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.
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.
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.
Howdy, pardner! Welcome to my first stray post roundup! I don’t always confine my writing to this blog, and some of my critters have wandered off hither and yon across the ‘Net. I thought I’d rein ’em in here in case you missed seeing them.
In this roundup, I’ll link to my new magazine column and responses posted on other sites about my thoughts on setting boundaries in your voiceover business, how audiobooks allow you to read more books, which audiobooks about technology are best, and whether to read fiction or non-fiction. I’ll also unveil my latest video, which shows how to use the iAnnotate app during the audiobook corrections process.
This Date In My History is an ongoing series of blog posts taken directly from my private journal entries and are intended to help others along their path. I usually use an entry that is at least 10 years old. However, today is the 4th anniversary of a significant change for me. Perhaps after reading it, you’ll want to make the same change.
I received a Joyfully Jobless newsletter from Barbara Winter today. I just signed up for her newsletter recently although I’ve known about her for years.
Today’s was titled “The Company You Keep”. She wrote that John Tesh had received a letter from a 15-year-old boy who wanted to know how to make it in the music business. Tesh
said his best advice to was to listen to great music every day and study what other musicians do.
She also gave the example of Simon Cowell, who said that in his early days,
he was a sponge soaking up the advice of those around him who were more experienced.
She continued:
I’m surprised to discover that everyone isn’t an enthusiastic student of success…Would-be writer is not an active reader. Would-be entrepreneurs have never had a conversation with someone who is successfully self-employed about how they got started…
So where do you want to succeed? Study those who have done what you want to do. Absorb the lessons of success, not failure.
With that in mind, I realize I need and want to be an active audiobook listener. I think the last one I heard was in Hawaii last year [a year before this writing].
I downloaded Anne Frank Remembered narrated by the audiobook master herself, Barbara Rosenblat…I’ll be listening to the phrasing and pauses as much or more than the accent.
I will listen to an audiobook every day on my day job. It’s another good way to prepare for the audiobook success and constant work that is coming to me. I’m also thinking it would be great to listen to a book while swimming. I’ll have to give it a try.
1) To quote the fabulous and wise Barbara Winter one more time: Be a keen observer. Identify with excellence at every turn. It will make a huge difference in your ultimate results.
2) If you want to narrate books, you need to listen to books. If you’re an author who is considering making an audiobook from your text, you need to listen to books.
For the past 4 years, I have listened to an audiobook every day. I have listened to an average of 20 books in each of those years. Since audiobooks are a multitasker’s dream come true, you can listen while doing some other activity. This thread on Goodreads will give you some ideas of how to include audiobooks in your schedule.
3) I do listen to books while swimming, and I highly recommend the Waterfi waterproof Shuffle for that purpose. Since I don’t swim every day, I’ve found that it helps if I already know the story. Gone With the Wind accompanied me in the pool last summer, and I’m determined to finish it this summer! 🙂
In writing a response on author Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog about tips for success on ACX.com, I realized I had been remiss in adding my latest video to my own blog!
Last fall, I spoke at the Georgia Romance Writers annual conference to help authors get started with creating audiobooks. I recently created a 41-minute video from that presentation which:
If you have questions or comments about the video or the audiobook production process, please leave a note for me on the blog!
