So I recorded a few sections of my podiodbook last night.

First the good news:

• My microphone is better quality than I thought and sounds just fine so I don’t need a new one
• It was a lot of fun to read my book out loud (yes, I am a dork)
• I should be able to get this done in less time than I originally thought

Now for the bad news:

• I breathe waaaaay too loud. My brother taught me how to fix this though so we should be OK on the next take.
• I have found a lot of typos/awkward sentences/etc that I need to fix. I am going to have to do some heavy text editing before I can actually do a final recording of anything. On the plus side, I needed to do an edit of the book anyway to add in the new TA info that eBay changed so it is for the better in the long run but annoying when you wanted to be done yesterday
• After I unplugged my headphone/microphone combo, all sound on my computer stopped working. I have monkeyed with all the settings that I can think of and no luck. I am hoping it will just fix itself out of pity in a few hours. In the meantime, all sound is broken on my computer a fact I re-discover every few seconds when I try to listen to something

I am doing the book of The Trading Assistant’s Assistant first as it is pretty straight forward. The Author I suspect will be much harder so I am waiting until I get some solid practice in to do that.

I will keep you all posted on how this disaster goes.

I have been doing a lot of listening to podiobooks lately, in specific Max Quick 2: The Two Travelers and Brave Men Run (which I started listening to for killing time between Mahalo delayed MQ2 episodes). For the record, I actually listen to these while working because a small part of my job is very mindless so I can listen to a story while doing work. I do have to pause the story, though, when writing emails or other text or I write down the words that I am hearing. That can be very bad.

My observations are that podcasts can be very are entertaining, that podcasting is pretty easy for anyone to pick up with a little research and that podcasters themselves are largely very clique-y. It’s a little like cyber high school. This is both good and bad. Bad because you have to crack their group so you can sit at their lunch table but good because they all stand up for each other and promote the heck out of each other’s works which is great. I do not put this in the plus or minus column, it is just an observation from an outsiders.

That said, forever ago (maybe like a year +) I had bought myself a microphone to try some podcasting with and (surprise, surprise) never had time to try it. The idea of doing a daily/weekly podcast appealed to me at the time but now I realize that I would rather blog than podcast on a regular schedule so I shelved the idea.
However, upon listening to all these books online, I thought it might be fun to try a podiobook, the finite nature of such an endeavor appealing to me more than something open ended. So my hope is to, in the near future, be able to present podiobooks of both The Trading Assistant’s Assistant and The Author. If you don’t remember The Author, that is because it’s been out of print for a few years because I had no idea how to market it then but its going to be getting a new life with a new paperback, eBook and audiobook edition.
Right now I am still prepping the text of both for recording but I will definately pass on more information as

I have once I have it so please stay tuned for free audio versions of these books. If any experienced poscasters want to add their tips in the comments, I would appreciate it.