Audio presentations of fresh, new, original short stories of mystery, suspense, horror and humor, plus serialized audiobooks.

I am a television writer and novelist. My TV credits include The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Star Trek: Voyager and The New Addams Family, and you can find my novels, Near Death and The Dead Kids Club on Amazon.

Written by Rich Hosek is a weekly audio fiction podcast of original short stories. They're not of any particular genre, some are mysteries, some are ghost stories, some of funny, but all of them are entertaining with interesting twists and surprises.

I produce the podcast to give fans of my novels something to enjoy between books. And also I hope people will just enjoy a break from the glut of true crime, politics and self-improvement that a lot of other podcasts seem to focus on.
 

I mostly write novels these days, but when I was working regularly in television, I always enjoyed the challenge of coming up with new stories every week and seeing them come to life with actors and sets. I had always read to my son, and enjoyed making the stories into bedtime "radio" shows for him, doing different voices (and sometimes sound effects) for him. When I released my first novel, I recorded the narration for the audiobook as well and really enjoyed bringing my story to life. So, I recently decided that in addition to work on my novels, I was going to write a short story every week, record it, and publish it on this podcast. It gives me that rush of making something people can enjoy right away, and make it as accessible as possible to as many listeners and readers as possible. Plus it's a lot of fun to creating the stories and voicing the characters.
 

I think there's always extra time available to do something you love. Since I'm doing everything myself and I already had on hand for my audiobook recording, the funding is the cost of a subscription to a stock sound effects and images service--which is less than a couple hundred dollars a year. It takes a few hours to write and edit the story, then another couple hours to record and edit the audio (depending on how many sound effects it has). So an hour a day covers it. The challenge is making sure I don't take away from my novel writing time. But who knows, maybe this will become bigger than my books.
 

What I gain from this podcast is an audience for my work. I'm essentially my own sponsor, since it gives me an opportunity to let the listeners know that if they like my stories, they can buy my novels as well. I'm a new podcast, rapidly getting to thousands of downloads. And I've been asked to be the guest on other podcasts to talk about my writing based off of this podcast.
 

I usually have a bank of a few story ideas to start from. I pick one and just start writing. The short stories for the podcast end up at about 3,000 words give or take, which translates to a podcast episode of 15 to 20 minutes. Once I've completed the story, I read it out loud sever times, fine tuning the dialogue and making sure everything tracks. I always include some kind of twist in my stories. I want the listener to be entertained, and come back for more.

Once I'm satisfied with the story, I record it. Usually there's only a couple of voices I need to do. For one story about an homunculus I tried an electronic filter, which was fun. Then I make a list of sound effects that will help bring the story to life, find and download them and layer them into the audio. Right now I'm using Audacity to produce the episodes.

I hope to find and start including a theme song and thematic music to enhance the various stories I tell as well.
 

I've mostly marketed the show on Twitter and Facebook. Instead of constantly hawking the same book over and over, I have brand new stories to promote. And I've recently started making the rounds of other podcasts to get the word out. It's too early to tell what works the best, but I believe my most valuable promotion will be people who like my stories sharing them with others.
 

Do it. I was inspired to produce a fiction podcast by Scott Sigler, an author who got is start narrating his own books and making them available in podcast form for free for years. Eventually, he was able to build a fan base that caught the attention of the big book publishers and he's written dozens of books, has hundreds of thousands of reviews on Audible and recently did a book in the Alien universe. My lesson from him is that it takes persistence. You can't expect to be an overnight success. Stick with it. Keep producing good quality content regularly and the listeners will come and with it the success you deserve.
 

You can find links to my podcast on pretty much all podcast apps, just look up Written by Rich Hosek.
For more information about me, my books and my television credits, visit https://RichHosek.com.
Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RichHosek
Like my page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/writtenbyrichhosek
Support me by buying my books on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Hosek/e/B08KG71LMV and Audible https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Rich+Hosek
or at https://writtenbyrichhosek.locals.com/ or https://ko-fi.com/writtenbyrichhosek