Déjà vu Podcast

You may remember one of the first novels we featured on the FPI blog when we started earlier this year, Déjà vu. Well, the author of that rather cool tale has been in touch to let us know that he is adapting Déjà vu for podcasting, under the creative commons license (as championed by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow to name but two) and it will be available free on his site.

Ian tells us that he has already posted the first installment and plans to release a new section each Saturday. Some in the book industry have been worried that creative commons will dent sales of books if free web versions are available in podcast or PDF form, but Charlie seems to be able to do both and so do other writers as is eveident to anyone who reads Boingboing regularly.

In fact, as Ian point out on his site it can be a good way for a writer with a small publishing house with little marketing budget to get their work noticed – think of it in the same way as listening to a sample streaming track from an album before buying it; some folk may listen and not buy the book, but chances are they were never going to in the first place, so nothing it really lost – on the other hand some folk who may not have come across this author may now think, hey, I want to sit down and read their novels.

I think such approaches, along with cross-media work such as Jeff VanderMeer’s new movie project (mentioned here yesterday) show how authors can use digital technology and their own imagination (the one free resource any good writer has in abundance) to help reach new audiences and it certainly makes the book world a more interesting place. In fact I think I’m going to have to have a listen myself. Ian chatted to us a few months back and his interview is still available to read on the FPI blog archives here.