Erotica By Helen E. H. Madden

For once, I have the cartoon done a little early this week. I pulled an all-nighter last night to get this done. Not the strip I had originally intended to put out, but it occurred to me yesterday afternoon that Mur Lafferty's novel, Playing for Keeps, was going up for a big push on Amazon.com on Monday and...

What? Who's Mur Lafferty and What's Playing for Keeps?

You mean you don't KNOW?

Mur Lafferty is a writer and podcaster extraordinaire. She's the host of the podcast show I Should Be Writing, the podcast for wanna-be fiction writers written by a wanna-be fiction writer who it just so happens now has a published book. For some time, Mur's been writing novels and podcasting them a chapter at a time, gaining an audience in the tens of thousands as she gave away book after book in MP3 and PDF format. Yeah, that's right, she GAVE HER BOOKS AWAY! And in the process gained a HUGE following. Earlier this year, her super hero novel, Playing for Keeps, was picked up by Swarm Press. I had previously bought a copy of Playing for Keeps, one that Mur had self-published, and let me tell you, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I'm looking forward to seeing what the newly published book will look like because guess what? I'm a book junkie and I'll buy the book a second time, even though I already have a hard copy and the PDF and the podcast.

And I'm not the only person who will do that.

See, here's the thing. Not so many years ago, someone figured out that the way to hook a reader was to give them a story. For free. I think that someone was Tee Morris who podcast his first novel, Morevi: The Chronicles of Rafe and Askana, for free after publishing it with Dragon Moon Press. Tee is big on promoting his work, and does an outstanding podcast called The Survivor's Guide to Writing Fantasy in which he discusses how authors can promote their books. Podcasting Morevi worked so well for Tee that he podcast his second book as well, and now he has a huge audience all clamoring for his third book which he, along with fellow podcaster Phillipa Ballantine, pushed at Amazon.com on August 8th. Phillipa's book, Chasing the Bard, is another free podcast novel, and a damned good one. Both she and Tee had such huge response on August 8th that they climbed the charts that day and stayed on the charts for a while after. And these are two books published by a small press!

Other authors have struck it even bigger than that. Scott Sigler, who landed on the New York Times bestseller list, podcast a number of his novels for free before landing a major contract with Crown. And he started, just like Tee and Mur and Phillipa, by podcasting his work for free.

It's an odd concept, and a very uncomfortable one for many writers, giving away your work. We all put so much into our writing, hoping to get published, hoping to make money, so how can we just give our stuff away? Especially when so many of us fall victim to e-pirates who take our books and post them to groups for others to read without concern for the fact that they've stolen our work.

And yet, the idea seems to work. Give your work away. Build an audience. And then when the time comes, when you have that audience, you can go to a publisher and say, "Hey, I've got twenty thousand people listening to the podcast of my novel week after week!" Or maybe "Hey, the free PDF of my last novella was downloaded fifty thousand times!" And that publisher might take a long hard look at that built-in audience you've worked so hard to gain and think, "Hey, if I publish this guy, I've got a sure thing..."

And then you might just have a contract for a book.

I give away a lot of my work for free. Each week I podcast a new erotica story on my fiction podcast, Heat Flash. I get about two thousand downloads a month, which ain't small change. I also publish a lot of free reads on the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, and I know people see those stories because I get e-mails from folks who enjoyed my work. I've got the cartoons which I post each week. I'm working now on a novella to put together as a free downloadable PDF and a podcast. The idea is to offer the PDF at my website and my publisher's website to give people a taste of what I write, and to distribute the PDF via my blog, podcast feed, etc. The PDF of course will have my URL and a buy link to any other work I have available. And the podcast version of the novella will hopefully gain me an even larger audience than I already have, an audience of people willing to spend some money on any current or future books I write.

Yeah, it's a lot of work, but I keep thinking, I would be writing anyway (I should be writing, according to Mur), and yeah maybe I could publish a novella through an e-publisher for money, but in the long run a podcast might do me more good. It's an experiment, and one I'm looking forward to trying.

In the mean time though, Monday -- August 25th -- is Mur Lafferty's day. If you like super hero stories, if you like a good read, if you want to be a part of publishing and podcasting history, stop by Amazon.com and buy a copy of Playing for Keeps. Help push Mur up the charts. Visit her website - www.playingforkeepsnovel.com - to find out more and get lots of free goodies, including extra stories and video, and enjoy Mur's work. She's a good writer. She's given her readers a lot. Now let's give her some love.

Labels: Cartoon, Podcast, Writing Business

Friday, August 22, 2008

Cartoon on Playing for Keeps - the success of podcaster and novelist Mur Lafferty

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