Podiobooker
The blog for Podiobooks.com

I get asked this on a frequent basis: Will you accept my book on your site?

Short answer: Yes! As long as you hit our technical requirements, we’re happy to host the files for your serialized free audiobook. We’re not in the business of determining quality. We leave that to the listeners. If they like it, they’ll listen. If they don’t, they won’t. No harm, no foul. Though we do encourage you to do your best.

Longer answer: In the almost six years (holy cow six years really???) we’ve been doing this, we’ve rejected a grand total of three books.

Three. Out of 496 current titles and something well north of 500, some of which are paused or removed at the request of the author/producer. That’s a tiny number!

The first was rejected as hate speech. It was written from the “ex gay” point of view, which isn’t as much a point of view as a twisted and perverse broken lens from which a tiny part of a made-up world is viewed. Hate speech comes in many flavors. And hate speech — of any kind — isn’t welcome here.

The second book we rejected was a medically negligent manifesto that through readily falsifiable information attempted to persuade people with a life-threatening disease that it was all a government conspiracy and that the medicine they were receiving for their illness was the actual cause of their illness. This wasn’t just pseudoscience or alternative medicine. This was going to get people killed. Sorry, but I’m not going to help spread that lunacy.

The third — which happened today — was a single file (already rejection material because it’s impossible to serialize a single file) that was nothing more than a blatant infomercial. No, that’s not harsh enough. It was a 17-minute-long commercial, imploring the listener (as if there would be any) to buy buy buy BUY! Ugh. No. No sales brochures. I wrote a humorous (I think) and very off-color and NSFW post about it on my personal blog if you want more details.

Now, that may lead some of you to the slippery slope argument, or to suggest that I’m (Evo) rejecting books that I don’t agree with. I assure you that is not the case. Do a little digging on me and you’ll find my opinions and understanding of how the world work run completely counter to some of the books presented here on Podiobooks.com. Not only do I allow these books, but I actively collaborate with the authors/producers to make them better. Because I’m not so (or rather no longer so) naive to believe I can convince everyone to think like me.

So there you have it. Yes, we’ll take your book. Probably. Well… 99.994% of the time.

This entry was posted by Evo on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Rants, Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.