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In the last installment we visited with some of the new stars of genre podcasting, writers who post spoken word versions of their novels on the net for downloading under a Creative Commons license. That means they’re free, folks! Several years ago net pundits were declaring that podcasting was the Next Big Thing, and indeed, podcasts seemed to leap from rare to ubiquitous at the click of a mouse. More recently, their phenomenal growth has slowed. According to a survey <http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Podcast_2008_Memo.pdf> published in August 2008 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project <pewinternet.org>, about 19 percent of all internet users have downloaded a podcast, up from 12 percent in 2006. So although podcasting would seem to be a niche activity on the net, it is a substantial niche, since Pew also reported that last year some 165 million Americans used the net. And let’s face it, the percentage of podcast patrons who are also readers of science fiction and fantasy is no doubt higher than that of the general population, since we fans of the fantastic have usually been among the earliest of early adopters.

In some corners of the genre, the give-it-away ethic is seen as an attack on publishing as we know it. However, all of the podcasters we spoke with last time hoped to parlay their successes online into traditional book deals and a career in print. One big selling point in their favor is the size of the audiences they’ve cultivated. J.C. Hutchins <jchutchins.net>, author of the 7th Son trilogy, reports, “I am able to look at statistics of downloads of my novels and I see that, because they are downloaded one chapter at a time, the first chapter in the book has a higher download rate than the most recent chapter. More than forty thousand people have downloaded the first chapter of my trilogy.” Book one of Hutch’s trilogy, Descent, will be published by St. Martin’s Press <us.macmillan.com/SMP.aspx> in 2009. Mur Lafferty <murverse.com> began posting her superhero novel, Playing for Keeps, as a podcast in the fall of 2007. The print version was released by Swarm Press <swarmpress.com> in July of 2008. “I am at about twenty-three thousand for the first chapter. I released my PDF a couple of days before the book came out, and, so far just from my servers, it’s been downloaded forty thousand times.” Playing for Keeps recently won a Parsec Award <parsecawards.com> (yes, speculative fiction podcasters have their own award.) for Best Podcast Long Form. Fellow Parsec Long Form nominee Tee Morris <teemorris.com> reports fifty thousand downloads of the podcast of his novel Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword, which was published in 2007 by Dragon Moon Press <dragonmoonpress.com>. As I was talking to Mur and Hutch at Balticon last year, new writer Christiana Ellis popped into the conversation. Her audiobook Space Casey had just won the Mark Time Award <greatnorthern.com/MarkTime/MarkTime.html> (yes, speculative fiction podcasters have more than one award!) and in August it won a Parsec as well for Best Audio Drama Short Form. She said that Space Casey had garnered upward of six thousand downloads in less than a year. A print edition of her previous podcast, Nina Kimberly the Merciless, is forthcoming from Dragon Moon Press.

But how many listeners will follow these writers to the bookstore? Hutch makes a point that bears consideration. “So when I approach an editor or agent, I can boast I was the first to do this or that in podcasting and that’s great on paper. But the real meat of it is, will any of this translate into sales? And I think that the attrition rate is very high. Maybe only 10 percent will buy the book. So it would be a Christmas miracle if four thousand listeners bought the book.” Suppose that Hutch is right and only 10 percent of listeners become readers. The question is, are those four thousand listeners in addition to the readers who might otherwise buy the book? If the answer is yes, then expect a raft of new writers to follow the example of these pioneer podcasters.

And maybe some old pros ought to take note as well.

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One thing that all of these writers have in common is that their podcasts have appeared on Podiobooks.com <podiobooks.com>. When I first wrote about podcasting back in 2006, Podiobooks.com was in beta. Co-founded by Evo Terra <funanymore.com>, Tee Morris, and Chris Miller <unquietdesperation.com>, it has become the most important portal for serialized novel podcasts. As I type this, it features two hundred and forty-seven titles and 4,978 individual episodes. In my opinion, it has been essential to the creation of the listenership that my podcasting pals enjoy. It was and is an important showcase where unknown podcasters can debut their work and it has become the center of the community that has grown up around genre novel podcasting.

If Podiobooks.com has led the way in novel podcasting, Escape Pod <escapepod.org> is without doubt the premier SF short fiction podcast site. According to founder Steve Eley, as of March 2008, each weekly episode had a download of about eighteen thousand, which led him to claim—with justification, it says here—that his site is the second largest market for short science fiction. That includes not just podcasts, but ezines and print magazines like our own beloved Asimov’s. And its success has led Steve to spin off two sister sites, Pseudopod <pseudopod.org>, which specializes in horror, and Podcastle <podcastle.org>, “the world’s first fantasy audio magazine.” All three of these sites are paying markets with editors acquiring both new and reprint stories. The fiction remains copyrighted by the authors, while the performances are released under a Creative Commons license. It is Steve’s policy that authors not be allowed to read their own works—a policy with which I respectfully disagree, but don’t get me started!—but that is the only cavil I can offer about these wonderful sites. As the Pod Empire has expanded, it has attracted an eclectic mix of hot new writers and celebrated masters. Take, for example, Peter Beagle <peterbeagle.com>, Elizabeth Bear <elizabethbear.com>, Andy Duncan <beluthahatchie.blogspot.com>, Charles Coleman Finlay <ccfinlay.com>, Nancy Kress <sff.net/people/nankress>, Tim Pratt < timpratt.com>, Sarah Prineas <sarah-prineas.com>, Cat Rambo <kittywumpus.net>, Mike Resnick <fortunecity.com/tattooine/farmer/2/>, and Greg Van Eekhout <www.writingandsnacks.com>, to name but ten.

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Although Steve Eley’s sites have set a very high standard for online audio short fiction, they are by no means the last word. From across the pond, for example, comes the excellent Starship Sofa <starshipsofa.com>. Let’s let host Tony C. Smith tell you a little about the show: “On Wednesday nights we have Aural Delights. Think of it as a kind of audio science fiction magazine in the realms of the greats like Asimov’s and Analog. We have a little bit of poetry, a little bit of flash fiction, short stories, and articles.” On the weekends Tony alternates three other shows, the original Starship Sofa, which focuses in depth on the careers of some of the greats of the genre; the Engine Room, which takes you behind the scenes of the Aural Delights podcast; and the Roundtable, in which Tony and his cohorts dissect the stories that have appeared on Aural Delights.

Then there is Variant Frequencies <http://www.variantfrequencies.com>, a monthly podcast of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, which features professional narration and slick production values. Produced by Rick Stringer, this show was one of the first regular short fiction podcasts. Its contributors are mostly new writers who bring a fresh perspective to the many worlds of the fantastic. The folks at Variant Frequencies must be doing something very right, since they have won a Parsec every year since the awards were first handed out.

Transmissions From Beyond <transmissionsfrombeyond.com> is an exciting new podcast from TTA Press <ttapress.com> with new stories appearing every Monday. Well, not exactly new, but new to podcast. The stories on Transmissions From Beyond are drawn from TTA Press’s three print magazines: SF and fantasy from Interzone, the UK’s longest running speculative fiction magazine; horror from Black Static; and crime and mystery from Crimewave. These are stories with an English accent, but they are without doubt some of the finest to be found on the web today.

Speaking of promotional podcasts, one of the most blogged-about site launches in recent memory is the new Tor.com <Tor.com>. Just about from the get-go it has joined the ranks of Locus Online <locusmag.com>, SF Signal <sfsignal.com>, and Sci Fi Weekly <scifi.com/sfw>—sites that I click almost every day. While it is perhaps best known for the lively conversations going on in its Community Pages, it has also begun to publish original stories by the likes of Cory Doctorow <craphound.com>, Steve Gould <digitalnoir.com>, and John Scalzi <scalzi.com/whatever>. You can read these stories online, download them as pdfs, and listen to them as podcasts. Although the sound quality of the podcasts is not up to those of, say, Podcastle or Variant Frequencies, the stories are read, unless my ear deceives me, by the authors themselves.

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So what are podcasts good for? To some extent, our survey of the pod landscape shows that they are being used for promotional purposes. Some writers are using them to promote their careers and some publishers are using them to attract readers. On the other hand, there are many, many podcasters who are in it for the joy of expressing themselves and because podcasting has some of the coolest toys on the internet. The exception would seem to be Steve Eley’s Empire of Pod. In March of 2008, he posted a “metacast” in which he talks about “the state of the podcast, the state of the business, Escape Artists Inc., and, to a certain extent, the State of the Steve.” I read this with great interest, because in it he is talking about the sites, not as a hobby or a promotional tool but as a going concern. “I have a plan. It’s a concrete plan. I have a list of actions to be performed, and these actions will make us a viable profit-making company.”

This I’ve got to hear!