Karen@KarenCommins.com

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

Away From the Mic

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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Putting the “I” in OrganIzed


A friend sent me a question tonight asking for some recommendations about ways to get organized. With a day job, her narration work, a husband, an aging parent, and her home all vying for her time and attention, she was understandably feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Since other people might find these thoughts to be helpful, I decided to answer her in this article.

Let’s look at 3 main areas of organization.

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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.

 

 

6 Weeks of Showing My Work

On Saturday, 16 May, I read Austin Kleon‘s book Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. He wrote:

When I have the privilege of talking to my readers, the most common questions they ask me are about self-promotion. How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience? How did you do it? I hate talking about self-promotion. Comedian Steve Martin famously dodges these questions with the advice, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do….

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.

While the book is short and easily consumed in an hour or so, its wisdom takes longer to digest.

I decided to do an experiment of showing my work with a Daily Dispatch on Twitter. Before you see all of the Daily Dispatches, let me first tell you 4 few things I learned in the experiment.

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Audiobook Roundtable on EWABS

Last Monday was Ladies’ Night on the East West Audio Body Shop (EWABS) show! On  22 June 2015, I was excited to be a guest on the show and talk with hosts George Whittam and Dan Lenard about my favorite thing — AUDIOBOOKS!

My narrator colleagues Hillary Huber and Ann M. Richardson and publisher Carlyn Craig, founder of Post Hypnotic Press, joined me as guests.

In our 1.5 hours on the show, we covered a variety of topics of interest to both new and experienced narrators.

At one point, I compared the job of audiobook narrator to that of a baseball player. I summarized my thoughts in the graphic below.

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