Audiobook Adventures: Week Nineteen

I don't know how much longer I'm going to keep writing these.  Each one seems to have less to say than the last.  Less original stuff, at least.

I accomplished very little in the audiobook-producing realm this week.  I got yet another list of fixes to make on a book I recorded in April, and I was pretty upset about it.  So I called up Big and complained to him about it on his drive home from work.  He sighed a lot and it sounded like he kept throwing his hands in the air from the screeching tires and honking of other cars, but I actually felt a lot better after talking to him, and went ahead and re-recorded the lines she requested I re-do.  I think I've complained about her pickiness before, so I won't bother to do it again (except to say that, honestly, there's a law of diminishing returns on audio fixes when every line she wants redone will sound different than the lines that precede and follow them.  I may have said "tuck in her hair behind her ear" instead of "tuck her hair behind her ear," but if the correction draws attention to itself and the original error doesn't . . .).

Conversely, I got exactly two edit requests on the short story collection I narrated and sent in.  Both were parts where I said the same line twice and didn't catch it in my edit.*  That was an easy fix, and within twenty-four hours, that book was accepted and headed to the sales racks. 

Big had suggested I ask that author if he would let us run one of his stories on our podcast, and I asked the guy about it yesterday.  He told me to go ahead, so I asked Big which story he wanted to work on.  He told me just to pick one and we'd run it soon, just as I recorded it.  I was a little bummed about that, since I was hoping he'd want to voice one of the characters and put music in, but his reasoning was, this is a promotional tool for that audiobook, and it wouldn't behoove us to put out a different version than people would be buying (especially if our version had bells and whistles that didn't come in the purchased version).  That made sense, so I picked one of the five stories and we'll have an episode with it soon.  Kind of an efficient use of my time there, when I think about it.

As far as recording goes, I have focused solely on the first book in a series I've been contracted to do.  I've mentioned it a lot, and hopefully, it'll sell well, and I'll end up doing them all, but that's quite a commitment to make, and we'll see if it burns me out in the end.  This first book is really pretty fun, and the greatest challenge** in it is that there's so many darn characters.  I've tried to give them all unique voices (okay, uniqueish), and started writing them down on the bookmark, because it sucks to have to go back through the recordings to try and figure out what kind of accent or pitch or bad celebrity impression I did for one of the villains.

Because of that, I put away my other projects and just read through it as fast as I could.  I got in done this week, in about nine days, but I know that editing will take way longer.  A part of me is worried that if I send in the finished work too quickly, that the publisher will think I can handle every book at that pace, and that could be dangerous. 

But I have another first book in a series that I began last month, and as soon as this one is done--or I start to hate editing it--I'll pick that up and start recording again.  That one has been fun too, and is a much lighter read than the one written in the Sixties.

I haven't included outtakes in the last couple blog posts, mostly because I ran out of them on the old projects, and I saved some from one of my recent recordings and when I went to save them, the file was silent.  That's happened to me once before and I'm not sure what causes it, but they're just outtakes--thank Bossk--so I just closed the file and started a new one.  Maybe in two weeks or so we'll get more.

Maybe.

Rish Outfield, Occasional Reader

*I wonder how many more of those are out there.  Probably several.

**The second-greatest challenge was that there were some sciency-sounding terms and discussions in the book, and not knowing which words were invented and which were real, I tried to pronounce them every conceivable way every time I said them.  Time will tell whether I failed on that or not.