Our featured writer today is Richard Roberts Let’s give him a warm welcome!
If you would like your talent featured in the Authors in Our Midst series or Artists in Our Midstseries, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.
This will be a little different from most of our Authors in Our Midst series, because much of the focus here will be on the audiobook facet of the book, rather than on the story itself. But if you’re interested in hearing more about the story, too, chime in below!
Spaceship Repair Girls (and audiobooks)
by Richard Roberts
This post is for the authors, the audiobook listeners, and hopefully we have some voice actors here at Balloon Juice. I’d like to talk about audiobooks, the process and the feelings involved, and how those two are tied together.
For fiction authors, audiobooks are strange and magical things.
An author pours their heart and soul into a book. Even writing pulp, there’s a huge investment of time, mental effort, and a reflection of who you are in the details.
And then someone comes along and reads every word out loud, records it, acts out your book. In doing so, they bring it to a new audience who will only know your book through this voice actor’s interpretation. Hearing it is like looking in the mirror and seeing someone else, which can be jarring, fascinating, scary, or fulfilling.
It’s also a gut level status symbol. A book with an audiobook adaptation has gone up a level, right? I have heard the hunger in the voice of quite a few starting authors talking about getting an audiobook. I have over a dozen audiobooks done of my books, and unless I’m actually listening to one, it’s stopped being real. Surely it’s not me that has OH MY GOD THAT’S SOMEONE READING MY WORDS LISTEN TO THAT.
So how does this miracle happen? Usually through either ACX or Tantor, and unless you are self-published, the author doesn’t have much to do with it. Most presses, small or large, will want control over this most basic and obvious of adaptations. Curiosity Quills (CQ) did it so much without me that I only found out I had audiobooks after the fact. They negotiated with Tantor, and got me the magnificent Emily Woo Zeller, and even a couple of advances that CQ immediately stole.
My current publisher, Crossroad Press, goes with ACX. They still handle most of it, but from what I can tell the process consists of posting a sample of the first few pages, and voice actors who like the look read and submit a sample. Those contracts are purely royalty based, so the big names rarely go for them, but most of my books sell, so I hope I’ve been worth the readers’ time. I know any of this because my part is that Crossroad Press hands me samples from about a dozen readers and asks me to pick.
My publisher’s advice was ‘pick the person you could listen to for hours’. Also important to me is that the actor understood what I was getting at. For Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster I ended up picking from the two actors who understood that when Mirabelle described being enraged, she was being sarcastic because she can never, ever express her anger. I listened to the audiobook later and I chose well.
I was inspired to write this post because for some reason, nobody applied to do A Spaceship Repair girl Supposedly Named Rachel for months, and it has only just come out. When I got it, this reader, who is supposedly a successful name, reads completely differently than any other voice actress I’ve worked with. All the others try for an even tone and rhythm, with only a little emotion, designed to be easy to listen to. This actress heavily emoted every sentence. I listened to the whole book and enjoyed it, but it stuck out as different.
Which leads me to ask… voice actors! Are there voice actors here? Who do audiobooks? What do you focus on when reading? What does the process look like from your end? Do you work with Tantor or ACX? What are your contracts like?
Audiobook listeners, what do you like in a voice actor?
And other fiction writers, are you getting audiobooks? Does your publisher consult you at all? Is the process as emotional for you as for me?
Nonfiction writers, is any of this familiar? Do you work in a different world? I’ve listened to a nonfiction audiobook, but it was a writer trying to make an unusual topic weird and fun.
I will leave you with an anecdote. My strangest book is Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth, a classic coming of age story except the main character is the nightmare of being chased by a big, fangy animal, and it takes place entirely within the dream world. That makes it pretty weird, and while I wasn’t trying to make it scary, horror stuff like ripping people apart is Fang’s life, even if his victims are in no physical danger. His friends are nightmares, demons, twisted ancient pagan gods, that sort of thing.
When Crossroad Press submitted Sweet Dreams, the readers applying were awful. Only one was pretty good, and he applied on the second round of asking for readers. So we agreed, he started reading the rest of the book… and immediately sent an email saying he was canceling the contract. The book was so vile and immoral he couldn’t be associated with it.
And then recently I found out there is an audiobook, and I’m listening to it and the reader is pretty good. He has to be, because so many of my books are female protagonists that a male voice sounds weird to me. But… I have no idea when he applied or how he was picked. I thought it was a failure!
Okay, that’s audiobooks from my end. Answer my questions, folks! I’m pretty sure a lot of people have thoughts and feelings about this!
WaterGirl
Hey Richard, please let us know when you get here!
Oh, and I should have said at the top. Richard Roberts, aka Frankensteinbeck.
Frankensteinbeck
EGADS I AM HERE.
EDIT – Quite a busy morning. I woke up going “Yes, the thread is today!” then totally forgot. But I’m here!
WaterGirl
@Frankensteinbeck: You aren’t the first featured author / artist to do that! :-)
I have considered asking for a phone number from featured peeps for occasions just such as this.
Matt McIrvin
and supposedly named Rachel!
twbrandt
So “A Spaceship Repair girl Supposedly Named Rachel” is narrated by someone supposedly named Rachel! Coincidence?
ETA: ninja’d
Citizen Alan
Don’t know if this is the proper place for this, but Strangers In Boston has been updated on Amazon as a 2nd edition (caught a bunch of typos I missed before and rewrote a bit of chapter 1, because my voice guy pointed out one bit of unintentional racism on my part which I was happy to edit out). The audio book will go live after the first of the year, mainly for tax purposes.
Strangers In Boston by TS Mann on Amazon, Kindle, and soon Audible. An urban fantasy about a secret subculture of reality warpers trying to stop an apocalypse.
TheOtherHank
I listen to a fair number audiobooks, across a fair number of genres. I’ve read quite a few of the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich so I thought I’d listen to the audiobook versions. The books are written in the first person and the main character makes a big point about being from New Jersey. I didn’t make it past the first audiobook because the person reading the book didn’t have a New Jersey accent. I try not to get too hung up on performance when listening to a book, but a first person story told by a character with a regional accent should be read in that accent.
Frankensteinbeck
Note: The ‘supposedly successful’ is only that I have no way to validate whether she is or not. It’s hearsay evidence that she knows what she’s doing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I used to commute 90 minutes to work, twice a week. I loved audio books for those trips. I got them from my library.
Frankensteinbeck
@TheOtherHank:
I’ve been too scared to listen to the audiobook where the PoV character has a regional accent. That would be Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead, where Avery Special has a mild Southern accent in her head, and a magically cursed range of swamp-muck-thick Southern accents in her speech.
Wag
@TheOtherHank:
maybe? But do they hear that accent in their head? I can see maybe the accent when the character is speaking, but maybe narration can be without accent.
Another Scott
Wonderful topic – thanks for letting us see a little behind the scenes.
My commute is short (usually around 20 minutes) so I haven’t gotten into audio books.
But, a few weeks ago I heard a rebroadcast of a Snap Judgment reading of a short story, and it was absolutely fabulous – (repost) 13 Ways to Destroy a Painting (11:42). The narrator – Thao Ngyuen – is perfect.
Looking forward to the thread. Thanks, and good luck everyone!
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Citizen Alan: You will have to forgive me for not remembering for sure., but did we feature your book in one of these posts? I’m at 85% yes, 15% no.
gwangung
A lot of my Facebook friends are VoiceOver artists—not a big surprise, given my position in the Asian American theatre world. And I’ve somehow managed to get in a private group of BIPOC artists who specialize in VoiceOver work, for books, animation and foreign film dubs. One of the welcome trends is an increasing use of ethnic appropriate artists, instead of using white artists all the time.
Frankensteinbeck
@gwangung:
I was interested in getting a black voice artist (not that I’m sure I could have told the difference) for the book of mine whose heroine is definitely black. My publisher told me strongly that since it’s part of a series, I needed to look first for a voice artist whose voice resembled the voice artist for previous books, Emily Woo Zeller.
Emily Woo Zeller is good, too. It’s an honor to have had her doing the first five supervillain books.
MisterForkbeard
Oh! This is super cool. I bought this book awhile ago and finished the first couple chapters before an emergency interrupted, and I’ve never finished. This reminds me to go finish that up.
Super cool that the author is here.
@Frankensteinbeck: Emily Woo Zeller is really good. She did an excellent job on the supervillain books – my wife is normally not an audiobook person, and she listened to the whole series.
dimmsdale
Well, having voiced around fifty audiobooks, I could offer a somewhat personal idiosyncratic view of all that. If it’s fiction, I generally try to “see” the book as if it were a movie unfolding before my eyes, and as I narrate, give the narrator (first or third-person as the case may be) and each character, their own distinctive voice, which you work out beforehand. By the time you actually record the book, you’ll have done your prep, and you’ll know each main character well enough that you have a fairly extensive mental bio of each of them: personality type, any distinctive way of speaking or accent or other vocal mannerism they have, ESPECIALLY if it’s referenced in the text. You also know how all the words and place names are pronounced.
With nonfiction, you’re simply acting as the author’s representative, and speaking directly to the listener with all the authority and passion and curiosity that led the author to write the book in the first place.
Contracts? I’m not much of an expert there. All the major publishers (not only Tantor, but Penguin Random House, Harper, Scholastic, Macmillan, etc etc) have their own audiobook divisions, and in most cases the majors use SAG-AFTRA Audiobook contracts, which have set minimums. But in general audiobook contracts, especially non-union, vary all over the place. I’m afraid I have no experience at all with ACX. Hope this is a little helpful
PS: Agreed, Emily Woo Zeller is a total rockstar.
Frankensteinbeck
@dimmsdale:
I get Arielle DeLisle for one book, You Can Be A Cyborg When You’re Older, and the woman is a goddess. I got so lucky there. She was perfect.
Brachiator
I used to have a very long commute and traveled on buses and commuter rail. I filled the time with podcasts, audio nonfiction, audio short stories and radio drama. Rarely audiobook novels.
Working from home, before and during the pandemic, my audio listening dropped off considerably.
ETA. On regional accents. No strong preference as long as the accent is not so strong that I have to struggle to understand what is being said. Years ago, there was a British TV show where a character’s accent was so difficult to understand that I had to turn on the captioning.
The Lodger
@TheOtherHank: TBF Stephanie Plum is from Trenton, not Nurk or Elizabut. They really don’t have the same accent.
SeattleDem
I listen to audiobooks while woodworking or on long flights (10 hours to Amsterdam, 6 to Mexico City) to visit the grandchildren. I especially enjoy voices that sound like the character if it is first person. I’m amazed at the vocal range of some readers. To have distinctive voices for each character, male or female, seems otherworldly, probably because my vocal range is from low bass to mid-bass. One notable reader grated on my ears every time she pronounced a character’s name as “Jamie” instead of “Jaime.” Having read that book in that series several times, I still cringed every time she butchered it.
dimmsdale
Well, I have a question for audiobook listeners, if this thread isn’t stone cold dead by now. When you listen to an audiobook, is it in the foreground (i.e. you’re listening undistractedly and closely) or is it in the background (while housecleaning or e.g. clerical work in the home office etc.)?
TerryC
@SeattleDem: Having relatives in that part of Appalachia known as Hoopie, I have relatives named “pronounced Jamie” (spelled Jaime).
@SeattleDem:
lowtechcyclist
@SeattleDem:
I attended a memorial service this morning where the minister had a brain fart and referred to the deceased as ‘Elise’ instead of ‘Elsie’ twice before correcting herself. She was appropriately embarrassed and apologetic about it, fortunately.
Journeywoman
@dimmsdale: Most of the time I listen while doing other things, but it’s always something nonverbal, so I can easily split my attention between them. I listen a lot at work while doing relatively repetitive tasks, so despite the chance that I may get interrupted, I’m pretty focused on the book content. If I feel my attention slipping, I’ll stop the book – there’s no point in listening if I’m missing half of it.
Citizen Alan
@WaterGirl: I think I mentioned it in a prior one when the first edition came out. And maybe posted the Amazon link. But that was it as I recall.
dimmsdale
@Journeywoman: @torrey: Thank you. The reason I asked is that there’s a fair amount of concern in the narrator community about AI-generated voices supplanting human narrators (frankly, a possibly extinction-level event in the making, as AI voices improve.) I’m a bit curious about whether audiobook listeners who’re only mildly engaged in a book would be able to tell the difference. I’m hoping that highly engaged listeners would be able to tell the difference, and wouldn’t put up with AI-voiced material. Remains to be seen, I guess.
Torrey
@dimmsdale: I listen while walking or knitting/crocheting, painting (as in painting a room, not as in making art), basic mindless cleaning–things I can do while listening pretty intently. I listen while driving only in cases when I’ve got a long stretch on a fairly boring highway with very little traffic, never in city or suburban driving, which requires attention. It is not uncommon for me to listen to a segment twice, just to enjoy how the actor read it. A good voice actor is a treasure. I have no idea how you and your colleagues manage to do it.
ETA: Knitting/crocheting only on the parts that are basically mechanical. If I have to count stitches, or even modify stitches (e.g., popcorn stitch, a concept crocheters will recognize), the audiobook goes off, as I can’t give it my full attention.
Grover Gardner
Well, I’ve been producing, directing and narrating audiobooks for over 40 years now. ;-) Author input on the narrator is pretty standard nowadays. For the narrator, as dimmsdale points out, it’s a tremendous amount of work and a grindingly slow process, often taking one, two or even three weeks to record an average book, not including prep time. The goal is to make it sound like you didn’t do any work at all and just tossed off the story on the spur of the moment–which, of course, is exactly how a writer wants his/her/their book to come across. No one wants the work to show. ;-) The worst narrator is one who thinks it’s their job to call attention to their performance, in which case, all you hear is the narrator instead of the book. A good analogy is the difference between a conductor who brings a symphony alive while respecting the score to a “T”, as opposed to one who imposes all sorts of personal idiosyncracies on the music.
Dimmsdale also describes my own process pretty accurately–like making a movie in my head. I’m the casting director, the scenic designer, I’m responsible for following all the author’s cues in terms of character, time, place, action and staging. If I see it in my own head, it sort of magically follows that the listener will see it too. You can almost immediately spot a narrator who doesn’t visualize. You get nice words but no mental pictures behind them.
If all this sounds rather complicated, it is–unless you’re the kind of person who naturally processes written material this way, which is what the best actor/narrators do without really thinking too much about it. I imagine dimmsdale would also agree that it’s nice to get compliments to the effect that you told the story in a way that matched the reader/listener’s expectations. But I’m just as happy if people say they enjoyed the audiobook but they forget who read it. ;-
FWIW, I’ve cast Rachel and Emily in many books, and both are excellent professionals, albeit with different approaches.
Grover Gardner
@dimmsdale: Yes, AI is the huge ugly Godzilla in the room, for sure. I imagine it’s the rare listener who understands how bloody expensive it is to produce an audiobook, and how small the profit margins are compared to print books. And it’s gotten to the point where it really is difficult to tell the difference, at least for ten or fifteen minutes. After that the mind begins to wander because there’s no intelligence behind the voice to really guide you through the story, and you have to work a bit harder to maintain the thread. For some genres and listeners it will probably be good enough, but it’s hard to imagine the magic of Dickens or Twain or Paulette Jiles or Alice Walker or John Irving, or any wonderful writer really, effectively served by a computer voice. At least I hope so. ;-)
Betty
Fascinating discussion. I don’t have much occasion to listen to books these days , but enjoyed the ones I did listen to. They were a godsend to my mom after she lost her sight because she loved books.
Journeywoman
@dimmsdale: I feel like fiction would suffer worse than non-fiction when it comes to AI. Recently I’ve been (re)listening to James Marsters reading some of the Dresden Files books, and I’ve really been noticing the subtleties in his performance. He’s constantly modulating his speed and adding unwritten but very effective pauses, changing his volume between moderate to low (and occasionally high when appropriate), sometimes softening his voice and almost mumbling, other times hardening his tone and speaking quite clearly, adding grit, adding laughter, adjusting his pitch – and all of this just for the main character, before he even gets into other voices. It’s really pretty amazing, and it’s hard to see how AI could match that kind of thing anytime soon without completely overacting.
Journeywoman
@Grover Gardner: Oh, wow – Grover Gardner! That’s so cool – I’ve been listening to your stuff for years! :)
Kayla Rudbek
@dimmsdale: seconding Torrey above, audiobooks are great to accompany easy knitting projects (especially ones where the pattern fits on an index card). It’s the modern version of having someone in the room reading to you while you’re doing a simple task.
And James Fouhey reading Jennifer Estep as the character of Lord Kyrion Caldaren could melt ice in an Antarctic winter.
dimmsdale
@Grover Gardner: Hey, Grover! Yeah, ” If I see it in my own head, it sort of magically follows that the listener will see it too.” It’s an almost alchemical process, and the A-list narrators I admire most (Edoardo Ballerini, for example) kind of disappear themselves; you do all this prep work but your goal is to be so transparent that nothing’s left but the author’s intention, the narrative thread, and the living, breathing characters.
I did hear an unsettlingly good narration, as it happens in a doc about building Aston Martin’s F1 cars. English-accented, voiced with poise, urbanity, and a startling degree of seemingly human sincerity about the product! But its handling of technical details was clumsy, not fluent, as if it didn’t quite know how all the doohickeys worked together (engineering processes a human narrator would take GREAT pains to master, so as to replicate them smoothly and authentically). I don’t know how many viewers would have picked that up, but it made ME a little nervous. I’m expecting that when AI is able to generate a passable novel, AI will also voice it (maybe even in the same program). [Eeek, is my feeble cry.] For the most casual listeners it may not matter in the slightest; for publishers and producers, it’s money in pocket.
dimmsdale
@Journeywoman: Yep, that’s the job. I feel like adding, “THANK YOU for noticing! Lots wouldn’t!”
WaterGirl
@Citizen Alan: Sounds like it would be perfect for an Authors in Our Midst thread. If you’re interested, send me an email message.
WaterGirl
@dimmsdale: I only listen to audio books with really good narrators. I cannot imaging listening to an AI generated reader.
Ugh.
WaterGirl
@Grover Gardner: If you ever need a test subject (aka reader / listener) get in touch.
NA
Wow, Grover Gardner! A rock star to me!
dimmsdale
@WaterGirl: Ha! good for you. I’ve had to narrate my share of really bad books, and could only feel sorry for the poor listener; I figure narrating them can’t be nearly as bad as having to listen to them, because as a narrator you get to improve them as best you can with the tools you have.
Grover Gardner
@Journeywoman: Thank you! :-)
Grover Gardner
@dimmsdale: And that’s another question–can AI make a bad book sound better? Because a good narrator can certainly do that. It’s about double the work to make the dialogue sound natural and the descriptive passages actually describe something the listener can make sense of. :-) But it can be done. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how far they can push AI toward this result.
It will also be interesting to see how the role of the audiobook “director” develops with AI. Right now probably 80% of audiobooks are produced by smart solo narrators relying their own dramatic instincts. Very few are produced in a studio setting with a director. With AI, surely you’ll need a strong hand at the tiller (or maybe “joystick” is a more apt term) to tweak and fine tune.
dimmsdale
@Grover Gardner:
One would hope! What prompted my questions above about degree of listener engagement was the experience of narrating books (well, “books”) that were self evidently some dude in a barcalounger reciting off the top of his head into speech-to-text, then presumably loaded into a book-like graphic template, then off to the bindery and to an audiobook narrator and then to market–and the stuff somehow finds a sometimes large audience. I can’t believe listeners of these kinds of audiobooks are sensitive to character nuance or literary style particularly, they just want to know what happens next. THIS is exactly what AI would be suited for. And for self-published authors particularly, the temptation would be huge to get their work to market as fast and cheaply as possible, to start racking up unit sales.
Good audiobook directors, I’d hope, will always have a job coaching celeb narrators and/or self-narrating authors new to the process…and as long as the major audiobook publishers maintain their gatekeeper/QC focus and insist on quality work. But it’s easy to see the entire audiobook process, below a certain level, becoming entirely AI-generated from concept to finished audiobook, with nary a quaver from their dedicated listeners.
Grover Gardner
@dimmsdale: Sometimes I’m surprised at the level of narration demanded by consumers of what I would call “pulp” fiction–military or sci-fi shoot-em-ups with lots of action and seemingly little character development. They may be in it for the thrills and indifferent to “style,” but they’re often mighty quick to call out a substandard narrator–especially one who flubs the terminology or the character voices. It will be interesting to see what those folks think of AI. ;-)
Kristine Smith
@Grover Gardner:
Alien names/bits of made-up language can be stumbling blocks too. Same with some fantasy names.
Readers have asked me about audiobooks for my SF series. Cost is a major stumbling block. I know the other option is royalty share, but that can get complicated if you want to move to another company.
dimmsdale
@Kristine Smith: I know next to nothing about self-publishing, either in audio OR print/kindle, but it sounds like you’ve looked into audio at least a bit. I wonder if you were to write a novella or short story, maybe based off of an existing title, if that would be more affordable to put into audio, just to get some audio up on your Amazon website and then see how it does. That is QUITE a body of work you have there!
Kristine Smith
@dimmsdale:
I’ve thought of that. I have a prequel novella in my SF series that might work well as a starter. Another possible project to add to the 2024 list.
Thanks! I feel like an utter slacker compared to some of my friends who started around the same time and now are well into double-digits wrt novels.
dimmsdale
@Kristine Smith: Yeah, and IF your audio novella does well, wouldn’t that enhance your royalty-share attractiveness to narrators? (again, I don’t work in that area so I’m genuinely asking.) Or maybe enhance your leverage if you want to approach audio packagers/producers like e.g. Spoken Realms with an eye to partnering with them? (Mentioning Spoken Realms because IMO it’s an enormously ethical, quality-oriented outfit.)
Kristine Smith
@dimmsdale: Thanks for the info about Spoken Realms. I hadn’t heard of them
I honestly don’t know if the novella could attract narrators or improve possible deals. I’m at the egg stage in all this. I do know a number of writers in multiple genres who release regularly and know a lot about the business, which will help.
dimmsdale
@Kristine Smith: There are a couple of resources I respect that it might be worth your while to look at, assuming they’ll tell you things about audiobook marketing and distribution you don’t already know. Karen Commins runs something called “Narrators Roadmap,” and there’s a section for authors:
https://www.narratorsroadmap.com/welcome-center/#author-resources
Here’s a similar section on the Spoken Realms website; the proprietor, Steven Jay Cohen, is both brilliant and deeply knowledgeable about the audiobook market.
https://spokenrealms.com/distribution/
Whether either of them is a good fit for you I can’t say, but if nothing else the websites might tell you more than you already know. Good luck!
rayb
@dimmsdale: in the foreground on the first listen or two. If I like it enough I’ll play non-verbal computer games while listening again – I think they use a different part of the brain so I can do both at once.
My favorite by far is Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter books. I have listened to the series over 10 times. I love that he reads in all those different voices (I think he said its over 300!). It makes it alive and interesting. Sometimes I find it boring to listen to the same voice for a long time.
WaterGirl
@Grover Gardner: Your name was so familiar when I saw it, that I googled to find books that you have narrated. Yep, you are one of the short list of narrators that I really enjoy.
Nice to have you here!
Miss Bianca
I am so sorry to have missed this thread in real time! I was busy with our community staged read of A Christmas Carol. And may I just say, to all the audiobook narrators here, and all those I have enjoyed over the years: Thank you! The blessings of hearing a fluent and and expressive reader are NOT to be taken for granted!
Ask me how I know! Or, rather, don’t! :)
Grover Gardner
@Kristine Smith: Exactly. They are expensive to produce, and the catch-22 is that if you cheap out and pick an inexperienced narrator (or just the wrong one) you get a bunch of two-star ratings on Audible and your money went down the drain.
One thing to consider is to reach out to Podium Publishing. They specialize in sci-fi/fantasy and they do a royalty-share with the author (at least they used to) but they pay the narrators a standard fee so they a have solid pool. Another idea is to reach out to a narrator you really like, get them interested in the book, then crowd-source the funding. But as you mention, in many of the self-production scenarios it’s difficult to hang on to your options and not barter them away just to get *someone* to do your audio.
Kristine Smith
@Grover Gardner: @dimmsdale: Many thanks for all the info!
dimmsdale
@Kristine Smith: My pleasure, and all best wishes to you!! Hope your way into audio is smooth and easy.
jurassicpork
Watergirl, I’ve self-published 11 books on Amazon and four of my novels have been turned into audiobooks. What you say about audiobooks, especially in the beginning, being an exhilarating experience is absolutely spot-on. I remember when I first signed up with ACX in the summer of 2021 and got my first audition, it was a kick in the head hearing my words read by someone else for the first time in a professional environment. Hearing someone else narrate your words forces you to look at your work in a new light and through a different prism. And with it comes the revelation that how you interpret your work is only one out of however many people read it. Because, once you put your book out there, you no longer control how it’ll be interpreted. Since then, I’ve put out four audiobooks in rapid succession, including my entire Scott Carson trilogy. In fact, here’s my latest one: https://www.amazon.com/Doll-Maker-Scott-Carson-Saga/dp/B0CMCBXKGR