First audiobook!

At last, it’s done!

I started on this project months ago, thought about it, blogged about it, struggled with the abridging, rehearsed, found a recording studio, got help and did it. Then the master discs sat and looked at me for a while: what was the point of all that work if I didn’t know what to do next?

Thanks God for a competent and supportive partner with experience of packaging. ‘I can do that’, he said, and he did. He researched the best deal for duplication and packaging, worked on the design, and the first batch was delivered last week. You can buy it with Paypal for £10 – you can’t get much for £10 these days – and this would make a great gift. Just go to ruthsutton.co.uk and it’s the first item in the Bookshop.

It looks really good, but I still daren’t listen to it. I know it’s OK, and my commitment to the book and the characters comes out in the reading, but it’s almost too personal. At one critical moment I was close to tears reading it and had to stop. There’s something about the voice that brings the words alive.

Recording an audio book: lessons learned?

This week I finished the recording of ‘A Good Liar’ and here are a few things I learned, in case you fancy doing it yourself.

1. Find a good studio with a decent mike and a proficient engineer. Mine was the Music Farm in Egremont, only 20 minutes from home, and exactly what was needed.
2. Abridge if you need to – definitely consider the number of CDs, cost of duplication and packaging, and the consequent price.
3. If you’re not using CDs, consider whether all your potential customers/listeners will have the necessary new technology at their disposal or within their confidence boundaries.
4. Once you have the text you want, print it out, double spaced and in good dark quality. Number all the pages.
5. Read and rehearse, marking up your script with prompts about where to take a breath or a longer pause, and alerting yourself to difficult words or phrases. The fewer times you have to stop and re-record, the quicker the process, with less studio time and lower costs. Rehearsal before you go to the studio is key, at least twice and more for difficult passages.
6. Do all the sound checks, wear the headphones and get used to them.
7. In front of the mike, use a stand and arrange your pages in such a way that you can work through them without having to stop each time you need to go the next page. A very good mike will pick up every sound, so practice doing this until you can do it confidently without making a noise or stopping. It helps if each page ends at the end of a paragraph when you would be pausing anyway.
8. Have water at hand, you’ll need it.
9. If you make a mistake as you read, or if you’re not entirely happy with the way it sounds, stop and re-record straight away – much easier than going back to it. If you need to stop frequently, don’t worry about it, just keep going. Afterwards, however, think what made you hesitate or stumble and try to correct it before the next session.
10. Concentration is key to both the technical quality of the recording and the feeling you can put into the text. This is where recording your own story is so effective, if you can do it well. You know everything there is to know about the story and that will come through.

Do ‘special deals’ on books really work?

I’ve just put the ebook of ‘A Good Liar’ on a Kindle store special deal for a week, starting April 1st. I have mixed feelings about doing so, but it’s just for a week, and we’ll see how it goes. If it encourages people to read the whole trilogy, as ebooks or paperbacks, it’ll be worth the angst about reducing the price to less than a cup of coffee.

My ambivalence about this stems from knowing how much time and effort any author puts into writing and publishing their work : setting a very low price seems to under-value all that. But, on the other hand, if you want people to read and enjoy your stuff, making the price temporarily very attractive is a way to achieve that. One of the joys of self-publishing is that you can make those choices yourself.

It was recording the audio book of ‘A Good Liar’ that reminded me what a good story it is. The engineer who helped me – Tom Tyson, at the Music Farm in Egremont, Cumbria – is not a great fiction reader, but he was so hooked after the second recording session that he had to read the rest of the story for himself to see what happens.

Jessie Whelan is not an easy character to deal with: she’s self-centred, impulsive, and sometimes insensitive, but she’s had to battle all her adult life, and it shows. She’s also – despite years of abstinence – very interested in sex, which pulls her into a relationship that she could, and probably should, have avoided. Some scenes were really hard to read while I was doing the recording, not just because they portray sexual assault but because Jessie doesn’t really know whether to blame the perpetrator or herself. It’s not in her nature to feel like a victim, although the reader can see that’s what she was. How did Tom react while he was listening to it, I wonder? I didn’t ask him, but I will.

In the meantime, before the next trip to the studio to finish off the edits, I’ll put the ebook version on special offer for a week and see if I can introduce new readers to the trilogy. Maybe some of the millions of Lake District and Cumbria visitors will enjoy the story, and deepen their interest in this wonderful region. I hope so.

 

 

Reading your own audiobook: is it a good idea?

I’ve been reading a piece in this quarter’s ‘The Author‘ from the splendid Society of Authors, about the frustrations of listening to a reader making a poor job of recording your book, and being powerless to intervene. And another piece from Alice Jolly about the merits of the partnership arrangement with a ‘crowd-funding’ publisher, as exemplified in her experience of ‘Unbound’. Both are mainly about the relationship between the author, the book and the publisher.

One of the benefits of self-publishing is that the author is never pushed away from important decisions about her book and expected to leave to others the question of cover, design, print run, other formats, promotion – all the things that so radically affect the link between writer and reader.

Very early on I considered who should abridge and read my books for the audiobook version. There were cost implications of course: doing it myself would save a lot of money. But the decision to trust myself wasn’t just about money. Abridging is tricky and requires a feel for the overall story, and who knows these books as well as the person who wrote them? Successful reading too necessitates a feel for the text and the context, accents, nuances of the characters and the plot, and here again the author – if she knows her setting as well as she should – is best placed to do justice to the words. If you have a teaching background, as I do, you’ve spent many years using your voice to engage an audience, and the skills don’t fade, even if you’re talking only to the microphone.

So I found a local recording studio and am doing everything necessary to prepare and read my own books. It’s hard and time-consuming, but I’m learning a great deal about the flow of the text from reading it out loud. And it’s restoring my faith in my own capacity to tell a good tale, after the thankless task of trying yet again to interest an agent. Have a look at an earlier post to hear my agonising about that.I’m asking again – do I need an agent?

If you can afford it, and if like me you have the power to make your own decisions, consider doing your own audiobook. Very instructive!

Preparing the audio book: what am I learning?

Preparing to produce the audio book of ‘A Good Liar’ is turning out to be an interesting experience. The first task, before any other planning or costings can be undertaken, has been to re-read and abridge the original text. Actually, even further back, the very first question was whether I wanted to abridge at all, and the answer is I would prefer not to. ‘Murdering your darlings’ they call it – killing off slices of the story that meant a great deal to you at the time. That process is usually part of editing the final draft, but abridging is even harder. The final text of my first book was truly a labour of love. Writing ‘A Good Liar’ took me nearly four years and involved some very steep learning, stumbles, frustration, almost chucking it on the fire and then dogged determination to see it through. Maybe there’s always a special attachment to the ‘firstborn’. Whatever the reason, abridging it is proving painful, but unavoidable. An unabridged version would run to too may CDs, twice the time and at least twice the cost. Every extra 1000 words of text means more studio time, more CDs to duplicate, more packaging – and each of those means more outlay for me and a higher price for the buyer. Just not practical. So abridging it is. Woe is me.

Rather than using the paperback for this process, I’ve chosen to work from the mobi file, highlighting on screen where the cuts are to be made. That way I can read off the screen rather than the page, and avoid the inevitable sound of turning pages, which the sensitive mike at the recording studio picked up when I made my demo disc.

I’m glad it’s me doing the abridging: the decision about what to leave out is dependent on thorough knowledge of the text and the significance of details. It’s made me realise how keen I was on the authenticity of the setting in this first book, both place and time. That’s why many local readers enjoy it so, but for an audio book there may be too much detail, and some of it has had to go. Some of the dialogue has been cut too: on the page it reflects the complexity of conversation, the interruptions and dialects, but that’s hard to relay in a narrated text with only one voice. It is possible to cut some of the text and still leave the story moving on, with enough detail to help the reader understand the where the characters are, and why they do what they do. I’ve found myself drawn in to their stories yet again, which has been reassuring. It’s a good tale, if I say it myself.

Apart from the necessity of abridging, I’m also clear now about the need to read it myself. I’ve seen some critical comments about audio books and poor narration by authors. I simply couldn’t afford the extra cost of a professional actor, and the demo disc sounded OK. Really! The abridging of ‘A Good Liar’ should be finished this week. Then I have to read it all through and check the timing. The goal is to get it down to 240 minutes, but I’m not confident yet that I’ll achieve that at the first attempt. When the required length is achieved, then it’s off to the studio. Hard work, but enjoyable on the whole, and I’d rather be busy than bored..

 

Audiobooks: can I do it all myself?

It’s amazing what a relief it is to have decided already that I won’t have a new book out until mid-2018. For the first time in five years I feel I can step back a little and not be plunged immediately into the research and planning of a new book, while simultaneously up to my ears in promotion of the last one. This time I can do the usual round of WI meetings and library groups and still let my mind roam freely around ideas for the next project.

The new book will be a project, of course, but before I get deep into it I’m thinking in greater detail about a new way of presenting at least some of the books on my growing backlist. I’ve done the paperback and the ebook for each book in my original trilogy – Between the Mountains and the Sea – and now I want to do them as audiobooks. It’s been on my mind for a while, but hitherto discounted as too difficult, or too expensive and risky. Now I have the time to break down the audiobook challenge into its component parts and see if I could actually manage it.

The first step came from a casual conversation at our weekly coffee catchup about some very popular local slide shows and where the voiceovers are recorded. A phone call and a few emails later I visited the studio just twenty minutes from my home, to meet the man who owns and runs it. It was a really impressive set-up, and I had the chance to discuss the detailed practicalities of abridging and reading the books myself, to make each one – if possible – fall within the number of minutes on a disc. And would CDs be the best option, given the recent advances in the technology? I have to be careful that in going for the latest technology I don’t put the product beyond the reach of many of my potential audience.

If I take the CD route, each disc has a maximum running time of 80 minutes: how many discs would I need for each book? If it’s more than three, it gets cumbersome and more expensive, but could I abridge sufficiently to manage a running time of 240 minutes without sacrificing the integrity of the story? I’ve already tried abridging the first book ‘A Good Liar’ and the first cut is relatively easy: there are some sentences and even the odd paragraph that can be cut with too much damage to the story, but after that it gets really tricky. On the first attempt I managed to cut a fair chunk of the text, mainly descriptive details of setting and some extended dialogue, but would that be enough to achieve the time limit overall? Very hard to judge: the only thing to do is to ‘edit/abridge’ the whole book, check how many and what proportion of the words have been removed relative to the whole word count, do some basic sums and see whether it would fit in the 3 CD target. Abridging is always a wrench, and could be annoying for the reader, but at least if my text is abridged it will be done by the author, who is in the best position to know how it should work.

The next decision I needed to make was about whether I could read it myself, and here again the only answer is to try it and see. So I went into the studio, put on the headphones, took my cue from the man at the console and read for five minutes from the abridged copy of ‘A Good Liar’ that I’d already worked on. I managed the reading – although the wonderful microphone picked the rustle of turning pages – and enjoyed it, and was given the demo disc to take home. There are many more practical hurdles to be considered: costs, time, how many to produce, where and how, packaging, promotion, distribution. It’s all pretty outfacing. It would help for a start that I could find the courage to listen critically to the demo disc, but I haven’t found the courage to do that yet! When I finally take that plunge, I hope I feel I can do this job, because I really want to. If I can sort out all the decisions and embrace the adventure of the audiobooks, it could be so much fun!