I believe she needs no real introduction. However, she is the author and podcaster of The Goblin Market, she is taking readers on a 12 part Dark Journey, she is one of the founders of The Creative Alliance, and is the editor of two upcoming charity anthologies, From the Dark Side and Farrago.
Without any further ado…
So, who are you and what do you do?
I am an emissary from the Old Gods sent to Earth to monitor human behavior and report back in written form so they can plan the best way to wreak havoc on mankind… seriously. I’m a storyteller. I have been telling stories as long as I can remember. I write all day long every day. Some of it is actually fiction, but right now most of it is creative nonfiction and news commentary on a variety of online blogs.
I talked with James about this extensively, and we started kicking the idea of putting together an online place where the people in the community we’re a part of could reach out and share their creativity, knowledge and approach to the changing times in an effort to make a greater impact as a group. So we set up The Creative Alliance.
We are working together as a community, not just for our own individual goals and such, which is a great thing.
One afternoon, Acadia asked me who I knew that podcatted (yes, podcatted) because he wanted to try and network with some podcatters and get them some more exposure. From there, he asked me if he was going to link to Podcats, if he should have a podcat, and he came up with an idea to record a 1 minute podcast about things he could say in under a minute.
Then we started playing around with FreeCallRecorder.com, and came up with an idea to just ramble on about whatever popped into our heads, and Podcaturday: The Weekend Roundtable Discussion, was born. We hook up on Skype every Saturday morning and just talk about whatever comes up for about an hour. On our second episode, we invited James to join us, and the chemistry the three of us had was so good, we decided to make it a regular thing.
It’s just nonsense… but it’s good nonsense, and I hope more people check it out because we really have a great time doing it.
lin Market has definitely introduced me to a lot of people, both in a networking sense, and a fanbase sense. I haven’t put Goblin Market up on Podiobooks yet, but it’s still managed to get about 15,000 downloads just on my website, which is such a great thing. Giving it away for free is an investment in your fans. You give them a piece of yourself in its entirety, and in a sense, you prove to them that you can provide good content, or not, in some cases.There is a hope that through establishing yourself and building a little credibility by giving away your work for free, they will in turn tell others about you. When you do publish work, whether it’s through a publishing contract deal, or on Amazon or Smashwords, people at least know what they can expect from you as a writer. It’s touch and go marketing, and it doesn’t always work in terms of selling your fiction, as a lot of authors have discovered, but everything is changing so rapidly we have to do what we can.
For me, I want to get my work out to as many people as possible because that is why I write. So I will keep experimenting with both models as long as it keeps getting my work out there to new readers and listeners.
I am also editing two charity anthologies this summer: From the Dark Side, which all proceeds will go to the Letters and Light Organization, and Farrago. Farrago is an effort to help raise money for Michael Bekemeyer’s film project.
On top of that, I am working on a novel called Running Down the Moon, which I want to get traditionally published once it’s finished.
