Karen@KarenCommins.com

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

Audiobooks

3 Take-aways from APAC 2016 and 2 Networking Tips

The Audio Publishers Association Conference (APAC) is an annual event held on the the day before BookExpo America, the largest trade show for the publishing industry. This year, APAC was held in Chicago on Tuesday 10 May.

I debated about listing all of the panelists’ names below as I believe in giving credit where it’s due. I decided not to include the names because a main value in attending the conference is to meet and learn from people who are in a position to hire narrators. My freely sharing all that was said and the names and positions of those influential people would not be fair to the narrators who paid the conference and associated travel costs.

Instead, I’ll share 3 of my take-aways from the day and offer 2 ideas to help you plan for future similar networking opportunities.

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Interview with Audiobook Blogger Beccy Stokes

Authors and narrators greatly appreciate the people who take the time to listen to our audiobooks and then write thoughtful reviews. In this installment in my series of interviews with audiobook bloggers, I’m excited to welcome Beccy Stokes from Audiothing Reviews and find out about her review interests and process.


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Interview With Audiobook Blogger Susan Voss

Authors and narrators greatly appreciate the people who take the time to listen to our audiobooks and then write thoughtful reviews. In this installment in my series of interviews with audiobook bloggers, I’m excited to welcome Susan Voss from Dab of Darkness and find out about her review interests and process.

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2015 Audiobook Wrap-up

As we count down to a new year, I wanted to take a moment to update you on some of my activities this year. Much of this article originally appeared in my profile earlier this week on the Eargasms Audiobook Review site. I appreciated the great questions from audiobook listeners and encourage you to read them.

During 2015, I’ve drastically increased my efforts to help authors and publishers with a backlist understand the audiobook production process and get more of their titles into audio! I wrote a number of articles and created some videos, which I will detail in a moment.

New Links In My Discography

Rest assured, my writing and video production activities are mere extensions of my greatest passion, which is audiobook narration! I’m delighted to announce I released 8 new audiobooks in 2015!

My first release of 2015 was BLY VS BISLAND: BEATING PHILEAS FOGG IN A RACE AROUND THE WORLD, which the talented Melissa Reizian Frank narrated with me. It was a very special narration project, and the story behind the story still gives me chills!

In addition, I performed:

You can hear samples of my 2015 releases in this Soundcloud playlist:


 

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How to Afford Your Editor, Proofer, or Narrator TODAY

An author recently wrote that her fans were demanding audiobooks, but she couldn’t afford to spend any money up-front for the narrator’s fee and other costs of production.

Narrators frequently bemoan the fact that, instead of narrating the next book, they are spending too much time editing an audiobook because they can’t afford to hire an editor.

I’ve previously written about our words being a self-fulfilling prophecy and encouraged you to think/write/speak what you WANT into being.

Thinking or saying “I can’t afford it” is often a knee-jerk reaction immediately offered by Resistance to keep you from taking action toward the good you seek.

If you’re among the people who frequently tell yourself “I can’t afford it”, I urge you to do this exercise, which I first wrote about in my review of Fabienne Frederickson’s Mindset Retreat last September.

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Chat with Audible Approved Producer Eric Summerer

On 15 September 2015, ACX.com hosted a Twitter chat with Audible Approved Producer Eric Summerer. Erik has recently passed 15,000 sales on royalty share titles.

He talked about his criteria for book selection and other topics of interest to audiobook narrators.

I used Storify to compile and categorize all of the tweets on this page so that the questions and answers are together. I also added some headlines for navigation.