In early 2005, Scott Sigler spent two weeks getting up to speed on the technologies surrounding podcasting. The reason? He wanted to podcast his first novel, EarthCore, as an online serial novel, something no one else seemed to have done.

Over the course of the next few months Scott's audience grew, partly because the weekly, cliff-hanger-like podcasts were the only way for listeners to get the novel (it wasn't out in print) and partly due to his "first mover advantage" making the fact that he was podcasting his novel this way a story in its own right. Ignoring warnings about the various rights he was putting at risk he plowed ahead, eventually achieving the publication of EarthCore on Amazon.com. Along the way Scott was able to use the podcast as a market test of EarthCore, receiving valuable feedback direct from his potential future readers; feedback he was able to incorporate into his next works .

Dave Slusher talks about the success of the EarthCore podcast with Scott. Scott and Dave discuss Cory Doctorow's parallel work, how Scott's podcast is (hopefully) helping him move beyond the cross-genre problems of his writing, and how the production values of Scott's reading of EarthCore increased the impact of the podcast.