This is me, six years ago, recording Morevi: The Chronicles of Rafe & Askana.

Six years ago, I was talking to Evo Terra about podcasting Morevi with support from The Dragon Page, a podcast about Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. This was all to promote Morevi‘s upcoming sequel, Legacy of Morevi. Evo paused, and said “Let me get this straight: You want to podcast Morevi. That’s a really big book, Tee.”

Evo and his on-pod partner Mike Mennenga, at that time, hadn’t been podcasting for long. Only a few months. It made sense, though. Their podcast was all about books, and all about Science Fiction and Fantasy. Have an author podcast a book on their Dragon Page feed. Sure. Why not?

Six years ago, Mike Mennenga patiently walked me through the process of hooking up a mixer to my PowerMac G4. My first rig, including the iLife package that included GarageBand, was an investment of $400. After making sure the cables were plugged into the right inputs, the audio card was solid, and the MXL990 was hearing me loud and clear, I started recording. After roughly a week of recording, editing, and mixing, my first episode was ready for delivery.

Six years ago today—January 21, 2005—the Prologue of Morevi went live on The Dragon Page’s RSS feed, beginning the first novel to be podcast in its entirety.

This was a publicity stunt. A shot in the dark. A leap of faith, which ironically was the title of the Prologue. Shortly after I went live, author Mark Jeffrey stepped up and said, “I’d like to podcast my young adult novel, The Pocket & the Pendant.” Then along came a guy named Scott Sigler who wanted to release exclusively as a podcast his novel, EarthCore.

In the midst of all these downloads from Dragon Page’s RSS feed, Evo coined the phrase “podiobook” and later launched Podiobooks.com.

All this started six years ago. Today. And it hit me just this morning.

Woah.

Thank you, authors and listeners alike, for coming along with me on this unexpected journey.

I’ve got more coming. See you on the other side…

The day after the Great #Snowpocalypse of 2009, I felt the walls closing in a bit…and the twins inviting me to play with them really wasn’t helping. Fortunately, saving the day was Peter Cox all the way from Central London when he rearranged his schedule to sit down, open up the mics, and talk with me about podcast fiction. Seems that Litopia has opened a floodgate in talking about podcasting, Social Media, and the modern writer, and Peter wanted to sit down with the guy that started it all.

If you don’t know Litopia, you should. Lipopia is  run by writers for writers. It’s a podcast, it’s a blog, it’s a forum. It’s an inside look and a behind-the-scenes look at the publishing industry, and what was supposed to be a fifteen minute podcast…well, we went a little longer…

Enjoy this bit of time travel through the history of podcast fiction, and looking at the present day and possible tomorrows of Social Media in the publishing industry.

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