Karen@KarenCommins.com

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

Dixie Divas

National Tell A Story Day 2015 — DIXIE DIVAS

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!
 

Winter 2014 Audiobook Releases

I’ve got several recent releases to post, so you might want to get a cup of coffee and relax!

Earlier this year, I published The Heart of the New Thought by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, one of the leaders in the New Thought movement in the early 20th century.

This short book was first published over 100 years ago, but Wilcox offers advice for living a better and more spiritual life that is still practical today. Wilcox suggests ways to change your thinking and specific actions to take in order to feel better about yourself and improve your life.

For instance, have you ever noticed that the more you talk about being sick, the illness worsens and stays with you for a longer period of time?

I’m especially proud of this book because it is the first publication for my new audiobook company Jewel Audiobooks! Jewel Audiobooks will specialize in self-development and travel treasures and long-hidden gems of fiction.


 
Fans of Melissa F. Miller’s Sasha McCandless legal thriller series will be happy to know that book 5, Improper Influence is now in audio!

In this book, Sasha meets forensic pathologist Bodhi King, who asks her help in solving a case where young, healthy women in Pittsburgh are dying. In determining the cause of deaths, Bodhi also becomes a target.

Meanwhile, Sasha is working on a legal case involving corruption and another with a breach of contract. Could these cases be related to the deaths?

As if she didn’t have enough on her plate, her hunky fiancé is getting antsy about planning their wedding.

It’s never a dull moment in this series!


 
I had the honor of narrating Mary Potter Kenyon’s Chemo-Therapist: How Cancer Saved a Marriage .

When Kenyon’s husband David contracted oral cancer, she looked for books and inspirational stories to help them get through the experience. She lets the listener know early on that her husband DID NOT DIE from his cancer treatments as she wanted to provide hope to those who are ill or caregivers for cancer patients.

She wrote with honesty and frankness about the state of their marriage at the time of his diagnosis and their steps to become closer as he went through treatments.

She also discussed the effect that his treatments and the couple’s re-commitment to each other had on their 8 children.

I wanted to narrate it because so many people are in a similar situation. I think this book can offer hope and encouragement to people who need it most.


 
Just in time for pool season, I’m delighted to announce that the Dixie Divas — your favorite summertime companions — are back with book 5 in this funny, cosy mystery series, Divas Do Tell .

You’ve heard of the book The Help? Well, this isn’t that book….but Holly Springs, MS resident and sister to one of the Divas Dixie Lee Forsythe was inspired by that book to write one of her own!

Bitty Hollandale and other own residents were upset about the publication of Dixie Lee’s tell-all Dark Secrets Under the Holly due to its thinly-veiled descriptions of townspeople. They were even more upset about the movie version…..that is, until they found out they could be IN the movie! Of course, wherever the Divas are, murders seem to follow.

It’s a fabulous day when I get to voice the dialogue between the main characters Bitty Hollandale and Trinket Truevine! I’m thrilled to learn that author Virginia Brown is already at work on book 6!


 
My latest release is Two Shades of Morning by Janice Daugharty. It falls in the category of literary fiction.

A woman looks back to the early 1960s and tells us about her relationships with her next-door neighbor. At the time, our narrator Earlene was 19, married, and accustomed to being the prettiest girl in her little N. Florida town.

Nothing changed — yet everything changed — the day her friend and neighbor Robert Dale Sharpe brought home his pretty new wife, Sibil.

“Nobody ever believed much about Sibyl Sharpe, least of all that she would die, and yet death is the first thing I heard about her.”

With an opening line like that, you know there are secrets to be kept and others exposed!


 
All of these books are great listens for those summer road trips and lounging by the pool. Enjoy!
 

The Ole Miss Hotty Toddy Cheer

A friend’s daughter has recently started college. She’s living on campus, which is something I didn’t do. In fact, she traveled around to universities in several states to pick the right campus for her.

 

I only applied to one college and commuted here in Atlanta. While I got a great education and never regretted my choice, hearing about this girl’s experiences both in picking and living at college have made me think about things I may have missed in my college years.

 

One thing I missed was going to football games. My college didn’t have a football team. I had played piccolo in high school marching band and would have enjoyed playing in the band on college football Saturdays.

 

A big advantage to being an audiobook narrator is that I can vicariously live through other people, even when they are fictional characters. For instance, in the fun, cozy Dixie Diva mysteries,  Trinket Truevine, the first person narrator, and her cousin/best friend Bitty Hollandale went to Ole Miss. In fact, the latest book in the series Divas and Dead Rebels revolves around a dead professor on campus.

 

In one scene, the ladies attend a tailgating party at The Grove. I decided to make a video of that scene for an audiobook trailer and was thrilled to do the Hotty Toddy cheer for Ole Miss right along with some students!

 

 

May 2013 Audiobook Releases

Between moving my blog platform from Movable Type to WordPress, a wonderful beach vacation with Drew and Yogi, and my on-going audiobook narration projects, May quickly evaporated and has now turned into June.

While this WordPress blog now has a nifty new Yearly Archives index, many things about the blog still don’t work, especially links within articles. Thanks for your patience as I continue to fix the previous article links. I also hadn’t posted new articles during the conversion, which, of course, took far longer than I expected! I will post a new article after this update on my recent audiobooks.

Divas and Dead Rebels by Virginia Brown

Book 4 in the best-selling Dixie Divas Cozy Mystery series

Trinket and her pals are, once again, caught in the middle of a murder scene. What Trinket thought was an untidy pile of clothing tumbling out of Bitty’s sons’ dorm room closet turned out to be a professor with whom Bitty had just quarreled that very morning. At 13 hours, this book is the perfect, light-hearted, fun companion to take to the pool or beach!

I love narrating this series! The Divas are like old friends, and the banter between Bitty and Trinket makes me laugh out loud! They remind me of Blanche Devereaux and Dorothy Sbornak on the TV show The Golden Girls.

You might think this type of book wouldn’t require preparatory research, but it does. In addition to looking up pronunciations for places mentioned in the book, I had to learn the Ole Miss Hotty Toddy cheer. I didn’t go to a college with a football team, but as an audiobook narrator, I was able to pretend I was a fervent football fan and cheering with the best of them!

Available at Amazon   Amazon   iTunes

Indispensable Party by Melissa F. Miller

Book 4 in the Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller series

In the name of science, an international team of researchers creates a deadly virus capable of killing untold millions. While the U.S. government quietly stockpiles a vaccine, a militaristic group of doomsday preppers begins to mobilize in response to the economic collapse they’re convinced is coming.

Then the Doomsday virus is stolen, and a researcher is murdered. Attorney Sasha McCandless and her boyfriend Leo Connelly, who is now chief of security at the pharmaceutical firm making the vaccine, are in the middle of the action and racing against time to find the missing virus before it is unleashed on the world.

This audiobook can give you nightmares! As usual, Miller wrote a fast-paced book that reads like a movie script, with scenes primarily in Washington, DC and Pennsylvania.

While I was on vacation, I read the text version of Dan Brown’s latest thriller Inferno. Even if I didn’t narrate Melissa Miller’s books, I must tell you that her plot and action seem much more realistic and likely to happen than did Brown’s. I look forward to the day when her name and work is as well-known as his! 🙂

Available at Audible   Amazon   iTunes