Ten years ago this month I released my very first podcast episode. This realization struck me last Christmas, and I was once again reminded, damn time flies.
Weaver’s Web was my first novel that I had finished, and I had sold it to a small Australian ebook publish in 2002. Ebooks back then were…well they weren’t a thing, and the amount of money I made in a year was perhaps enough to buy a cup of coffee.
Then the second book I sold was Chasing the Bard, to DragonMoon Press, and that was when everything changed, and not just writing wise. I was soon corresponding with another author, Tee Morris, and it was he that convinced me to get into podcasting. So I took my first book that wasn’t doing anything, bought myself a microphone, and leapt into it.
Since that moment I have recorded and released four complete novels as podcasts, produced nearing seventy short stories, and done three chat-style podcasts. I’ve learned to work with guest voices, wrangle sound effects and bed music, and mix it all into an mp3.
But it is far more than the technical strides I have made over these last ten years. A lot more. In podcasting I found an online home. It has given me a voice, a particularly New Zealand voice, on the internet. Along the way I made friends. So many friends. More than I had in New Zealand, and in places I had never even heard of. I remember getting an email from Estonia about how much a listener had enjoyed Chasing the Bard. These were the kind of things I could never have imagined happening when I tentatively posted my first episode of Weaver’s Web.
It also gave me that necessary but required thing, a platform. When I got the first nibbles from Ace publishing about Geist, they wanted to know my author platform, my numbers, and podcasting was definitely one of those things. All together they counted, and Ace took a chance on me and my writing.
Podcasting has come a long way in those ten years, and yet in someways is still exactly the same. Big business has moved into the sphere and many of the faces I used to see at the top of the podcasting category in iTunes have been pushed further down. However, the success of podcasts like Welcome to Nightvale do show that there is still plenty of room for great story-telling. And even better, a lot of the people I listened to are still podcasting in some form or other.
I am sure that podcasting has changed a lot of lives, not just mine.
In short, I don’t know how my life would have gone without podcasting. I wouldn’t be living in America, a mother, or with half of what I have done accomplished—if anything. I look back on that first choice to pick up a microphone as one of the important pivot points of my life.
And most of all, I have no plans to stop podcasting anytime soon.