Storefronts busted, businesses destroyed, accounts frozen. No one knows who’s behind the rash of vandalism in the virtual world, Marionette City, or how to protect themselves from becoming the next victim.

Andersson Dexter has a new lease on life. Things are looking up for the newly independent investigator, when he picks up what seems like an ordinary case of vandalism.

Soon Dex discovers that what appears to be a run of the mill case may be linked to a series of more sinister events which could jeopardize the very existence of the virtual world, Marionette City.

Join Dex and the rest of The Cubicle Men team on his most complex case yet.

Risveglia il tuo inglese! ti offre:
* in questo podcast solo la versione inglese, nel libro testi bilingue in italiano e in inglese
* metodi di apprendimento accelerato per aiutarti ad assorbire la lingua piu velocemente!
* nessun esercizio di memorizzazione!
* Indicato soprattutto per studenti di livello intermedio!

Puoi trovare tutti i testi di questo podcast nella libreria a te piu vicina, sia in versione cartacea sia come ebook!

La musica usata in questo podcast è royalty free di Kevin Macleod.

Have you ever thought that you could improve your English while learning something useful for yourself? With Awaken Your English! you will:

* Finally set your goal of practicing the language
* Learn how to relax at will before speaking English
* Relax while learning new empowering words and techniques as well as the English language that conveys them
* Have fun with five key lessons in mental training where the main character is YOU!

Awaken Your English features:

* in this podcast only the English version, in the textbook English and Italian parallel texts
* accelerated learning methods to help you absorb the language faster!
* No memorization exercises!
* Especially suitable for intermediate learners!

YOU can find all the texts of this podcast in your nearest bookstore, as paperback and as ebook!

Music used in this podcast is Royalty free Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Narrated by Chris Snelgrove & Antonio Libertino

Our Captain Bligh is Roman Meister, a blustery, insecure giant who manages an
independent-league baseball team near the California-Mexico border. Commanding but confused, endearing but scary, Roman pushes his multicultural young players to win the championship he needs to advance in pro ball–and validate his very existence, it seems. Roman reveres the fading America of Ted Williams, struggles with the burden of inherited prejudices, and lives in terror of disappointing his ex-marine father. He is equally apt to straighten the pillow beneath a sleeping player’s head or brutally bludgeon a still-breathing fish.

Our Fletcher Christian is Rex Hirsch, an elfin eighteen year-old from Venice Beach who plays baseball with joyful abandon. He’s a Hacky-Sacking free spirit with a taste for anarchy who loves animals, plays Native American flute to coyotes in the field, flows easily among his multicultural teammates, and reveres his graybeard hipster dad. He holds absolute views and tends to zealotry.

Rex and Roman get along well at first when Rex’s bold play helps the Coyotes win: Roman likes and admires the youth, and Rex defends Roman as “old school cool.” But conflict builds when these seeming opposites push each other’s hot buttons, and Rex instigates a rebellion that burns through all kinds of contemporary social divides. Will the wounded white male explode into violence? Will the neo-hippie succumb to his dark side and destroy the man?

It’s a wild trip around the bases with gobs of humor, colorful characters, spirited action, and dark overtones.

Is Roman mighty?

Was Gatsby great?

A nice topic for discussion while watching a game.

Stella has lived on Novi all her life and she’s going to the Matcher to find her affinity group. She sees no reason to change and she plans to live happily ever after.

Max Bari wants to change Novi from a backwater colonial planet to an interstellar power, with himself at the helm. All he needs is to fix the Matcher. He has a plan.

Three people, three plans. But the Matcher has no plans. Only rules …

Interviews

The Mask of Inanna by Alicia E. Goranson
Horror/Dark Fantasy Family Safe Audio Drama

Website: http://www.themaskofinanna.com
Twitter: @maskofinanna
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Mask-of-Inanna/249989415021695
Alicia E. Goranson is a Boston author and playwright. Her novel, Supervillainz, is a 2006 Lambda Literary Award finalist and winner of the 2004 Project QueerLit Award. Charlie Jane Anders, editor of io9.com, says, “Alicia Goranson’s superpowers include searing vision, a powerful voice, and the ability to leap over genre boundaries.”

Matcher Rules by Mary Holland
Futuristic Fantasy
Podiobooks release date April 11, 2012
Website: http://www.mary-holland.com
Get it at Amazon today!
Mary Holland writes social fantasy and science fiction. She has degrees in sociology, art photography, and library science and she has worked as a corporate librarian in Silicon Valley. She lives in the Santa Cruz mountains in California with three cats and one husband.

News

The Parsec Awards begin taking nomination on April 15th, 2012. Go to the website, grab one of the promos, and then spread the word and nominate you favorite podcast. http://parsecawards.com/

Brian Rathbone has a new Paranormal Mastery release. Lure is the first book in the Sam Flock Adventure series. The ebook is currently available everywhere for .99 cents. Click here to get it at amazon.

Our friend Ian Rutter has just release the acclaimed podiobook The Faeries of Birchover Wood – Book 1 – The Bad in ebook format. This fantasy is excellent for younger listeners.

Get it on Amazon for only $1.99 and if you are a Prime member you can get it for free! Or listen to it from Podiobooks.com.

Contests

The Masters of Macabre Contest is accepting entries. Time is almost up to take a stab at horror. Gentleman, entries close April 11, 2012. Head on over to the website for all the details.

But they won’t leave him alone.

The Isabellan government and slavers both want him dead. Savages look to him as their prophesied savior. His lawyer wants to control him. His neighbors and friends have been murdered, and a once dead shaman declares him a servant of her One God.

Aaron has to make things right. His honor demands it.

Dusting off his guns, he sets aside his grief, readies his Talent, and declares a one man war against a nation that has betrayed him, the Clan, and itself.

With no other ships near enough to reach them, rescue is impossible, and the few survivors fight their unknown enemy while trying to invent a way to survive the growing heat of the sun.

INTERVIEWS

Travis Heerman

Social media: On Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Website and blog at www.travisheermann.com

Bio: Freelance writer, poet, novelist, screenwriter, podcaster, English instructor, poker player, biker, roustabout. Author of two published novels, plus Rogues of the Black Fury, forthcoming from E-Reads, a metric ton of role-playing game content for AEG and EVE Online, and short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines, such as Cemetery Dance, Historical Lovecraft, Library of Horror Press, and others. He taught English in Japan for three years, where he stood out like a space alien with his head on fire, but he now lives in much larger world than before. He’s camped out in Nebraska, nursing his long-cherished dreams: a NYT best-seller, a produced screenplay, and a seat in the World Series of Poker.

Travis will be attending World Horror Convention in Salt Lake in March.

Tio Jorge by Vincent Meis

Website: www.vincentmeis.com

Bio: I grew up in the Midwest and at an early age I began writing plays, which I cajoled my sisters to act in. In the 1980’s and 90’s I published several pieces, mostly travel articles, in several different magazines. In recent years I have finished three novels and a number of short stories. All three novels are set at least partially in foreign countries—Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. I currently live in San Francisco.

Like any boy of the radio era, Leonard Allen dreamed of hitting big in New York and Hollywood; to write or host that one big show that would make everyone notice. Even after he had his chance at both, that dream still burns inside him. He’s always been able to spark the divine somewhere in his work. And he’s been noticed.

He doesn’t know the lengths people will go to take advantage of such gifts. So when the mysterious David Lewis asked him finish his classic radio drama “After Dark” after a half-century from a pirate radio station in a New England lighthouse, Len didn’t realize it wasn’t as simple as that. The truth is that Lewis served a more powerful entity than even public opinion: the goddess Inanna, Sumerian patron of love and war both.

Sometimes, a god wants a sacrifice. Sometimes, a god wants praise and devotion. But the most fickle, and the most dangerous, are those who demand a show.

Journey into the creative mind of award-winning author Alicia Goranson, as she explores the nature of power and those who covet it in a genre-busting work that blends classic fifties radio drama, tense, paranoia-fueled thrillers, and the intimate knowledge born of a career working behind-the-scenes in the performing arts. Marvel at a stunning collection of award-winning stage actors, the Post-Meridian Players, as they provide the voice and heart to a cast of over thirty. Follow Allen and Lewis as their ideological conflict threatens to consume their friends and family, a battle neither can yield.

Is magic simply a tool, or a living thing to be respected? Does man have a right to make demands of the gods? What lengths would you go to for the power to protect what you love? Whatever you believe, don’t get caught out After Dark, in THE MASK OF INANNA.

At a gas station in the middle of nowhere, late at night, his wife Jenny appears… no car… no coat and looking older than when he saw her last. That’s because this is not the woman he received a good-bye kiss from this morning. This woman has been a widow for over four years and has made an impossible journey back in time to try to stop her husband’s murder.

Will they be able to escape the killers or does fate only have one plan… one possible outcome… ONE WAY?

* Finally set your goal of practicing the language
* Learn how to relax at will before speaking Italian
* Relax while learning new empowering words and techniques as well as the Italian language that conveys them
* Have fun with five key lessons in mental training where the main character is YOU!

Awaken Your Italian features:

* in this podcast only the Italian version, in the textbook English and Italian parallel texts
* accelerated learning methods to help you absorb the language faster!
* No memorization exercises!
* Especially suitable for intermediate learners!

YOU can find all the texts of this podcast in your nearest bookstore, as paperback and as ebook!

Music used in this podcast is Royalty free Music by Kevin MacLeod.

E se tu potessi imparare qualcosa di utile per te stesso e per la tua vita mentre impari una nuova lingua? Con Risveglia il tuo italiano! TU:
* fisserai il tuo obiettivo di praticare la lingua
* imparerai come rilassarti volontariamente prima di parlare l’italiano
* ti rilasserai imparando nuove parole e tecniche potenzianti nonche l’italiano che le trasmette
* ti divertirai con 5 lezioni chiave di allenamento mentale dove il protagonista sei TU!

Risveglia il tuo italiano ti offre:
* in questo podcast solo la versione italiana, nel libro testi bilingue in italiano e in inglese
* metodi di apprendimento accelerato per aiutarti ad assorbire la lingua piu velocemente!
* nessun esercizio di memorizzazione!
* Specialmente indicato per studenti di livello intermedio!

Puoi trovare tutti i testi di questo podcast nella libreria a te piu vicina, sia in versione cartacea sia come ebook!

La musica usata in questo podcast e Royalty free di Kevin MacLeod.

Even though the ACX website clearly states they offer non-exclusive terms and are actively seeking authors who narrate their own books, Nicole painted a different picture of the “intent” of ACX. She stated that they never really wanted indie authors, and instead only wanted the top few hundred titles from big publishing houses that weren’t already available as audio books. So much for this nugget also found on their website:

“The result: More audiobooks will be made.
Too many authors have been left out of the quickly growing and culturally repositioned digital audio market. Until now.”

But not, it turns out, if you’re an indie author who’s taken the route of offering up a free podcast version of your work. You, my friend, can take a flying leap as far as ACX is concerned. You are not welcome in ACX’s playground.

Someone look up the definition of “exclusive”. I am not sure that word means what ACX thinks it means.

According to Nicole, Audible members get their panties in a wad when they find a free version of the audio book they were overcharged for. On the surface, I can understand that. Audible’s terribly outdated “book of the month club” model doesn’t make it easy to enjoy more than one title each month, and their prices beyond that are notoriously high. So if I found a more-friendly alternative, I’d be a little pissed, too.

But that’s where Nicole’s argument breaks down. You see, the parent company of ACX and Audible is Amazon.com. And Amazon.com happily shows multiple formats of books at different price points side-by-side. Here’s a shot of Scott Sigler’s Infected:

Multiple formats & multiple prices on Amazon.com

Ebooks, hard cover, paper back, audio books… and even from other retailers and individuals. I count 12 different price points, ranging from eighty-one cents to about thirty-five bucks. That’s a healthy delta. In fact, it’s such a delta that I asked Nicole a point blank question: If we sold the podcast version for a penny, would ACX have a problem with that?

You can imagine how stunned I was when she said something along the lines of “No, that would be OK.”

So there you have it, overcharged Audible member; Audible thinks that you are so stupid as to not be able to tell the difference between a penny and thirty-five dollars. Do you also think that as long as you still have checks in your checkbook, that you have money in your account?

I tried to explain to Nicole (who, in fairness, seemed to understand what I was saying), that a free podcast version is very different than a fee-based downloadable audio book version. The former takes many many clicks to listen to. It takes listening to repetitive intros and outros. It requires patience to listen to some chatter from an author about a convention they attended three years ago or a now-defunct contest you can’t enter. And it requires exposures to commercials and special offers.

Contrast that with a one-click download for a complete and self-contained audiobook, where the only thing heard is the contents of the audio book itself! Sounds like a convenience some (though obviously not all) people will pay for, yes?

But not on ACX, it seems. Because even armed with that information — I like to call it logic — Nicole stuck to policy. She even admitted to hearing from a handful of authors from Podiobooks.com who tried to explain the difference.

Some of what I said got through, and Nicole tossed the ball higher up the food chain to Jennifer, whom I just got off the call with. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any substantive change in the official ACX position. Jennifer doesn’t see how multiple price points for ebooks are relevant for audio books (“An ebook is just a photocopy of a book in a different format,” she said. No, not kidding.) and doesn’t understand how free and for-fee play together (“I don’t get what authors get from giving away free content“.)

It’s hard to argue someone away from that position. So I stopped trying.

The only slightly positive takeaway from the call with Jennifer was her comment that ACX does have plans to let authors who have already created audio version in their sand box in the near(?) future. But not if that author gives a different audio version away for free. Even for authors who don’t want to play in the free-space, they run the risk of having their content taken down if the alternate audio version is priced too low. So if you were thinking of selling your podcasted version for $0.99, think again.

Jennifer would like to keep the conversation going. I’m OK with that. As much as I’d like to ignore ACX and Audible — I can’t. They remain the near-monopoly in the space. I stand behind Cory Doctorow’s concept of giving people every possible chance to buy an author’s work, and that means getting books on every possible marketplace. (Side note: When I brought up Cory, Jennifer said something along the lines of “Yeah, we’ve talked to him. We won’t put his books up on Audible.“)

Many authors are wondering what they can do to turn the tide in their favor. Here’s one option: Call Nicole. Her office line is 973-820-0400. Tell her you are a rights holder who’d like to take advantage of ACX, but you’re not willing to burn the bridges you’ve established with your audience. Try (perhaps in vain) to tell her that a free podcast version isn’t all that competitive with a downloadable fee-based audio book. Tell her that authors like Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi provide .pdf versions of their books for free and still manage to sell tens (or hundreds) of thousands of their books in print and ebook form for their publishers. Tell her how hard you’ve worked to build your platform, and would like to give that platform one more chance to purchase a fee-based product. And that you’re willing to do the work to make the best possible product for sale.

In the mean time, there are other distribution outlets. If ACX won’t play, there are other market places who will. And who will pay a better royalty. Authors on Podiobooks.com have been extremely good about building their own audience without a powerhouse behind them. I think we can do it again. I recommend BackMyBook.com as an alternative. If you’re interested, reach out to Tay (tay@backmybook.com). He’s got a great model that gives you more than 80% of sales — and you set the sale price. We’ll work to fully integrate with them to make a seamless experience for those who want to pay you for your work.

And maybe, just maybe, ACX will change their minds and open up to the indie author who knows the power of using free to bolster for-fee. Here’s to hoping.