S. 3, Ep. 4: A Chat with Crime Fiction Author Seth Harwood

Debbi Mack interviews crime fiction author Seth Harwood on the Crime Cafe podcast. The transcript is below, if you'd like to read it. Debbi: Hi, everyone this is the Crime Cafe, your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I'm your host Debbi Mack. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to remind you that The Crime Cafe 9 Book Set is available as well as The Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology. They're both available online on all major online retailers for $1.99 for the boxed set and $0.99 for the anthology, which is a real deal. Just go to debbimack.com and click on either Crime Cafe or my book link to find the Crime Cafe buy links. Now, having said that I am very pleased to introduce the author that I once called the ‘Golden God of Marketing’, Seth Harwood. Hey man, how you doing? Seth: Hi, thanks for having me on. Debbi: I am so happy to have you on. I’ve admired your business savvy and your writing for years, and I gotta say it seems like a million years ago that I first heard about Jack Wakes Up. But I had no idea that you had serialized it as a podcast before publishing. So see—you were way ahead of the curve on all of us. When did you start the podcast? Seth: I started it in 2006 in the summer. I had been a big fan of audiobooks and so I saw that the way that I could put this book out was to put it out as audio in a way that people could get it on the web and interact with it. And that seemed to make so much more sense than putting it on the web as text. So there were guys like Scott Sigler and Tee Morris and a few others at a website called Podiobooks and they were ahead of me, but it was still like very early stuff. I mean you know it's years before something like Serial comes along and people really know what a podcast is. But what we were doing was serializing our books as podcasts. So I did it Jack Wakes Up, I started and then I really found an audience that I could connect to. And I feel like for so long as a writer, that's what I had been looking for and even having gone past that to get books published by big presses, small presses, all different kinds of presses; that interaction with readers, that feeling of I knew people were waiting for my stuff to come out each week. I knew that they were invested in the story and I would hear from them. That level of interaction—that was the best thing ever really. And so you know it was great that I did that and my goal at the time was to get enough of an audience so that publishers would take me more seriously and publish me. And looking back on it now, what I was doing then was even better than working with publishers. And so now I'm going back to that, and I think you've done a lot of self-publishing, other guys have done self-publishing and you know just to find a way to sort of work with the audience directly; I think that's the best thing that we can do. But the rest of the story, yeah, and you probably know more about that than I do. But the rest of the story is that I did like five or six books as serialized audiobooks, podcasts. I put them all out for free, built in audience. And then I started doing Crime Wave, which is how I met you, because I wanted to get more crime stories to that audience that I had and I wanted to help other authors get into the podcasting stuff and sort of helped get their work out there. So, yeah, it was really great and it was a very intense period of my life where from you know 2006 to about 2009, I was doing roughly a podcast a week of 30 minutes of fiction, mixing, recording, editing, putting it out, doing the web posts. And sometimes two a week when I was doing my own stuff and Crime Wave. So it was really a lot of work. Debbi: I know how much work goes into it personally of course. And so that must have been quite hectic for you writing, podcasting, all of that—to be a good time manager. Seth: It must be a good something. But what I did that was helpful was that,