Update on My Audiobook

As I mentioned previously, I began the process of converting my first novel, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, into an audiobook.  I'm pleased to report that I received seven auditions for the narration before I made a final selection.  I could have gone with any of three of the narrators.  The one I chose, A. Bran Peacock, has both the voice and the interpretive skills that will bring my novel to life.

Over the next several months, he and I will review his initial performance to identify any pronunciation and performance issues.  After that, he'll narrate the entire story.

I'm hoping the fully-narrated novel will be ready for release sometime this fall.

The Hero of Gucci Gulch, a murder mystery set on Capitol Hill, features a public interest lobbyist as amateur sleuth.  It's an easily read novel with a lot of action that I think will translate easily into narrated form.  When it has been released by Audible.com, I hope you will agree.

Creating an Audiobook

Recently, I decided to investigate releasing my novel, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, as an audiobook.  Frankly, it's something I never thought could be possible.  I imagined the process as being too expensive, or something I'd have to narrate myself with equipment and skills I don't possess.

Still, I came across an invitation from Audible.com to check out their service, called ACX.  I was surprised by what I found.  First, there are tens of thousands of what Audible calls "producers" willing to narrate books, far more than there are books ready for narration.  Second, while you can certainly pay high fees to have your book read by a well-established producer, you can also arrange to pay for narration by splitting the royalties obtained from sales on a 50-50 basis.  If you are able to negotiate that kind of arrangement with a producer, it makes the whole project affordable and, hence, feasible.

ACX allows you to specify the kind of voice you want for your book, including gender, age, regional accent and voice quality in a wide range of  types.  This is very helpful in letting producers know what you are looking for and narrowing down the potential producers from the thousands available.

So, I signed up (free) and created a profile on ACX and uploaded a short piece to be used by prospective producers for auditions.  ACX then notifies me when their auditions have been posted and I can listen to them and decide which is right for my book.

So far I've received three auditions and am expecting at least one more in the next couple of days.  I'll wait a week or so, then select the one that seems best for my book and start negotiations on terms, that is, whether we can agree to split royalties or whether I need to pay a per hour of narration fee to go along with that.  My book is estimated to be 8.1 hours long when narrated and I offered to consider payments of $50-100 per narrated hour.

I have some work to do yet.  I'll need to make notes for the producer on the pronunciation of key words and on the accents I want for key characters.

What will this do for sales?  Frankly, I have no clear idea.  But given that Audible.com is very popular and publicizes its offerings well, I'm hoping that sales may be good, even if the asking price is low.  In any case, it seems to me that it's worth taking a shot at it.

Have you written a novel or a non-fiction book that's suitable for narration?  If so, I encourage you to check out ACX at acx.com. 

Publishing on Amazon

I've been chugging away hard on my newest book, Choosing and Using Handplanes.  This is a book for woodworkers who are relatively new to the use of handplanes that describes them and how to set them up for effective use.  My plan is to publish the book as an 8-1/2 X 11 inch paperback and also in a Kindle edition. 

I wrote the book section-by-section in Word, then pasted it into Microsoft Publisher for laying out the 99 photos and figures in a pleasing format.  I am now only lacking the foreword from having a complete text.  Once I have that in hand and know my final pagination, I'll finish the Table of Contents, convert the book to pdf format and upload it to Amazon.  The cover has already been designed, so that will get uploaded at the same time.  So the hard work has been completed on the paperback version.

Not so the Kindle version.  Kindle books are best submitted in Word format, which means I had to convert the Publisher file back to Word.  Unfortunately, that process stripped all the photos and figures out of the book and they will have to be re-inserted.  Also, for some reason the sections of the book were saved in Word in the sequence in which they were originally written, not their final sequence in Publisher.  That meant I had to do a lot of cutting and pasting to get things back into the correct order.  Then there are the headings to establish so Word will create a Table of Contents that Kindle can use.  And hyperlinks to add; I didn't need those in the paperback version, but I want the Kindle edition to be as user-friendly as possible and that means adding links to resources and to various points in the book to which readers might want to jump. 

It'll take a lot of work to get the Kindle version finalized and submitted for publication review by the folks at Amazon.  Kind of makes me wish I had taken the time to study Adobe's InDesign program, which I believe would have generated a mobi file for Kindle without all the extra steps.  Next time, I promise.

My Handplanes Book

For the past several months, most of my writing energy has gone into the writing (and photographing) of a 90+ page book on handplanes in woodworking.  Titled Choosing and Using Handplanes, it contains well over 90 color photographs and figures that clarify the types of planes available, how to set them up and sharpen them, hold lumber during planing operations and techniques for successful handplaning.  A key feature is a section on diagnosing and fixing common problems encountered in handplaning.

The photo shows the cover I'll be using on this book, which is expected to be released on Amazon in paperback during November and in a Kindle edition soon after that.

I've discussed the process I used to build this cover on my photographic blog, PhotoPlusMore, if you are interested in knowing more about how I did it.

The book will be for sale on Amazon and on my web site.

A New Writing Project

I've been a semi-professional photographer for over 30 years.  Though I've published many photos during my career and written many articles illustrated with my shots, I've never ventured to write about the craft of photography.  Until now, that is.

What I'm about now is a book about landscape photography.  It will be a short work, perhaps 30-40 pages, with brief tips for making better landscape photos.  The intended audience is the amateur photographer with minimal experience who wants to achieve more professional-looking photos.  I'll illustrate the book with photos that underscore the tips.

My plan at the moment is to market the book myself, at least initially.  I'll first release it in a pdf version.  Later, after I've learned to use InDesign, I'll publish an ePub version that can be read on iPads and Nooks.

The principal points I'm making are that great and inspiring photos must be made, not merely taken, and that they depend more on the photographer's vision than on his or her equipment.  I'll give tips on how to go about making photos that inspire.  That, in fact, is what my tentative title states--Making Landscapes That Inspire.

I've already drafted the text and I'm now in the process of selecting and editing the photos I'll use to underscore my points.  I will soon set up a web site that I'll use for marketing the book.  At the same time, I'm practicing with InDesign to see how I can build great-looking layouts so the book will look its best.

I've not yet decided whether to include dynamic content in the ePub version of the book.  Frankly, I'm not sure what I would want that to look like.  I think dynamic content could be a very effective way of teaching photography, but given what I still need to learn about InDesign, I think it is something I'll take up after I've released the static versions.

If anybody has any suggestions for how to approach dynamic content, or has good examples to recommend, I'm all ears.  Please leave a comment.

And Now Available on Amazon.com!

Today I discovered that The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel set on Capitol Hill, is available for sale on Amazon.com.  They had promised it would become available in five to seven days; they made it in one!   It is even available for free shipping by Prime, if you subscribe to that service, so you can have a copy by Monday if you order today.

As I said in my last post, the book will also be available in a Kindle version, but converting the file will take me a while so I can't yet predict when that edition will be ready.

At Last I'm Published

My murder mystery, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, passed all of CreateSpace's hoops as well as my own critical review (for the umpteenth time) and I approved it for release yesterday.  So now it's published!

Copies can be purchased immediately at the CreateSpace eStore.  It takes CreateSpace another week to release it on the Amazon.com web site, where it will be more readily available to the buying public.  A Kindle edition is also in the works, but that involves a fair bit of reworking of the text to make it readable in the scalable Kindle format.  However, because Kindle reaches a different audience--and a large one at that--I will make the necessary changes and get it posted there as soon as possible.

You can read the synopsis and my bio statement at the CreateSpace site.

On Ice

Today I'm in a holding pattern.  I've submitted The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel, to CreateSpace for review and it passed all their tests.  Then I ordered a review copy, paying extra to have it delivered quickly.  It is due to come today.

But will it come?  Yesterday we caught the tail end of a major snowstorm that afflicted much of the east coast.  We did not get the predicted 10" of snow--at least, not so I can tell with it blowing around in the high winds.  But we did get maybe 5".  Why is this important?  Because it will disrupt package deliveries. 

The book is coming via UPS.  I live atop a fairly steep hill and have an unplowed, gravel driveway.  UPS will not come up my driveway when it has snowed any amount and certainly not through the drifts that have accumulated in the driveway.  Instead, they will fling my packages at the foot of my mailbox.  That is, if they come at all.

And if my book does arrive today, as expected, then the issue is whether it will pass muster.  The small  photo of the cover I viewed on-line suggested that the book title may be shifted somewhat to the left of the page.  If so, I'll want to repair the cover and send the book back through the review and reprinting process, something I would be very unhappy to do because of the delays it will entail.

But until the book arrives, I don't really know what I'm faced with.  I want to release it for publication so I can start marketing it and--I hope--generating royalties.  But I also want it to look right.  So, until the physical copy arrives, I'm literally on ice.

How I Write

Writers have all manner of ways to turn out words.  Many, in the current era, employ the keyboards on their laptops or desktop computers.  A few dictate directly in Dragon Naturally Speaking and then edit their dictation.  Probably even fewer--like historian David McCulloch--resort to the time-honored practice of  banging the keys of a standard typewriter.  I myself used an upright Royal, as well as an Underwood, for years, churning out hundreds of pages of text that became articles, monographs, books and a Ph.D. dissertation.

But I do none of that now.  I am, I must confess, a lover of fountain pens.  There is something about the intimate relationship of ink, paper and thought that seems only achievable when hand writing with a good pen.  And so, when I write anything of substance--and this includes my novels--my invariable practice is to first set down my words in curive script.  Lengthy documents--again, my novels are a case in point--I then dictate into Dragon Naturally Speaking, which converts them into computer-editable text.  Dragon has gotten to the point where it is proably 99 percent accurate, so this is a quick and easy way to make the ink to digital conversion.  From there, I print out the text and begin the process of seemingly endless edits until it is polished to my satisfaction.

Why do I write this way?  Writing by hand introduces white space into my thoughts and allows them to develop and mellow while they are in process.  Often, I will find my characters and plot evolving from one sentence to the next, something that might less readily occur if I were typing at rapid speed (which I am well capable of doing).  Frankly, I relish the time to allow my thoughts to ripen, something that the more relaxed pace of hand writing permits, even encourages.  And, I enjoy the tactile sensation of the ink flowing from the pen's nib onto quality paper.  It is one of life's genuine pleasures; why should I deny it to myself?

What works best for you may be different.  There is, in the end, no right or wrong way to write, just a variety of ways that work for each writer.  After all, it's the quality of the writing--the strength, clarity and sensitivity of expression--that really matter.  How you get there doesn't.

Publishing Through CreateSpace

Amazon.com's self-publishing arm, called CreateSpace, turns out to be a suprisingly easy and affordable way to publish a book.  At least, that's been my experience so far.  CreateSpace gives you two options: do your own text and cover layout or hire their experts to do it for you.  If you are able to carefully format your text in Microsoft Word, you can do it yourself.  That's the option I chose, which is the free option.  Amazon then makes its money from sales of your book on-line.

The same is true for your book's cover.  You can choose one of their standard cover templates and add your title information; you can pay their experts to design a cover for you; or you can develop your own in a photo editing program such as Photoshop using the layout template CreateSpace provides.  Since I am somewhat Photoshop-adept, I chose the latter option.

The hardest part of the process, frankly, is getting your text formatted.  I chose a 6X9" book format, which is the one recommended by CreateSpace for best distribution and sales.   To accommodate it, I changed the page size of my document in Word.  This necessitated reviewing all of the page breaks and eliminating the resulting widows and orphans.  This was eased, I later discovered, by turning on the widows and orphans feature in Word, something that would have saved me considerable time--not to mention several read-throughs--had I done it earlier.  Numbering the pages also turned out to be something of a challenge; numbers kept popping up on blank pages and in other places where they were unwanted.  I had to insert special breaks in the text, sometimes seemingly at random, until all the page numbers ended up where intended.

Once I had my text formatted the way CreateSpace needs to get it, I converted it to a pdf file--the preferred method for uploading to CreateSpace, though apparently they will also take Word files.  I filled out the background information needed--title, author, choice of ISBN option and where I want my royalties deposited--then uploaded my text for review.  In a matter of minutes, the text is returned in a form you can scan on-line for errors.  The review, in fact, will tell you whether or not your text passed CreateSpace's tests.  Mine did, with one minor error.

While your text is being reviewed and approved, it's on to the cover.  This is uploaded as a pdf file also.  It must meet CreateSpace's specifications for layout and spine thickness (which depends on the number of words and the choice of paper color).  This too is reviewed by CreateSpace.

That's where The Hero of Gucci Gulch stands now--waiting for final review.  Once I get approval--a matter of a day or less, in my brief experience--then I'll order a single print copy for final inspection of the book as produced.  If all is then OK, I'll release it for publication. 

This process has proven to be very quick.  I've spent three days getting the text laid out in final form and through the review process at CreateSpace twice.  Now I'm down to waiting to order and receive the first hard copy.  I'll let you know how that goes.