How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away

Today we’re fea­tur­ing a piece by Seth Har­wood, an inno­v­a­tive crime fic­tion writer who has used the tools of Web 2.0 to launch his writ­ing career. Below, he gives you an inside look at how he went from pod­cast­ing his books to land­ing a book deal with Ran­dom House. If you want to learn more about how writ­ers will increas­ing­ly build their careers, be sure to give this a read. Take it away Seth…

Before it ever hit print, my debut nov­el JACK WAKES UP was a free seri­al­ized audio­book.  And giv­ing my crime fic­tion away for free turned out to be the key to becom­ing a pub­lished author—that last piece of the puz­zle that eludes so many aspir­ing writ­ers. 

How did it work? Well, I got my MFA from a pres­ti­gious writ­ers’ work­shop.  I got a dozen sto­ries placed in lit­er­ary jour­nals.  In short, I was doing all the things “they” (the lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment) tell you you have to do in order to become a suc­cess­ful author.  And it wasn’t work­ing.  Agents were say­ing nice things about my crime fic­tion, but weren’t will­ing to take me on as a client.  Even­tu­al­ly I start­ed look­ing for anoth­er way to dri­ve my own career and put my work in front of peo­ple. Hav­ing had a lit­tle suc­cess with a pub­lished sto­ry online—my friends could read it and I was hear­ing from strangers who liked it, two things that had nev­er hap­pened with the dozen sto­ries I’d slaved to pub­lish in lit­er­ary journals—I could see that the web was the way to do this. But I couldn’t imag­ine any­one read­ing a nov­el online, or even on his or her com­put­er. I did have an iPod though, and didn’t I lis­ten to it all the time in the car and at the gym? Wasn’t I tak­ing out books on CD from my local library for my dri­ve to work? Sure I was. So when a friend showed me how he’d been using his iPod and a thing called pod­cast­ing to get free audio­books from an unknown author named Scott Sigler, I knew I had to fig­ure out how this was done.

Turns out that mak­ing MP3 files costs noth­ing. Dis­trib­ut­ing them costs me less than $10 a month, no mat­ter how many episodes go out. Each week, I release a free episode—usually a cou­ple of chapters—to thou­sands of sub­scribers. You can think of this as a throw­back to two old forms of crime dis­tri­b­u­tion: either the pulp mag­a­zines or the old-time radio plays that intro­duced detec­tive adven­tures to ear­ly lis­ten­ers on the radio.

The point of the pulps was the same as what I’m doing: to use the least expen­sive means to get good crime sto­ries out to eager con­sumers. Sure, I’m giv­ing my work away and get­ting nothing—at least no money—in return. But as an author, this nev­er both­ered me: all around me writ­ers are fight­ing to get their work in front of read­ers, buy­ing expen­sive ads, employ­ing pub­li­cists, pray­ing for a piece of the ever-shrink­ing review pages. So if I’d found a way to get my work out on my own and build an audi­ence, why should I care that I wasn’t earn­ing mon­ey? I mean, my goal has always been to sup­port myself as a writer, but it still looked like land­ing a pub­lish­ing con­tract was the way to make that hap­pen.

More impor­tant than the career stuff, though, has been the effect of hav­ing an audi­ence on the way I work. As soon as I start­ed pod­cast­ing, I was get­ting reg­u­lar emails from lis­ten­ers around the coun­try and even the globe! I start­ed to see pos­i­tive reviews post­ed about my work on iTunes.  Peo­ple actu­al­ly liked what I was doing. Sud­den­ly I was writ­ing for an audi­ence. And ulti­mate­ly this made all the dif­fer­ence. Now I know I have peo­ple wait­ing for what I’ll write next; I feel like a dig­i­tal Dick­ens, try­ing to get the new book writ­ten for my fan base to con­sume as soon as I put it out. Pod­cast­ing also became a new end-prod­uct for each book; once I’ve pod­cast a book, I want to move on and get work­ing on some­thing else.  In the last three years, my writ­ing out­put and dri­ve have soared to lev­els I couldn’t have imag­ined back in my MFA days.

The truth is, I learned a hell of a lot about how to craft good fic­tion in grad school, and I’d had enough of just show­ing my work to my peers for cri­tique. I was ready to get my words out there to a real audi­ence of read­ers. And since I have, they’ve giv­en me all the moti­va­tion to achieve things I nev­er even thought I could.  Design a web­site? Put out videos of myself on the web? Become some­one on the cut­ting edge of new media? I nev­er would’ve dreamed of doing all that a few years ago. In grad school I wrote every­thing with a pen on a yel­low pad!

And some­where along the line, that pod­cast­ing process turned into a game plan, one that worked. Thanks to pod­cast­ing I’ve just become a pub­lished author—my book JACK WAKES UP came out two weeks ago from Three Rivers Press, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House! (Shame­less plug: Michael Con­nel­ly said, “JACK WAKES UP rocks!” But you know what’s even cool­er? I’m get­ting emails from my fans with pic­tures of them hold­ing the actu­al book!) I’m back to my orig­i­nal dream: to suc­ceed in the tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing realm–and now I’m final­ly see­ing my book on book­shop shelves! When I approached the pub­lish­ing estab­lish­ment with a proven audi­ence behind me, I sud­den­ly became about a hun­dred times more attrac­tive than I’d been as just anoth­er aspir­ing author with the typ­i­cal lit­er­ary creds.  

Dis­tri­b­u­tion, cre­ation, mar­ket­ing and promotion—podcasting has giv­en me the keys to all of these at a time when old avenues have van­ished. It gave me con­trol of my career.

If you’d like to hear JACK WAKES UP or my two fol­low-up JACK PALMS nov­els, vis­it http://sethharwood.com. There you’ll find inter­views, press cov­er­age, free audio­books, and much more. You might want to try http://sethharwood.com/what_is_podcasting for a start.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can get involved in the pod­cast­ing process and use it to pro­mote your own work, vis­it http://authorbootcamp.com or drop me a line at http://sethharwood.com/contact.  JACK WAKES UP is now out in book­stores every­where from Three Rivers Press, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House.