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.
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.
[Read more…] about Interview With Audiobook Blogger Susan Voss
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.
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:
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.
Every now and again, we get a Divine whisper of an inspired idea. Such was the case about a very special and exciting audiobook I created and produced earlier this year.
In 1889, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland were female reporters in New York. Each went on a daring solo trip around the world at the same time. Nellie wanted to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s fictional character in Around The World in 80 Days. Rival reporter Elizabeth Bisland left on a solo race around the world hoping to beat Nellie’s time!
Nellie sailed east to England in the morning. That night, and unbeknownst to Nellie, Elizabeth took a train west to San Francisco. In Bly vs Bisland: Beating Phileas Fogg In A Race Around The World, I combined the narratives from both women into a single book with 1 timeline! Who will win the race?!
My journal entries tell Part 1 of the story behind the story between idea and implementation.
[Read more…] about Bly vs Bisland: The Story Behind the Story (Part 1)
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.
