I Listen to Podiobooks discussion

I about about to produce my first Podiobook and I am looking for any advice. What do you like or not like about the format? What should I do or not do?

I have never created a podcast and only recently began playing around with Audacity, but I do listen to quite a few podcasts. As a listener nothing annoys me more than contrasting volume.
I actually had to stop listening to a podcast novel because the authors reading of the story was so much softer than the music that seperated chapters. The music, of course, was kicked off with an ear-splitting cymbal crash. I'd have to try and rip the ear-buds out of my head before suffering permenant damage to my hearing.
So, I guess my suggestion is to be sure and run the podcast through some volume equalizer. Good Luck and Congrats.

I have just started listening to podiobooks and the best thing I can suggest is to SLOW down. I found several podiobooks were actually worse then the actual story because the reader (author) rushed through the reading. The next problem frequently noted was a near monotone presentation. Finally ... it seems that 10-15 min. chapters are popular ... but they are very annoying on my end. Make them at least 20 mins., preferably 30+ mins. each.

Great suggestions Kristjan. I do some mentoring over at the Podibooks.com community website and "slow down" and "vary your delivery" are two of my constant points for prospective podcast authors.

Eric, I'm not sure if you have signed up over at the podiobooks community site, but please consider it: http://community.podiobooks.com

There is a pretty strong mentorship group there (even if you decide not to use Podiobooks.com).

CN Networks Levelator is the perfect tool to stop this from happening. I use it on the Project: Shadow Informant and will on the podiobooks too.

I was wondering about chapter length. In Liquid Sky, the chapters are about 30 page each so they should be in that range, but I will have to be careful with Shine Like Thunder.

I am signed up over there, I was just curious to get some listener feedback.

My experience is very limited - I've listened to only a handful of audio books. We have 3 authors that have done them - 2 are read by the authors the third was a "full production" with multiple voices and sound effects etc. I must say that they are very different experiences.

While I appreciate the full production one for the quality (it was not produced by us by the way but by the author's previous publisher) I like the "intamacy" of hearing the author read the work. So for now I'm going with the "less is more" at least for my personal tastes.

Just listen to anything by Scott Sigler (FDO). I much prefer an author reading than full-production, multiple voices, sound effects. In my view 'less is more' here.

I just launched my first podcast on Podiobooks (The Red Album of Asbury Park Remixed, a novel. It's a steep technological learning curve and an enormous amount of work. I may have been too ambitious on this project, but I'm satisfied with the result. My advice would be to nail the technical aspects before doing much recording. I re-recorded all chapters at least three times and many more than that. One definite plus of the form is that in recording the novel I found typos in the text that I missed. I also changed parts of the story that I had previously been satisfied with.