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Review: Tor Podcasting
Feb. 25th, 2011 07:50 pmI recently delved deeply into the iTunes store looking for more writing-related podcasts, looking for more to add to my repertoire.
One of the ones I downloaded is Tor Podcasting, which was a series of 12 author interviews done in 2008 by Tor Books, a Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher that you've probably heard of. The interviews ran from between 5 and 15 minutes, though the longest podcast was a little over 30 minutes.
So yeah, it's an oldie, from 2008 and only ran for a year. But the short format appealed to me and I always love listening to interviews from authors. You never know what tidbits you might pick up, so when I saw it I just downloaded them all and listened to them basically in a long marathon.
Doing it that way is a different sort of experience from listening to something week-by-week or month-by-month as new episodes come out. It tends to make both the virtues and the sins stand out more starkly.
To be honest, unless there is a particular author that you personally enjoy, I'd recommend that you just pass it by. The interviews were sometimes fun and good for a smile, but they were definitely entirely promotional and contained little meat that I could use for my own writing. Listening to 3-year-old interviews of authors I'd never heard of talking about their brand new books that are likely now out of print wasn't all that interesting. The interviews were very informal and not super-penetrating, so rarely did anything really jump out as highly insightful or moving.
The exceptions were the last three episodes, which were quite good. Brandon Sanderson did a two-part interview talking about his books, and Orson Scott Card did the last one. These episodes were a completely different format from the earlier ones, a sort of long monologue without interruption. The editing was, at times, quite choppy - you could often tell when two parts were edited together. But since I actually cared about these authors and had read their work, I was interested enough in the subject to listen closely for the entire thing.
I don't want to harp the series' failings or anything, but I do want to critique one last item that I think was pretty, um, odd. And it's entirely possible that this coloured my experience of the entire series.
The very second interview was with Whitley and Anne Strieber, a husband and wife author team that I admit I'd never heard of before listening to this podcast. Apparently they wrote the novel that was turned into movie The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 as well, so they're pretty successful.
The interviews were going on rather normally, forgettably but vaguely interesting, and then it took a rather bizarre turn. I distinctly remember the interviewer asking something along the lines of there being an interesting "event" in the author's past which shaped his books, and Mr. Strieber proceeded to explain all about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 80s.
Okay, I don't judge. I'm an open-minded girl, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility that he's not nuts and he actually was abducted by aliens. I don't really care if he was abducted by aliens - that's not really the point of bringing it up. It was quite interesting to listen to this, though I sort of finished out the episode feeling like my mind had been blown.
And the next podcast wasn't an interview at all. It was a recording of an address Mr. Strieber had made to a convention of alien abductees.
Again, I don't judge. But here's the thing: By the end of this episode - only the third episode in the series - I was really wondering what kind of podcast I was listening to. Wasn't I listening to a series of author interviews talking about their books? Is Tor Books a collection of people who get together and commiserate about their alien abduction experiences? Was I going to be hearing other mindblowing personal wacky stuff in all of the subsequent interviews?
Of course, I didn't. All of the others were quite benign.
I don't take issue with Tor deciding to interview Mr. Strieber and ask him about his alien abduction experience. But I think that it would have been a lot better if they had waited until at least 4-5 interviews in before doing that one. It's a matter of trust, I think, and what kind of impression one is giving one's listeners.
A new listener will grab the first couple of episodes of something to try to get an idea of what to expect for later ones. If you start off a podcast saying you're going to talk about sales techniques, and in the second episode you suddenly start discussing government policy on abortion, people are going to wonder if the podcast is really about sales at all.
I think if the Strieber interview hadn't come so early, and then been followed by what almost seemed like a promotion specifically of this alien abduction sub-culture, I would already have known what kind of podcast it was. Even if those episodes still blew my mind - which I'm sure they would have - I still would have had reason to trust that the next one would be back to the usual subject matter. It would have been a very interesting interview, but no reflection on the podcast as a whole.
As it was, I seriously considered just moving on and listening to something different instead of moving on to episode 4, because I was no longer sure of what I had in my hands. I'm glad I stuck with it, at least because of the last few interviews, but it was definitely... twilight zone... there for a bit.
One of the ones I downloaded is Tor Podcasting, which was a series of 12 author interviews done in 2008 by Tor Books, a Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher that you've probably heard of. The interviews ran from between 5 and 15 minutes, though the longest podcast was a little over 30 minutes.
So yeah, it's an oldie, from 2008 and only ran for a year. But the short format appealed to me and I always love listening to interviews from authors. You never know what tidbits you might pick up, so when I saw it I just downloaded them all and listened to them basically in a long marathon.
Doing it that way is a different sort of experience from listening to something week-by-week or month-by-month as new episodes come out. It tends to make both the virtues and the sins stand out more starkly.
To be honest, unless there is a particular author that you personally enjoy, I'd recommend that you just pass it by. The interviews were sometimes fun and good for a smile, but they were definitely entirely promotional and contained little meat that I could use for my own writing. Listening to 3-year-old interviews of authors I'd never heard of talking about their brand new books that are likely now out of print wasn't all that interesting. The interviews were very informal and not super-penetrating, so rarely did anything really jump out as highly insightful or moving.
The exceptions were the last three episodes, which were quite good. Brandon Sanderson did a two-part interview talking about his books, and Orson Scott Card did the last one. These episodes were a completely different format from the earlier ones, a sort of long monologue without interruption. The editing was, at times, quite choppy - you could often tell when two parts were edited together. But since I actually cared about these authors and had read their work, I was interested enough in the subject to listen closely for the entire thing.
I don't want to harp the series' failings or anything, but I do want to critique one last item that I think was pretty, um, odd. And it's entirely possible that this coloured my experience of the entire series.
The very second interview was with Whitley and Anne Strieber, a husband and wife author team that I admit I'd never heard of before listening to this podcast. Apparently they wrote the novel that was turned into movie The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 as well, so they're pretty successful.
The interviews were going on rather normally, forgettably but vaguely interesting, and then it took a rather bizarre turn. I distinctly remember the interviewer asking something along the lines of there being an interesting "event" in the author's past which shaped his books, and Mr. Strieber proceeded to explain all about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 80s.
Okay, I don't judge. I'm an open-minded girl, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility that he's not nuts and he actually was abducted by aliens. I don't really care if he was abducted by aliens - that's not really the point of bringing it up. It was quite interesting to listen to this, though I sort of finished out the episode feeling like my mind had been blown.
And the next podcast wasn't an interview at all. It was a recording of an address Mr. Strieber had made to a convention of alien abductees.
Again, I don't judge. But here's the thing: By the end of this episode - only the third episode in the series - I was really wondering what kind of podcast I was listening to. Wasn't I listening to a series of author interviews talking about their books? Is Tor Books a collection of people who get together and commiserate about their alien abduction experiences? Was I going to be hearing other mindblowing personal wacky stuff in all of the subsequent interviews?
Of course, I didn't. All of the others were quite benign.
I don't take issue with Tor deciding to interview Mr. Strieber and ask him about his alien abduction experience. But I think that it would have been a lot better if they had waited until at least 4-5 interviews in before doing that one. It's a matter of trust, I think, and what kind of impression one is giving one's listeners.
A new listener will grab the first couple of episodes of something to try to get an idea of what to expect for later ones. If you start off a podcast saying you're going to talk about sales techniques, and in the second episode you suddenly start discussing government policy on abortion, people are going to wonder if the podcast is really about sales at all.
I think if the Strieber interview hadn't come so early, and then been followed by what almost seemed like a promotion specifically of this alien abduction sub-culture, I would already have known what kind of podcast it was. Even if those episodes still blew my mind - which I'm sure they would have - I still would have had reason to trust that the next one would be back to the usual subject matter. It would have been a very interesting interview, but no reflection on the podcast as a whole.
As it was, I seriously considered just moving on and listening to something different instead of moving on to episode 4, because I was no longer sure of what I had in my hands. I'm glad I stuck with it, at least because of the last few interviews, but it was definitely... twilight zone... there for a bit.
