Berkeley author Seth Harwood on the podcast replacing the page.
Despite graduating from the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop creative writing program, would-be novelist Seth Harwood wasn’t under any illusions as to how easy it would be to find a publisher for his noir fiction—at the ceremony he was handed a “diploma” of antacids wrapped in an unemployment application. Still, the lukewarm response he received from publishers smarted. But rather than sulk, Harwood began making podcast readings of his crime novel, Jack Wakes Up, available through the website Podiobooks.com. Set in the Bay Area, the saga of nearly washed-up actor Jack Palms reliving his sole hit movie has since been downloaded over 10,000 times—a bona fide audience that sealed a real-life book deal. I caught up with Harwood, now living in Berkeley, to find out how he keeps his mojo working.
Paul Kilduff: Do you think future up-and-coming novelists are going to have to podcast their books? Is there now a template?
Seth Harwood: I think there is a template evolving for up-and-coming novelists to get noticed. Part of that is using podcasting and part of that is giving stuff away for free. People [publishing executives] in New York are afraid, for whatever reason, and for a long time new authors have been told they need to blog. So they go out and blog about their life, or how they write, or what they think of the publishing industry. The reader is never going to find that as interesting as their actual book/story—the thing they’re going out to sell. That is always better than their secondary writing. So if we’re starting a template: give your content out for free. You build benevolence and trust and a potential audience out there. Let them try your thing and you give them your best content. I think there’s a big chunk of people out there listening to podcasts and I’m not sure how much that’s growing. It’s possible that that’s a static number that’s not growing. But if you look at the iTunes store, the Apple store, that is growing and growing and more and more people are getting iPhones.
PK: Everybody has a website, everybody has a podcast (including myself), everybody has a blog. How the hell did you get anybody to go to your website and download the content onto their MP3 player? They don’t know who you are. What drove them?
SH: It’s the media that gets you more involved in the content. You only need to go to my website. And they don’t even need to visit my website—they can go to the iTunes store, or they can go to Podiobooks. And if you’re familiar with these sites, you may have seen the one-click subscriptions that they have. All you need to do is click once and then anytime I put out something new, whether it’s an audioblog page or a new chapter of my book or anything like that, it’s going to get downloaded onto your computer. You’ll find it on your iPhone, your MP3 player.
PK: So, an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed?
SH: Yes. Basically my website is an RSS feed. So people say you have to blog, you have to blog and people think that means you have to write about something weird, but part of what that means is having an RSS feed. So a podcast is just an audioblog basically. So when people subscribe to that, instead of just getting a little message that says Seth just posted a new thing on his blog, they get the actual audio file downloaded onto their computer. The majority of people are using iTunes for this and so when you go to the podcast, iTunes’ default settings update the podcast. So if you’re subscribed to my thing, every day your computer is going to check to see if I have new content. If I do, it’s going to download it. People are listening to this on their commute or at work and they’re tired of listening to NPR. [Although] I think NPR is great.
PK: But do you ever get tired of the church of NPR?
SH: The thing that got to me is not being able to control it, [like] if your drive time is [during] a show that you’re not interested in, like “Money Matters.” If you’re driving in the morning you just get this mishmash of all these different things. This is going to on-demand. I used to go to the library to pick up books on CD. Now this is all automatic and the beauty of this [Podiobooks] is if you go to the iTunes audio store, all the books are $15 to $20. Our books, including by the people I know, are free.
PK: Is it going back to Charles Dickens or Mark Twain? Obviously they had big personalities and packed halls reading their works. Do you think you could pull that off someday?
SH: You have to promote. That was the only way I could get a publisher. I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that’s a grad school for creative writing. I couldn’t get an agent to take on my project, and so I realized was going to have to get my own audience. I’ve seen how other people from Iowa do this on their own, whether it is buying a table at street fairs and selling the book there, or booking their own cross-country road trip book tour where they just sleep out in the car for a few months. People do anything to sell books and once you show you can sell, then the publishers will get interested. What I wanted to do is public, but also pretty private because I don’t need to leave my apartment to do it. I just go into my little room, pajamas on or whatever, I record, and it goes out there. Absolutely you need to promote, but it also goes back more to Dickens in terms of serialization. Putting your stuff in a serial content, that has been going on forever. If you go back to the early pulps they were on the radio, in magazines. You can go back to Homer and those guys, the serialized audio story has been going on since they invented fire.
PK: The book reads like a movie. Have you thought about who will direct it? Who will be Jack Palms?
SH: A lot of my influences for this kind of book and this kind of writing were movies. At the point when I wanted to write action, I was influenced by action movies that I’ve always loved over action in novels to an extent. I’ve always been a kind of literary reader and a literary short story writer for a little while, so that’s where the present tense came in. Like you can use the present tense in stories and it’s no big deal, but in a novel it’s a little weird. John Updike wrote a book in present tense, Rabbit Run, so it would seem more like a movie. So maybe I stumbled into that without realizing what I was doing. I’ve always liked Scarface, always liked Pulp Fiction. I’ve always liked action movies and some of the ones coming out now are terrible and I was like, “I can write a better book than these movies.”
PK: So why didn’t you just write a screenplay and become an L.A. waiter?
SH: My goal has always been to be a published author and so I’ve had all these backward ideas for a long time. One of them was to produce novels and that’s just where I’ve been. I’ve never even tried to write a screenplay, although I would love the book to go to Hollywood.
PK: Why is the book based in the Bay Area?
SH: The Bay Area has a long tradition of noir going back to Hammett and Dirty Harry and all these kind of movies. But also we had just landed in the Bay Area—my wife and I moved out here just after we got married and there was something about Boston at the time that I was too much a part of. I grew up in Boston. I also lived in New York City, St. Louis, Iowa. I’ve written a few novels based in Boston—it was too much a part of me to really describe it. And then when I came out here to San Francisco, it was like seeing all these things fresh. Seeing all the architecture, seeing the Bay, the wharf. All these things were so visceral I could describe them. I was really enjoying seeing them so I wanted to put them into the thing that I was writing.
PK: One thing I remember about living in L.A. is that if you tell people there you’re from the Bay Area they immediately say, in a condescending way, “Oh, it’s so beautiful there.” To me the subtext of that comment is, “Oh, it’s so unimportant where you’re from—but I like the clam chowder in the sourdough bowls at Fisherman’s Wharf.” Do you ever get that?
SH: I think if you’re on the East Coast and you say you’re from California anywhere, people will give you the same response: “Oh, it’s so nice out there.” Which basically means you’re such a pansy. You don’t have to deal with the winter. It’s like you’ve now entered the world of the lotus-eaters. It’s totally what they think.
PK: What do your hard-core East Coast friends think of you now?
SH: I was just back on the East Coast and I did a reading in New York. My cousin was there and he was like, “How does it feel to be back as a California guy?” And my first reaction was, “I’m not a California guy.” But I think I am gradually becoming a California guy. I spend a lot of my time in Berkeley. I can see the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, Sausalito, and downtown San Francisco from my house and it’s amazing.
PK: Okay, fine, but are you worm-bin composting?
SH: I am recycling.
PK: You’re not composting?
SH: I’m not composting. My wife wants us to compost and now we’re starting to compost a little. I have a hot tub. It’s outside on the deck and the best view from the house is in the hot tub. You get in there and the sun beams down on you and you can see the Golden Gate and Sausalito and everything around. It’s amazing. But the upkeep of a hot tub is a pain in the butt.
PK: I’ve heard that.
SH: Yeah, you think, “Oh, it’s great,” but then when you actually get one that’s 20 years old like mine…
PK: Have to add a lot of chemicals, check on the pH balance…
SH: You can get these nasty rashes and stuff, which you totally don’t want. My wife bought a used convertible. How could you get any more Californian than that? On the East Coast you’re like, “Well, a convertible seems nice,” and people on the East Coast buy convertibles, but how many months out of the year are you going to be able to use it? Maybe four.
PK: Sounds like you’re having so much fun with your hot tub and your convertible [that] maybe you’ll start composting at some point.
SH: You really want me to start composting. My sister composts a lot.
PK: The Bay Area and all its glorious beauty, does it interfere with the discipline and the sheer drudgery of being by yourself and sitting at a computer and actually writing? Would it be more beneficial to be in an area with harsher conditions so you’re more inclined to wall yourself off?
SH: I think I do a pretty good job of walling myself off. The dog gets me out. I don’t get in the hot tub nearly enough is the reality. I’ll go out every day because of the dog just to walk around. But one of the interesting things is that originally writing was drudgery. It was like, “I’m going to sit here for two hours every day and I’m going to write.” Now there are times when I do that and the writing is fun because I know there’s an audience waiting for the thing that I’m writing and I’m eager to get it out to them. But also now I can stay in my apartment and work on things that are part of my writing career but aren’t just writing. I’m the kind of guy who wants to work on my career as a writer for eight hours a day but I literally can’t write a novel for eight hours a day. So to be able to do things on the Internet like record a podcast, do social networking, get people to know about my work, do interviews like this, do interviews online, blog about different things—that has been great for me.
____________
Suggestions? E-mail Paul Kilduff at PKilduff@sbcglobal.net.
See more of what he is up to at http://thekilduff-file.blogspot.com.
Age: 35
Birthplace: Boston
Astrological sign: Libra
First “real” job: Commodities floor options trading clerk.
Planet you’d emigrate to?: Saturn. Clearly. Those moons! Those rings!
Extinct species you want to be reincarnated as? Are pandas extinct yet?
Website: http://sethharwood.com
