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
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.
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.
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! 🙂
Today is National Tell A Story Day! In honor of this special day, I want to share the back story about one of my favorite books to narrate.
Like a lot of people, I often download free Kindle books so I can try a new author or genre. My Amazon order history shows me that I downloaded DIXIE DIVAS by Virginia Brown on 15 October 2010.
On Friday, 16 September 2011, I wrote in my journal that I had recorded 3 auditions on ACX.com, one of which was for DIXIE DIVAS. I wrote:
When I read this book, it was a freebie on Kindle. It’s set in Mississippi, and I remember thinking of the character voices for audio when I read the book. I was excited to see this title pop up today. I think it was a new listing and hope I was one of the first in line to audition. I feel I did well.
Two days later, I wrote:
WOOO-HOOO!!!! I was chosen to narrate DIXIE DIVAS from Friday’s audition on ACX!!!
I was (and still am!) so thrilled to see the message! It’s a royalties-only deal, but I’m okay with that. It relaunches my audiobook career in a big way!…I have a message from my book’s rights holder, which says:
Karen! Hello! Author Virginia Brown loves your voice, and we do too! She says your “Bitty” is perfect.
I’ve always said there’s no better praise in this job than when the author loves your interpretation. 🙂
Narrating this book has truly been a life-changing experience!
First, I had not narrated a commercial audiobook for several years, and my soul was yearning to return to audiobook narration. As I wrote in my journal, this book relaunched my audiobook career.
Perhaps even more significantly, I was returning to audiobook narration with a book that I had wanted to narrate even as I read it for pleasure! The story is interesting and funny, and the characters are very real people to me who have become dear friends!
In the intervening 3.5 years since that fateful audition, I’ve voiced 5 books in the DIXIE DIVAS series and eagerly await the next book! One reviewer commented about book 4 that I have:
“…expanded and fleshed out Bitty and Trinket way beyond what even the author had in mind. To read the text of the Divas would only be a shallow and two dimensional personification of Bitty and Trinket, whereas listening to Ms. Commins, they explode into your mind and come to life. Each book in the series is very long with a great deal of detail, again, to read the text could pall and become dull and lengthy but Karen Commins is such an extraordinary reader with true storytelling talent that time flies and you’re totally engrossed listening and visualizing.”
My narration of DIXIE DIVAS and then the other 4 books in this best-selling series has led to a wonderful, ongoing relationship with the publisher, for which I’ve narrated at least a dozen other great books.
The DIXIE DIVAS series also prompted me to have a fun trip last year to Holly Springs, MS for the annual Pilgrimage.
When I first announced the audiobook here on my blog, I wrote: What could be more fun and intriguing than a murder mystery that starts with a pot of chicken and dumplings?
What happens at a Divas meeting stays at a Divas meeting….unless you pick up one of the audiobooks in this series, starting with book 1, DIXIE DIVAS!
DIXIE DIVAS is available for immediate purchase, download, and enjoyment from Amazon and iTunes, or get it for FREE when you start a trial subscription at Audible!
