Back to work

I've survived the holidays unscathed.  Yay!

The Buddy audiobook is available on Audible and Amazon.  It's supposed to be on iTunes, too, but I don't have a Mac, so browsing the iTunes site isn't easy.  If the audiobook is there, I haven't found it yet.

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching regarding Larsons.  I'm not sure I'm hitting the tropes in the way that readers want to see.  I may spend some time on other works for a while, at least until I figure out what to do with it.

In any event, I hope 2015 turns out to be a good year for me, both personally and as an author.  And, to anyone reading this, I hope you have a happy new year.  :)

Buddy is free!

Amazon was kind enough to price-match it.  The ebook is now a free download.

My hope is that making the ebook free will drive sales of the audio version.  Will this strategy work?  I have no idea.  I'm like a babe in the wilderness, toddling my way through the self-publishing forest and hoping to not get eaten along the way.

Trying something new is definitely exciting, though.

Now if I could just get these holidays out of the way so I can start being productive again...

Buddy (the audiobook) now available on Audible

Check it out.

 


The story is narrated by David Radtke.  Check out some of his other stuff.

The return of the radio play

The most famous (or infamous) radio play from days gone by is probably the War of the Worlds production by Orson Welles.  Some listeners apparently thought it was real, and panicked at the idea of an alien invasion in New Jersey.

In later years, television would come to replace radio as the medium of choice for broadcast entertainment, and the radio play disappeared from the collective consciousness.  For someone like me, born in the 1970's, it's simply a historical footnote, and one I probably wouldn't have learned about at all if not for the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast.

But things seem to be coming full-circle now.  The advent of digital self-publishing has also led to the self-recording of audiobooks, and with that, we are seeing a return to the good old-fashioned radio play of yore.

Hugh Howey gives us an example here.  I find it interesting that the story was adapted for the first-person POV.  Hugh wrote Wool in third-person.

Baen Books is on the radio bandwagon, too.

It's an exciting time to be an author.  A little too exciting, actually; everything changes so fast, and it's hard for me to keep up.  What worked six months ago is passé now.  I guess we all just have to do the best we can and try not to get swept away.

In the meantime, though, I'm enjoying the return of the radio play.  It's like a piece of Americana from the 1930's, reinvigorated for a new century, and I think that's awesome.

Recording is done

It will still be several days before the Buddy audiobook is made available, but the work is done.  More details later...

An unexpected benefit

As a part of the audiobook creation process, I am required to listen to the narrator's first 15 minutes of my story and officially approve it before he can continue recording the rest.  I did so, and nearly fell out of my chair when I heard him say the wrong name in the story's third paragraph.

Well, I checked the file, and, sure enough, it was something I had missed during the revision process.  I felt like an idiot.  Naturally, I fixed the error and sent the corrected file to the narrator, along with an apology.  I also re-uploaded the corrected file to Amazon and Draft2Digital.

So this experiment in audiobook production has already yielded a benefit: a previously unnoticed error in the manuscript was brought to my attention.

Even if the audiobook never sells a single copy, I'm still glad I decided to do it.

Buddy is now live on all outlets

Added the links for Barnes & Noble and for iTunes on the sidebar.  The story is free everywhere except on Amazon, and that will be remedied shortly.

Buddy: the audiobook

The deal has been done, and production is underway.  More details to come later...

New links for Buddy

Buddy is now live--and free--at Scribd, Inktera, and Kobo.  Links are on the sidebar.