GUEST BLOGGER: Helen Madden

Hi everyone! Here's my guest blogger for this week, Helen Madden! I apologize as this was supposed to be up earlier today. I totally flaked!

Without further ado, here is Helen's post on podcasting!

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What Podcasting Can Do For Writers

Guest blog post by Helen E. H. Madden

Thank you Rose Marie for giving me the opportunity to blog here today! When I first approached Rosemary about writing a blog post for her site, she told me she was looking for articles on anything related to writing or publishing. Well, I write every day, and I've got two books published, but there's a special little project I've been working on for almost two years that has really made my career.

Back in the spring of 2007, I was a writer no one had ever heard of. I had a handful of published stories to my name and one novel that had just been contracted to an e-publisher, but I was still a complete newcomer to the world of "published author". I was at that point in my career where I knew I could write and write well enough to get published. But with the new contract on the book, I was suddenly faced with a problem.

How could I get people to buy my book?

I didn't think of it in those terms at the time. It was more, "Yay! I published a book! Uh, now what?"

"Now what" turned out to be marketing said book. We all know that every author, published or unpublished, ought to have a marketing plan, a way to tell people you've just written the most wonderful book ever and then get those same people to BUY THAT BOOK! And we're all familiar with the most popular ways to market a book -- Yahoo groups, blogging, guest blogging, contests, reviews! We join FaceBook and MySpace and Twitter to connect with potential readers, and we work our butts off to get the word out about our books. But pretty soon all that marketing becomes so much work that pretty soon it starts to interfere with what we writers truly want to do, and that's write!

As a stay-at-home mom with two small children, I'm very conscious of how little time I have each day to write. Marketing my first novel cut that time in half. I spent so much time on Yahoo groups and in chats, trying to lure readers into buying my book. Meanwhile, stories I wanted to write languished in my ideas notebook because I didn't have time to do anything with them. Less writing of course meant less to offer to the audience of readers I was trying to grow. I needed free reads! I needed to get into anthologies! I needed to feed my audience! But I couldn't seem to write and promote at the same time.

Enter podcasting. For those of you not familiar with the term, a podcast is a way of delivering content to subscribers via RSS feed. It's a lot like a blog, only with audio or video added to it. People subscribe to the RSS feed, using a program like iTunes or iPodder, and can then downloads the media file straight to their computer. From there, the files can go on an iPod or other multimedia player to be enjoyed at any time.

That's a lot of techno-babble, I know. So think of it in these terms. Podcasts are like radio or TV shows that people can subscribe to and watch whenever they want. You, the author, create the show, and audiences sign up to get it.

Podcasting completely changed my marketing plan. As soon as I realized what I could do with podcasting, I came up with an idea for a show. I would write a new short story every week, record it, and upload it to a website with an RSS feed. I let a few people know the show was out there, and they subscribed to the RSS feed to listen. The show was free, so it wasn't hard to get those first few listeners. And when those listeners decided they liked the show, they told other people, who also signed up. And when those people liked the show, they told others, who signed up and told others, etc., etc., etc.

It was like killing two birds with one stone. I wasn't getting paid for these new stories I was writing, but in just a few months, I had 200 subscribers. That was 200 people who I knew wanted to hear my stories. Now, nearly two years and 91 stories later, I get close to 2000 downloads a month!

It sounds crazy, right? I've given
away 91 storiesand didn't make a cent off of any of them! But think about it. That also means I **wrote** 91 stories in the last two years. And people are **listening** to those stories. And they're sending me e-mails saying how much they like those stories. And now that my second book, Future Perfect, is out, I'm starting to get e-mails from those same people saying how much they enjoy the book! I'm no longer the author no one's ever heard of before. I'm Helen E. H. Madden, writer and producer of the popular Heat Flash Erotica Podcast! Best of all, I've already got a publisher interested in putting out a collection of the first 100 stories from my show... in e-book AND in print.

It's been a lot of work, keeping up with writing and recording a new story every week. I still have to spend some time promoting the podcast, but not nearly as much as I did trying to promote my first book. Podcasts are viral. Once you set them loose on the internet, they have a way of getting around and promoting themselves and the authors behind them. If you're looking for a new way to promote yourself and get some writing done, consider podcasting! But be forewarned. Once you start, you may suddenly find yourself the proud author of a popular new show. And Heaven only knows what that will do for your writing career!

Links for Helen E. H. Madden
The Heat Flash Erotica Podcast - http://www.heatflash.libsyn.com
Future Perfect: A Collection of Fantastic Erotica - http://www.logical-lust.com/futureperfect.html
Writing website - http://www.helenehmadden.com
The Adventures Of Cynical Woman - http://www.theadventuresofcynicalwoman.blogspot.com