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. (more…)