Tag Archives: audiobooks

The Book Biz is A-Changin’

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

(Apologies to Bob Dylan)

Can you believe we’re into November already? Why does time feel like a toboggan on Kiwi Flats at Mammoth Mountain? Things are also moving faster than ever in the world of publishing, both self and traditional. And now we’ve got AI out there, churning out subpar fiction that crowds the electronic shelves. (I’m currently reading the letters of Raymond Chandler. Get this. In 1947 he wrote to an editor, “I wrote you once in a mood of rough sarcasm that the technique of fiction had become so highly standardized that one of these days a machine would write novels.” Ha!)

Wherever you are in this game, be ye DIY or working with agents and publishers, you have to think of it as a business. Indeed, as a business that may not look the same six months from now. In that regard, here are a few items that recently caught my eye:

Kindle Direct Publishing Beta Testing AI–Narrated Audiobooks

The biggest barrier keeping self-publishing authors from doing audio versions of their books is cost. To hire a narrator to produce an 80k novel can easily run you north of $3000. An alternative is Amazon’s ACX program, which offers the option of splitting the royalties between author and narrator, and thus no upfront cost to the author (but only half the take).

Now comes another option. According to Publishers Weekly:

KDP has announced that it has begun a beta test on technology allowing KDP authors to produce audiobook versions of their e-books using virtual voice narration. The ability to create an audiobook using synthetic speech technology is likely to result in a boom in the number of audiobooks produced by KDP authors. According to an Amazon spokesperson, currently only 4% of titles self-published through KDP have an audiobook available.

Under the new initiative, authors can choose one of their eligible e-books already on the KDP platform, then sample voices, preview the work, and customize the audiobook. After publication, audiobooks will be live within 72 hours, and will distributed wherever Audible titles are sold. Prices can be set between $3.99 and $14.99 and authors will receive a 40% royalty. All audiobooks created by virtual voice, the post says, will be clearly labeled and, as with any audiobook, customers can listen to samples.

I suppose this was inevitable. The question is, what will the quality be? Will books be better or botter? Can a bot read a novel with the same emotional caliber as a human? Will there be market resistance from a large swath of audiobook fans?

In somewhat related news:

Debbie Burke’s Nightmare Becomes Real

The head coach of the Michigan football team, Jim Harbaugh, is being accused of cheating, specifically sending one of his assistants out to steal the signs of opposing teams. He has denied the allegations and the NCAA is currently investigating.

But now a video has surfaced on X (formerly Twitter) of Harbaugh in a press conference admitting he knew, and that “I’m just doing what I can to drag this sorry program out of the mud.”

It’s Harbaugh’s “voice” matched up with his lips from another presser. It’s obviously a fake, because the real Harbaugh would never say anything like the above. Most commenters get the “joke,” but no doubt many will think he really said it. It’s just eerie what can be done with AI, and from now on our thrillers will have to take it into account.

Authors Guild Survey of Writing Income

The Authors Guild recently conducted its most comprehensive author income survey to date. According to the Guild: “A total of 5,699 published author participated, and the survey sample was meticulously divided, with representation from both traditionally published and self-published authors, making it the most representative author income survey to date as well.”

Only key takeaways are available as of this writing (posted on the site linked above). Here’s the one about income

The median author income for full-time authors from their books was $10,000 in 2022, and their total median earnings from their book and other author-related income combined was $20,000. Book income includes advances, royalties, and fees from licensing and subsidiary rights. Other author-related income includes work such as editing, blogging, teaching, speaking, book coaching, copy writing and journalism.

***

This means half of all full-time authors continue to earn below minimum wage in many states from all their writing related work, and well below the federal minimum wage of just $7.25/hour from their books. It also tells us that most authors are earning half of their writing-related income from sources other than their books.

Now, I’m not sure what definition of “full-time author” is being used here. It can’t mean authors who make their living solely by writing fiction because, kids, who can live on ten grand a year? They are also including “other author-related income” such as editing, teaching, etc. But if you’re editing and teaching to make money, how is that being a full-time writer? Or maybe I’m missing something. It wouldn’t be the first time.

There’s a marketing segment to the survey. It should come as no surprise that the most effective marketing tools reported by the respondents were: Kindle Unlimited, ebook discount programs (e.g., BookBub), and an email list. One curious nugget about KU: “Kindle Unlimited was particularly effective for self-published authors, who earned 67 percent more book income from the platform than traditionally published authors make on book-earnings alone.”

Amazon Sues Scammers Targeting Authors

Amazon announced last month that it has filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California against 20 individuals “scamming authors by falsely claiming an affiliation with Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing. According to the suit, the scammers run fake Amazon knockoff websites designed to lure would-be authors into paying a fee to publish, and then deliver either substandard or no service at all.”

Dealing with scammers is like playing 100-hole whack-a-mole. At least you pound one every now and then. Glad to see Amazon stepping up.

Goodreads Taking Steps Against “Review Bombing”

In June, bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) pulled her novel, The Snow Bird, which was slated to be published in 2024. The reason: “Review bombing.” That is a spate of 1-star negative comments meant to depress sales. It’s not based on the writing, but for political or cultural reasons. Goodreads allows any user to rate and review a book before it has been published, whether or not they’ve read an advanced copy.

The Snow Birds is set in Soviet Russia. Based only on the description, over 500 negative reviews from Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian users expressed concern that the book would “romanticize” Russia. So Gilbert pulled the book, stating, “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced – and who are all continuing to experience – grievous and extreme harm.” She will now focus on other literary projects.

Goodreads issued a statement to its users saying, in part,

Earlier this year, we launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines, including instances of “review bombing.” If you see content or behavior that does not meet our reviews or community guidelines, we encourage you to report it.

Isn’t the simple answer to require a reviewer to be a “verified purchaser” or at least be identified as having read the ARC before posting a review? Or does that make too much sense?

Meanwhile, At the Big 5

Jane Friedman of The Hot Sheet (subscription required), spent two hours talking with Peter Hildick-Smith, who helped the Guild conduct their survey. She concludes:

Finally, the survey results look sobering for anyone with a Big Five house: Earnings have declined for those authors over the last five years at the rate of inflation. The biggest selling authors are seeing their sales soften, which indicates to Hildick-Smith that the big traditional publishers need to think of some new approaches for marketing and promotion. For the top 10 percent of traditionally published authors, he said, “There are a lot of folks out there nipping at your heels, and you’re having to share the winnings a lot more.”

So Be a Cork on the Roiling Sea of Change

Way back in 2012 I wrote about the “discoverability problem” in the “roiling sea” of digital publishing. Our job is to be a cork, always bobbing right back to the surface, no matter what waves come our way:

The good news is there is one tried and true method that is consistent throughout all marketing platforms: good old word of mouth.

Which comes from quality + consistency x time. The best books and stories you can write, and then more, and more, never stopping, ever.

What say you? How are all the changes affecting your work or plans? Are you keeping the main thing (writing) the main thing?

An Interview with Narrator Steve Marvel

Posted on by

An Interview with Narrator Steve Marvel
Terry Odell

Actor Narrator Steve Marvel head shotI’m pleased to have Steve “Captain” Marvel, the narrator of my Mapleton Mystery series, as my guest at The Kill Zone today. We’ve been working together for eight novels and a three-novella bundle and since I’m virtually clueless about how someone works with voice rather than fingers, I asked if he’d share a bit about himself and his process. He said he’d check in from time to time, so if you have any questions for him, ask away.

A little bit about your background qualifications as a narrator.
I studied Acting at a renowned university Theatre program and have had a four-decade stage career since. That time in the theatre has taught me how to create distinguishable characters, which lends itself very well to audiobook narration. Shortly after I started narrating, I won Audible’s Audiobook Narration contest. I’m only one of four narrators to have done so. I suppose you could say I’ve developed a skill in storytelling over the years which is serving me well in audiobooks.

How long have you been narrating audio books?
I started narrating audiobooks in 2013, although I had a regular job narrating a weekly financial newsletter for four years before that. So that’s about fourteen years, all told.

What other projects do you undertake?
For audiobooks, I go for titles that seem well-written by authors who like to collaborate. I tend to work mostly in detective fiction, thrillers, and sci-fi/fantasy, although I’ve done some fascinating non-fiction work, including a chronicle of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is surprisingly popular, and a history of Star Trek, in which I voiced the words of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. That was a hoot.

Where other voiceover is concerned, I do a fair number of video games, mostly of the lighter-hearted, more tongue-in-cheek variety. I’ve voiced a lot of silly characters, including a series of fish and one fully non-verbal game in which I played five different monkeys. Those are fascinating challenges.

What made you decide to become a narrator?
Demand rarely exceeds supply within the acting business, but I discovered audiobook narration at a time when their popularity was exploding and publishers were actively seeking voices with acting ability behind them that could effectively portray characters and not just read copy. Audiobook narration also presents the actor with the opportunity to be not only the lead of the story, but every subordinate character, as well. He often functions as director, too, so the opportunity to exercise one’s creativity is greater than in just about any other area of the business.

How do you decide what projects to pursue?
Besides the qualities I look for in both book and author that I mentioned earlier, economics play a role. I take projects that either pay an attractive rate (as a member of SAG-AFTRA, there’s an established minimum I’m allowed to accept), or which show prospects for royalty-share income adequate to compensate me for my time as a professional. Choosing the right book is part art and part science.

For audiobooks, how do you determine the voices for each character?
I look for clues within the book’s text. Obviously, gender and nationality (accent) factor prominently. Age and attitude can also come into play, as can physical characteristics—is the character described as rotund or slight, healthy or wan, etc.? The body affects how a person’s voice is produced fundamentally, so I use all clues to feel out the character’s spine, both literally and figuratively. I often adopt that physical posture as I voice the character, which changes the voice without my having to rely strictly on auditory memory.

How do you keep all the voices straight?
I typically concoct and record all the major character voices for a book after I’ve read it through and before I begin the narration. I keep a file of those audio clippings open on my computer as I record the narration and refer to it as needed to remind me of my choices for each.

How closely do you work with the author?
That tends to vary by author and publisher. For major publishers, one doesn’t always have access to the author (especially, as was the case in a narration last year, when the author had been dead for a decade!). With independent titles where author and publisher are typically one and the same, some authors are very “hands off” and only have something to say about the narration at the beginning and end of the project, and then usually about logistics. Other authors give feedback as chapters get recorded, generally about characters and specific line readings. I’ve been very fortunate to work only with authors who mostly give me creative freedom and intercede only when something really jumps out at them.

I always try to keep in close touch with the authors I work with and keep them in the loop as to my progress and any questions I might have.

What are your biggest challenges?
The sorrow of seeing worthy audiobooks go unnoticed. Many authors struggle to market their work effectively, and I feel for anyone who’s poured so much creativity into a project only to see it languish in the marketplace. Digital items can live a long time online, though, so hope springs eternal.

Steve Marvel, audiobook narratorWhat’s the favorite part of the job (not counting getting paid!)

Connecting with the characters and the story and performing an interpretation that comes out of my own creativity. Reading alone in the booth, in the dark, can have a decidedly meditative quality to it. As someone who enjoys spending his vacations on silent retreat, I find that aspect of the process very appealing.

What’s the least favorite part of the job?
Like many narrators, I find editing the audio tedious. I don’t mind voicing the edits, replacing a word or phrase here and there. What I do mind is the process of cutting out the “bad” sections to replace them with the “good.” I’m actually quite good at it, but it’s extremely time-consuming. I’d rather be narrating!

How long does it take you to record a “typical” novel?
My average audiobook runs about 10 hours in finished length. Figuring about four hours of recording/editing time per finished hour, a book takes about 40 hours of work to produce. It probably takes me another 10 hours to read the thing through initially and make notes.

As an author, I compose my manuscripts at the computer, using Word. I’m always moving things around, finding better words, and fixing mistakes. With a word processor, it’s a very simple task. I have copy, cut, and paste commands at my disposal. I can highlight a sentence or phrase and drag it somewhere else in the manuscript, or delete it altogether.
What do you do with the first narration of the manuscript before you return it to the author? Do you hire out to have someone clean up the sound quality? (And could you describe what kinds of things have to be cleaned?)
Because my recording environment is particularly quiet (I have my own “isolation” booth at home), I generally don’t have to do much to the audio before I send it off to the author. I edit out mistakes and misreads as I go along, using a technique known as “punch and roll” to erase the unwanted audio and replace it with the proper reading as I continue on with the narration. When I finish each chapter, I run the audio file through what we call an “effects chain”, which is just the software taking out any low-level hiss and normalizing all the volume levels in the file.

What about matching the narration to the manuscript? Do you have someone else take a pass through the manuscript to avoid as many missed bits as possible, or do you rely on the author for that step?
I tend to work with a proofer to check my audio after I’ve recorded it against the manuscript. That person specializes in proofing audio, so she picks up the vast majority of glitches and misreads. I’ve tried to do it myself, listening to each file after I’ve recorded it. I can say without qualification that I’m now happy to pay someone to do that for me.

Then, the bigger questions. If there’s a notation that you read a word/sentence wrong, what’s your process for fixing it? Can you drop in or replace a single word? Do you go back and re-read the sentence? The paragraph? Would you be willing to walk us through your process?
As I mentioned before, if I catch a mistake as I’m narrating, I immediately correct it and move on. For mistakes the proofer catches, it can be time-consuming to match newly-recorded audio to the old—distance between mouth and microphone and the condition of the voice can vary between recording sessions—so I prefer to re-record as little as possible to replace misreads or bad sound in a file. That means I typically re-read just the phrase containing the wrong word—that is, that part that falls between breaths, as those are natural pauses. So I tend to replace phrases and rarely whole paragraphs. Occasionally, I’ve re-recorded a single word, though mostly when the word stands alone for some reason. More common than replacing a single word is removing an extraneous one without having to re-record the whole phrase.

Also, rather than re-record a correction multiple times, I’ll sometimes “tweak” the correction I’ve read with a software tool—raising or lowering the volume or pitch slightly, for example. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of tricks I can use to reduce my editing time. One still has to listen to each edit itself, of course, to make sure it’s acceptable.

Audible doesn’t require a 100% match of audio with the ebook. Do you grumble when an author asks you to fix minor glitches, like “a” for “the”, etc.? Or do you discuss whether it’s worth changing with the author?
If the sense of the writing doesn’t change due to an omitted, added, or altered small word, I tend to leave it alone and try to prevail on the author to let it be. There is a cost, in time, to editing. Editing audio takes a surprisingly long time, due largely to the need to match old and new sound, as I mentioned previously. If I’ve requested the author to leave an “alternate read” as is and she pushes back, I go back and make the edit. Perhaps I’m lucky, but I’ve never yet worked with an author whose requests I’ve found to be unreasonable. Perhaps I’m also easy to get along with!

What about the less obvious parts of the narration? I know you and I talked about some of the characters and what they should sound like before you began the narration. But what if there’s a difference of opinion about things like inflection, or emphasis on a word when the author listens—things that aren’t obvious when you read a manuscript. Does it bother you to have to go back to fix those types of narration?
It’s funny—there’s a great deal of talk about “micromanaging” in the online narrator forums. Possibly due to luck, or possibly because I do so much preparation with the authors I work with beforehand, I’ve never had such a difference of opinion with an author that there were very many things to change. It’s rare that authors I work with request very much, so with what few requests for such changes I get, I’m usually happy to comply. You and I have had a discussion or two about pronunciations of certain words, which I believe we split about 50-50 to change or to not.

(An aside from Terry: An example from my work. “either” (and “neither”). I prefer “EEther, but Steve had recorded “EYEther” and I didn’t make him go back and change them.)

I think things also come down to a matter of confidence. I’ve narrated enough books to feel very confident in what I’m doing—and I’ve had a decades-long acting career to bolster the performance aspect—so I assume that confidence suffuses my dealings with the author. Having confidence tends to make one more accommodating, because he isn’t threatened by disagreement, and it also makes him sensitive to others’ wishes, because he’s not caught up in defending his own. Confidence tends to be contagious, so I suppose because of that, again, I just don’t encounter very many differences of opinion with the authors I work with.

Steve recently completed the narration of Deadly Relations, my newest Mapleton Mystery. You can listen to a sample on my website (upper left), and find buying options here.

For more about Steve, visit his website.

Cover image of Deadly Relations by Terry OdellAvailable Now in digital, paperback, and audio formats

Deadly Relations.

Nothing Ever Happens in Mapleton … Until it Does

Gordon Hepler, Mapleton, Colorado’s Police Chief, is called away from a quiet Sunday with his wife to an emergency situation at the home he’s planning to sell. A man has chained himself to the front porch, threatening to set off an explosive.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”

Introducing Audiobook Narrator Eve Passeltiner

Posted on by

by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Audiobook narrator Eve Passeltiner

Gifts sometimes fall into my lap from benevolent angels who watch out for writers. During a book appearance last summer, good fortune smiled on me.

The venue was an outdoor bar/café on the shoreline of the Swan River in Bigfork, Montana.

About 30 people sat on socially-distanced lawn chairs, noshing, sipping, and soaking up sunshine while listening to me and three other authors chat about our books. For most of us, it was the first gathering since the pandemic began and everyone’s spirits were high.

Afterward a woman approached me and introduced herself as Eve Passeltiner, a stage actress who’d performed for years in New York and New England. She’d recently moved to Montana, had read my work, and said, “I’d like to narrate your books.”

Well!

Although I was flattered, I sidestepped. Readers often ask about audio versions but I wasn’t ready to take the plunge yet.

When we later met for coffee, I let her know my concerns but, bless Eve, she persisted. She had more faith in my books than I did and convinced me that an audiobook was worthwhile.

Market stats back her up and mirror the continued rise in audiobook popularity. According to a June, 2020 article in Publishers Weekly:

The Audio Publishers Association’s [APA] annual sales survey found that sales from 24 reporting companies rose 16% in 2019 over 2018, reaching $1.2 billion. The survey also found that unit sales increased by 16%. The gain in 2019 was the eighth consecutive year in which audiobook revenue rose by double digits, the APA said.

Another PW article about the 2020 online BookExpo stated:

APA retail member Chirp reported an initial dip in listening during commuting hours at the start of the lockdown, but it rebounded quickly as people discovered their new routines at home, and listenership has in fact increased to above the pre-shutdown level.

Authors need to put ourselves into the minds of our readers and figure out what they want.

Although I personally prefer written words over spoken ones, many book buyers choose to listen.

Eve convinced me I need to consider those buyers…and the sales I was missing.

During more coffee dates, I learned that Eve had been a flashlight-under-covers young reader who saved her babysitting money to buy books. Her early love of reading provides a solid grounding for audiobook creation.

In addition to performing and directing theatre, Eve is also an accomplished voice-over actor (video games, commercials and more). One of her most treasured projects was being the featured voice actor for the Washington Post’s Webby Award Honoree multimedia piece “The Women of Kabul” where she portrayed three different Afghan women, bringing each to life with a unique vocal quality and energy.

Eve Passeltiner with her Audie medal

In 2020, she was part of audiobooks that were nominated for awards including the Audie (the Oscars of the audiobook world) and an Independent Audiobook Award from the Audiobook Publishers Association (think Sundance Film Festival). She has also been reviewed in AudioFile Magazine, the source for everything audiobook.

Because Eve has traveled extensively, lived in big cities and small towns, and speaks several languages, she is skillful with accents and dialects (British, Irish, Scottish, Spanish, German, French, Russian, New York, Southern and more). She says, “Accents are a wonderful flavor that add to the work, but they shouldn’t overpower the storytelling.”

What is a day in the life of a narrator like?

Like most narrators, Eve wears several hats—researcher, actor, director, and engineer. Roughly half of Eve’s jobs come from publishers and half from indie authors. Although she does the initial engineering to record the book, publishers either have in-house staff or contract out the final editing, mastering, and proofing of the audiobook.

When I visited her home studio, it was a beautiful, carpeted, walk-in closet with a high ceiling. Eve says its unusual trapezoid shape is ideal because of the way sound waves move, making it preferable to a square room.

Hanging garments, covered with curtains, surround a desk with recording equipment. Eve says, “Clothing is a great sound dampener, along with the carpet.” Sound-absorbing pillows and blankets give the room a tranquil feeling. The studio is in the center of the house which acts as a natural barrier to noises from the outside world.

“What you want,” she says, “is a good dead sound, not boxy [echo or hollow].”

Dead sounds appropriate for crime fiction, doesn’t it?

When recording, Eve turns off the furnace, leaves her phone in another part of the house, and shoos Marco the cat out of the bedroom.

“Narrators are always looking for the sweet spot in terms of hydration and eating,” Eve says. “I start drinking water hours before I record—but not too much. And, of course as far as food goes, I want to avoid stomach gurgles. It is amazing how many sounds the body can make once you tune in to them.”

Eve does extensive preparation before she even starts to record. She reads the book, maps the story, casts the characters in her mind, studies relationships, character and story arcs, and looks up unfamiliar words and locations. She does a lot of the same in-depth research that writers do.

One of her favorite tools is her iPad. From it, Eve creates the master document for performance and recording. Using a special application, she inserts character notes, differentiates narration from dialogue, and includes correct pronunciation of names, places, or foreign words. She adds either an audio clip with pronunciation or types out the phonetic spelling.

For example, the name Kahlil Sharivar is noted as Kaw-LEEL SHAH-ree-var. She’ll be saying that name a lot as she records Instrument of the Devil, the first thriller in my series.

For each character’s dialogue, she color-codes the script: women’s voices are often highlighted in pink, orange, or purple, with the female lead in yellow. Men’s voices are often blue, green, or brown. She uses harsher colors for dangerous characters.

In addition to the script on the iPad screen, she monitors another screen in her studio that displays Twisted Wave, an editing software program for audio. Punch and roll is the industry standard for recording long-form audio and allows her to re-record or make changes to the audio file. If Eve misspeaks, coughs, or hears a car drag-racing in the distance, she can go back, reset the cursor, and start recording again. This allows for a seamless wave file that is ideal for editing, mastering, and proofing once the book is recorded.

On the tech equipment side, Eve is a big fan of Audio-Technica AT4047 microphones (she has two, one as a backup) because it perfectly matches her rich alto voice. Her Beyerdynamic headphones are easy (literally) on the ears and her pre-amp (a magic box that is a conduit between mic and computer) is an Audient iD4.

She prefers to sit when recording because it gives a more intimate feel, like telling a story to a good friend over coffee. Sessions last between 45-90 minutes, usually to the end of a chapter. During breaks, she stretches and uses a foam roller for massage. Then it’s back to the studio.

When asked how long it takes to record an audiobook, Eve gives the same answer that authors often give when asked how long it takes to write a book: “It depends.”  Variables include how many accents, the number of characters, and the writing style of the author. Plus, of course, the length.

Similar to acting, the narrator “lives” in the world the author created. She must get to know characters well enough to portray them with convincing, engaging voices. To differentiate the sound of a character, she uses pitch, speed, and even body placement to create an individual voice. To indicate internal thoughts, she may change her tone or volume.

My Tawny Lindholm Thrillers are set in northwest Montana where both Eve and I live. To further capture the story mood, Eve went the extra mile, checking out locations in the series, including the classic Craftsman bungalow that I’d used as a model for Tawny’s home and Hungry Horse Dam, the scene of the climax in the first book.

As a self-described “student of humanity,” Eve travels extensively and has a lifelong love of learning. New experiences help her relate to characters and make them feel more real.

Eve performs in three dimensions as if she’s on stage. Her body position and facial expression reflect what’s happening in a scene, whether she arches her back or hunches over, is wide-eyed or squints, etc. She says, “Stage actors make great narrators because they have endurance and know how to inhabit the character.”

During one of our visits, I saw firsthand how convincingly Eve inhabits a character.

The male lead in my series is a brilliant, intimidating lawyer named Tillman Rosenbaum who’s 6’7”, with a James Earl Jones voice, and an intense, dark stare that skewers his opponents.

How the heck could this pretty, petite, blue-eyed woman pull that off?

At the time, she was reading the second book in the series, Stalking Midas. She mentioned how much she liked my female lead, Tawny, and hated to see her suffer.

I made the smartass crack, “Wait until you read the later books where I really beat her up.”

Eve’s entire demeanor changed. In a flash, she grew larger and imposing. She leaned toward me and pierced me with a stare that was so threatening, it sent a shiver up my neck.

She became Tillman—a man who would kill to protect his beloved Tawny. 

At that moment, any doubts I’d had about Eve’s ability to capture Tillman  evaporated. Now we joke often about the “Tillman Stare.” 

Hearing my book for the first time is an author’s milestone that feels much the same as the first time holding the physical copy of my published books.

Here’s a small sample performed by Eve:

I didn’t go in search of an audio narrator but, by good fortune, I found one. Eve is not only hard-working and talented but is also a genuinely nice person who’s become a good friend.

How did I get so lucky? 

~~~

TKZers: Do you listen to audiobooks? What do you like most about them? What, if anything, do you dislike?

Any authors with audio versions, please chime in with your experiences.

~~~

Stay tuned for the launch of the audio version of Instrument of the Devil. 

 

Meanwhile you can read ebooks or paperbacks in the series, Tawny Lindholm Thrillers with a Heart…and Sass.

For sale at Amazon and online retailers. 

Are You An Audiobook Fan?

Posted on by

This Thanksgiving week I’m already starting to worry about Christmas presents for my family – though I’m thankful that for both my sons, books are always an awesome idea – but what about someone who wants to read more but just can’t seem to find the time? (yes, hubby, I’m talking about you!)

After chatting with members of my book group, I discovered that many, if not all, prefer audiobooks these days, as it gives them much more flexibility and allows them to fit more reading time into their busy schedules. Now, apart from listening to many an audiobook in the car on long drives, I have to admit I’ve never really been a huge audiobook fan. Although I’ve enjoyed listening to them, my preferences has always been for paper or an ebook. Once I started mulling over the audiobook gift idea, however, I soon realized just how popular they are these days.

Consumer demand for audiobooks has been steadily rising over the last few years, with estimates indicating that over half of all Americans listen to audiobooks (see Publishers Weekly report here). Not surprisingly, mystery, thriller and suspense titles are the most popular genres.  Part of the appeal to listening rather than reading a book is that audiobooks apparently stimulate our “echoic memory” or the process by which sound information is stored while we wait for the next sounds to make sense of the whole (click here for the link to the article in The Guardian)… Who knew?!  Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve obviously been a luddite for too long and I need to open my mind to the benefits of audiobooks – especially as a gift that I can also enjoy:))

So TKZers, I’d love to get your input on the pros and cons of audiobook options. First of all, are you an audiobook fan? If so, do you use Audible or another service? What would you recommend? One thing I do know is that it’s all about the voice/narration – so if you love audiobooks for mysteries and thrillers, who provides the best narration? What audiobooks are on the top of your must read/listen list?

Thanking you all ahead of time for your guidance and recommendations…

Happy Thanksgiving week – and if you live anywhere like I do, travel safe in the snow!

 

A Book In My Ear: Audiobooks, the Writer’s Take

Posted on by

My nineteen-year-old son always has his face in his phone. Drives me nuts, and I confess that when he’s around I nag him about it.

“Focus on what you’re doing,” I say.

“But I’m just rinsing off this dish to put it in the dishwasher,” says he. (Okay, at least he’s following House Rule #1–Zero dirty dishes on the counter or in the sink.)

“The phone is rewiring your brain. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing. I think you’re addicted.”

“It’s just a plate, and I’m putting it in the dishwasher! You know,” he says, after taking care of the plate. “You kind of nag me sometimes.” He puts one arm around my neck–coincidentally it’s the arm with the phone on the end of it. “What’s up with that?”

Yes, I do nag him. But I’m also a hypocrite of enormous proportions. We’re a lot alike, he and I. We both have attention issues–as in, we are both very easily distracted and desire almost constant mental stimulation. I say “desire” because I’ve spent many years working to get a handle on my distraction habit–a habit that can be both devastating and helpful to a writer.

My name is Laura, and my phone is near me at all times. Not necessarily because I want my family to be able to reach me 24/7, though that’s important, but because my AirPods might lose the audio signal of the book I’m listening to. I listen to 5-6 audiobooks a week, with a few podcasts in between.

In fact, I listened to the entire 6+ hours of the excellent true crime podcast, Bear Brook, on Monday, after talking about it with my editor around 2:00 p.m. And Monday was a pretty busy day for me.

Sometimes, when I’m cooking and have a book in my ear, my husband will come in and talk to me as he has a snack or peruses his own phone. I’ll turn a part of my attention to him and let the narrator’s voice drop into the background. Husband doesn’t necessarily know if I have a book or podcast going on, or if the pod is just there for phone convenience. If he appears to want to have a conversation, I’ll take the pod out of my ear and slip it in my pocket.  I’ve started to feel a bit icky about this scenario. I would almost always prefer to talk to him.

Last November–and I can’t believe it was so long ago–I posted about my attraction to audiobooks as a reader. The comments on that post are amazing and truly informative. I love reading about other folks’ reading habits. A rereading of that post also woke me up to the fact that I’ve since almost doubled my audio consumption. I knew it was getting out of hand, but seriously…

Audiobook overconsumption is, I’m afraid, messing with my writing. There. I’ve said it. (Took me about 500 words, but I’m fond of big intros outside of my fiction. Sorry.)

As with watching television, audiobook listening is primarily a passive experience that can happen while the listener does other things. Yet, surely there are people who listen to books and do absolutely nothing else while they’re doing it, giving the book one hundred percent of their attention. Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, writes about listening to music that way. She’s a huge proponent of doing one thing at a time. She protests that she would be very offended if someone came to one of her dance performances and read a book, so she wouldn’t read a book while listening to Beethoven. Which leads me to wonder if I would be offended if someone vacuumed or changed tires or gardened while listening to one of my books. Or if they read a paper copy or ebook while keeping an eye on a televised football game as my dad often does. My answer is an emphatic no, of course not.

For the two and a half decades before I started writing, books were entertainment and solace for me. I paid attention when I read because I was interested in the stories. When I started writing, I learned to actively read like a writer. Writers read for language, grammar, story shape, character development, story arcs, plot elements, point-of-view. We read to learn how to do it–it’s as simple as that. Some of us try modeling our work on more skilled writers (a marvelous exercise to step into another writer’s shoes). After a while, the reading-like-a-writer habit can get frustrating for writers at every level. Sometimes you just don’t want to know about the puppeteer behind the curtain, you just want to know what happens next.

I find it difficult to track the writer’s journey in an audiobook. There are occasionally those moments when I think, “I see what she did there.” While I tend to recall plot details and my mental images of the characters in books I listen to, I retain little else besides the conclusion that I liked them or didn’t.

I have a similar problem with ebooks, oddly enough. As with audiobooks, I have a very hard time returning to a word or a scene I want to go over again. I can’t tell you the number of bookmarks I put into ebooks, and the audiobook screenshots I have in my phone so I can bookmark scenes that way. With a paper book, I usually remember where something I want to find appeared on its page, left or right, top or bottom, or middle. Also I can usually narrow it down to a half dozen pages with less than a minute of searching.

There’s something so concrete about watching a story unfold on the page and also following it in one’s mind. I feel like I can almost reach out and hold it. I remember very early on that my husband said of my short stories that they looked like short stories, but that they had little story in them. Yes, I’d read a ton of books, but I hadn’t yet read much as a writer. Still, shape is important, especially when you’re starting out.

Over the past year, most of the ebooks I’ve read have been friends’ or students’ manuscripts, or books to blurb. I’ve read some hardcovers and a couple of regretful paperback freebies I picked up at a conference. But I can say with confidence that the novels and books I’ve listened to outnumber the print/ebooks at least ten to one. That number feels pretty shocking.

I feel rather like a student who has been watching YouTube videos while sitting in a classroom as the teacher lectures. Ouch. That’s no way to learn. Content is important.

That said, I love all versions of books. Sometimes I think it’s not quite fair to the book I’m listening to if I’ve glossed over bits of it. I’ve missed something, and I hate missing out, especially on a story.

Today I ran across this interesting piece, 8 Science-Backed Reasons to Read (a Real) Book. It’s an eclectic list, focusing mainly on books themselves in place of other forms of entertainment.  But a lot of it make sense. I’m not surprised that turning pages helps one’s recall, and reading is like a workout for the brain. I’m much more likely to immediately look up a word when I’m reading, rather than when listening to a book.

Right now I have three books going: I’ve listened to the Twyla Tharp book, and have read the first fifty pages of the softcover version. The second is a ginormous hardcover, Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White. The third is, yes, an audiobook. Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. Perhaps I should be reading the Heinlein on paper, and listening to Lethal White. Heinlein’s characters are wonderful, but Galbraith’s are deeper, especially given that they are series characters. But I’m sixty-five on the waitlist for Lethal White at Overdrive. And it costs a small fortune to buy on audio.

It feels good to sit down at the computer with some hands-on, eyes-on reading backing me up again.

What about you? Do you experience a difference in your writing if your reading habits change?

Audiobooks: Is Listening the Same as Reading?

Posted on by

“You cannot borrow any more titles this month” has become the saddest phrase of my small existence.

I may be an audiobook addict.

My gateway drug was the bargain-bin cd novel. Years ago I discovered many in odd places like Tuesday Morning stores, Big Lots, and very occasionally at Barnes and Noble. It took a lot of digging to find unabridged versions–I will not read or listen to abridged versions of books because they incite moral outrage in me. WHY are there such things? I can see perhaps that once upon a time people read Reader’s Digest abridged versions of classics so they could boast they’d read them with some measure of authority, or in case someone might burst into their house and made them take a pop quiz on Great Expectations or Anna Karenina. But, really, if that happens, you’ve got worse problems than being a slacker reader.

After CDs I moved on to iTunes books. I logged on frequently to look for specials, and rarely paid more than $5.99. They were much more portable than bulky CDs. But I got greedy and started buying pricey bestsellers and had to cut myself off. My husband subscribes to Audible. Several of my own books are available on there, but I bristle under the program: limits and specials and points. Mostly, I don’t like to belong to clubs that will have me–especially if I have to pay.

For a while, I listened exclusively to free podcast books. One of my favorite sites is the Classic Tales Podcast with B.J. Harrison. I believe all of the audiobooks he reads are in the public domain, making them truly classic. You can subscribe and get the free podcast, but he also has a great library of inexpensive classics.

I know the rest of the world began streaming library books years ago, but I only started last winter, when I re-joined a nearby library (we are in an unincorporated area) for $80. Now HOOPLA is my new best friend. I have yet to figure out the metrics for which books are available on HOOPLA and which aren’t. The pickings are occasionally spotty. For example, nearly all of  M.C. Beaton’s backlist Agatha Raisin books are available, but there are few books by Robert Stone. If anyone knows how the selections work, please do enlighten us…

As you can see from the photo above, my audiobook listening is fairly light. I’ve been bingeing on traditional and procedural mysteries. (Ignore the “resume” on the two Beaton books–I suspect I moved on to the next one before the last few seconds played.) HILLBILLY ELEGY has been a kind of in-between book. The first 90 minutes or so made me uncomfortable because 1) I found Vance’s broad statements about history and class attributes random and defensive, 2) he pronounces “Appalachia” with a long, Midwestern 3rd “A”, and it drives me nuts as someone who lived for years in WV and western VA, and 3) I have deep, recent roots in eastern Kentucky, and it felt achingly personal and aggravating at the same time–which is to be expected, of course, because my hillbilly ancestry makes me ornery and skeptical anyway. But somewhere around the 90 minute mark, Vance gets deep into his personal history and it becomes a compelling story.

Sorry, I digress.

I nearly always have an audiobook on in the car, whether I’m going on a long trip or to the post office. I have one on while I cook or garden or clean. In fact, I’ve been known to engineer solo driving errands just so I can listen to a book in peace.

Sometimes I wonder if listening to a book isn’t cheating. Is listening to a book too passive an act to be considered useful to a writer? I’m torn. It occasionally feels like that. I’ve let the first 4 Hamish MacBeth books pour into my ears like mineral oil used to float a bug out. (That’s a thing.) I started my heavy listening of traditional mysteries last spring, in preparation for writing my first cozy novel, and now can’t stop. Thank goodness there are a ridiculous number of mysteries out there. Unfortunately I’ve listened to so many that I’ve found there are some books that are marvelous in audio, but are barely readable on the page. (Not telling. Let’s just say I never tried paper with that author again.) It’s as though my listening brain is so focused on the story that it can ignore the weak writing–something I seriously have a hard time doing when I’m looking at a page.

Although magazine and Buzzfeed-type quiz testing tells me that I’m an equally visual and audio learner, I retain stories I hear in much more detail than I do when I read words on a page. Yet the story plays out in my head in much the same way for both–I get to visualize the characters, I get to make educated guesses, I get to participate in ways I don’t when watching a film.

And yet. One of the reasons I still read more paper books than I do ebooks is that I am better able to create a mental map of both the book and the story when I can actually touch and turn pages. It feels participatory in a way that swiping never does. Ebook pages are too uniform. They aren’t alive. Now, that’s just my mental eccentricity–I do read and publish ebooks. It’s just that the experience is different. Stories have a shape, and I like to feel the shape so I can create story shapes for myself. If that all sounds a little Montessori Method to you, sorry. It’s the only way I can think to describe it.

I do, to some extent, also see the shape of stories when I listen to them.

I know. This is starting to sound a little too theoretical. A little too woo-woo. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m betraying my writer self if I’m not reading words on a page. There are times when I realize I’ve been thinking about something else for a minute or two and have to click back to hear what I’ve missed. That’s not to say there haven’t been many times that’s happened as I looked at a paper book.

What say you, dear Zoners? Am I splitting hairs? As writers, do you think there’s a best way to experience a story?