The holy grail for authors is finding new sources of readers for their stories.
I’ve been wanting to check out podcasting for a while as it seems to be growing in popularity everywhere. The wonderful news is that it appears to be relatively easy to implement. My first effort is to pod cast my Christmas short story for 2006 entitled Three Christmas Lovers.
After some research, I found the best way to podcast my stories is to use blog technology because podcasts are technically closely tied in to RSS feeds which are provided automatically in web logs. One of the systems I use is Wordpress weblog which has several special plugins to handle podcasts and makes it relatively easy to produce the web-log podcast.
Creating the podcast sound file (mp3) needs audio recorder software in your computer. Audacity offers a free, cross platform sound editor as a free download for the recording and also provides links to the Lame mp3 encoder that can be used to convert the sound file to mp3 format (but check out the legal issues also discussed there).
Before you rush madly into podcasting, it’s a good idea to make sure you have lots of bandwidth available from your web host. Three Christmas Lovers short story podcast file is three megabytes in size which is a lot whereas the text version of Three Christmas Lovers is very much smaller.
In conclusion, pod casting is a great way for an author to reach readers who prefer to have a story read to them. It is relatively easy to implement with blog technology but the size of the files can soak up bandwidth all too quickly.
Happy pod-casting 
Bye for now
Rob
