Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As an individual doing a podcast, you don't get even remotely rich. It's not something to do for money.
What the podcast novelists do isn't all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.
You don't need 30 million people to listen to your podcast. If 10,000 people listen to your podcast, which is not a hard number to achieve, then 10,000 people are listening, and you can build a community, and literally change the world just recording into a microphone.
I can't give money away to buy listeners. I can't pay listeners off with phones or food stamps or anything. I can't come by my audience by buying it.
Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.
I don't make money doing my podcast. I've learned that people want to hire creative people who are already doing something when they approach them.
Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.
Podcasting is great. Total freedom.
Books are so cheap and easy to get that people don't bother stealing them, which is the essential rule of piracy that the music business learned much too late.
Marc Maron's podcast success has nothing to do with my podcast success. If I do a quarter of a million downloads, I can show that to an advertiser as a fact, and that's that.