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!

To-Do List

I suppose if your book is picked up by a publisher, they still expect you to do lots of editing, but they take care of the rest - the cover, the formatting, the electronic formatting, the publicity, the book review requests. But that's all up to me, and I'm learning. I've got an almost-perfect (as perfect as it's gonna get) version of my book. Levent just needs to read over it one more time to catch the things that I didn't catch, before I upload it electronically to Amazon.com, BN.com, and iBooks. I have to change the formatting before converting it to a format that they accept, too - the formatting doesn't work the same way on Word as it does on EPUB.

Here's what else I am working on:

• my cover art
• a letter to send to newspapers, etc... for publicity purposes
• a list of places who will receive my publicity letter
• creating a blog for myself where friends, family, and unknown readers can contact me
• a one-paragraph summary of my book - like the kind of thing you'd find on the back cover of a book