieces and are sticking them together in new and exciting ways. So yeah, it wasn't a lot of work to do. It was just, "Gee, I wonder who will listen to me this way now."



DS: Right. I think it also owes a lot to iPods becoming a household name. But, you don't need an iPod to listen to them. But it was because of portable media players I think also played a big part in once people were able to audioblog and get the enclosures and download it automatically. Putting it onto a media and taking it and going.. that was it.



ET: You're exactly right. Untethering from the computer was really the key. Because, while there is still a significant portion of people who will listen to podcasts on their computer, that's not the way it was intended.



The intention here was for you to get it whenever it happens to come down, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're not using your computer, and for you to move it to your portable player of choice so that you can take it with you. You know, it's "to-go" type of information.



There's no doubt that the success of the iPod really fueled that. Although it's funny that you mentioned that you don't need to have an iPod to listen to podcasting and you're exactly right. Inside the book PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES, I make that statement over and over again, and even go so far as to say, "I don't even own an iPod." But I will tell you a story.



I didn't own an iPod for a long time. As soon as I got a copy of PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES actually in print, in my hand -- not an advanced copy, but the real ones out of the stores -- I went down 30 minutes later and bought an iPod. So there. I didn't want to lie in the book. So if you were one of the first people to buy the book as soon as it went on the shelf, it was true then. It's not true anymore. I now own an iPod.



DS: And what do you listen to on your iPod? If I may ask?



ET: Oh my god. Well, I'm one of those crazy obsessive people that once he finds something that he really enjoys, goes to town with it. So, at last check there were 65 different podcasts that I'm listening to at any given time.



DS: Sixty-five... but you have the time on your commute to listen to them.



ET: Well, that's true, that's probably the best way to do it. You know, I live 105 miles away from the studio, and so that's an hour and a half there, and an hour and a half back, at least once a week. My son plays hockey as I mentioned, so I've got an hour drive to take him to hockey and an hour drive back, that's at least two times a week. Then I've got the two hours that I'm sitting there watching him practice to listen. So I have a lot of time to listen. So yeah, I can consume those 65.



Although I gotta tell ya, I just came back from being gone ten days in Belize and being gone for like four days for a hockey tournament at where my mom was out so I was kinda not very nice of me to sit and listen to podcast while she was out. So I just got caught up yesterday from about 20 days back, it was crazy. My iPod had about 120 different episodes in it.



But you asked me what I'm listening to you right now, Not as much science fiction as people might think. People, I think, tend to assume I listen to a lot of sci-fi shows, but I don't. For the sci-fi shows out there, I do listen to "Escape Pod" and love it, love what Steve Eley is doing with it. I had a lot of fun doing a couple of readings for his show, that's a lot of fun. I've been listening to Mur Lafferty's "Geek-Fu Action Grip" since day one. She's a great person and a great friend, you know she contributes to our show now. I listen to Paul S. Jenkins' "The Rev-Up Review" out of the U.K. And I listen to Daniel Emery's "Brief Glimpses of Somewhere Else". And that's about it for science fiction shows. A few others here and there when I get a chance, and of course the various podiobooks that are on there.



But I try to broaden my horizon with the podcasting world. I've been listening to Dan Klass' "The Bitterest Pill" for a long time, love what Dan does. He's since turned me on to a variety of other people such as Lance Anderson's "The Verge of the Fringe". Cush, "Things I Say", So I try and really get an understanding of what's going on in the podcast world, the "podosphere" we call it. It's really become so difficult to talk about all of them. So, I just posted them. If you go to dragonpage.com and click on the "About" link and click on my picture, you can see every podcast I'm currently listening to. I just updated it a week ago. About every three months somebody sends me a note saying, "Hey, those haven't changed in a while," so I put new ones up there. But those are the ones I listen to regularly. You can find out there.



DS: Very cool. All right. OK, so when did you meet Tee Morris and were you helping him with his novel, and that's what made podiobooks? Or how did that work out?



ET: Yeah, Tee Morris was one of the first guests we had on the Dragon Page Cover-to-Cover in early 2002. He sent us a copy of his book, MOREVI, and I loved it. So we kind of developed a friendship over the years. In November of 2004, he contacted me and said his agent for non-fictional work had contacted him and said there was an opportunity to write a podcasting book and would he be interested. So he immediately called me and said, "Hey, you're the guy that's having me podcast my book MOREVI, maybe you should help me with that."



"Yeah, I should help you with that Tee, since you don't understand the technical side of the thing. You're gonna need some help." So I said, "Sure, we could probably put a 120-page book together."



He talked to his agent and his agent said, "It's a 360-page book." I said, "You're kidding! 360 pages for me to say: Record it, post it up on a web server and link your RSS feed to it. There's no way we can do that."



So, then he said, "It's a For Dummies book." I said, "Crap. I can't say no now."



DS: Yeah, you gotta do that.



ET: So, yeah, how do you say no to that kind of deal? That's a real book. So that's how we got together writing together. But yes, I was helping him podcast his novel, MOREVI. I approached him back in October and said, "There's this new thing we are doing called podcasting. I think you should be involved somehow. I'm not sure. What do you think?"



Well he was going to release his second book in that series come July of 2005 and he talked to his publisher and got permission to go ahead and release every chapter of that book in serialized form in a podcast up until the release date.



Right after he and I had started chatting, I called up another guy, Mark Jeffrey, who I'd also spoken with about the idea, and said, "You're gonna do you book too that way." I didn't even give him a choice.



Scott Sigler contacted me and said, "Hey I'm gonna do this new thing called a podcast for my book," and I said, "that's not new, I'm already doing it, but I'm happy to include you as well." So we stuck him in the mix.



So, for the longest time it was those three, then we found out about a guy named Paul Story doing a book called TOM CORVEN. So they were the first four. Since that time, I'm not sure how many there are out there right now. I know we've got 20 different podcast books up at podiobooks.com right now. There's probably an equal number of those out there that are doing it solo projects for now.



DS: Right, and that's how Scott Sigler started. He was doing it on his own, and was the first if I'm not mistaken.



ET: Well, there were three different firsts. Since I am the one who created the word "podiobooks", by God, I get to say who was first.



DS: Well, there you go. Please.



ET: Yeah, I'll set the record straight, because I actually have the timeline on all of these books. Scott Sigler had the very first "podcast only" novel. You couldn't get EARTHCORE in print form. The only way you could get this book was via podcast. Now it was previously written. It was ready to be published before 2001. But for a variety of reasons it never happened. The imprint he was with fell apart.



Second, another first is Tee Morris. Now Tee Morris had the official very first podcast novel. He had an MP3 file attached to an RSS feed via enclosure before anybody else. Not long before but close enough to before everybody else. So the first ever podcast novel was Tee.



And then we have TOM CORVEN which was written by Paul Story over in Scotland. His was the first novel written exclusively for a podcast. His book wasn't written. He was writing it as he was going along. Every three or four days, he would write a chapter. Sit down, record it, and release it.



So three different firsts, and they all happened in a three-week period.



DS: Wow, well that's the wonderful thing about this medium. It has just been this explosion of ideas, and people are having the same ideas. You know, we can do this. Now, was Paul Story also doing his as a "blook" - as a blogged book? Or just as a podcast?



ET: Strictly as a podcast. You know, I am embarrassed to say this. I heard the term "blook" for the first time two weeks ago. I mean, here I am the guy who was doing an internet radio show all about science fiction books, and the guy behind podiobooks and I'd never heard of blooks before. Sorry, I kinda skipped that. Yeah, those are cool, too, but no Paul's book, TOM CORVEN, was only available as a podcast.



DS: Wow, cool. How is podiobooks doing right now? I mean you said you've got about 20 books up there right now. Are you actively pursuing more authors? Are more authors coming to you? How's it going so far?



ET: Well, it's going really well. We put the site up in a beta form, kind of an official beta, on the first of October of last year. I think we launched with, I don't know, about five or six different titles. Since that time, we went out of beta last weekend, or weekend before last, I forget when it was, with an all-new site design. Everything works well, and with 20 different titles on top of it. Really excited. We're adding, as of last count, almost 100 new members a day. That's really cool, and they're subscribing to three to four books each on average.



That's the cool thing about podiobooks, you know. It's hard to read, unless you're a crazy person like me, more than one book at a time. But it's easy to listen to more that one podiobook at a time. You know, the way we designed that system is each feed is unique to each individual. So, even if you are on chapter 17, and you are the author, and somebody comes in next week, they don't have to catch up 1 to 16. They get chapter one. And it comes down to them every week, if that's the way they set it.



So on a Monday, they could subscribe to MOREVI, and on a Tuesday they could come back and subscribe to EARTHCORE. On Wednesday they could come back and subscribe to AMBER PAGE. That's three books, three days, stretched out. And you can easily listen to them one chapter at a time that way.



So, you'd asked the question, are we going out and getting more authors? Yes. At last count 60 different people are in various stages of developing their book right now. Some of them are in the real early stages. Some of them are in the process of recording chapters. So there are 60 different authors last I checked, that are in the process of recording a podiobook.



Some of them -- most of them have actually came to us and said, "I want to put out a book, you guys seem to be the place." A few of them, we went out and cultivated and said, "You're already doing this, you should come over here since I'm not charging you anything and we've already got the audience base."



DS: Right, and there you go. There's bound to be a lot of authors like me that think, "This is really cool, I would like to do this, too." What advice do you have for authors like me who, we've got a book, what do we do now, if we wanted to make a podiobook out of it?



ET: Well, you're ahead of the curve. A lot of the people who talk to us want a book -- and a podiobook. So, my first advice to you is, you need a book first. It worked for Paul Story, actually writing his book as he goes.



But, I've been involved in the publishing industry long enough to realize that first drafts -- 99 times out of 100 -- suck. You're not ready to podcast your first draft. Write your book. Edit your book. Editors by the way, don't have the same last name as you. It needs to be someone different than your mother.



Once your book is solid, assuming you are starting with a book that is as tight as you can make it, then what are your next things to do. First thing you want to do is go listen to some other folks that are doing it because there a lot of right ways. A lot of different right ways to do a podiobook. And find your particular style. You know, some people use music all the way throughout. Some people have a very heavy, engaging first couple of minutes before they get into their book and they do it almost "Battlestar Galactica" style. With "Previously on..." and then "Next Week". Which is how Scott Sigler did it.



DS: Yes, I was just going to say EARTHCORE does that.



ET: Yes, Scott did that. I mean he said, "this is watt 24 does, this is what Battlestar does, this is what people are used to by god, I'm gonna do it that way." Scott's a media-whore, so he's gonna do what it takes to get it there. But everybody's different. Some people like Jack Mangan who did SPHERICAL TOMI. You know Jack's deadpan. I mean the boy seems to have no emotions coming out of his mouth. That's an OK delivery style. The nice thing about podiobooks are that it is different than an audio book.



When I listen to an audio book I want professional sounding voice actors giving it to me. That's because of what we've been trained to expect.



DS: Well, and you are also paying $40 for an audio book.



ET: No doubt, but with a podiobook, I want to hear it from the author. In the author's voice. I don't want someone else to do it for him, or her. I would actually prefer to listen to it in that voice, because I get a much better connection to that story by listening to the guy who wrote it. As opposed to some actor that was paid $500 a minute to try and read it.



So, back to the advice I'd give somebody: invest in a good quality microphone. That's probably the single best piece of advice I can give you.



Your editing software is immaterial. You're not going to do that much with it. Audacity and GarageBand are two free products, well sort of free for GarageBand if you've got a Mac, are perfectly fine. Use Audacity, it's going to do everything you want it to do.



Spend some time navigating through one of the podsafe music directories to find the music that fits your book. Contact that artist and say, "I want to use this, are you OK with it?" You already have the rights to do it, but it's still nice to do that. That's all you've got to do.



Get a good microphone, get some good background music with it, and put your heart and your soul into it. Take your time. Don't rush. Podiobooks aren't going anywhere. We'll be around until you get it right.



DS: Cool, and that brings me to your first point: a good quality microphone. I'm still using an old-fashioned Radio Shack headset microphone plugged into my PC. But I've heard a lot of people saying that the USB microphones are better. Just for going that way, would you suggest that, or would you say you really need a studio-quality decent microphone.



ET: Well, it really depends on what else you want to do with that. There are plenty of people that are recording their podiobooks on, like me I've got a $60 Plantronics USB headset that I'm talking to you on. You can do it with that. I would not personally. The lowest microphone I would use personally if I was going to record these books, I've got a Shure SM-58 sitting right next to me. That's what I do all of my recording on solo. Now when I go to the studio with Mike, he's got $700 AKG blah-blah I don't even know what they are, that we do it with. If you are going to do it right, get a good quality studio condenser mic preferably, I would say. Although I'm really not the person to talk to talk tech on microphones with.



I don't know that I'd go with a USB mic. I might go with a USB interface that can plug in a regular microphone into that with a nice XLR jack or 1/4" plug. The USB mics I've heard people say that there are some really high-quality ones and I'm gonna go to the store and research some of those over the weekend. Because I'd like to be able to just plug in straight to my computer and not plug in the Shure SM-58 in the MotuTraveler who goes into all that other stuff.



But the thing about a microphone that every one should know is go try them out. Just because I use microphone A doesn't mean your voice is right for that same microphone. You might be able to get off with a much cheaper microphone, so go spend some time testing them all out. Got to Guitar Centers, they've got a thousand different microphones there. Tell the guy behind the counter you're not buying today you just want to check them out. Put some headphones on and see how your voice sounds and the one that makes your voice sound the best, buy it.



DS: Cool, great advice. Thank you very much. So, let's see. Besides working on PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES, what else have you written?



ET: Well, my first official written opportunity also came from Mr. Tee Morris. Trying to think exactly when this was. it was either 2003 or 2004, he was putting together an anthology if you will, I guess not an anthology, but it was called THE FANTASY WRITERS' COMPANION. A year or so before he had contributed to a book called THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING FANTASY. So this was the sequel to that, which kinda struck me as odd. If it was complete, why would you need a sequel? So we kinda joked about the name. For the longest time we were going to call it BRIDE OF THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING FANTASY, RETURN OF..., etc.



In the end they decided to call it THE FANTASY WRITERS' COMPANION. Tee had sent me an email and said that he would like for me to contribute a chapter to the book. Which was kinda funny because for those people out there who listen to my shows that I do, I don't like fantasy. I'm a reader of hard science fiction and bizarre stuff. Fantasy has never really lifted my flag, to say it's not my thing, so, as he asked me to write this I wasn't sure what to do.



We were going through my background and he said, "Maybe you could do something with herbalism." Which also struck me as kind of odd, but as I realized it, most fantasy books are written in 500-year old, some sort of medieval setting, at least where there's not modern-day technology. Herbal medicine is plant-based medicine. You go pick something, you do something with it, and you get medicine out of it. But so many books and movies, like LORD OF THE RINGS, for example, get it wrong. That's not the way things actually happen. Or they have it to where, oh, this person has broken his leg, quick, we have to go rush and find a healer 17 villages away. You know, 500 years ago, people could take care of just about anything on their own.



So, I decided to write that. So I wrote a book on how to make herbal medicine work in your fantasy world, and it was a lot of fun. I got to help you make up names for your plants and I used real-world stuff. You know, how plants got their names, through folklore, through legend, and what they did. A lot of the plants out there have healing names with them. So that was the first thing I sat down to write professionally. You know things I got paid for, and I found it to be a blast.



I struggled with it for about a week, and then I crumpled the page up and threw it away, and six days later I was done with my entire chapter. So I thought, wow, this actually works out for me. So then I set out to write the great American novel. And that's never gonna go anywhere. I have no gift for plot. Not my thing. And I genuinely didn't enjoy it. So I thought, OK, that was weird. Then I got the chance to write PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES, and I loved every second of it. So I realized, I'm a non-fiction author. That's what I'm supposed to do. Now I'll do some more with that. What? I don't know. I've got a couple things in the works. I've got some feelers out there that I've been talking to some people about. So we'll see, because I enjoyed that.



DS: Very cool, I loved the bio for you in PODCASTING FOR DUMMIES. Let's see if I can get this right.



"Evo is the poster child for Type A personalities the world over. Washed-up musician, tree-hugging herbalist, heretical-but-ordained minister, talk-radio personality, advertising executive and technology innovator, all wrapped up in one single-serving package."



I want to talk about each of these really quick. "Washed-up musician." Tell us about when you started playing guitar, or bass excuse me, and what happened with that?



ET: Well, it's a funny story how I got to playing. I was working in California, with a bunch of guys in a large company, and the vice-president of the area I worked for had come to me and said, "You used to play music when you were in high school, didn't you?" I was 25 or do and said, "Sure I did." So he said, "I'm thinking about gonna get together a band, are you interested?" I said I'd love to.



So three months later, he contacts me again. He rattled off the people who were gonna play, and he said, "I got this guy named Ron who's gonna play the drums." And I said, "Wait a minute, I play drums." And, he said, "I thought you played bass guitar." My response was, "I guess I do now." So I went out and bought a bass guitar. I used to play six-string guitar when I was much younger, and grew bored and frustrated with trying to place four fingers at a time. I could play single notes really well, but you know chords were beyond me. Bass guitar, ooh, one-finger chords. I'm in. So I picked it up and for like three years we were together doing cover tunes and whatever.



I got to Phoenix, and I met a really talented guy named Don Cross, who is just a musician -- it doesn't matter what it is, Don plays and wants to do something with it. Whether it's guitar, whether it's drums, whether it's the trumpet, whatever. Don's always had something going. He and I hooked up through some weird connections and we just synched-up together really well.



We formed a band called Serpent of Eve along with another guy named Dave Gonzales. We were just strictly a studio band at the time. We did two or three different albums of all of our original music. That was a lot of fun. But then we lost Dave, he had to pursue a career of driving a beer truck.



DS: Poor guy.



ET: Yeah, so we lost him. So I teamed up with Don as well with these really cool, interesting, innovative people that were forming a band called Spaz Kitty. That was a Ska Punk band. I loved the music although I had never played Ska before. So again I took home tons of CDs and had to learn how to play that funky rhythm. Being a drummer and a bass player, rhythm's not really a problem for me.



We were together for about a year and a half. We did a lot of gigs here in and around the Phoenix valley. In fact the band's still together. Don and I both left the band for a variety of reasons. One was the fact that I was moving 100 miles away. Plus I wanted to focus a lot more on the radio stuff that I was doing.



So they're still playing, but that was a lot of fun. My favorite memories of the band was that we did a cover song, and I really don't like playing cover tunes. I told the band that, so they wanted to do a cover of "Sedated", and I agreed to it. But only if we did it "Country-style". That's still my favorite song.



DS: I would love to hear that.



ET: You know what, Brian Ibbott from Coverville has a copy of it. So email him and tell him you want him to play that song on there. "Sedated" by Spaz Kitty.



DS: Cool, so you're also an herbalist. Now are you still practicing up in Cottonwood?



ET: Yes I do. I have a handful of clients, not many. I graduated from the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, their Herbal program in, I believe it was 2000. I'd been studying since 1997 kind of on my own, but reached a point to where I was as far as I could get. I needed somebody with more knowledge than me to take it further.



So I met a really cool lady who'd been a practicing herbalist for thirty-some-odd years that was teaching and advanced course in herbalism. So I studied under her. Her name is JoAnn Sanchez. A really talented, wonderful lady, who taught me amazing things.



So, after that I moved to Cottonwood, and grabbed a handful of clients. My specialty is the natural healing plants of this area. I like to use things that are local to where somebody happens to be. That's one of my specialties.



The other is dealing with people like me -- Type-A personalities -- that have way too much going on in their lives that really don't want to change and live the monastic lifestyle but need some things to help calm them down. So I do a mixture of herbs and also just some stress-reduction techniques, to help people like me deal with the world.



DS: Cool, OK, next one: "Ordained Minister."



ET: Yeah, believe it or not, I'm an ordained minister, I have actually performed three weddings and I have another one scheduled for March. Kind of a funny story. Some very close fiends of my wife a I got married over 2000 and they invited us to fly out to California to be with them in their wedding, and their wedding was in some guy's house. It was just them and this guy.



I said, "This is kind of cool, what's this all about?" So I talked with him and he became an ordained minister because he had some friends that wanted to get married and didn't really want to have all of the church stuff thrown on top of them.



In most states all you need to do is be recognized by an organized religion. So there's a group out there called the Universal Life Church. If you'd like to be an ordained minister, you can go to UniversalLife.org (or ulc.org) you fill out a web form and they send you a piece of paper in the mail that says you are now an ordained minister.



So while I wouldn't ever presume to stand up and you know preach a sermon or give someone the Last Rites, cause I'm not that kind of ordained minister, I definitely am able to perform ceremonies such as marriages within the letter of the law at least in Arizona and many other states.



DS: I was just going to ask you because, I too am an ordained minister through the ULC. I've performed one ceremony, and that was here in Maricopa County, in Glendale. But I wanted to know if it was different in Yavapai County up there.



ET: All of mine also have been done in Maricopa, I haven't done Yavapai yet, but I assume it's the same.



DS: Don't assume, but I bet it is.



ET: Yeah, well, that's the great thing about it. As the minister of the ceremony, I make it all up to them. Go get your paperwork, give it to me, I'll sign it, you mail it back. You're more responsible than I am.



DS: Well, a friend of mine just performed one in Colorado, and apparently there in Colorado, it's extremely simple. You don't even need an ordained minister. One person says "Do you?" The other person says, "Yes." They say, "Do you?" The other person says "Yes." You're married. It's that simple.



ET: That's awesome.



DS: Yes, you have to have a license, but you don't need a minister (or a Justice of the Peace). Anybody can perform the ceremony. That is what I wish it was everywhere. But, where it isn't like that, the ULC makes it easier.



ET: They make people like you and I who really get a kick out of doing it. That's the whole reason for doing it. You know, when my wife and I got married, we got married at 20 years old. We lived in Oklahoma at the time. Not because she was pregnant, mine son was born when I was 23, do your math. But in the state of Oklahoma, in order for a woman can get married in the state of Oklahoma, if she is 18 or older. A male in Oklahoma has to be 21 or older, unless he gets his parents' permission. That just struck me as the most bizarre thing on the planet. I need my mommy's permission to get married and I'm 20 years old. I'm living on my own, no. Not that my mother wouldn't have given us permission, but we didn't want to go that route.



So we drove to Texas and got married. Our plan was to go to a Justice of the Peace to perform the ceremony. But my wife kind of got sentimental there towards the end and said she'd really like to have a minister do it. So we found a really nice guy down on South Padre Island, Texas. A little place called Chapel By The Sea, and it really was. He had sliding windows that he opened up and there was the ocean in front of there. It was my wife and I and the minister and we got married. He talked to us for like twenty minutes beforehand and said, "OK, come on, let's do this thing." It was beautiful, it was a great ceremony. That's the kind of minister that I'd like to be to help these people do that.



So, when my friends got married years ago, now years later, this is something that I've gotta do to help people do this. You know, release the stress. Because getting married is stressful. Especially, from what I understand, for women. I didn't really feel that much stress. But womenfolk tend to feel a little more. So, I hope to relieve some of that.



DS: There you go. Awesome. So, let's see. We already know about the "talk-radio personality". "Advertising executive and technology innovator". Well "technology innovator" we know about podiobooks.com.



ET: Right, well and my prior life before that. I worked inside of e-business. I led a multi-million dollar revenue-generating products for years before I decide to get out of that and go into consulting. So, in consulting, I'm now doing online advertising. I work with a firm out of New York City and place somewhere in the neighborhood of $20-25 Million worth of ads on behalf of our clients every year.



DS: Wow.



ET: It's a job.



DS: It's a job...



ET: It pays the bills. There are definitely some challenges and some things that are quite interesting. But when it all boils down to it, I'd rather just be podcasting all day long.



DS: Yeah, so I guess that really brings you to one last thing. That is, how many people do you think are really making money out of podcasting? Is that something that you think is going to change in the future or do you think, hey we should do this to do what we love and if we make a buck or two, that's cool.



ET: Well, you know, I'd love to have the Dave Slusher attitude, which is the latter one. You know, do what you love and if you can make a buck or two, that is cool. And in fact that is still the approach I take every single day. But I do see some opportunities coming. For people to afford to podcast full-time. You know, I would have said "quit your day job", but that's been patented now or trademarked, and I don't know if I can say that without giving Adam and Ron some money. So, it is possible. But, where I think you're going to find the biggest thing happening is not necessarily with people who just wanna sit in front of a microphone and talk all day long. You know we have a medium for that, it's called radio. Podcasting needs to be something different.



DS: Right.



ET: So, your message has to be different. But you also have to think about what is revenue-generating opportunities that takes to podcasting. There are a lot of folks that I think will have, in 2006, that will find significant sums of income from production work. Actually helping people make podcasts, helping organizations and companies get into podcasting. There's a huge opportunity for that. I think there's a great chance also for people to get involved in the educational system. That is a great untapped market.



DS: Oh, absolutely. I would love to see, and I think I had heard either you talking about it, or maybe you'd written about it, about seeing podiobooks become something that you could see text books making it's way to.



ET: No doubt. Any sort of information, that is sequential in nature, and needs to be started from one, and unique to that particular person. Needs to be put out in podcast form. Probably the way we are doing it with podiobooks. With our "EachCaster" feed, that goes out for you. But those are the true opportunities.



Can you make money, by sitting together, you and your spouse, in a farmhouse in Wisconsin podcasting? Yeah. You can. How many people can do that, becomes the big question.



Those people that will find a way to derive real income from podcasting will make sure it is in the spirit of podcasting, which is the first thing you said, you know, do what you love. That's gotta be a big part of it. But, do something innovative.



Find a new direction for this. As we said before, there's nothing new inside of podcasting. But we can take this avenue of distributed audio and video content (I even call video podcasters, "Podcasts") a new direction. That's where the money's gonna come.



So, one show a week where you sit down for thirty minutes and do it, of course you're not gonna make any money off of it. That's ludicrous to think that's gonna happen to anybody. But maybe you help 15 different podcasters produce some stuff. Maybe you work with an organization to help them figure out this new distribution method. There will be opportunities that present themselves, I guarantee it.



DS: All right. Well, thank you very much for sitting with me and making the time to chat.



ET: You're welcome.



DS: I'm looking forward to listening to more of The Dragon Page, and Slice of Sci-Fi. Say Hi to everybody over there at the Draco Vista Studios.



ET: I will definitely do that, Dan. We look forward to seeing your book on Podiobooks.com before too long.



DS: Yes, well thank you very much. Take care.



ET: You're very welcome.



* I wrapped up the show by playing "Astray" by Serpent of Eve.



If you want to join us on our podcast, Skype me at IsThisThingOnPodcast.

- We don't have a scheduled time yet, but watch the status on Skype of IsThisThingOnPodcast.



If you have any comments about this podcast, feel free to drop a note at shaurette.net/podmail. Thanks for visiting.



This Blog and PodCast are © Copyright 2006 by Dan Shaurette, under the Creative Commons "Attribution with No Derivatives" License. Some Rights Reserved.



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Hello, and welcome to another episode of "Is This Thing On?"
(Download MP3)

For those of you flipping through the internet, my name is Dan Shaurette. Welcome to my podcast.

About a month ago, I mentioned a unique "email mystery" called THE DAUGHTERS OF FREYA, written by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. Besides being a suspenseful and fun read, the most fascinating aspect of the story is its presentation.

The story's narrative takes the form of a collection of email exchanges between the main characters of the story. However, the reader upon purchasing the story, has those same emails sent to their own inbox. This gives the reader a more intimate reading experience, as if being CC'd by the characters themselves.

While "email narratives" are relatively new, THE DAUGHTERS OF FREYA, which was released in 2004, is the first to actually be sent out as an email subscription. It seems like a fine medium for storytelling, drawing in the reader in an exciting new way. Besides wanting to know more about the story, I am curious about the technology behind the delivery.

It was a real pleasure speaking with both writers. My first attempt at the recording had to be scrapped, unfortunately. But luckily, I was able to talk again with Michael on September 8th. Here is our conversation.

DS: I did enjoy the story very much, and I want to thank you very much for this opportunity to interview you tonight.

MB: My pleasure.

DS: You're a writer and producer of documentaries and dramatic television programs, and you live in Toronto. You are currently working on a documentary on the wrongly-convicted.

David lives in California and is a writer and journalist. His seventh book, coauthored with poker's Annie Duke, hit bookstores yesterday!

Where did you two meet? How did you two get together?

MB: David and I met in Israel in the late 70's, and we've been friends since then. We've seen each other a few times over the years, but for the last several years really have kept in contact via email. So, he contacted me and thought that we should write a novel together that would be composed entirely of emails. A century ago it used to be very popular that people would write novels in the form of letters. This was kind of updating what was epistolary novel to what we called an "e-pistolary" novel.

I thought it was a really great idea and so we started to work on structuring a story and early on we decided that we would do a mystery. One of the things that intrigued David from the start was the idea that on the internet you can disguise your location and one of the insidious aspects of the internet in fact is that you never really know who is on the other end of an email. So the format of an email story was kind of tailor-made for a mystery.

He had written an article for Wired magazine on a cult and suggested that we might want to use that as the setting and I thought that was a really good idea. Very early on we decided that our sleuth would be a journalist because he had been a journalist for many years, so it was something that we would be able to write about with authority.

As far as the cult in this story, is a sex cult, although none of the sex is graphically depicted in the story and that just came out of our conversations back and forth, probably out of our fevered unconsciouses in some sense. The idea of the cult is that the cult believes that sex can solve all the problems of the world.

DS: Right.

MB: He originally contacted me in January of 2003, or proposed that we work on this together. Over the next six months, we got a basic story line together. Originally, we tried to each assume a character and actually write the emails, but it soon became clear that before we could get into actually writing the emails we had to get a story structure down. So through both email and phone conversation we got our story structure together and a basic plot emerged.

Then at the time we were still thinking very much of this as a print book the idea being that we would write a manuscript, the story would all be written in emails, and we would go and try to get a publisher interested. But that summer, so the summer of 2003, I was on a bike trip with a friend in British Columbia, and one night just killing time in a bar I told him the story line of our story and he thought it sounded really good and suggested that we instead of publishing it in a book that we should send it out as emails. A few emails at a time, as if the reader is being copied on the emails that the characters are sending to each other. I thought that was a great idea, and even in the morning after I'd sobered up it still sounded like a great idea.

When I got back to Toronto, I called David and he got really excited about the idea, and that was a real motivator to complete the project, because although we were committed to it, at the back of our minds was always an awareness of I think the hurdles that would be surmounted in trying to approach publishers with a print manuscript. Although we both are writers in our own medium, none of us had a mystery to our credit. I was certainly worried that was going to be an uphill battle and then the idea of distributing it over the internet and doing something that was completely unique was a real motivator.

But the following October, we got together in Washington and borrowed an apartment and spent four days sort of across the table from each other on dueling laptops and pounded out a first draft of the novel. Over that next winter we kind of polished it to the point that we thought that it was in good enough shape to present to people and test the concept of delivering it by email, which everyone has said to us, when we talked about it that everyone immediately reacted what a cool idea to send it out that way.

We recruited about forty acquaintances, friends, family -- different ages, different backgrounds -- and ran a test with them over two weeks sending it out as we are sending it out now, in random installments over the time of the story. The response we got was really encouraging and exceeded our wildest expectations. Unsolicited emails would come in saying, "I'm hooked," and when the story ended people were telling us they were going through withdrawals. So we felt that we were really on to something.

DS: Was it after that initial focus group of about forty people, was it them that suggested it should be stretched out into a longer period?

MB: So we sent out a survey following that and at that point the story lasted two weeks and we were sending out, I guess about ten emails a day, and we asked people if they felt that was the right pacing, and people said "yes." So we the next six months was another six months before we actually launched and during that period we both did a fairly significant rewrite on the story based on the focus group feedback on the actual mystery itself. I think people felt at that point that the mystery lacked a level of complexity. We agreed with that, found a solution to it. Did a rewrite, make it a complex and entertaining mystery. And worked with a web programmer to get our website up and running, and get the computer program that we would need to deliver the emails to subscribers up and running.

In September we opened the website up to the public and sort of spread the word among friends and acquaintances and we had a lot of people signing up and it was we still were on the two-week timetable and from that much larger group, the feedback quickly was that people were overwhelmed by the amount of email and that's when we decided to stretch it out to slightly over three weeks.

We combined some of the individual messages from the book into one email for readers so that readers now get about four or five emails a day and based on the feedback we are getting, people are finding that's a reasonable amount for them, because that really translates to about five or ten minutes of reading a day.

DS: Right.

MB: And you know it still is a lot of fairly high-volume of email but based on what people are telling us once they realize that each time they open it up it's only about a minute or so to read, it seems to be a decent pacing for people to accept.

DS: Mm-hmm, and that was one of my personal favorite things about the story not only is it unique in that it comes to you in an email format, so you're already doing something you are used to doing. But the fact that the you get sort of short bites... I'm notorious for taking forever to read a book and this was a good-size story and the fact that you get three, four, maybe at most five messages a day, and it only takes you a couple minutes to read each one. I felt like I accomplished something by getting through the story as in the pieces that it took. It felt good to get through a story. But then it also added to the suspense of I have to wait though to find out what is going to happen next. So the suspense is built up by it as well. So it just all came together in the pacing that you did put together for it.

MB: Well, I think that what sets this apart, people have tried to do this you know this sort of somewhat similar stories before like they tried to write .. people have written stories in email form but no one has really sent it out in the same way that we're doing where as the subscriber, you decide when you want to start and then you are on this three-week delivery and I think what distinguishes this from, certainly a print book is you can't turn the page to find out what happens next. You have to wait for the next email to arrive. So in a way as a reader you're surrendering that control.

DS: Yes.

MB: And that in itself I think transforms the reading experience in a away that has the potential to be more. There's an innate suspense in it. I mean, and again this is not a new development. A 100 years ago, Charles Dickens was writing novels that were delivered in installments and people would wait a week or so for the boat to arrive with the next installment. We're again updating that idea for a modern age, and instead of waiting a week, you wait a few hours, but you never know when it's coming in and you are as a reader you give up that control. And that makes this, I think, a different experience for people than reading a traditional book. Although the story itself is you know it's a conventional narrative that is chronological and linear and the mystery has a villain and a hero and clues so if you were to read it in manuscript form it would be readable as a mystery, but by receiving it in email installments you have this added element of having to wait for the story to unfold. That's why, you know, we kind of have been calling it a "real-time" mystery. If the protagonist for example is today she's in Toronto and tonight she is flying to California, as she does in the story, you don't get her emails from California until the next day when she's actually there. So we tried as much as far as much as possible to spread the emails out in the same, over a real time period.

DS: And that works and you are sort of bringing the cliffhanger-type feel to the story as well by not being allowed to see the next page. So you're sort of adapting that methodology as well.

MB: Exactly. Like people used to go to the theatre and there would be a weekly serial and every installment ended every week would end on a cliffhanger with the hero in trouble, and the next week the people would come back and find out how it unfolded. So wherever possible we try to end the day on a cliffhanger so the audience you know the readers go to bed you know sort of looking forward to what's going to happen next and living with that suspense and I think that that makes the reader feel a little more implicated in the mystery. Like the very act of picking up a book is a distancing mechanism. As soon as you pick up a book, you're aware no matter that you're an observer in events that belong in someone else's life.

Not to say that you can't get completely absorbed, because obviously people do get completely absorbed in print books, but the physical nature of holding a book separates the reader from the events in the story. In our story, because the emails come right into your inbox, it feels I think for the reader, that the line between the reality of their life and the fiction of the story is a little more blurred. And I think that's one of the attractive elements in one of the elements people like. Like one of our readers when they sent in the survey said that when the story was over they felt like their friends stopped writing to each other. And I thought that that was exactly the kind of reaction we were hoping to illicit, the idea that, you know because the emails arrive right in your inbox in the same way that the emails from the real people in your life do. So, the line between what's real and what's not is a little more blurred, and certainly a lot more blurred than it is when you are reading a print book.

DS: The look and feel of the emails as well there's definitely a distinction between the characters in the story. One that I can immediately think of is Max, Samantha's son. He doesn't know how to capitalize. He's just like a teenager or college student who is just writing a quick email. Doesn't care about spell check, or anything like that. But of course the journalist -- perfect writing, and the articles are well-written and perfect structure for the journalist articles that you see in these emails. That was also very well done. It fits what we expect in emails. If Max has perfect diction and typing skills, not to say it's not realistic, but it feels more realistic seeing that.

MB: We tried, certainly my experience is that younger people especially, an email is a more informal form of communication, and they don't care as much about spelling and punctuation. Plus, email is also, you know there's a lot of everybody sort of, even people who's spelling and diction might be right have their own idiosyncrasies, like some people separate sentences by a few dots in email. Other people when they're replying to an email will insert their responses into the body of the email that's been sent to them. So Samantha's father in our story, he does that so we try to give everybody their own email personality because that's the way that people use emails you know, that's something that's unique to this format. As well of course trying to give the characters all different voices as you would in a conventional story.

DS: Yes.

MB: So I'm hopeful that came through.

DS: It did. It definitely did.

MB: Thank you.

DS: So what challenges did you find -- once you'd written the story, getting it put out to the public? Did you seek out somebody to create the mailing list subscription system and the website, which by the way is just awesome. I just love the way the way the website is set up. It's just perfectly organized. It looks good. The ability to go in and read past messages in one place that you can log in to was very handy. To see a list of characters it's I just recommend even people just to check out EmailMystery.com just to see the look of it and appreciate the website for its strengths. And then check out the free sample, initial email that you can get before even deciding if you wanna put down the five bucks. I think you'll want to. It's a very good story. But tell me about the challenges you had in getting this out to people.

MB: Well the first challenge was to get a website design, get a computer program written. We worked with a guy here in Toronto whose name is Al Booth, who a total respect for who was a wonderful guy to work for, and takes a lot of credit for the visual look of the site. He wrote the computer program, and together we would discuss what functions we needed, and he was able to put them into place.

It was kind of a real fluke that we ended up with him, because I had received proposals from two other people that were very competent but somewhat corporate proposals. I met Al through, I had been recommended to him as someone he could talk to about a documentary film he wanted to produce. So he actually hired me to just talk to him and brainstorm his documentary and some of the problems he might run into doing that, to take advantage of my expertise in that field.

And at the end of our conversation, he asked me what I was doing, and I mentioned I was doing this project and he said, "Well I do website design and computer programs." I said, "Well would you like to bid on the job?" and he said "Sure," and he sent in within a day or two, a much more informal but very complete description of what would be needed and his price was half the price of the other two bids, and he didn't know obviously what the other people had bid on, but in his letter he said this is probably half of what you'll pay someone else would charge you and I'm doing it because I know you guys are putting your own money in. So, he was the total antithesis to the kind of corporate people we approached, and not only did he have like tremendous visual sense, and great to work with, we didn't have to worry about every minute of him time being rung up on the meter. So, everything came in on budget.

The look of the website was his inspiration and the functions that the website has were ones that we came up with in consultation. Like for example, the one that you mentioned, readers can to the website and log in and see the emails that have been sent to them, but only the emails that have been sent to them. They can't read ahead. Because part of the whole appeal of the project is you have to wait for the story to be delivered. And that was, that's a really key function to have because emails occasionally emails don't get through. You know servers block them, spam filters block them, you could be away at another computer and want to follow the story, so no matter what happens, you can always keep up with the story via your sort of personal archive on the website. And you know so that's worked out really well where people have had issues with their email or servers, no matter what they can keep up with the story.

And the free preview is also something that has proven to be very effective. And the way that works is people can go in and order a free preview and get the first three emails sent to them, and it's sort of a parallel to going into a bookstore and reading the first few pages to see will I like this story. But rather than post the emails on the website, we thought it would be cooler for people to get the idea of what it looks like when they get them in their inbox in the same way that they'll get the rest of the story.

And we've actually found that over 20% of people who read the preview go on to buy the book, which is a pretty gratifying statistic, because it gives you a complete sense of what the story is about and you know what the writing style is. so you can see when you read those three emails and say I like it or this just isn't for me. But at least you have that information. You can also send the free preview to a friend if you want, which is a function we've just put in. because thinking maybe that would be a good way for people to find out about it.

DS: Word of mouth has to have been the biggest key for the success of this because you're really not doing any marketing outside of the website, and the promotions of reviews and interviews like this.

MB: We haven't actually spent a nickel on marketing. Our strategy was to get the book reviewed by newspapers primarily as well as bloggers. We launched the project actually at BoucherCon which is the International Mystery Writers Convention. And we had a booth there with a couple computers set up and this was a convention in Toronto last October, where writers like Ian Rankin and the top ranking mystery writers were all there, and people would listen to them give seminars, and then they would walk through the dealers' room where people were selling print books, and we had our computers up and people got to see what we were doing.

The Globe And Mail which is Canada's national newspaper, sent a writer to the conference, and she interviewed us, read the mystery, gave us a really good review and we were able to use that to get the attention of other reviewers. We were basically cold-calling reviewers for newspaper and saying, "Hey, we're doing this thing, would you like to read it?" By being able to say that The Globe And Mail ran a big feature on us, allowed us to get our foot in the door, plus what we had going for us was the fact that nobody else had never done what we were doing. So that kind of separated us from the crowd. And we received many excellent reviews from The Globe And Mail, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The UK Guardian, Boston Herald, Vancouver Sun, that have given us a kind of credibility and they generated most of our sales have been generated through that and through word of mouth, as well.

DS: And, I've read many blogs, fellow blogs that have been just glowing reviews as well. I think you had mentioned BoingBoing?

MB: Yeah, we got a great review from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. Actually, ironically he, when we contacted him, he said I get too much email, send me it in manuscript form. So I mailed it to him in England, in manuscript form and kind of thinking, Oh God he's not gonna want to -- he's not experiencing it the same way, but he wrote a great review, calling it a "gripping, fun mystery" and he said he almost missed a plane to read the ending.

Well, as well as generating a lot of interest in the project, it was confirmation that the story on it's own was that we had a good story on our hands because the idea of sending it out by email, absolutely everyone we've talked to has said what a cool concept. We knew the concept was cool, but at the end of the day, people have to like the story that you're writing. People seem to be liking it. And when, the guy at BoingBoing liked it just reading it in manuscript form as if it was a print book without the added plus that the typical reader gets of having to go through the suspense of waiting for the emails to arrive you know that was sort of more confirmation that we felt we might have something good going for us.

DS: Well, absolutely. You've got to have a good story, a good plot, and great characters, and this story has all three.

MB: Well thank you.

DS: And the cool concept, and the wonderful delivery. Just everything about it, I loved it.

MB: Well, thanks.

DS: Uh, One of the cool things about this story was there are, since it is in email, one of the great features of email is the ability to link to websites and to articles. Which in this story, the main character is a journalist who's investigating this cult. So you get to read links to the articles that she's written, but there's also links passed around to real websites and real locations. Obviously, that adds to the realism to the story, but were there any other reasons why you decided to have links to real websites for stores and hotels and uh another author's book, kind of thing in this story, links to those?

MB: The guiding principle behind this concept is that we wanted readers to experience this story in exactly the same way that they actually use the internet. There've been a lot of attempts to get people to publish on the internet. And by and large they haven't been very successful, because by and large they've asked people to read a chapter book on a computer screen and people have basically said, "No thanks."

If our project works, I think one of the main reason is that the form of the story is integrated with the medium in which it's delivered. The story is written in emails and sent out over the internet. Our readers when they open an email they read an email that is written in email form in the same informal style of emails, chatty, and just as in the emails that people get in their real life will occasionally link to external sites, our emails also link to external sites. So some of them are newspaper, magazine articles, or photographs of potential suspects that were created specifically for the mystery. But in order to enhance that aspect of email use, we're sort of fit in organically with the story without having pre-planned it, we would include websites that were already existed just to further blur the line of reality and fiction.

Early on in the story, Samantha, who is the protagonist, is going to visit this cult in California that is named The Daughters of Freya, and Freya was the Norse goddess of sexuality. So, someone from the cult sends Samantha an email with the directions for how to get out there and says and if you want to know more about Freya, here's a link, and we just linked a real article on Freya. So now the reader links to that, and now all of a sudden they're out in the you know "real world", if you can use that for the internet.

So wherever there was an opportunity to do that, we took advantage of it, feeling that this would just enhance the reader's experience of the mystery. plus those websites already existed so it was a lot easier to just link to that rather than try to create one of our own.

DS: Sure, you had mentioned the photographs that were linked to the emails as well. Who were the folks that volunteered for these, some infamous photographs?

MB: The people are David and myself and a number of our friends who just thought it would be cool to be involved in this. So we just went out with digital camera and took pictures of people who said yeah you can use my photo and use the photos, these are people who are suspected of being involved in rather a shady dealings. So it was a matter of finding friends who didn't care about their reputation. I was happy to say that neither of us had any problem doing that.

DS: This is a grassroots project, you guys did publish this yourselves. You had mentioned it was originally conceived to be in emails but as a manuscript that could have been produced as a print book. Was it truly just an issue of you knew that there was going to be a lot of hoops to jump through to go through to make this a traditionally published story and you wanted full control over everything, or did you try any of those any avenues first, and then through frustration you decided to do it yourself?

MB: No, originally that was our idea was we would write up a manuscript and send it to publishers because really that was the only model we knew. As I mentioned it was this friend of mine who said what you really should do is send it out as email and that idea itself. That was really the killer idea behind the whole thing.

DS: Well the one great thing that publishers do provide is promotion. So, you're out there promoting this yourselves, through reviews and websites, but have you found that it's being successful with the way you're approaching it now, and do you have any plans for stepping up beyond? Specifically, for example, the Group Read that caught my interest in this case. Which started August 1st, and I read it starting with that. Is this the first time you tried a Group Read as an approach to get more readership, but as a marketing technique. And it worked. Are there plans for other group reads? What is next for trying to get the word out for the story?

MB: The group read was really one of the advantages of the format is that you can set up a kind of an online book club and have everybody read the book at the same time and be able to discuss it while it's happening. To explain to people perhaps what the Group Read was, we set it up with in conjunction with a website called ARGN.com Alternate Reality Gaming Network, and they through another website, unFiction.com set up an online forum and the idea was that everyone would subscribe and select August 1st as the start date.

So you would have this mass of people reading the same story at the same time and then people were able to discuss it as it was unfolding on this online forum. Since nobody could read ahead, there was no risk that someone could spoil it by revealing aspects of the story that other people wouldn't have caught on to.

Unlike a print book, where if you read a print book you know and someone happens to read ahead they could spoil it for you and that's why the traditional book club people discuss it a month later when everyone's read it. So we just wanted to kind of see what it would be like to have a bunch of people reading a book at the same time and discussing the book while they were reading it. It was quite fascinating to see the conversations that ensued. I would like to take that Group Read idea and expand it -- do more of it.

But I'm not sure how or where to proceed with that. Like one of my thoughts is maybe we could persuade one of these social networks to sort of run it for their members, because you know it is kind of like the equivalent is you go on your first date with someone and you go to a movie and now you've got something to discuss. So now here you're meeting people on the internet and you can all read this story and it's an entree to a conversation between people. I haven't really moved on that.

I love the idea of the Group Read as a marketing tool. The one we did was more of an experiment to just see what it would be like because it was a natural extension of the format we created.

Word of mouth is good. We have a gift subscription function. And about a quarter of our sales are gifts. So you know that's an encouraging thing. Most of whom are given by people who have read it. So people are reading it, liking it, and saying I'm going to give this to somebody. How we make this take off virally I don't know. But if any of your listeners are really clever marketers, I would love to speak to them. I believe that we really have something that would appeal to a lot of people and it's a bit frustrating not knowing how to kind of you know make that happen.

DS: I think that marketing is a challenge for just about every publisher, every author.

MB: Everything in life, really.

DS: Yeah, you've got to let people know you've got something that they're going to want to check out. But I think that the Group Read was just a great idea, I enjoyed it. The ability to chat with my fellow readers, ideas about what was going to happen next, who the bad guys were, what they were doing, what they were planning to do. And there was a great feature in unFiction's message forum where they had the ability to block out anything that their suspicions, that they considered spoilers, they were able to cover that up.

So if somebody reading that didn't want to know what somebody else was, what their suspicions were, they could go past that if they wanted to. But it was nice to be able to hide that. So I thought the marriage of that website with the story was just very well done. I think that there are a lot of websites with forums for different kinds of storytelling mediums that I'm sure would love to pick up on another Group Read.

Is there a sequel in the works? Either for Samantha Dempsey, or are you planning another mystery or another story in the same email format?

MB: We've got a couple of projects that are in the early stages of development. The idea of doing another mystery with Samantha is something we've discussed but that we haven't really taken that beyond the initial stages.

My feeling is that the format is would lend itself to any genre. It would be ideal for stories aimed at young kids who don't read that much, or parents who are having trouble getting kids reading, but certainly not having trouble getting kids turning on the computer.

But right now we are really focusing our efforts on getting the word out about this one, because if this becomes very successful it'll be a lot easier to get something else up and running

DS: Oh, absolutely true. So, what else is up next for you and for David?

MB: Well, David has co-written a book with Annie Duke, who is the top female poker player in the world, and that as you mentioned up front hit the bookstores yesterday, so he's gonna be fairly busy with the promotion of that.

I'm currently working on a documentary series on the wrongly-convicted that's investigative in nature. We're looking at cases of people who are still in prison who we feel are innocent, and so we are in the research phases of that, looking for cases that would fit that bill, and um, that's occupying most of my time. As well as the time I'm putting trying to market THE DAUGHTERS OF FREYA.

DS: Absolutely.

MB: Yeah.

DS: Well, I appreciate you taking some time with me to talk about it. I recommend to everybody who listens to this to go visit EmailMystery.com. Every good story starts with a good cover; the website is that cover. I think it looks good -- it brings you in. You have the ability to flip through the first three pages of the story as it were. It comes to you in email. You can decide if you like... if you like the characters in the story, you can go back to the website. It's $4.99 American, which is how much, Michael, in Canadian?

MB: $5.99 Cdn.

DS: Right, and so it's a good buy, it's a good story. It takes three weeks to read it, but it only takes maybe five, ten minutes out of your day total. It comes to you at your convenience, at your inbox. It's just a wonderful story. a novel way of telling it, and I really enjoyed it. and I'm glad you took the time to take to me and my listeners about it.

MB: Well, I really appreciate the invitation to talk to you and I'm really glad that you enjoyed reading it as a reader, and I appreciate the chance to talk to you about it.

DS: Thank you very much.

MB: OK, thanks a lot, Dan.
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Michael Betcherman is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. He is currently working on a documentary on the wrongly-convicted.

David Diamond is a writer and journalist based in Kentfield, California. His seventh book, coauthored with poker's Annie Duke, hit bookstores earlier this month.

To find out more about Michael Betcherman and David Diamond, visit THE DAUGHTERS OF FREYA website at EmailMystery.com.

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