I spent a good portion of the weekend at Baycon, the local Bay Area science fiction convention.

Even though I read a lot of science fiction, I've never been involved with science fiction fans as a group. I've been to one or two cons, including a Worldcon held in San Jose in 2002. It seems most fans attend to socialize but I mainly like to go to attend some of the panels.

At this Baycon, the most interesting panel I attended was one on podcasting novels. One of the panelists was Scott Sigler, one of the first, and most successful, authors to use podcasting to promote his un-published novels. He had some success with his first novel and his 2nd novel debutted at 7th place on Amazon after his podcasting promotions led to a publishing deal.

According to Sigler and the other authors on the panel, promoting novels using podcasting is still pretty new and not a saturated field like blogs. If I was a struggling author, I would definitely want to give this a try.