Creating a readership and attracting a publisher through podcasting

I wrote this little summary for a friend who is trying to get published. I thought I'd share it with my blogging audience (all two of you!)

A growing number of authors, frustrated by the difficulty of getting publishers to even look at their work are turning to podcasting to develop a reader base that then ultimately attracts publishers.

Here's the website of an author (Scott Sigler) who has achieved what I mentioned. If you look to the bottom of the page, you see that his book "Earthcore" is now available in paperback at Amazon.com.
http://www.scottsigler.net/index.html

(By the way, Earthcore is terrific!)


I think his approach is pretty sound:
His own website that acts as a marketing vehicle for his work.
Distribution of the podcast is done through podiobooks.com, which also allows it to be visible through itunes, the most popular podcast feed source.
Also, though the main gameplan is to get a readerbase to convince a publisher, podiobooks also takes donations (guiltware?) and the author gets 75% which is in fact a pretty good percentage. Of course not every listener donates and they don't regulate how much (so it could be $.75)

There are other examples, here are a few that I have personally listened to:
Cory Doctorow
Mur Lafferty
J.C. Hutchins

There's also an article on the New York Times website that covers the movement pretty well: (requires free registration)
Link to the article

Podiobooks main page:
http://www.podiobooks.com/index.php
Example of a book page on podiobooks.com
http://www.podiobooks.com/podiobooks/book.php?ID=85

Podiobooks has a submission guidelines page that also includes pointers to very good basic information about podcasting
(what kind of recording equipment, etc., tips, etc.)
http://www.podiobooks.com/authors.php

Once you start developing an audience, it is very important to keep up a regular frequency. Listeners are happiest with weekly, but monthly is the outside limit. It's probably better to crunch and build up a back log of several chapters, take a break and then do some more, etc.

If you have your own feed in addition to the podiobooks feed, you can release a modified version of your installments that includes a talk introduction if you want, responding to readers questions, making excuses why you missed last week etc. Some people go way to far with this.

Also no matter where your podcast feed is, if you prove that you have produced regular podcasts for more than three episodes, you can get linked into the itunes music store at apple. Another venue for exposure.