I went to GeekGirlCon today--my flyers were, indeed, in the goodie bags, and some copies have already been downloaded, so yay.
I wasn't feeling very well, so I wound up just going to two panels, one on podcasts and one with Jane Espenson, which I'll cover in the next post.
The podcasting one was interesting, but I'm not really sure what to do with the information I received. The folks at the panel create what are basically radio shows, which they give away--it's a hobby and they're not trying to monetize it. So of course their focus is on keeping costs low--apparently you're better off with a decent but not really nice mike (they liked the $99 Blue Snowball), because if you get a fancy mike you also need a fancy soundproof room in order to use it.
The problem for me is that I wouldn't mind doing a free podcast of Trang, but I'd like to be able to sell an audiobook as well, and apparently the retail sites don't like home-made audiobooks. It would be really annoying if I paid for the equipment to do it myself only to have to pay again for professional production.
In addition, while it's not expensive to do a podcast yourself in terms of money, it's a BIG investment of time. They were saying that it takes about an hour to produce a minute of material--now, these people are doing dramas with multiple voices and sound effects and what have you. But even assuming it takes an hour to produce five minutes of material, that's six hours for a half-hour podcast--and I have no idea if I could even get through a chapter in a half-hour, especially if I'm trying not to mumble!
So, I don't know. Maybe if I regarded the podcast as strictly a marketing task, I could justify it, but then again, maybe that marketing time & money would be better spent on something else. It seems such a potentially huge time suck--like redoing the layouts of the first two books. Not a task to be undertaken lightly!