EarthCore author Scott Sigler featured in Boing Boing podcast

Comments:

• Scott Sigler says:

  June 9, 2006 at 12:12 pm

  Thanks David! Oh, and it probably won’t surprise you to see how ahead of the mainstream media you are. The Financial Time (ft.com) just reported on the first “audio-only” novel, released by Audible UK. How many months is this after you wrote your story on EarthCore? At any rate, the reporter didn’t even bother doing a Google search to research the Audible UK press release, and it caused a bit of an online scuffle.

  http://digg.com/technology/First_Audio-Only_Novel_Tells_New_Story_for_Authors
• David Rothman says:

  June 9, 2006 at 2:43 pm

  Well, keep us posted, Scott! Again–congrats, and thanks for the interesting link! – David
• Garson Poole says:

  June 9, 2006 at 5:36 pm

  Plaudits to Scott Sigler for his fantastic pioneering efforts in podcasting. The thread on the Digg website that Sigler mentions contains several interesting references to early work in audio. Based on information in the thread I found an article at the Publishers Weekly website from June 2001 entitled “Audio Theater on the Rise”. Here is an excerpt about an audio effort from the antediluvian internet age of 1995:

  The first audio theater title to be broadcast over the Internet was Patrick Seaman and Jim Cline’s A Small Percentage, which was broadcast over Broadcast.com in 16 episodes in 1995. “We didn’t know if anyone would care about it, but we were deluged with fan mail from around the world,” says Seaman. A better-produced remake ran in 1999 in 42 weekly half-hour episodes, and Seaman says, “It was the #1 audiobook item on Broadcast.com almost every week.”

  This was not a “podcast”, and it was probably streamed but it is an intriguing precursor to today’s trends. “A Small Percentage” was later converted into a novel and an audio book for purchase.
• Garson Poole says:

  June 11, 2006 at 6:38 am

  Scott Sigler: During the discussion at the Digg website you said something extraordinary about your attempts to sell your audiobook Earthcore. Here is an excerpt:
  

  And I tried to sell it through Audible.com, but they offer a whopping 12 cents for every dollar earned, and a minimum sale price of $19.99 (I’m selling it in iTunes, ten bucks for 15 hours of audio) – 88 percent seems like a pretty steep commission for bits that they didn’t produce.

  That commission does sound outrageous. Can you discuss the commission rate at iTunes? Ideally, creators would earn wonderful commission rates for audio file downloads. An efficient hosting provider and content consolidator would lower overheads. But apparently that is not happening yet. Below is a quote from a Financial Times article entitled “Audio books open a new chapter in digital age”. The speaker Mr Soames is the publisher of Naxos an audiobook company :
  

  Mr Soames explains that, until as late as 2003, books on cassette tapes outsold CDs. Some listeners, he says, appear to be moving from cassettes to audio downloads without buying CDs. He adds that the margins are lower in audio downloads, but it has the benefit of bringing new audiences.