Recording an Audiobook & Waking a resting project

As I've mentioned before, it takes a really long time to record an audiobook.  My book has 28 chapters, and each takes about half an hour to record.  So 14 hours, which doesn't sound long except that I really have other exciting stuff to do, like laundry, taxes, and tidying up.  So if I manage to record one chapter a day, I am happy.  Some days, I've recorded two, but that won't happen today because I promised myself I would work on the taxes, and I've also promised myself that I will write at least one blog entry a week, and it's already been a week...  And if you think that recording takes a long time, consider this: I am not capable of reading from my book for half an hour without making mistakes.  I mispronounce words, skip words, read in the wrong "voice"... the audio has to be edited.  The way I've been doing it is to just repeat the messed-up sentence and remove them later.  My lovely husband has offered to do the editing for me, but it takes a really long time for him, too, even though he's much better with the equipment than I am.  So I've asked OpenBookAudio if they do that sort of editing, and at what cost.  Worth asking, but I'm guessing it's probably more than I'm willing to spend.

There's also a question on my mind, of whether I should offer the audio as free podcasts until the audiobook is complete and for sale.  This could build interest and an audience, but I don't want to simultaneously offer my book for sale and for free.  So I could only do this if it's possible to delete the podcast once the audiobook is on Audible.  Something to look into.

Meanwhile, I've decided to continue querying a project that has been resting for about a year - it's a children's picture book I wrote about Nardugan, a celebration of the winter solstice, and the book is called The Solstice Dance.  I had some interest when I queried it to agents, but no bites.  I'm not even considering self-publishing this one, because the cost of self-publishing a picture book is prohibitive.  In addition, I'm not a great artist, so I'd prefer to have a real artist do the work.

I had a friend, who is an artist, do the artwork of three pages, and offered it when I queried, but I later learned that in fact it doesn't work that way.  You are either a writer who is paired with an illustrator by an agent or an editor, or you are an author-illustrator.  They don't seem to want you to find your own artist.  Unless you're famous, probably, but I'm not famous.  Rather than querying agents this time, I'm going to directly query small publishers.  I don't know how that works, either, but a few of them do accept unsolicited queries, so I'll try that once I've written myself a list of the publishers that might be interested.

So much to do, and so much fun!

Audiobook and book trailers

That's write, I'm recording one.  I could have paid thousands of dollars to have someone else do all the work.  Time is money and it does take a lot of time to make a DIY audiobook, but I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars when I can probably do a decent job myself.  There is a great company called Open Book Audio that can make the audiobook for you, OR take a book you recorded yourself and take care of the distribution on Audible, for a small cut.  They require that the recording be of a high quality and that the book be broken down into 30-minute segments.  That's what I'm up to right now.  It may seem like a piece of cake, but I am completely unfamiliar with the technical aspects of recorded sound.  As if that's not enough, it's really hard to read out loud without making mistakes, especially for 30 minutes!  My book has 28 chapters, and each one will take me approximately half an hour to read, half an hour to edit.  That will add up to 14 hours of reading and 14 hours of editing.  28 hours of work... And let's not forget that everything takes longer than we expect. 

So far, I've recorded one chapter.  After dealing with some major technical difficulties (take one: recorded chapter one, forgot to save it, program crashed, lost it. take two: program crashed when I tried to export the file to .wav format, figured out that Firefox and Pro Tools are not friends.  take three: tried to send the file to the nice, helpful Open Book Audio people, but it's way too huge to attach to e-mail, finally uploaded it to Dropbox), I've sent Open Book Audio the Dropbox link, and hope they'll be so kind as to let me know if the sound quality meets their quality standards.

In the meantime, I'm also working on creating a book trailer for YouTube.  Apparently, this is what all the cool authors are doing.  I am so cool.

Sailing new waters, friends!