Podcasts, Projects

Ditch Diggers #89: Expanding Audiences

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:32 — 37.7MB)

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  • Coming to you live from the poured concrete foundation of the brand new Ditch Diggers HQ, it’s the first episode of 2020!
  • No longer will Matt and Mur squat on the estates of celebrities who let them down with their moral and ethical decay. They are taking responsibility for their own destinies.
  • Matt launches into an unrelated tangent about how Alton Brown seems like kind of a dick, and how Matt will not mill his own flour.
  • The year has began both late and in a frustrating fashion, but Mur states the Ditch Diggers goal of increasing listenership in 2020.
  • The topic of the episode finally emerges! Matt and Mur are going to talk about the ways in which they will achieve expanding the podcast’s listenership, and how those lessons relate to promoting books and other creative works.
  • But first! A brief explanation of both how Hugo voting works, and how being nominated or winning an award like a Hugo can be a false metric by which to measure the size of an audience or the reach of a particular work.
  • The importance of consistency, and how consistently releasing content at a scheduled time can be an essential component in building a large audience (and some of the challenges you encounter when trying to consistently produce and release content).
  • Cross-promoting your work with other content creators, whether it’s interviewing them on your podcast or appearing on their platform.
  • Matt longs for simpler times when authors didn’t have to do virtually every job in publishing, and he launches into a rant in which he compares himself to The Rock.
  • Mur reigns in Matt’s angry tirade and recaps the Ditch Diggers’ plans to expand listenership in 2020, and how they’re going to achieve it. Keep tuning in to see how it unfolds!
  • No Q&A this episode, but there is a plea to nominate the Ditch Diggers for the Best Fancast Hugo Award, despite it being a poor metric by which to measure audience growth.
  • Also, please preorder Matt’s epic fantasy novel SAVAGE LEGION, out July 21st!
  • ALSO, support the Ditch Diggers Patreon, which Mur does benevolently share with Matt, and she makes that abundantly clear.
Podcasts, Projects

ISBW #476: Resolutions Anytime

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:05 — 11.7MB)

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I got this done yesterday and then Music (why in the world did they change the name of iTunes???) died on me. So I’m super behind! This is Monday’s episode. Tuesday’s and Wednesdays will go up shortly. I will catch back up, dangit. 
Anyway, this one is about falling behind on resolutions, and why I dislike January for renewing yourself. 
Consuming media

My Award Eligibility Post for 2019

It’s that special time of year again, where we try to remember what the heck we spent the last 12 months doing. I’ve been quiet, head-down on the writing front, but I have still been podcasting and editing. So here is my eligibility post for 2020.

  • Escape Pod – eligible for any semi-prozine category
  • S.B. Divya and Mur Lafferty – eligible for any short form editor category
  • Ditch Diggers – eligible for any podcast/fancast category
  • I Should Be Writing – eligible for any podcast/fancast category

As for my endorsements, I am not endorsing much adult fiction, partly because I’m on the jury for the Philip K. Dick award and am keeping my opinions of original paperbacks to myself, but here are some of the other categories I feel strongly about.

Fan Writer: Alasdair Stuart continues to do amazing work from his newsletter to his in depth host spots on various Escape Artists podcasts. Jason Sanford is also doing a great job at keeping track of the news in SF.

Dramatic Work (short): I love seeing clipping. on the Hugo ballot because it shows how much we as a genre are willing to stretch ourselves. This year they did a full EP release alongside Rivers Solomon’s (Hugo-eligible!) novella The Deep, on which they share writing credit. (The EP is different from their Hugo-nominated single “The Deep.” But it contains that single, so I don’t know if that messes with eligibility or not.)

Dramatic Work (long): I find it amusing that The Witcher is so polarizing. I am firmly on the “loved it” side. It wasn’t perfect, and the disability representation seems to go from empowering to stereotypical (I am not a disability critic/scholar, so I invite you to read this criticism) but I really enjoyed it regardless. I also loved The Umbrella Academy as a whole season as well, and it looks like it’s not going to go the same direction as the comic did, which I really hated.

Graphic Story: I really enjoyed Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans. It shows that some stories we think of as tired cliches are masterful stories in the hands of an excellent storyteller. Kids get sucked into their own RPG game, but it’s so much more than that. (The title can give you a hint what the genre of this comic is.)

Lodestar (YA- not a Hugo): Neal Shusterman has written his YA trilogy masterpiece Arc of the Scythe underneath the radar of SF circles, but the final book, The Toll, came out last year, and it was as good as the first two. The series follows people who live in a government-free, eternal-life utopia ruled by a benevolent AI and Scythes, people who legally kill in order to a) control the population and b) remind people that life has meaning when it has a chance to end. All of the fascinating plotlines come to head including the introduction of a non-binary salvage captain.

I’m sure there’s more, but I will blog them as time goes on.

 

 

 

Travel

Traveling to Boskone next month!

I was neglectful at posting my ConFusion schedule – ConFusion was amazing as usual, by the way – but I wanted to make sure I listed my Boskone schedule for next month. If you’re going to be there, come say hi!

Saturday:

  • 12pm: Reading: Mur Lafferty
    Independence (Westin)
  • 2pm: Kaffeeklatsch: Mur Lafferty
    Galleria – Kaffeeklatsch 1 (Westin)
  • 5pm: Building Worlds Within LitRPG and Games
    Marina 3 (Westin) :: Literature, litRPG, and games all share a common worldbuilding process, but at what point do those processes diverge? How do the specific genres drive the narrative, which in turn drives the worldbuilding template for these different types of stories? What key elements distinguish litRPG and gaming fiction from their speculative fiction peers?
    Auston Habershaw (M), Christopher Irvin, Mur Lafferty, M. C. DeMarco, Erin Roberts
  • 8pm: Game to Fiction/Fiction to Game
    Burroughs (Westin) :: Game designers have to come up with an interesting world and compelling story in much the same way as authors who write fiction. So, what does it take to adapt a game to fiction or fiction to game? What new opportunities does the process create? What obstacles need to be overcome?
    Gregory Wilson, Dan Moren (M), Joshua Bilmes (JABberwocky Literary Agency), Auston Habershaw, Mur Lafferty
  • 9pm: Star Wars and the Rebel Legacy
    Burroughs (Westin) :: Skywalker has risen, and from one end of the galaxy to the other, the rebels have been fighting against the Empire for years. Rebellion is often a part of a good science fiction or fantasy story, but what makes a good rebellion? Does the Star Wars universe tackle the nuances of rebellion? Do the rebels ring true? How might the Rebellion grow and change, and even evolve, in time?
    Mur Lafferty (M), Martha Wells, Pete Hollmer, Gregory Wilson

Sunday:

  • 10am: Autographing: Christine Taylor-Butler, Mur Lafferty, Christopher Paniccia, Darrell Schweitzer
    Galleria – Autographing (Westin)