Tagged: conference

Is This Thing On?

One of the most informative sessions we attended at the Independent Authors Conference was the one on audiobooks. Among the things we learned:

  1. they’re expensive
  2. producing them costs a lot of money
  3. they ain’t cheap

Audio is the fastest-growing publishing segment [citation needed], and it’s not just a “millennial thing.” More than one of Kent’s coworkers where he dayjobs has asked when the works of Rune Skelley will become available in audio format, because they utilize their lengthy commute times to consume books. (These are people whose kids are millennials. But yeah, the younger crowd likes to consume content that way, too.)

The duration guestimate is around 9500 words an hour, so if your book is 95,000 words then it will be roughly ten hours. While there are different ways the billing can be structured, professional audiobook production basically runs several hundred dollars per finished hour. Given the scale of our novels, we experienced major sticker shock. The question that logically occurred to us was, “What about doing it ourselves?” We do everything ourselves. How hard can it be? Kent reads all the manuscripts aloud multiple times anyway in the course of our standard process, and we often say we ought to be recording.

Well. Short answer: yes, you can DIY your audiobooks. But it’s a lot of work, and requires adequate setup and preparation.

  • Needless to say, the manuscript needs to be final. So, our scheme to capture the audio on-the-fly during our writing process isn’t really sound. (Drat!)
  • If you flub anything, you need to do it again. Even if you said all the correct words in the correct order, you might not be pleased with your cadence or inflection. You’ll end up needing to record much of the text twice, or more, to get a top-notch end product.
  • All those takes need to be edited together. This is time-consuming, probably double or triple the finished hours of the audiobook. (And that’s assuming you already know how to drive the editing software.)
  • The narrator’s delivery must be even and distinct. This requires considerable concentration and holding a consisten posture, which can become exhausting over periods of hours. And, across multiple sessions. If you catch a cold, you might not be able to record until your congestion clears up.
  • Good narration is a form of acting. The book’s tone needs to come through, and each character’s voice should be distinguishable. Can you do the accents? Male and female roles? Remember, the listener is counting on you to bring the story to life.
  • The recording environment has be free of background noise, reverb, and interruptions. You need a space where you can’t hear traffic or opening and closing of doors, and so on. If there are other people or pets in the house, and you don’t have a soundproofed room, they’ll have to be unreasonably still or they’ll spoil your takes.
  • It’s critical to have someone do QA (quality assurance) on your output. This is a big job, and doing it well requires a good ear and the ability to deliver honest criticism. It might be hard to find someone willing to donate the hours whose relationship to you doesn’t interfere with their objectivity.

We’re still flirting with the idea of trying it, despite all these obstacles. It’s not impossible, but there’s a reason that the pros charge serious money to do it. Perhaps we’ll have an update in the future, whether it’s a sample recording or, “Yikes, that didn’t go well.”

 

Successfully Defining Success

Saying you’re a self-published author is just another way of saying you’re both an author and a publisher. If you’re like us, you don’t find those two occupations equally rewarding.

So, as a self-published author, how do you define success?

As we mentioned, we just got back from the Book Baby conference in Philly. There was a lot of good stuff there, starting with the opening keynote from Daniel Lerner on the topic of, yup, defining success. Daniel’s talk was excellent — energizing, moving, and thought-provoking. If you get the chance, definitely check him out.

On the drive home, we dug down into how Rune Skelley defines success. It was an exercise we hadn’t gone through previously, to articulate our aspirations. We had a strong sense that we wanted mainly the same things, but this was laying it out raw in a moving vehicle. It could have gotten tense. But what we confirmed is that we do agree on the definition of success.

For us, the quality of the writing is paramount. We measure quality by our own standards, and we strive to set that bar high. And, we believe that quality writing will find an audience. (This belief seems to verge on mystical, but we’re trying to become more realistic.) We have no desire to chase trends in search of a hit, we’re certainly not going to change how we write in hopes of broader appeal, but we do want to help our work find its audience. We have to figure out how to be as good at being a publisher as we are at being an author.

Watch this space for more reflections on the conference. To hear from us occasionally about our upcoming novels, subscribe to our newsletter.

Keeping With Tradition(al Marketing)

r-avatarThe frustrations of sending query letters do sometimes have their compensations, such as when an agent asks for a full. That happened to us this week, which (a) makes us both extremely happy, and (b) feels a little spooky considering that just last week we vented about marketing.

Now we need to generate a properly formatted manuscript of the Science Novel and get it sent!

In related news, we’ve also registered to go to a conference next month. It’s been a while since we attended one, and we’re excited to do a little networking with industry types and our fellow wordsmiths.

Meanwhile, the first draft of Son-of-Music-Novel continues to move along. We’re at 80,000 words and into our fourth batch of stubs, which takes us more than halfway through the outline.