Blog Relations

We’ve been working on a nice little project this week – though it’s had its ups and downs, I think it’s going to turn out well.

We are recording an abridged version of a novel – I won’t say what it is yet but it’s published by a mainstream publishing house in the UK, and our client is the author who is using to his marketing budget to fund it. The idea is to podcast the audio, and see if that helps sales of this book, and the next in the series, and to see if it can help interest a US publisher. All I’ll say at the moment about the book is that it’s a bit of a thriller-mystery, and that my business partner, Matthew, is very much involved with the original book.

We’ve hired an actor called Rob Maloney to read it. It took us a day for him to find the voice, but now he’s very much into it and finding all sorts of shades and tones which add the appropriate atmosphere of mystery and suspense. Although one has to respect the efforts of Librivox, having a professional actor read a novel makes a huge difference.

There have been a few problems: first we have builders here in Star Street, so day one was a big trip out to Tunbridge where Matthew lives. There I found that the line-in socket on my digital recorder was broken – although it had been working the night before. I had to hold it in place with my finger.

On Tuesday we got rid of the builders for the day and I swapped to the mini-disc back in Paddington. Rob and I went out to a local Lebanese cafe -where I’ve eaten lots of times – and on the way back I was feeling a bit queezy. Well I’ve been pretty ill for the last 48 hours, and although I suspect the houmos, Rob seems okay.

So we resume the thriller tomorrow.

I’ve just come across the Hott 100 from podcast host, Libsyn. It’s a chart showing the most downloaded podcasts on Libsyn over the past 24 hours. Libsyn probably has most of the top indie pods, so it’s a good one to follow. It’s different from rankings by number of subscribers, such as the Podfeed / FeedBurner top 100. I don’t see many British pods there, but Storynory is at 85 today, and seems to rise to around 51 on our strong days (Monday usually being a good one after we publish on Sunday evening). Learn language pods do well, as does Grammar Girl, for all those Americans who are up tight about not knowing how to write English properly. Askaninja, which passes for humour in Geek land, is number one.

But Grammar Girl really is on to something. It’s short and simple, and presumably easy to make. Take heed Brit-podders, Grammar Girl doesn’t RAMBLE! I think self-improvement is a huge theme in Podcasting, and much over looked. People want to use that half hour on the train to limber up their brain-cells.

Download Jeremy Strong Interview

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/blogrelations/jeremystrong.mp3]

Packages are where audio editing gets creative. They are big part of BBC output, but not many podcasters make them. They are all about creating pictures with sound. You have to record plenty of ‘wild track’ atmosphere and mix it in with the words later.

This package comes, of course, from Storynory. It’s a visit to Reigate Priory Junior School to meet Jeremy Strong, author of The 100 Mile An Hour Dog. He was speaking to 600 school kids and did a wonderful speed-reading. It came about as part of our continuing friendly relationship with the children’s book publisher, Puffin. As I have mentioned before, I think Puffin understand the power of the Internet for reaching kids, as well as anyone.

For those who are interested, I mixed it in Sony SoundForge making ample use of Special Paste Cross-Fade and Mix. I also used plenty of fade out and fade in. Part of the trick is to make sure that a blast of atmosphere fades out and fades in gracefully. Also, you often start the atmos under that last few words of the preceding sentence, or even just ‘tuck” it under the last word. You might want to pick up the narration over the end of the atmos.

I could equally have done it in a multi-track program like GarageBand. The hardest part of recording it was to capture Jeremy’s words while he was speaking in front of the school. I sat on the floor near his feet, which didn’t look too silly as all the kids where doing the same.

The owner of the world’s most self-regarding newspaper has been musing that his NY Times might no longer be in print in five years’ time,

Here’s what Arthur Sulzberger has to say;

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either… The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

The Times’s online readership stands at 1.5 million a day besides its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

But Sulzberger seems to think that people will pay to read his news online…. I doubt that somehow. News is a commodity now, and the NY Times doesn’t do it that much better than anyone else.