Fogarty faces the mic

Authors are earning pennies from heaven and whetting appetites for books in-the-make with podcasts and audiobooks, according to The New York Times.

When a book is due next year, what's a writer to do for bread today? Many are now following a trend embodied by Mignon Fogarty, whose podcast Grammar Girl has kept her in public thought as she and publishing company Henry Holt languish over her book. Meanwhile, an audiobook she put together in a few days leapt to iTunes' best-selling book list after her appearance on Oprah.

Audiobooks reside in a division that receives little love in most publishing houses. However, publishers are fast reconsidering those sentiments in a world where information needs to move quickly and with less expense. Audiobooks provide both benefits and are also easy to create.

iPods help disseminate the trend and well-known authors can use their "brand" equity to push their recordings while new print releases wait in the sluggish publications queue.

But Fogarty, a veritable newbie to publishing, demonstrates brand equity isn't critical to leveraging the audio wave. With the help of Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers (parent company to Henry Holt), she put together an audio version of her unfinished book and was soon serving 100,000 new listeners a week on her resulting podcasts. The hastily-rendered audiobook gained fast popularity on iTunes, bumping The Secret, a high-profile advice book that was also promoted by Oprah.

Fogarty creates podcasts on her own mixing board in Arizona. Her show is hosted by grammar.qdnow.com and iTunes.

Audiobooks, which typically appeared after or alongside published books, are characterized as "the tail on the dog, and here the tail is wagging the dog," said John Sterling, the president and publisher of Henry Holt.

Other publishers experimenting with the neglected medium's potential include Hachette Audio (formerly Time Warner Audiobooks), which is toying with a Jon Stewart audio project, and Simon & Schuster Audio, working on a set of Stephen King stories.

Image courtesy of Jeff Topping for The New York Times.