What I've been listening to...

It’s another round of “What I’ve been reading” and, like last time, I haven’t been reading much lately other than stuff I’m publishing.

So, I’m again going to take this in a different direction!

It’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to get into podcasts.

I’m sure some of you reading this don’t listen to podcasts and you’re thinking “That’s not embarrassing”. The difference with me, though, is that I’ve been a regular co-host / panelist of a podcast for a year and a half, but it’s only about six months ago that I listened to my first podcast. Since then, I’ve pretty much exploded into podcasts.

Under my real name, Craig, I’ve been a regular on the Write Right podcast since the start of the second season. (It was a 2018 goal of mine to “come out” about my writing, so it’s only now that I’m starting to link my real name to my author name.)

Under the name Cameron D. James, I now host two podcasts by myself:

Deep Desires Podcast — this is tied to my publishing company, Deep Desires Press, and we feature an author guest every month to chat about their book and their process of writing. We have a lot of fun and I feel like we keep the conversation interesting for both readers and writers who might be listening.

Sex For Money — this is a new podcast of mine that focusses on the business side of writing, publishing, and selling romantic and erotic fiction. There are a number of podcasts out there that talk about the business of writing, publishing, and selling, but things are almost always different for those in romantic and erotic genres. Because of what we write, special rules and limitations are often put on us. I’m only a few episodes in and I feel it’s gotten off to a bit of a rocky start — episode one (about changes at Facebook) I was unexpectedly nervous and rushed through it, and episode two (about Goodreads) I felt I wandered too much. For episode three, to be released this week, I interview an author to talk about motivation when it comes to writing and building a career. Next month I’m going to talk about strategies for making money in this genre.

But this post isn’t all self-promotion!

The theme of this fortnight is “What I’ve been reading” — so here is “What podcasts I’ve been listening to”:

Writing Excuses: This weekly show features a 15-minute discussion on writing by big name authors (or at least one big name author and some lesser-known authors). It took me a long time to even try this because the big name author is Brandon Sanderson, so I expected it to be focussed on epic fantasy and strongly favour traditional publishing. It’s not that at all. They totally respect all genres and have a romance author as a co-host and they have a healthy respect for self-publishing. I highly recommend this one.

Sell More Books Show: This weekly podcast explores the news in publishing and self-publishing. There are a few podcasts that explore news in the industry, but I find these co-hosts — Jim and Bryan — to be better than most other “news” hosts. They really break down the business of self-publishing and look at it objectively. (Whereas I find a lot of other book news shows carry heavy biases — you either agree with them or not. With Jim and Bryan, they try to look at it from all angles, so even if you don’t agree with their conclusion, your point of view was likely given discussion time.) It’s from listening to this one that I decided to start the Sex For Money podcast — while Jim and Brian give excellent analyses and advice, sometimes what they say doesn’t apply to erotic authors.

Smart Author with Mark Coker: Hosted by the founder of Smashwords, this is a very indie-focussed podcast that starts at the basics — how do you self-publish? — and then moves onto marketing. I find the information a little bit basic, but definitely worth listening to.

The Secret Life of Canada: I felt this one started off a bit rocky (it’s pretty new), but has very quickly grown in their professionalism and their approach. This podcast explores the history of Canada — but topics that don’t generally make it into school classes — and covers tough topics. There was one episode, though, that was erotica-focussed, exploring the history and context of Governor General Literary Award winning erotic novel Bear by Marian Engel — a book about a woman who enters a sexual relationship with a bear. (Like, the animal, not a fat hairy gay man.)

Canadaland Commons: This is a political magazine show, for lack of a better term. They explore issues in depth about politics in Canada. I find it can be a bit hit or miss, but when they do a good episode, they really do a fantastic job. One of their recent episodes covers what it means to be a person of colour in Canada — and exposed some really shocking things about Canada, like the fact that our last segregated school closed in the 80s.

Lore: This is a beautifully produced podcast that explores history and folklore — and how they intersect and overlap. The stories are captivating and the production quality (which includes haunting piano music) is entrancing. This is perhaps my favourite podcast.

I also listen to a few others, but these are the big ones that I look forward to the most when they pop up in my podcast app.

Hopefully I’ll actually be reading books again when this topic returns!



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Autumn Fire. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, member of the Indie Erotica Collective, and hosts two podcasts, Deep Desires Podcast and Sex For Money. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Let Me Whisper In Your Ear

by Helen E. H. Madden

Digital vs. traditional. What a discussion! I've always considered my writing career one giant experiment, so it should be no surprise that I'm quite happy being e-published. I've even taken to reading e-books myself (yes, really!) now that I have a decent device to read them on. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to have a library of books on my little Asus EEE netbook. But the net book wasn't my first means of getting my fiction fix digitally, nor were e-books my only means of getting electronically published.

A few years ago, at a science fiction convention not too far from my home, I attended a workshop on podcasting. I had no clue about what podcasting was, only that it had something to do with iPods. This particular workshop was billed as a must for writer interested in promoting their work. Since I was a new writer who had just signed a contract for my first e-book, I decided to look into it. That's where I met Tee Morris, the godfather of podcasting.

Tee is one of many authors, and I believe the first, to create an audio recording of one of his book and post it to the internet for free. He has not been the last, not by a long shot. That weekend, I sat through several hours, listening to Tee and Rich Sigfrit and others talk about the benefits of creating free these free audio recordings and giving them away. I got my degree in broadcast journalism, so it wasn't hard to convince me. that this was somethng I wanted to try. All I would need was a USB mic, some audio recording and editing software (which I could get for free), enough space on my hard drive to store my recordings, and a website to post my work.

Oh, and I needed a topic.

Yeah, that last part was tricky. I was all a-buzz with the want, the need, to get my work out there on the intertubes, but I had no idea what to say. The one thing Tee Morris had emphasized over and over again in his workshop was the need for good content. A podcaster could get away with an okay technical set up, so long as what they recorded would grab the audience's attention.

In search of ideas, I bought a tiny little iPod and downloaded a bunch of other people's podcasts. I listened to fiction and non-fiction, full length books and short stories. There was Tee Morris' Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword, Scott Sigler's Ancestor, Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing, Danni Cutler's Truth Seekers, and dozens of others. Pretty soon, I was getting my geek fix with Escape Pod, Psuedo Pod, and then Podcastle, all podcast magazines of short genre fiction. There was even an erotica author out there, Nobilis Reed of the Nobilis Erotica Podcast. I was in heaven, listening to all these stories while I exercised and cleaned house, taking them with me anywhere I wanted to go.

But I still didn't know what **I** wanted to podcast myself. I was getting desperate. I so wanted to get out there on the net and have my own show. The amazing ability to whisper my thoughts, my stories, my ideas, into people's ears seemed like such power ot me. The answer of what to record finally came to me while listening to Jared Axelrod's Aliens You Will Meet. This was my favorite podcast of them all. It was simply a very short spiel told by a computerized assistant to a galactic ambassador, detailing the aliens he would meet that day. It sounds strange. It's hysterically funny. As a story telling device, it's brilliant. Imagine what your day-planner would say to you if it could talk!

But the thing about it was, it was short, really short. I suddenly had the idea that perhaps I could write a series of flash ficiton pieces and record them. Writing flash fiction made sense. I had a tight schedule. Any new project I took on couldn't take up too much time. So I made a plan to write twenty or so pieces of flash fiction, to see how that would fit into my schedule. I would write the stories first before recording a single line, to give myself plenty of lead time on the techincal aspect of things. I knew it would be important to keep up with regular output. Once I got started, I'd have to keep going to build an audience, and that meant writing in well in advance of recording and producing and posting my work. What I didn't know, didn't count on, was that I would fall in love with what I was doing right off the bat.

I wrote my first piece of flash fiction for the podcast, a horror piece that I submitted to the storytime group at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. No sooner was it done than I was suddenly inspired to write a whole series of horror stories. "That's it!" I thought to myself. "I'll start in October, with a monthly theme of horror stories. Then in Novemember I can write about feasts. For December, I can write about gifts..."

It was already the first week of September. My plans to write 20 stories in advance went straight out the window. I spent the rest of that month knocking out four more horror erotica stories, buying a mic, setting up audio software and getting an RSS feed for my show. I mixed my own music from some free sound loops I had, and over that in as sexy a voice as I could muster, I recorded the following:

Warning, this podcast contains sexually explicit material, and is only intended for listeners ages 18 and older...

In the background, you could hear what sounded like the engine of a space ship revving up. Then the bomb sirens kicked in, along with the music, and "Welcome to Heat Flash..."

Heat Flash, the intense burst of heat that accompanies a nuclear explosion. Also, short erotic fiction available in audio format every week. That was my show. And it all started two years ago. Since then, I've written, recorded and produced over 100 stories for the Heat Flash Erotica Podcast. It's science fiction, fantasy, and horror erotica, the stuff I love the most. It's also completely free to anyone who wants to listen. I don't make any money off of it, at least not directly. I do think it keeps me out of the slush pile when I submit for anthologies, and it goes a long way toward promoting me and the other projects I work on. Last winter, I was picked up by Radio Dentata for part of their erotic story time line up on Thursday evenings. Again, still no pay, but you know what? I don't care. I'm addicted to the format. Each week, I can't wait to sit down and read my stories into the mic. I can't wait to mix those recordings together with some music and then send it out to whole wide world. I've had over 40,000 downloads of my show in the last 2 years. That's a lot of ears to whisper into. And I'm no longer the no-name writer with a handful of publishing credits to her name.

I'm a podcasting star, baby. And you could be one too. All it takes is a USB microphone, some free audio editing software, a little hard drive space and a website with an RSS feed.

Oh, and content. Something you want to record, something you desperately need to share with the rest of the world, to whisper into eveyrone's ear. That's the hard part, but it's also the best part.