Podioracket.com would like to welcome Isabel Joely Black as a guest blogger.  Her first podcast book, Amnar: The Awakening, is now available on Podiobooks.com and is topping the chart:

Listen now:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

or download it now.

“If you’d asked me a few weeks ago how many people listened to my podcast of AMNAR: THE AWAKENING each week, I’d probably have said it was about ten.

When I released it to Podiobooks.com, I confidently predicted months of hard promotion, with the comfort of cheering on from the ten people who listened and were finally able to get hold of it in MP3 format.

Well, that wasn’t how it happened.

I came downstairs a couple of days later, to see a tweet from author Brian Rathbone congratulating me for getting to the Number 1 slot on Podiobooks for daily downloads. In fact, there was a whole conversation about it. And I missed it.

Which is why it sometimes doesn’t help if you live in the UK and everything happens while you’re asleep.

AMNAR sat in the charts for a week, in the Number 2 position, and then reappeared this week at Number 1. I was stunned.

But that was only the start of it.

I also release a podcast on my own site of the current book in the AMNAR series, called The Inheritance, which goes out every Friday. A friend has kindly offered to own the site while I’m working on building a business and doing the basic survival thing. He called to say that downloads from that site were going up.

By the end of July, we’re looking at 10k downloads, in the space of about two weeks.

It’s the kind of thing that persuades you to call all your friends and tell them, and then spend time wondering how this happened.

It’s fantastic, of course. We – as in myself and my most vocal fans – have done a lot of work on Twitter to get people interested. Even that’s been noticed and blogged about by book marketers.

This is another step toward a dream that I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and it’s been very exciting to see Amnar doing so well.

If I’m being absolutely honest, I haven’t quite adjusted yet. It has made me very happy and I’m very grateful to everybody who’s made a noise on Twitter on my behalf, and all the fans who’re now demanding a paper version of the book. But I’ll sign off before this turns into something resembling an Academy acceptance speech. If you’re listening, thank you and I hope it lives up to expectations!”

– Joely Black