The podcasts for the July BristolCon Fringe events are now available.

First up we have YA author, Andy Goodman. Andy writes mainly for boys, and we’ll come back to the issue of gendered marketing during the Q&A. His reading is from the start of his novel, Tiberius Found.

The second reader was Ken Shinn, whose only current publication is in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. You may remember that he read from that back in February. Ken’s story is about summoning demons, and Benny Hill, and a drunken otter. Ken was supposed to be on first, but he got stuck in traffic. Andy commented afterwards that he was very glad he didn’t have to follow Ken.

The Q&A turned out to be very interesting because we got into a conversation about gendered marketing of YA books. Andy assured us that publishers are moving away from this now, at least in part because they have discovered that the kids don’t like it. This is very good news.

Also in the Q&A, Pete Sutton and I talk about the fabulous Small Stories: Big Books event that we are curating with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer for the end of August. Last I looked there were only 5 places left (out of 50), which is really pleasing. I’ll be talking to Nat from the Small Stories group on Ujima on Wednesday, so expect more coverage of the event then.

Hopefully you’ll notice an improvement in the audio quality this month. We got to use the new amp that Jo bought, and a wired microphone. This cut out a lot of the crackle. We are still sorting out how to best record direct from the amp, which will hopefully improve things further. There was actually a lot of noise from the air conditioning that night, but because it was very predictable noise I was able to clean it out.

As Claire notes in the Q&A, the next Fringe event is on August 18th, when I’ll be in London at Worldcon. I’m not sure yet what is happening with recordings for that.

By the way, I’m pleased to see that listener figures for these podcasts continue to go up. That means that last month’s readers, Pete Sutton and David Rodger, have the biggest audiences, outstripping Gareth Powell and the Flash session with me in it. Gareth will be back with his new novel in a few months, so I’m sure he’ll get his crown back soon. We broke 900 listeners last month. I’m looking forward to hitting the thousand. FYI, around 32% of the audience is from the USA, and 28% from the UK. Finland is the next biggest market, followed by Sweden and Australia.