Book 1’s audiobook now available!

It was a longer project than I imagined but at long last, Book 1 is finally available as an audio book. It is on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3jZ9evM

A good while back, some friends lamented that my books weren’t available as audiobooks since they had little time to sit and read, and often listened to audio books while they drove. When I looked into audio books, I was pretty quickly soured on the idea. “How To” website told of paying thousands of dollars to a narrator, then thousands to an editor and maybe a producer too.

(sigh)

As fun as the stories are to write, they’ve never been “hotcakes” in the book market. This was my choice, of course. I intentionally wrote the books to NOT be like the hotcakes. The stereotypes of super-preppers and/or military hero types overcoming world-changing cataclysms sell thousands. As I said in the opening of book 1, Giant lizards sell better. The Siege of New Hampshire stories appeal to a smaller audience. As such, they have never generated thousands of dollars. The idea of an audio book seemed practically out of reach.

A friend, Jeff, talked me into trying to do the narrating myself. He got me oriented in the audio editing software Audacity. I had to get a decent microphone and sound-deaden my little office so it didn’t sound like I was recording from the bottom of a well. That took some finagling to get right.

Another friend, Todd, suggested that I post the audio chapters as a weekly podcast. A great idea, except for my knowing nothing about doing a podcast. More learning curve. I settled on Podbean as the simplest and not too expensive. One nice thing about Podbean is that they have a robust distribution feature so a Podbean podcast gets linked out to Apple, Google, Spotify, etc. without too much fuss. I started posting the chapters back in August of 2021. I was learning how to edit the audio files as I went along — sometimes having to go back and re-edit previous podcast files to fix things I didn’t know how to fix at the time.

It took until just before Christmas to finish all 14 chapters of Book 1. Originally, I had thought to only do Book 1 as a podcast but the weekly episodes were proving to be more popular than I thought — as far as downloads go. So, I decided to continue posting chapters of Book 2 at the start of the year.

Turning all the chapters of Book 1 into an audio book psyched me out. My first read through what Audible expected, sounded daunting — mostly because I’m a neophyte when it comes to audio work. It took several more readings to decipher what Audible really wanted. While a bit tedious, their requirements were do-able. (Things like having opening credits and closing credits as separate files, etc.)

Uploading the chapters (they had to be separate files) to the Audible site, their software analyzed the audio file and rejected it if it fell outside of certain perameters. It took a bit of research to understand what Audible didn’t like so I’d know how to fix it. So, I got to know a bit more about how to use Audacity.

After all the files were accepted by Audible’s software, I was told I’d have to wait 10 business days while my book was reviewed. Maybe a human has to listen to it all to make sure someone doesn’t include “Let’s Go Brandon” or some other prohibited ‘hate speech’? I don’t know.

But, just yesterday, I got an email from Audible saying the book is release. Yay! (horns, confetti)

Turning Book 2 into an audio book will go a LOT faster now that I’ve figured out what Audible wants and how to fix non-compliant files.

Since I’m only two chapters away from being done with Book 2, I’m going to have to decide whether I’ll continue posting podcasts with Book 3, or be done with podcasts. The podcast has been a net loss, money-wise. It takes some time too — aside from that needed for the audio files themselves. Is it worth it?

I haven’t decided, but I’m running out of time to decide.

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