The post 283 The Art of Audiobook Narration with Charlie Albers appeared first on Sacha Black.

The post 232 Audiobook Publishing in 2024 with Kate Runde appeared first on Sacha Black.

In this episode we cover: 

• The differences between indie and trad publishing
• Advice for writing cozy fantasy
• Creating great descriptions
• Narrating your own book
• Writing better dialogue

This week’s question is: what is giving you joy at the moment?

Recommendation of the week is: Reclaim Your Author Career by Claire Taylor

Apple

Kobo

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

***this show uses affiliate links

Links I mentioned:

13 Steps to Evil: How to Craft Superbad Villains and 10 Steps to Hero: How to Craft Kickass Protagonists are just £1.99 each for the rest of January. Grab them now on all stores.

Preorder A Game of Hearts and Heists

Find out more about Travis:

Twitter @travisbaldree
Instagram @travis_baldree
Legends & Lattes

Rebel of the Week is: Anonymous

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com

1 new patron this week, welcome and thank you to Daphne Garrison. A big thank you to my existing patrons as well. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

The post 173 How to Write Cozy Fantasy with Travis Baldree appeared first on Sacha Black.

Howdie folks, I finally pushed my first audiobook over the finishing line. Now, I’m by no means an expert at any of this stuff, but boy did I learn a lot from the process. I love learning from other people’s mistakes, so I thought I would share 8 lessons I learned from narrating and producing my first audiobook.

If you would like to listen to a copy of my first audiobook: 13 Steps to Evil: How to Craft a Superbad Villain, you can using the links below. Note, the audiobook is wide and you should be able to purchase it using any store you usually use, I’m still trying to figure out how to find the other store links.

Audible US

Audible UK

Buy Direct

ONE – YOU’RE ALWAYS GOING TO BE A NEWB

So, here’s the thing. I have voice acting experience, I used to have an agent and I worked many contracts as a teen using my voice. Plus I’ve been podcasting for two years. So, naively—or perhaps arrogantly—I figured I’d wipe the floor with this “audiobook” exercise. Oh you sweet, sweet, naive fool, Sacha.

It doesn’t matter how long you’re in this game, if you keep doing new things, if you keep trying to grow and develop, if you keep experimenting then you’re going to stumble across things you haven’t done before. You’re going to make mistakes, and believe me, I think I must have made all of them on this journey. But that means you’re going to be taken right back to the beginning again.

I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be a newbie in this world. Which is terrifying because 1. I don’t feel like I’ve been in it that long really—and when did I start feeling so damn old—I’ve only been full-time two years. 2. Shit changes so fast I have whiplash.

I’d forgotten how frustrating it is to be new and doing something for the first time and not having all the answers. I stumbled multiple times, thinking I’d taken something to the finish line only to discover I had eighty-five thousand other tasks that needed completing first.

It was strange, I loved and hated it. But what it did do, was give me a much more significant sense of achievement completing each task than I’d been getting with things I knew the ropes for.

A takeaway for me to remember not to get too comfortable.

TWO – BOOTH BUILDING – WOBBLY WHEELS AND DOGS

We built a booth to record in. So if you’re not able to do that you might not find this lesson as useful. But, my incredibly talented wife built me a 3ft by 3ft… umm… phone booth style box. The base was 3ft square but of course it was taller than that. I’m 5”5 so it’s maybe 6ft tall. It lives in the garage which is an exterior building with electrics. The original plan was to have it in the house, but after having built it I’m so pleased we situated it outside not least because it would be a fucking giant eyesore in my office. But also because after all the homeworking, I’d never have gotten the silence and muted sound I needed in the house. Something to consider if you have members of the family at home.

The booth is made out of MDF, drilled together with screws and situated on a MDF base. We cut a hole out of one panel to make a door and hung it back on with hinges. Door hanging was a bit of a saga, we didn’t quite get it right, it’s a bitch to shut, but it functions.

Then my sister in law had the genius idea of using the spare carpet we’d saved from when we had our carpets redone after we bought the house last year. So we lined the interior with the spare carpet, and I’d actually advise everyone to do this if you build a booth because it was a great initial layer. It kept the booth a fraction warmer, and even with just carpet, the sound was muffled.

I then bought three acoustic panels. One for each side (except the door which remained just carpeted). And because I am a whore for branding, I paid extra to have them in purple. I then used acoustic foam to fill in the gaps between carpet segments near the ceiling.

I kitted out the inside of the booth with a mic stand and a sound shield and that’s about it.

Oh, I also used push LED lights, battery operated lights and popped them around the ceiling, but they weren’t bright enough, so I ended up with a light clipped to the mic stand.

Last, in terms of the build, we drilled a small hole in the side of the booth after it was built and we’d decided where it was going to live in the garage so that we could pull USB wires through to connect the mic to the laptop.

The biggest lesson I learned was that we decided to attach locking wheels to the base of the booth so we could move it and take it with us if we ever moved house. But it could also lock in place to save movement. This was a great idea in theory, but it lifted the booth off the floor. Meaning the base platform would creak if any chunky butts stepped on it. And being a chunky butt, this wreaked havoc with the audio. I essentially had to stay absolutely motionless while narrating which is difficult when you’re aggressive with gestures.

We fixed this by placing wooden planks under the booth that filled the gap and strengthened the base.

THREE – KIT AND CABOODLE

What else do you need? I use:

• A sound shield (AmazonUS, AmazonUK)
• Pop filter / wind shield (AmazonUS, AmazonUK)
• Mic stand (AmazonUS, AmazonUK)
• A Blue Yeti mic and USB wire connecting (AmazonUS, AmazonUK)
• Amadeus Pro (Audacity is free and suitable for mac or PC)
• Karl Hughes Audio Mastering Services 
• WeTransfer for file sending
• Laptop
• Infinite supply of honey, lemon and ginger tea
• Your inner diva

FOUR – MOUTH SOUNDS SUCK

It is astonishing to me how many fucking sounds our mouths make. Clicks and tuts and clucks and claps and sticky wet noises and pops. And that’s the shit you don’t even mean to do. Here’s what I know:

• Stay the motherfuck away from dairy. It makes your mouth clag and the sticky sounds rife
• Eat before you work. I didn’t on many occasions and it led to gurgles and belly rumbles which powerful mics pick up and also meant I tired quicker than on days I ate.
• Having gotten rid of myriad sounds, that nearly drove me to insanity, I will never understand why people like ASMR
• Ginger, honey and lemon can help your throat when you start to get sore
• If possible, work in 1-2 hour sprints. But start smaller than that.
• Put a seat outside your booth or have cushions for when you take breaks
• Stand, always. I recorded a couple of chapters sitting—thinking I’d be able to work for longer—and all it led to were more fucking mouth sounds and an abundance of editing hours slapped on my total. Sitting changes the shape of your airways and the distance between you and the mic. Stand bitches or behold the copious amount of hours you’ll need in post production.

FOUR – IT’S A PERFORMANCE… SO PERFORM

Recording audiobooks is a performance. You get to be a diva, an actress, a fucking daaahling for the day. HAVE FUN. It’s so much fun talking your words and putting all of your sarcasm and expression and nuanced voice into the words you wrote. If you’re narrating you can say the words exactly as you intended them to be said. It’s a lot of fun, but, it’s also tiring.

I found after an hour or two in the booth, I was done in. My throat kinda ached, even though I wasn’t hoarse, and I was tired enough that if the literary Gods had allowed, I’d have napped. Alas the bastards smited me with more work. Such is life.

I definitely feel like I learned a tough lesson with this one. I almost got the performance right, I wasn’t quite as relaxed as I wanted to be and I think the next audiobook will be even better because I’ve gone through this one.

EXAMPLE IN AUDIO SACHA READS TWO VERSIONS OF THE FOLLOWING QUOTE

“What it means, is that when you create your villain, whatever traits you do show, need to be in your face. Like a red-light district’s glowing streets only louder and with big red fire truck sirens that blast ‘come get me, sugar’ in your reader’s face.”

ONE WHERE SHE STRAIGHT READS AND ONE WHERE SHE PERFORMS

FIVE – RECORDING IS FIFTY SHADES OF SAVAGE… BUT I KINDA LIKED IT

Okay, down to business how do you record.

You and Your Fashion Diva

Wear cotton fabric. Jogging bottoms, loose jumpers. Don’t wear nylon or jeans or anything that rustles when you move. Remove bracelets and any loose jewelry and watches that tick. And whatever you do, don’t drink milky coffee, don’t eat cereal with milk, or porridge or chocolate unless you’re recording ASMR in which case off you pop sunshine and have fun.

Refreshments

Black coffee, water, and ginger, honey and lemon tea.

I ate oat based flapjacks – not the healthiest but if you make you’re own they’re a darn sight better. If I needed a sip of water, I tended to take it in the booth, I’d leave the recording going as when you edit you need to listen to the whole thing anyway and it’s very obvious from the waveforms where the sound drops in and out. I left hot drinks out of the booth as it gave me an opportunity to step out and rest for five.

Breathing

Podcasts have lots of stray breaths in them and we accept that because it’s a conversational medium. There’s laughing and piggy snorts and gasps and deep breaths.

But audiobooks are not like that. Now, there’s lots of different methods for dealing with breathing. I listened to the sample of Addie LaRue on audible narrated by Julia Wheelan often breathes on the end of words. I tended to: breathe. Hold and pause for one beat. Narrate. The reason I did that is it put a gap between the breath and the narration which made cutting it out easier in post.

SACHA READS THE SAME EXAMPLE WITH BREATHING AT THE START AND END

“There’s laughing and piggy snorts and gasps and deep breaths.”

I tried to cut as many breaths out as possible. Most audiobooks don’t have many. Though there are always some. Especially in longer sentences. I actually think I may have cut too many out as some of the sentences may be narrated too quickly without that pause. Something to take on board for the next one.

Editing them out is a techy aspect and something you’ll have to wrangle with your editing software. I use Amadeus Pro, and I literally highlighted what I wanted deleting and hit the delete button. Simple as that.

Speaking / Narrating

Silence

One of the requirements Karl had was for me to be quiet for a few seconds at the start and end of each track. This allowed him to gather up a baseline “room tone” which he could match the levels for the rest of the audio.

Narrating

I’m still not quite sure why speaking is so exhausting but I was genuinely surprised at how exhausted I was after sessions. I suppose because I’m thinking about breathing and speaking and performing and not moving or crinkling fabric and not popping P’s and myriad other things.

Anyhoo, on to the technical stuff:

I try to stand about a foot from the mic. I don’t know if that’s what everyone else does, but because I over enunciate, I have to be a little further back to avoid popping P’s.

SACHA GIVES AUDIO EXAMPLE OF POPPED ‘P’ AND ‘P’ WITHOUT POPPING

“This is popping your “P’s” and this is not popping your “P”

Ps, Ths and W’ are a bitch if you over enunciate. They will pop and fry your audio even with a windshield / pop filter, I got to a point where I almost let go of the end of the word so it didn’t over exert the mic.

I also start with my mouth open. So I breathe, open mouth, pause, narrate. This got rid of clicks and clacks from saliva when you open your mouth to start a word.

Speak using your normal voice, make sure the gain is relatively low. You’d be surprised at how low it should be, I was. I paid for a 1 hour consultation with Karl. He got me to record a few minutes of samples and then told me how to adjust my gain and levels to make sure I was producing the audio quality needed for ACX and Findaway etc. This was invaluable. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that I had the mic facing the wrong way. I didn’t have a clue. I must have been podcasting like that too! It would have screwed the audio completely had I gotten all the way through. That consult was definitely the best money I spent in this process.

Mistakes

If I made mistakes while in the booth, I would usually cuss like a violent sailor—something that made for a delightful outtake reel for my Patrons. And then I’d take a breath and say the offending line again and continue narrating. When I wasn’t turning the air blue, I’d blow raspberries or click my fingers as these all created spikes in the waveforms which were easily identifiable when it came to editing.

If you hear dogs, cars, planes or anything in the background, then your mic can hear it too. The number of times I had to stop for fucking dogs yapping at birds was unreal. The rumble of cars on the street 30m away was also audible. I couldn’t believe how powerful the mic was. It truly was a pain in the ass. I tended to record first thing in the morning straight after the school run as the roads were quieter and all the day job folks had fucked off. Kids were at school and the only people left at home were old codgers and creative randos.

Speed

This is the most difficult aspect for me. As a podcaster, I’m used to speaking normally—if a little fast—but audiobooks are considerably slower. I’ll be honest and say I still need to work on slowing down. I think if I had slowed down more, I might not have had so many errors to fix in the editing rounds. I don’t have any good advice on this other than to say listen to a lot of audiobooks at normal 1x speed. Buy the book and audiobook combo. Then try to read along (speaking not in your head reading) at the same time to match their pace.

What I will say is that some parts to me (more so in non-fiction perhaps than fiction) felt like they should be faster if the tone I’d implied was faster. Like a run on sarcastic sentence I would speed up for performance purposes.

One of the biggest lessons for me, though, is speed. I do feel if I’d slowed down—not something that’s a natural inclination for me—I may have made fewer mistakes. So this is one I want to work on for the next book.

Quantity

I tried to limit to 1-2 hour recording bursts to keep my voice healthy. As I’m not a professional narrator, I haven’t built the vocal muscle to go for eight hours. I would always finish a chapter or summary chapter in the session. So sometimes I finished in less time than others. The reason for that is I wanted the background base audio sound to match for each chapter and also, I hate leaving things unfinished so I wanted to end each session with something complete.

I mixed up the long chapters in with the shorter chapters to keep me motivated. I’m sure some people record front to back, but I don’t even write that way so wasn’t about to record that way. Matching a short with a long chapter helped my motivation.

Voices

Given this was nonfiction and first person nonfiction. The only real voice I had to do was mine. That said, when I read titles or subtitles I did kind of drop my tone a little and made it slightly flatter to indicate that it was a title and not normal text.

SACHA READS THIS SECTION TITLE IN FLATTER TITLE TONE AND NORMAL NARRATING TONE

“FIVE – RECORDING IS FIFTY SHADES OF SAVAGE… BUT I KINDA LIKED IT”

My natural tone for narrating my own words is very rollercoaster up and down, using the full vocal range. But I used a slightly less rollercoaster tone when reading out quotes. And where there was a silly voice required or a villain voice I’d just go deep or gravelly.

I am no expert at voices, there’s some resources at the bottom, I particularly recommend Storyteller by Lorelei King and the Rebel Author Podcast episode 104 with Jillian Yetter who is a narrator and they both talk about voices.

SIX – EDITING IS SATAN’S FAVORITE FORM OF TORTURE

There I was smug as a fucking button when I finished recording. Off I fucked back to the computer thinking this was about to be done and dusted mate. But oh, fucking no. The editing took longer than the blasted recording. I had to snip out the repeated lines, the fuck ups, the breathing, swearing, drink slurping, burping, belly rumbling.

Waveforms

After the 87 years I spent editing, I rather rapidly learned what the waveforms of individual sounds looked like. This enabled me to pick them out faster. For example, my breathing tends to look like a flat-ish mound. I usually have a click when I start a sentence with a word beginning with an ‘O’ this is a very small “I” vertical stick type shape. Claggy mouth sounds looked like a series of those shapes and then a sort of weird trapesium / bent in the middle triangle shape at the start of words that needed cutting out too.

Marking Edits

For me personally, I edited all the mistakes out in post. If I made an error while recording I blew a raspberry or clicked or shouted “wanker” or some other obscenity to blow the audio and cause a little waveform spike. That helped me identify the mistakes more easily when I was back at the computer.

I would open each file and just start listening from the beginning. When there was a problem, a click clack titty whack sound that shouldn’t be there, I’d pause the audio and edit.

Where there were speech mistakes, I would make a cut in the audio. The fucked up phrase was then separated from the good audio. It basically made my audio files look like zebras. But it made my life a lot easier in the booth when I was editing. The other thing I did was sticky tab and underline the sentence in a paper copy of the book. If you prefer digital you could do the same in an ebook. The sticky tabs meant I could flip straight to the error and hit record.

Re-recording Errors

The first time I went to re-record the errors, I jumped in the booth and just hit record. Recording all the errors back to back in one go.

This was an epic failure. Don’t do this.

The tones of my voice weren’t right and didn’t match how I’d said it previously, and somehow the gain had been shunted up. So the levels were off (though some of that can be fixed in mastering) but the mismatched voice was not fixable.

Cue attempt two.

I opened one chapter, listened to the audio right before the mistake, listened to the mistake itself so I knew what was wrong, and then when I was satisfied with what I needed to do—and I knew the tone of voice needed—I hit record, jumped in the booth and re-recorded the error. I made sure to say the phrase 2-3 times just incase the first phrase wasn’t good enough—and often it wasn’t. Then I stopped and jumped out of the booth and listened to what I’d just recorded. I’d cut out the ones I didn’t like and stitched the error back to the good audio. So when there were no more zebra stripes left, the file was finished in edits.

Proofer Edits

No matter how optimistic you are—and by this point I was borderline hysterical wanting the sodding thing done, your proofer is going to pick up errors. I had proofed as I’d done all the corrections listening from the start of the track to the end. But I was still surprised how many errors there were. Mostly I’d left repeated phrases in the audio from corrections. But there were other mistakes, most often she would pick up where I’d said something not quite exactly as I’d written it in the book.

You have a choice – go back and re-record, or change the ebook. Given my levels of hysteria, all bar three of those errors resulted in changing the ebook. I could not be fucked and unless it changed the meaning of the sentence, I just changed the ebook. Why do you do this? So that the book syncs with whispersync. I’ve been told that some people purposely try to stop whispersync because you earn less per purchase. But honestly, I don’t have enough experience to comment on that.

SEVEN – UPLOADING AND PUBLISHING

This was a world of fun. Not.

Thankfully, I had Karl mastering so he had sorted all the levels and requirements for ACX and the other stores. I had to weigh up the best use of my time and I couldn’t be arsed learning anymore technical stuff.

I did have to fill out all the W8 tax forms again. Always a source of anxiety for me. And I have to say, I found the whole uploading a bit stressful. It reminded me very much of uploading my first book. Most of the back end is more or less identical to an ebook back end. But it’s the whole journey of navigating a new thing that just caused anxiety. So I definitely have a new found empathy for first time writers again.

In terms of distributors, I chose ACX, went direct to Kobo and then used Findaway Voices for everything else. Not everyone will want multiple dashboards, but I use multiple dashboards as a wide author so

EIGHT – GREEN EYED DOUGH MONSTER

Cost of Production

The booth build came in at around £250-300 pounds. The most expensive part was buying sheets of MDF and the audio panels. The panels were around £100, including VAT and shipping. The MDF was a little over £100. And then I already had the carpet scraps and the foam. When I threw in screws, wheels and odd bits, the total totted in around £250-300.

With my microphone at £130 and I paid around £50 ish for the audio software, although you don’t have to do that as there’s free software like audacity.

I also paid around £100 for consults and mastering.

I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but for the audio set up, it came in under £500. That isn’t counting the endless hours I spent doing it. But I won’t have the set up costs to pay for again next time.

Pricing

I struggled with pricing. While Findaway does give pricing suggestions, I felt they were more representative of fiction pricing. And also not so representative of what I found on the audible store. In the end, I asked friends and went to the US audible store and checked what audiobooks in my genre with a similar length in time were priced at. Then I matched their pricing.

This was harder for library pricing (an option on Findaway) you don’t get distribution to libraries if you’re exclusive to audible. I did try to google and looked in a few books but came up with no resources. I followed a similar model to ebook library pricing which was 2-4 times the amount of one copy. I plumped for double because I’d rather the price be slightly lower for my first audiobook to encourage library borrows than worry about smashing bank.

There’s one other distribution mechanism I want to do, which is selling direct. I recently purchased Joanna Penn and Mark Lefebvre’s The Relaxed Author in audio direct from her website and was surprised at how smooth the interface was.

To do this, it will cost an additional $20 a month using Bookfunnel. So I’m still trying to understand whether to do this now or wait until I’ve got a second audiobook out and it’s more likely that the $20 will be covered. Once you start these subscriptions it’s hard to undo them because you establish a precedent that your audience can buy from certain places—another reason to be cautious when hopping from wide to exclusive and back again.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

Until I’ve had income come in, I can’t really tell you whether this was financially worth it, but I will update on that once it’s been out for a while, or perhaps after I’ve published another one or two and I’m able to do discounts and things, then I can really get a lay of the land financially.

What I can tell you is that it was invaluable to learn a new skill. If you like learning, I highly recommend doing it even if you do it once. I also loved the performative aspect in the booth. It was fun and playful and I hadn’t felt that buzz of getting to play while working for a while.

Would I do it again for nonfiction? Absolutely. Would I record fiction? Not sure. I think I need to practice voices more, but as yet, I’m not sure I have the confidence to do that, and not sure whether the amount of time I’d have to expend would be worth it. If I get to this point, I might look to employing an editor so I only have to be in the booth as I think my time might be better spent wording or being a voice than the countless hours I spent in post.

It probably, in all honesty, took me far longer than it should have to produce, edit and upload the audiobook. I hate to admit that because I really thought it would be faster. Lots of estimates suggest 3 hours for every 1 hour of finished audio. Given 13 Steps to Evil is 4.5 hours, that should have been around 13.5 hours. Maybe 1-2 working days.

LOL.

Silly Sacha.

There’s no fucking way it only took me that long. Granted this was the first time I’d done it and I made a bazillion mistakes. But I know I spent two full working days editing on-screen, because I did it in one big chunk. Plus there was a smattering of hours around that for on-screen editing. Recording I don’t even know. I did it in such small chunks and didn’t record the times so I don’t know. Re-recording edits took probably one and a half full working days. I did a big chunk of four hours on the last day and spent a week doing 2 hours every morning. So that sounds about right.

This is not a small endeavor to pursue. Perhaps for more efficient and effective people it might be fast. But I think I’ll also be much faster next time, so that’s some reassurance at least. Audio is sticking around and growing year on year, so I do think the investment is worth it.

BONUS – STRATEGIC QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

Going all in to narrate and produce your own audiobook is full on. So here are some of the strategic things I weighed up before committing to this process:

1. Which are my best selling books? I started with villains. Villains and Prose are evenly matched but villains was shorter and felt like the easier option to start with. Prose will be next. I started with the best selling books because they are the most likely ones to sell in audio.
2. Did I have a history of selling that book well and consistently? Yes, therefore the time and money investment would likely be returned on audio too. Heroes is my worst selling nonfiction book and so that will be the last audiobook I do. If I’m going to invest the time in narrating I would like to see a return on that investment
3. Do I have some level of technical capability? You don’t need much. If you can publish a book and work out all the dashboards and fire fight your way through formatting then you can edit and produce an audiobook.
4. Am I interested in doing more than one audiobook? You may only want to do one, and that’s cool. I was interested in narrating all my nonfiction and I was happy to give up the time to do that. So setting up properly and making a plethora of fuck ups on the first one felt like the right thing to do because even if the first audiobook didn’t recoup its money, the second or third might—much like publishing books.
5. Do you like performing or being a little bit silly? This is important because narrating is hard work, and if you’re not interested in that performative aspect it might not be for you, and that’s okay, your time is better spent elsewhere.
6. Do you have an established audio audience? Now, not everyone will and this isn’t a do or die question. But as a podcaster, you can safely assume that those that listen to podcasts in audio are also likely to listen to audiobooks, therefore you have a head start with audience building.
7. Are there any parts of this process you can outsource? Obviously if you’re narrating you can’t get rid of that, but can you have someone else do the mastering? Could you pay someone to edit for you? Would an upfront consult work in terms of helping you establish the correct set up be worthwhile?

That’s it. I hope you found this a useful bonus episode, and if you did, please do share it with friends or other creatives who might find it useful.

If you’re interested in listening to the finished audiobook, then you can purchase 13 Steps to Evil: How to Craft a Superbad Villain from all the usual places or request a copy from your library.

Audible US

Audible UK

Buy Direct

FURTHER RESOURCES FOR YOU

AUDIOBOOKS

Narrated by the Author: How to Produce an Audiobook on a Budget by Rene Conoulty

Kobo

Apple

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Audio for Authors by Joanna Penn

Kobo

Apple

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Storyteller: How to be an Audiobook Narrator by Lorelei King

Kobo

Apple

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Writing for Audiobooks: Audio-First for Flow and Impact: Author Advice from Radio Writing by Jules Horne

Kobo

Apple

Amazon US

Amazon UK

PODCAST EPISODES

006 How to DIY an Audiobook with Rene Conoulty

023 How to Write for Audio with Jules Horne

078 How to Sell Ebooks and Audiobooks on Kobo with Tara Cremin

104 How to Work with an Audiobook Narrator with Jillian Yetter

BLOG POSTS

Publishing Alternatives to ACX

How Audiobook Authors and Narrators are Paid by Audible-ACX. We think.

The Ultimate Guide to Self-Publishing Audiobooks

Audiobook Promotion for Indie Authors

The post BONUS EPISODE 8 Lessons from Narrating and Producing My First Audiobook appeared first on Sacha Black.

In this episode we cover: 

• How to work with audiobook narrators
• How to find narrators
• What information you need to give narrators
• Mistakes authors make working with narrators
• How to create good working relationships with narrators

This week’s question is: what’s your relationship with audiobooks?

Recommendation of the week is: Some Girls Do by Jennifer Dugan

Apple

Kobo

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

***this show uses affiliate links

Links I mentioned are:

The 99c Fiction Sale

Find out more about Jillian on: 

Instagram

Facebook

Website

Her books on Audible

Rebel of the Week is: Mel

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or instagram me @sachablackauthor

No new patrons this week, but a big thank you to my existing patrons. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

Thank you to all of the patrons who have upped their pledge and joined the rebel readers group: Scott Kavanagh, Jen Roundell, Herman Steuernagel and Matt Goodall.

The post 104 How to Work with an Audiobook Narrator with Jillian Yetter appeared first on Sacha Black.

The post 078 How to Sell Ebooks and Audiobooks on Kobo with Tara Cremin appeared first on Sacha Black.

This week’s question is:

What is the best book you’ve read this year?

Book recommendation this week is our lovely guest Jules Horne’s Writing for Audiobooks: Audio-First for Flow and Impact

Kobo https://www.kobo.com/ebook/writing-for-audiobooks-audio-first-for-flow-and-impact-author-advice-from-radio-writing-method-writing-book-3

Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/2wMgtCf

Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/2JtfauF

If you’d like to help with the launch and be on the street team or read a review copy, you can. I have a short form which can be found here: https://bit.ly/AoPTeam

I was on the Alliance of Independent Author’s Inspiration indie authors podcast on Sunday. Listen here: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/sacha-black/

Listener Rebel of the Week is: Kathleen March

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

One new Patron today, welcome Julia Fortune. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you to all my patrons, who help to ensure that this podcast continues.

If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

How to Write for Audio with Jules Horne

Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast. Today I am joined by Jules horn. Jules is an award winning fiction writer, playwright who performs spoken word as rebel cello. Love that. She is a passionate indie author and teaches on the Open University Creative Writing MA, welcome Jules.

Jules Horne
Hello, Sacha. really lovely to be on your show.

Sacha Black
And before we start, I am just going to make an apology. It appears my very inconsiderate neighbors have decided to stop building something today. So there are… I’m just peering out of the window, which is why the sounds go by. And there’s some sort of drilling cutting metal kind of device. So yeah, if you hear that, I apologize.

Jules Horne
It’s a bit inconsiderate, isn’t it? I mean,

Sacha Black
God some people work at home guys. Anyway, right. Let’s let me focus. Okay. Tell everyone Little bit more about you your writing journey and how you got to where you are now.

Jules Horne
Thanks, Sacha. Yes, I just wanted to it this is quite a long journey because I’m a bit elderly. So I just wanted to sort of really in a nutshell, but I think what’s always important is write your journeys as you find somebody who inspires you right at the start. And I think that happened for me in primary school. So there was this primary teacher, John stables, and he just, he just fed us with these amazing stories. I mean, we were at we were hearing about Lord of the Flies and all sorts of fantastical stories really early on. So I think that really got me my attention. And he got us creative writing as well, which I think in Scotland’s quite big thing, you know, you do examinations and creative writing, and it’s really part of your education from right young, and I think that sort of is fed into, and there’s a really fast forward, so I kept doing bits and pieces but never thought, you know, it’s that thing that you think oh, being a writer, it’s like way out of reach sort of thing.

But I did that an a writer in residence came into my life and I think that happens quite a lot of people as well again, and especially where somebody locally is maybe got a job in a library or something in this case, it was Tom Bryan was a Canadian Scots author and he came in and kind of said, you know, you know, just a helping hand. And that got me started writing short stories again after a very long period of kind of not being not being involved in writing. And then finally, what the final thing was, was the travers came to town, some traverse theater from Edinburgh, they came to our rural area, and said, because you’re quite isolated in a rural area, and so wondering, you know, how best to connect with writers and do it. And they came in, and they kind of really stirred my sense of heightened storytelling, dramatic storytelling, and I’m quite interested in the supernatural and fantastical things come from the borders, which is quite I think, I like to say it’s where the Game of Thrones was inspired by so it’s kind of kind of got that sensibility of lots of ruinous landscapes and things where you can project all sorts of stories on tour from from the history. So I think and then I started talking Mixing short story writing, which has always done with more of a sense of drama. And I started writing please go ahead a couple of BBC radio plays on, wrote some scripts for the stage for French shows and that kind of thing. So I’ve kind of gone via short story writing into dramatic writing, including radio. So that’s where I’ve kind of come full circle, and then kind of back to spoken word and ways to make writing kind of live in front of an audience. So yeah, so that’s, that’s it in a nutshell.

Sacha Black
The thing that I love most about what you just said, is that we all have that person from our past, who really is the inspiration and I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that. But you are absolutely right, because I’m now immediately thinking of, I had an English teacher. I’m just trying to, was it? I must have been in high school, so I must have been. Yeah, no, it was high school. I was just trying to all the schools merge into one and I had a three tiered system unlike most people in the UK who only have like private School in secondary school sorry for all of the non UK people listening who will not understand our education system. But yeah, so this is in high school. So I was it’s Yeah, well anyway 13 until you leave for university. And I, I English was always my best subject at school. But he really fostered this love of story and analyzing story and learning how to write better and you know, so yeah, I just have a blast from the past that I’m so happy with memories now.

Jules Horne
Yeah, I think it’s really important to have that person that kind of sparks up for you remember going to a workshop once and it was Janice Galloway, the novelist, Scottish novelist and she said a librarian had kind of taken her into a corner and said, Look, Janice, this is for you. And that came out was that somebody actually recognized that later thing in that she was part of that world and kind of really fostered that and it’s just so important, because I think in my case, like say English teachers But that the young, the primary teacher was great. But when we did things like Shakespeare at school, and the Shakespearean Macbeth is amazing, it’s like really amazing supernatural horror story. But they kind of ruined it the way they really do at school and you need you need someone with the kind of imaginative leap that kind of helps you see the excitement of it, I think is really, really important.

Sacha Black
Yeah, and I will confess, I honestly, I’m a bit of a rebel, but so I never read any of the school textbooks that I was told to read. Ever. I don’t know how I managed to come out with like the A grades that I got. But obviously, like in class, you do the analysis and stuff and that was enough, but they just ruined them. They ruined my joy of, you know, doing that kind of stuff in school, but what he did do was foster my love of a)reading. Anyway, aside from that, because obviously they would encourage you to read all kinds of books but also the story and I actually I’ve just sort of I still have the very first story that I wrote of any significance in the world. Yeah, I just remembered like, Oh, I like going down memory lane. I’m so sorry guys, this is completely irrelevant to our, our podcast but yeah,

Jules Horne
that’s lovely it ties it ties into what your reason your why you’re talking about why and stop tapping into that thing it’s really important because sometimes you can get disparities when you’re going along with the rating the rating journey and just really tuning into that thing that got you going that catalyst I think is really important. So having that first story is just amazing.

Sacha Black
Yeah, I know I and I, yeah, I completely forgot until this point that I still had that story and but I’m almost certain I know, where it is in the loft. Anyway, right. We’re here to talk about audiobooks and writing for audio specifically. So you’ve written a book called writing for audio books, audio first, for flow and impact, which i well i say i read it. I listened. Is that what you do? It’s still a bit bit of a, you know, is it really a good question? But I listened to the audiobook in 2019. And I loved it. I have been trying to consume as much as humanly possible on this, you know, audio creation front. And but for those that haven’t read it, could you tell everyone about the concept behind the book? And? Yeah,

Jules Horne
yeah, well, it’s a massively exciting time for audiobooks, you know, because because it’s really taking off. And when I think that thing that you’re saying about not sure whether it’s reading or listening and where it sits, I think people are, it was really gobsmacking to me to hear from friends who were saying, I’ve read this book, and they actually had listened to it. And I think that’s really changing at the moment as it takes off. And so the book is really about exploring what’s the difference between writing for the ear and writing for print and ebooks, and I have a radio background so did some reacted radio news. I’ve been reading plays and thinking dramatically and how he writes scripts. Realizing that there’s actually quite a difference between how you how you write for the ear and how you write. So more generally for for the eye and for print. And so I wanted to just capture all those things that I learned, you know, from doing radio and from being you know, you work with them, you know, producers script editor, when you do you’re frustrated your script and they kind of take up and go do you know, any changes as you change this, and it’s really developing your understanding of what’s different. And I came back I thought, God, this is gold stuff that, you know, it was quite hard one to learn that because you have to go through that painful, you know, get heavily edited by a producer and go, Oh, I need to change everything. And so I wanted to capture all those things. I think they’re not out there enough. And, and for any authors who want to kind of make that transition and make make their fiction books for ready for audio narration, which obviously is a really costly process, you want to really make the best of it. So, so I just put all the things in the book. And yeah, it’s to help authors. Think about what the concepts are different and Get their book ready, if they’re planning to make that investment in an audio recording, you have the annual just checklist of Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? And yeah, and it’s, that’s, that’s really the concept behind the book.

Sacha Black
So, obviously, you’ve said that audio is increasing in popularity, but why would an author write for audio first?

Jules Horne
Yeah, I think I mean, I think there’s a sort of material reason which that it’s really taking off. And, you know, they’re saying audiobook sales. I mean, if you if one of the things about writing writing a book is it’s your IP, and so you want to make the best of it on different platforms. So having haven’t done the work, I’ve written the book, this is another platform. And so I think just materially speaking, it’s a good time to consider that and, and also to just, I mean, I think the the skills that you learn through writing for the ear actually really kick ass editing skills. So it can help kind of it can help clarify your writing and make it more make it bolder, because you have to be bolder, you have to be clearer and crisper when it’s just audio and not visual. So yeah, so I think it just helps your editing skills generally. So there’s the material reason and then there’s the the clarity and understanding and enjoyment. The other thing is obviously, it’s really fun. Forget that aspect is really fun to write for the year and to have an audiobook performed, and to hear it kind of come across in that live way narrated. It’s just a really fun medium.

Sacha Black
So obviously, I think audio listeners will be able to maybe subconsciously, maybe consciously, I don’t know, but they will be able to tell the difference between something that’s been written for sight versus something that’s been written for the ear because obviously, as per the title of your book, and you know, flow and impact. Do you think if somebody is writing for audio first that sight, readers would feel the difference? Do you think they would feel like it’s been written for or audio or do you think it is? It is that you know, sight readers are much more forgiving?

Jules Horne
I think it can. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting question because I think some writers for some, for some writers who write fiction for example, you they are the kind of writer who’s so tuned into audio types of writing types of storytelling anyway that you maybe wouldn’t notice a difference. But you can certainly tell when someone hasn’t thought about the about your storytelling and its musicality, for example. I mean, there’s people like I would say, like Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman and they, they write in a way which has various got a certain kind of musicality, and a lot of writers who are natural born storytellers, they’re almost from from that campfire storytelling tradition where you, you’re really aware of audience and of the sort of musicality of performance. They do that naturally anyway. And I was really interested to hear it was Pullman on some, you know, documentary on the BBC or something he was talking about the kind of musical shape of his writing that he kind of could anticipate what the shape of it that was coming up, even though we didn’t know quite what was going into that sentence, you could sort of feel where it was heading. I thought, well, that’s, you know, he’s got that kind of innate thing when he edits. So some people do that anyway. I think with other writers yet, you could tell and you could see, you could really improve your script for narration that your book for narration, and I think that’s a key slip, because actually, it’s, it is a script, I think that’s the key thing, it becomes a script, which is for performance. And you can tell if people haven’t thought of that, because because of the writing can be yeah, more forgiving, as you were saying it can be more forgiving in, in writing for sight, because it can have really long baggy sentences. It can have loads of which clauses and nested clauses and asides and backflips. And if you if the reader loses their way, they can always kind of nip back and have a quick Oh, yeah, that’s that correct. sort of see where we are. And whereas audio, you don’t have that kind of ease of just checking back and forward, flipping back to linear in unfolds in that way. So you can sense that someone has written with that in mind with that kind of performance, performative aspect of mind. Yeah.

Sacha Black
Okay, so what? What are the key differences then between writing for sight and writing for the ear?.

Jules Horne
I think that that performance idea is one of the key ones. So, you know, most writers are aware of origins. But I think that people who write for the era where of audience in a very particular way, because without the audience there, and that awareness, it’s not, it’s not a performance. So you really, really have to imagine that that person that you’re speaking to, and write for them and to them, so I think that’s the key thing that’s sort of that conceptual thing like it’s, it’s a performance to an audience.

And the second thing is it’s it’s physical. It’s actually, you know, it’s actually physics, you’re hearing a voice in your ear, it’s kind of it’s kind of embodied in that, in that very physical way. And all these things that are true for music are also true for writing for the ear. So it’s things about rhythm, flow, repetition, and, you know, the kind of melody of a voice and kind of, in the way, it has different intensities and that kind of thing, a different kind of pattern making. So anything that’s true of music is also true of writing for the ear. So that’s, I think that’s a key difference. And, and also, I just think, voice is really important and the whole sort of distinctiveness of who you are and how you’re, how you relate and how you how you shape your worldview by it comes across so much more clearly when it’s anchored to a voice. So I think for authors, this is such a great thing because not only are you able to write, you know, for sight but you can also get that whole, that whole distinctiveness that comes through your manner of speaking and One your personality and your color that comes in your choice of words that kind of magic dust that makes each voice distinctive, I think. Yeah, I think that’s one of the real joys of, And one of the real differences is the fact that you can physically hear that that human person coming across

Sacha Black
I think voice is a very, very interesting topic. And I’m just gonna tangent off just a little bit on this because I find voice fascinating. I listened to both audiobooks and podcasts. And originally, I didn’t know you could listen on high speeds. So I consumed them for probably about a year at normal speed before I then realized you could increase them. And I was very, very, very particular about who I would and wouldn’t listen to you because some people’s voices are really annoying. And you know, you just you can’t listen. To them, and obviously that is going to be a huge consideration for anybody who’s picking a narrator and not and choosing not to narrate themselves but and what I find interesting now is voice has less of an impact for me. And I don’t mean to the author’s voice or the characters voices, I just mean the narrating voice and this is why I say it’s a tangent. But because I listen on high speed so actually the voice usually sounds if not like a chipmunk, then it is distorted at any rate. And and I just wonder how, how important narrating voice is going to be for the future. When I know that our you know, our attention pan at attention pans, yes, our patterns, our attention spans are shortening, and we’re trying to consume more faster. So I it’s just a tangent, really, but

Jules Horne
I think it’s a really interesting one because this is developing so fast as they’re kind of they’re kind of, you know, digital ways. And, you know, Kindle is Got your voice speaking we were saying to bring your book across so and also this thing about speeds which a lot of, I’ve heard actors really railing about this the fact that you can do it. But I know I do it too. Yes, listening faster and I suppose it depends on the genre and what you’re, you know why you’re listening what you’re listening for. And also you tune in don’t you you get used to different speeds. It’s amazing how you don’t really hear a chipmunk. So voice you’re actually just focusing really hard. And you you get you hear you hear it just as well as amazing how quickly you get sort of into that which is a bit frightening, really.

But I also think there’s a thing about, you know, in the spoken word realm, one of the things is the whole the whole distinctiveness of character and voice and and you’d be listening for different reasons in that so. So there I would say for example, if you’re a Scots language speaker and you don’t have many chances to get people don’t like reading so much in the Scots language because it’s it’s quite Difficult it’s like the Spelling’s all different, and all that kind of thing. But with spoken word you can go directly to, to the voice as as, as it’s used in everyday life. And so I think for that kind of which is a different genre than maybe information type books or nonfiction type books, it that’s a real opportunity as well. So two divergent things may be the the people who want to read really fast and it’s about information and, you know, really, you know, devouring a book really quickly, for example, and I’m not sure and then there may be things like spoken word, it’s a slightly different market and a different reasons. So yeah,

Sacha Black
yeah. I agree. Because interestingly, I can’t listen to fiction audiobooks. I yeah, so I only consume nonfiction in audio and podcasts, which are equally information giving audio and but it’s funny he was saying how you get used to it. I actually I now think some of the podcasters that I listened to sound bizarre with a normal voice because I’m so used to hearing them at double speed, but it is it you you very much get used to it and, and it didn’t take me very long to be able to go from one speed to speed to even a fraction faster sometimes. Yeah, just, you know, children you have to conceive when you can, can’t you? Okay, so how can writers create better flow for audio?

Jules Horne
Well, I think I think the key thing is read it aloud. And it sounds really obvious. But I think quite often when people are preparing their book for audio, they’ll read they’ll read aloud in a way that’s kind of to themselves. So they’ll kind of mumble it to themselves. And that’s not the same as reading aloud, which is projecting and really trying out how it feels and really sort of projecting into the room. So I’d say reading aloud reveals one thing that’s quite fundamental, which is sentences are usually too long. So that’s really one thing. It’s just a human limitation of your breathing. You know, it’s like so sentences are too long so that I think that’s the first thing, too. Yeah, that’s that’s a subject just create better flow by breaking up your sentences more. Some words are a bit of an indicator like things like which clauses, which are relative clauses. So it’s kind of an aside explaining something, then, you know, the man went down the street, which was at the far end of the da de da, and you can, these are kind of like net bags, net shopping bags, where you can put loads of stuff in and then get back to the verb you know.

So which clauses are a bit of a culprit and quite often, if you look out for words, there, which clauses started by which clauses you can kind of chop them up a bit, that helps flow. And another thing is to look out for spans and arcs of attention. So you can use things like that there’s these words in grammar called connectives. And that covers things like first and firstly and secondly, so firstly, big baggy net bag where you can put loads of stuff in. And then secondly, big baggy net bag. And those can be expanded infinitely, but they also create spans of attention. So looking out for connectives, and that’s even things like but then and, and so on, they really help you create a sense of flow. It’s almost like the structural glue, have, you know, of paragraphs and so on. And I was thinking, yeah, and things like touches and something are called touches, which is something weird thing about radio is that if something’s not mentioned, it’s literally invisible. So if you’ve got a radio drama scene, and you’ve got, say, three characters in there, and two are speaking away, and the third character is kind of on the edge of the room reading or something like that. Because they’re not mentioned, they’re not speaking, they’re not vocalizing any in any way. They’re, they’re literally invisible. So the actors have to have to kind of vocalize Greg, and, you know, just remained, you have that presence. And that’s our kind of catch that, you know, just it’s like a firefly that kind of refreshes the memory of that person, or thing being there. And it’s the same with audio writing and fiction. If, for example, you’ve got, I don’t know, there’s say you’re in in some kind of wardrobe or whatever, and there’s a dog, and you’re hiding from somebody, and you’ve forgotten to mention regularly that the dog is there. And then we really can’t see it in audio. So you have to keep popping up these these touches that keep the picture alive. Because the whole thing is about creating pictures in the in the readers mind, and it’s keeping the aspects of the picture alive that are important for the story. So I think touches is a thing that’s, that’s really important. And maybe you need a bit more of that in audio writing than you do in, in the in fiction generally.

Sacha Black
Yeah, and I think I can compare that to so I do developmental editing and one thing I often see writers do is they’ll bring a character in, and sometimes they’ll describe them, sometimes they won’t. But if they have described them, that’s it, you get one description, and then nothing for the whole rest of the time. And actually, and so I’m writing a book called The Anatomy of Prose. And one of the tips in there that I was talking about a couple of days ago was to do these touches, just little things, little reminders, even if it’s body language, or you know, or how, you know, you don’t have to continually describe everything, but just little touches to keep the image of that character what they look like what you know, they’re there, how they interact with the world alive in the readers mind. And so I love that that is one of the things you need to do in audio as well that makes a lot of sense to me.

Jules Horne
Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t need to be like you say the dog and then you see the dog again Yeah, in an oblique way by referring to its you know, wet smelly pelts or, and these sometimes with characters they have totemic things that are attached to them. Yeah, you know, Sherlock’s pipe or something. So ya know, it’s a kind of Totem for that character, etc. ways to make the visual live in a way that’s quite theatrical as well because when you’re thinking about what’s what you’re trying to think what can read well on stage, what can read really clearly on stage? And so, you know, Shylock on his pipe clearly. And so, you know, already know, Beckett’s tree or something, you know, these kinds of things, are they, it’s a bit like that in fiction, I think and translating it into audio to keep those two totemic visual things alive. It really helps the reader to have their picture. Yeah, kept going with these little Firefly moments. Absolutely. Yeah.

Sacha Black
And so any other sentence level tips and tricks you can give listeners to improve their prose for the ear?

Jules Horne
Yeah, I’ve got a tip sheet tip sheet on that. And I think the which they mentioned is an important one. I think breaking things up which and that clauses, there are two concepts which are really helpful that can come from drama, and I think one is called one is landing and that’s where the sentence lands. So if you’re reading aloud, it’s useful to think sometimes I see, you know, like a watch of prose, which is very dense. And somewhere in the middle of that is a knife, which is the word or the murder weapon. And it’s kind of so buried within that text that’s kind of really dense all around it, that you don’t notice the knife. So it was it was, I mean, it’s like somebody sort of going up the stairs, and then there’s a knife and a little anything. And it was just a night was that was that because it’s important. And if you don’t land, clearly on that word that needs to be salient for the story, it just kind of goes under. So I think the idea of where something lands is really important so the beginnings and ends of sentences in audio writing a really, really important bit like you know, you know, they can in poetry, you have a line and often what happens at the end of the line is got more prominence because of where it is. So kind of looking out for that. Sometimes it’s putting it’s just putting something at the end of a sentence or at the beginning or But in some way or at the end of paragraph, but in some way, using space a bit more to allow the salient things to really pop out. Okay, so that landing things a good one.

Yeah, and the other one is attunement, which I think it’s like it’s used in meditation. So, or in meeting sometimes in meetings, people have this moment of attunement where you’re kind of settle and focus. Well, there’s a kind of equivalent thing in audio writing, which is and then read your writing, which is the recognition that you don’t really get straight into the sentence at the beginning. And you need a little bit of time. So when you hear radio news, for example, here, and in other news to go on, ‘and in other news’ is totally unimportant. That’s a phrase, but it kind of gets your attention. And then the next bit is a panda has escaped from, you know, it’s like it’s, it’s that kind of thing. And if you think about it, once upon a time, is a bit like have that attunement freeze. It’s kind of once a All the time. And then it’s there was a, you know, young girl in red, hooded coats going into the forest. That’s a terrible thing that was never, you know, I mean, it’s like later. Yeah, yeah, exactly that little time of attunement and transition, which then puts the focus on the next bit. So there was another and this happened, and it’s just getting a sense of giving that little bit of time. So landing attunement, I think are two useful sentence, sentence level editing tips.

Sacha Black
Amazing. And they came in a way they sort of contradict themselves in a way so it’s obviously it must be about getting a balance because if you’re, if you’re if the important thing is what’s at the beginning and the end, but then also you need attunement time. That is definitely a balance that you need to strike what there’s, there’s there’s a psychological concept called primacy and recency effect, which I think is is what’s behind that. And you know, where you put the word knife, which is the important thing for foreshadowing. And yeah, I that’s my key here. I didn’t mind my degrees is in psychology. So that’s the only reason I know that. But yeah, fascinating. I’m really looking out a bit here.

Jules Horne
That’s a brilliant one and there’ll be another one, but she’ll love as well, which is this Zeigarnik effect. The idea that it if something starts and it’s got closure, and that kind of, you know, even like in hooks and whatnot, you plan to hook and then people are waiting to see where that leads, and in scriptwriting everything called plant and pay off. So at story level, there’s the plant something like, it’s like the check, I don’t know, that gun check off gun on the wall or something. It’s got to go off, it’s a plant and pay off. And then so I’ve heard of this. And it’s really fascinating. Let’s say garlic effect is like the human need for closure. So if something is started off, it needs to kind of have its answer at some point. And you can use that idea to create these sort of spans. And when you do your Firstly, secondly, whatever. That’s actually the Zeigarnik effect. I think that’s harnessing the Zeigarnik effect, because it’s kind of going we’ve got Wait for this next thing. And when I did, I did radio, radio interviews sometimes with politicians of local radio, and they were really been quite well trained in this kind of thing where they would go. Okay, there are three answers to your question, firstly, and then you go, Oh, no, I’ve got you because it created a spike.

Sacha Black
Yeah. And you couldn’t interrupt.

Jules Horne
Yeah. Yeah. So but it’s interesting from a sort of positive perspective of how do you sustain attention and and so I think, yeah, that primacy and recency effect and I think that that all ties in some posts, actually interesting.

Sacha Black
And is it that Zeigarnik you said? Yeah, yeah, that effect also, I think is and you see that in books that are really Pacey. So they’ll leave something unanswered at the end of a chapter so that the brain has no choice but to continue reading. I love love what a book does that I hate it but I love it. Yeah, yeah, you bastard I’ll just have to keep reading until 3am. Okay, what mistakes Do you see writers making? When trying to write for audio?

Jules Horne
I suppose I suppose the first thing is sort of being aware that that it may be different and and kind of approaching it differently. So I guess the first thing is really preparing your script because I, you know, audio is so expensive to produce the going into a situation where you’re getting your audiobook recorded, and not having done that prep. I think that’s a mistake, because it’s just a really costly thing. And knowing that sound editing is really quite involved and isn’t the same as like Quicken up a word, which you would do if you were if you had a written text. So I think the thing is to really edit your script, practice it and tighten it up for audio and use markup just underline where you would, where you would emphasize things. And I think I think that’s a mistake, not actually acknowledging that it’s different and going into that situation without having done some prep. That I think that’s the main thing. Oh, and also also in the rating, the actual physical duration of your own book, I’d say people have maybe an idea of how to perform or project which is a bit different. I mean, you like being, I think you’ve got to think of it not as an audience. That’s your huge, you know, loads of people out there but more specific friend and actually, that’s a really nice thing. But, you know, radio writing because it’s, if you’re an introvert, particularly it’s got that intimacy. So what I do is, I post a picture of, in my case, it’s Robert Louis Stevenson. He’s on my he’s on my wall, but it’s somebody who’s, who I really love and want to speak to about what, what excites me in the in the book and I use that as a kind of projection. So I think that’s a really good thing not to think of it as a kind of declamatory way of reading but actually more an intimate one to one and you can really help that by pinning somebody pinning somebody on your wall.

Sacha Black
I think that’s a great tip. I’d never thought of that.

Jules Horne
It really helps. It’s funny. It’s like you’re speaking to them and it makes you point it out a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. And you’ve gotten some joy in who you’re speaking to as well, which is nice.

Sacha Black
All fear if you, you know, put your old boss up there or something. Yeah. But I’m evil. So you know, I that’s the first thing I thought. Okay, so you actually narrated your audiobook as well, didn’t you?

Jules Horne
Yes. Gosh, that was a learning curve. Yeah.

Sacha Black
Well, okay, well, maybe I should also make mistakes. You know, what, what tips would you give for authors wanting to narrate their audiobooks?

Jules Horne
Yeah, well, I made a lot of mistakes. So the first tip is, don’t underestimate what it involves. Because it was I thought, Oh, yeah, how hard can it be? Okay, you’re just speaking and reading aloud. And actually, yeah, it was it was quite, quite involved, needs a hell of a lot of stamina. And so the tips would be to really practice and prepare your script and to mark it up, but I think there’s the first step, and there’s some sort of things that I’ve discovered. Yeah. God, really be hydrated. And what I realized was that you, your body doesn’t. It takes a while to process liquids and that kind of thing. So what voice artists do apparently because I was reading up on all this once I discovered how tricky it was, was drink loads the evening before. So, so that you’re really, you know, your voice is not going to get hoarse. And yeah, you can’t just sort of swing on the tape and expect it all to be really, really good. It’s better to kind of be, you know, have sustained hydration so that was a useful thing. And also discovered coconut oil on your lips is really good because, yeah, yeah, some things like that people swear by a slice of apple or to know, yeah, coconut oil was the thing for me. That was really good. So

Sacha Black
That is fascinating. I am always keep lip balm in here and I always lip balm on before I go. on the podcast, that’s usually the last thing I do. But I’d never conscious I don’t do it consciously. I just obviously it must be my subconscious brain going. Your lips are chappy today love, you know.

Jules Horne
But I think I think what’s different about Coconut oil is what I realized is you can actually kind of, you can use it as a kind of mouthwash. So it sounds quite gross. I know. But it’s like, yeah, it sort of works. Whereas lip balm, you’d have to kind of crunch it up. But yeah, the general idea is assume Yep.

Sacha Black
A coconut oil has a plethora of different uses, though. I know you can use it as like a hair mask and all sorts. Anyway,

Jules Horne
lots of calories though that’s a drawback. Yeah,

Sacha Black
yeah. And so I write both nonfiction and fiction, but specifically for my nonfiction. I have a lot of graphs or tables or images. So obviously those aren’t going to translate into audio. What What would you do in a situation like that for for authors, have extra things in their books.

Jules Horne
Yeah, because then numbers and URLs and that kind of thing are really don’t come across that well, in ear so people have different techniques for that. But if you’ve got loads of things like that, and things that might might go out of date, for example, what’s great about audible is that you can put them in a PDF, and that’s attached to your books, it’s kind of like a downloadable, that’s just related to your book. And people can get that. So you can use that to capture anything like graphs, or hyperlinks or stats, or anything that’s maybe not completely evergreen and needs to be updated every now and then. So yeah, that’s what I would do with with any of those things. And you can also radio tends to say don’t use long numbers, but round them up and down. And, you know, similar with stats use comparisons rather than loads of long strings of numbers because the the mind can’t take in too many numbers. You know what it’s like when you’ve got phone numbers and you’re trying to remember them. It’s a bit similar with audio, so anything that you can capture outside that and then that lesson loaded on you having to put that into the audiobook itself. PDFs are key thing. Yeah,

Sacha Black
I definitely don’t do numbers. I yeah, I caught the other day I recorded a, like quarterly goals post and I had like 19 goals or something I could not even count. I couldn’t keep the numbers in my head while I was talking. But anyway, I was mortified. And this is The Rebel Author Podcast. So tell us about a time you unleash your inner rebel.

Jules Horne
Oh, heck, right. Well, I think I think the funny thing is like, Rebel in author in the author world, being an indie author is a rebel thing anyway, because you’re kind of going against the traditional publishing and kind of trying to carve your own path, which I think you know, I think is intrinsic to the whole thing that you know that you’re about and that many of us are boat, which is really doing our own thing. And but there’s a specific example here because I actually play and though you play cello as well, so I play I play cello by really badly. And I discovered it has another use in spoken word. So I actually play under the name Rebel Cello, which involves playing the cello sideways with a strap on so that it’s kind of like a guitar. And I use that in a spoken word context. So it’s great because you can play sort of little bass riffs and little he can use the bow, but it’s all kind of sideways. And yeah, I’ve had so much more fun ever since I’ve kind of picked out that way. Then when I was trying to do it in a, in a kind of classical way in an orchestra. So never really had the technique to get beyond you know, fourth position or whatever. I wasn’t really that great for classical music, but in the sort of folk and spoken world and spoken word world. You can you can just kind of do your own thing. So yeah, I’ve really enjoyed doing that. So yes, standing on stage with a cello sideways, doing some some of my poetry and actually spoken word is great for people who want to practice reading their word out alone. So, yeah, really was trying to short and there’s no huge commitment and you can just try it out.

Sacha Black
When you when you told me you were called rebel cello I was like all of the high fives I am Yeah. Wow. No so that’s what I was gonna say. So I played for I think seven or eight years when I was at school and I loved loved loved playing and actually on my bucket list is to get another cello but to buy one because when I was at school I didn’t you just have like you rent them kind of thing from the school. And and so I do so yes on my bucket list. I would love to get a cello again and to play. But when I was at school you if you wanted to play, so I played I think for six years and then for the last year they changed the policy, that if you wanted to play an instrument and have lessons through the school, you had to play in the orchestra.

Now I don’t really do people, even less so in a bloody orchestra where you have to keep time with everybody. And everybody’s like, you know, you know, anyway, my orchestra were really militant about being orchestral, and I was not orchestral, I played for me. And for me only it was just I had a love of, of music and the strings and a love of practicing and just being by myself with that music. And anyway, so I went once and I was humiliated. The I remember the orchestra music teacher humiliated me, in front of everybody. And so at the end of the class, I said to him, I am not coming to the orchestra. And he was like, well, either you either you play in the orchestra, or you don’t pay at all so I handed him the cello and was like, Well, fuck your cello then. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I know. And I walked out and that was the last time that I played and I, how dare he, how dare he ruin a child’s love of music like that just to play in the orchestra. In fact, I’m now furious at the time. I was just like, wow you know screw him blah blah blah demonstrative little teenager that I was but now I’m like how dare he? Like I could have you know, I could have you know, ended up

Jules Horne
Yeah, that could have been such a sort of rich part of what you what you did all the rest of your it’s such a rich created creative outlet what’s what’s brilliant i think i think you should get back into it I think the thing is, what’s what’s no there’s such a sort of alternative cello movement so a lot of people are using it in different ways. And there’s this amazing guy who kind of leaps about and does mosh pit tape things. Just some really wild stuff happening with cellos and particularly with the liberation of being able to play him standing up and wandering around just fabulous for storytelling, and you get to be all electronic as well, which is for me, that was just great. You remember Electric Light Orchestra, and they used to think well, I want to be you know, something like that. But because they had electric cellos. And, and no, you can, you can do that. You can have a sound effect. You can have a looper and the great thing about loopers is you don’t need to be like a sociable person because you can play…I really love the fact I can layer music. I mean,

yeah, you’d love it. You absolutely love it.

Sacha Black
Now, the key question is, obviously for branding, do they do them in purple?

Jules Horne
They do? Yeah, you can get all sorts of electric Chang all sorts of electric shells. And some of them are really quite sculptural. They’re not they don’t look like normal tailors. They’ve got like hollow strew shapes and things like that. So yeah, it’s amazing how much has changed recently, a guy called Mike block online who sort of does it, I suppose it’s like the alternative cello scene and, yeah, so he’s just Yeah, he’s really inspiring. So I think I think you’ll I think you’ll enjoy that. And oh, god, it’s such a shame not to have that kind of Avenue closed off for you at that time. I know. Definitely check it out. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we can do it sometime.

Sacha Black
I don’t know. I think I did quite a lot of practice before I got back to that level, and tell listeners where they can find out more about you your books and your audio books

Jules Horne
Well I have my own site which for my creative work, which is Juleshorne.com, my name is J U L E S like Jules Verne. Horne with an E. JulesHorne.com and where my nonfiction books are his methods writing and site. So it’s method hyphen, rating calm. And there’s various kind of downloadables and things on there, including a rating for the ear tip sheet, if anyone’s interested in that, so yeah, thanks.

Sacha Black
And thank you for your time today. Also, thank you to all of the show’s patrons who support the show and help to keep it running. If you would like to get early access to all of the episodes, you can do so by visiting www.patreon.com/SachaBlack. Thank you very much listeners.

Jules Horne
I thanks very much. Sacha sort of spoke over there. Thanks very much, Sacha. It’s been great.

Sacha Black
Thank you. I’m Sacha Black. You were listening to Jules Horne and this was The Rebel Author Podcast.

The post 023 How to Write for Audio with Jules Horne appeared first on Sacha Black.

In the Introduction

This week I was delighted to be on the Alliance of Independent Authors fiction and nonfiction podcast with Orna Ross. We were talking about all things marketing. Specifically answering the question Who is Your Reader and Why Should You Care? If you’d like to catch the episode you can right here.

I’m even more delighted to announce that I’ll be a regular guest on their podcast going forward. Every second Monday of the month, I’ll be hosting the fiction and nonfiction podcast episode with Adam Croft. We’ll tackle all kinds of writing, marketing and publishing questions. So subscribe on your podcatchers so you don’t miss out.

I also have a book recommendation for you this week: Dear Writer, You Should Quit by Becca Syme grab a copy from Amazon UK, Amazon USA

Listener Rebel of the Week is Renee Gallant

@thewriterenee on twitter or @thewriterrenee on instagram

If you’d like to be a listener rebel, then email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

If you’d like to get early access to every episode you can by clicking the image below.

Today our lovely guest is hosting a giveaway to win 1x ebook and 1x audiobook copy of Narrated by the Author.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

How to DIY an Audiobook with Renee Conoulty

How Indie Authors Can DIY Audiobooks with @HeySaidRenee #selfpublishing #IARTG #ASMRG #amwriting #writingcommunity #writetip
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Find out more about Renee on her Website, Facebook, Instagram, Podcast, Author Services.

Grab a copy of Renee’s book Narrated by the Author here.

If you’re interested in Renee’s course on audiobook creation, you can find that here. 

Last, we talked about a narration resources page which you can find right here.

How to DIY an Audiobook Transcript

Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to the rebel author podcast. Today I am with Renee Conoulty. Renee is an Australian Air Force wife and mother of two. She writes stories of dance, romance and military life including heart swings, catching onyx and swinging through life. If you run into Renee at the shops, make sure you wave to get her attention, because she’ll likely be listening to an audiobook or lost in a daydream. Renee Welcome.

Renee Conoulty
Hello, Good morning or good evening. I’m not sure where we are today. We’re all over the world.

Sacha Black
We are I love it. I love that technology can connect us from quite literally thousands of miles away you are in the future. Tell me what happens in the future?

Renee Conoulty
The sun comes up. That’s about as far as I’ve got coffee still works. And that’s about where I ‘m at so far today.

Sacha Black
That is the two most important things the sun rose and there is still coffee in the world. We’re all good. So you thank you very much for getting up super early for me it is very late here. But, you know, hey, we’ve made it. And that’s the important thing. So tell me a little bit about your author journey and how you got to where you are.

Renee Conoulty
Well, unlike most people I hear who have always wanted to be to be authors. That was never something on my radar, I’d never dreamt of being an author. I was always an avid reader. And I’d put authors up on this godlike pedestal that they were up there and amazing creative beings. And that wasn’t me, and that could never be me. But it sort of all happened by accident. One thing led to another which led to another. I see it really triggered off when my husband joined the military. And we had to move from the town we’re living in across the country up to Darwin, which is right up the north of Australia, and I’d never been there before. I didn’t know anything about military life. So the avid fiction reader that I was I went looking for books and stories set in Darwin or stories with Australian military life. And I couldn’t find any. So it was after we moved up to Darwin. And I’d been reading more I’ve joined an online book club to try to make friends and then got into book blogging so that I could get more books, because there’s never enough books. And through those connections, I actually met some authors and discovered that they’re actually people.

Sacha Black
Well I mean that is a bit of a stretch.

Renee Conoulty
It took me by surprise for a while it took a little bit of getting used to that they were normal people like me, I was a person too, and maybe it wasn’t out of the realms to be able to write a book. So with a bit of prodding from a few online author, friends and other bloggers, I signed up for camp NaNoWriMo, which is like NaNoWriMo in November which is the month people try to write 50,000 words in a month, which I found way too overwhelming. So camp NaNo, you’re allowed to change the rules, make them yourself.

Sacha Black
You already sound like a rebel!

Renee Conoulty
I’d just change the rules and do it my way. So I set a 20,000 word goal and hit it. And then I figured, okay, took it going, and I haven’t looked back.

Sacha Black
When was the first NaNo that you did?

Renee Conoulty 
The first nano I did was in 2015. So it took me probably about a year to get through the first draft of the first book, because I got that 20,000 words. And then I thought, okay, I better take this seriously and go and actually read some writing craft books because I have no idea what I’m doing. So we did a bit of research and did some online courses and kept writing and came back and kept writing and got to a point where I needed to know my character’s backstory. So I just wrote it, and then copied and pasted it out of the novel because it didn’t need to be in there and turn that into a short story. So that’s Now the prequel to the novel that I first wrote, which is actually currently in limbo, because I’m in the process of having my rights returned from the publisher that I worked with.

Sacha Black
Ahh, so you’re traditionally published?

Renee Conoulty
I’m a bit of everything published. I’ve worked with three small traditional publishers, so three small publishers, all over Australia and the US. And it was earlier this year, I just decided I’d rather do it all myself, I really like

Sacha Black
Yeah, come to the dark side.

Renee Conoulty
I’ve self-published a few other books and it’s like, I want them all back, give me all my books. So I just emailed everyone and asked really nicely, can I please have my rights back to everything? And everyone’s said sure. And so it’s just taken a bit of time to go through the process.

Sacha Black
Gosh, you’re so lucky.

Renee Conoulty
Once they’re back I’m going to be launched them all.

Sacha Black
That’s fantastic. You are very, very lucky that they’ve they all said yes, that is fantastic. So how many books are you getting back.

Renee Conoulty
I’ve got a children’s book back, which I just launched a couple of weeks ago, relaunched a couple of weeks ago from a small publisher in Queensland, and then I’ve got a novellette back from a publisher in Perth, that’s they’re still selling it as part of their anthology. So I said they can still have the rights to include it there. But I’d like the rights to sell it as an individual. And ebook, paperback and audio, of course, we have to do everything. And the other one is a novel and then there’s some associated short stories with that. And then I’m writing a couple more novels because that’s a whole series.

Sacha Black
Amazing.

Renee Conoulty
The series is in limbo at the moment and I’ve got sort of a few other short stories and children’s books that nonfiction books out there.

Sacha Black
And the nonfiction or at least one of the nonfiction books is the reason that we are here today. So we are here to talk about creating audiobooks and specifically empowering indies to create their own audiobook. So tell me, tell me how that came about how you decided to record your own audio book.

Renee Conoulty
I listen to audio books more than read with my eyes these days. I’ve always loved audio when I got my first book published. Most people are sort of dying to see their book sitting on a bookshelf somewhere on a in a shop. I wanted an audiobook. That was my goal. That’s what I wanted. That’s why I chased up a publisher in the US because I couldn’t access ACX. And I wanted an audiobook. But with the initial cost of the audio book, The novel wasn’t selling enough to rationalize spending that on the audio at that point. So the audio just kept getting pushed back and not happening. So I thought, well, I just want an audio book. That’s all I want. That’s my goal. Damn it, I’ll do it myself.

Sacha Black
I love it.

Renee Conoulty
I thought about it sort of tossed around the idea for a little while and thought no, I can’t do that I’m not a voice actor I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m did all that sort of doubtful self talk that we all do. But I looked at a few things online I read a couple of books. And then of course, my laptop died, which was a very sad day and I had to go into the shop to buy a new laptop. So while I was in JB Hifi I kind of wanted ran to the other end of the store. Just have a little look at the microphones.

Sacha Black
Fatal and absolutely fatal

Renee Conoulty
I walked out of there with a laptop. Yeah. So it’s like, well, I’ve spent the money now I better turn it back and go make some audio books. That’s how it all started.

Sacha Black
Amazing. And so did you was your first one fiction or nonfiction.

Renee Conoulty
I started with fiction. I started with one of my flash fiction collections and short stories that are published because as a beginner narrator, I didn’t want to jump into a full length novel. I didn’t actually have the rights to do the audio on my full length novel anyhow. So I started with catching onyx, which is a 3000 word short story. That’s my permafree short story up everywhere as an E book, just sort of, to get my name out there, that sort of thing. So I did the audio for that one. And then I’ve got two flash fiction collections. They’ve got about 10 or 12 stories each in them. So then I’ll work through those, and then work through the children’s books and then work through the nonfiction sort of went all the way through that the nonfiction happened because I did those first, probably three books. And I had people online like other author friends saying, how did you do that? And after the 10th person said, How did you do that? And I tried to explain things in Facebook comments. I thought, look, I’m just gonna write a blog. Send people a link and then I don’t have to repeat myself. So I sat down, open the laptop thought I’ll just do it in a Word doc, and then I can format it and copy and paste it in later, I’m four hours later, I was still writing. I did about 6000 words and decided, I don’t think it’s a blog post anymore. And I still had more to say. So I wouldn’t had a break myself a cuppa and come back and kept going. And over the next sort of… I had to take a break, and go and be responsible for children and things. So I got back to it the next day. And I finished off and I ended up with just over 10,000 words, which was a brief sort of breakdown of this, you do this, and this is why I did it. And this is like all the different steps and here’s all the technical stuff. And this is what it means. And I sort of kept breaking it down because I go, Well, I know what that means, but nobody else would. So I’d have to go and add a bit more detail about this and to explain concepts. And I went okay, well now it’s a book and I go, and I suppose I better narrate it.

Sacha Black
Yeah that would be ironic.

Renee Conoulty
Well it was amazing. I’d gone looking for so many books on how to narrate audio books and do audio and I couldn’t find them in audio. They’re all in ebooks. I thought well if I’m going to make a book about audiobooks, I’m going to make it in audio.

Sacha Black
And so for listeners I have both listened to the audiobook and then loved it so much I immediately brought the paperback as well because I you know, I like to hand write notes in my nonfiction books where I’ve learned loads of things. I have to say I think it is one of… I would say my top one of my top two books for writers that I have read this year. It is absolutely fantastic because it is so instructional and it literally takes an author from you’ve got an idea you want to put your book into audio to completed published audio book. I just, I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I was so desperate to speak to you because like you say, there are no instructional books out there. There are you know, like I listened to one on how to have startup podcast, I think it’s called So You Want to Start a Podcast. It was great. And it was but you know, it was very blue sky and strategic and not very tactical. And everybody’s afraid to do these tactical books. So I just I loved it. And I really urge anybody who’s even considering doing an audiobook to go and buy it. So. So, tell me, how difficult is it really to record an audio book?

Renee Conoulty
I don’t think it’s difficult. It’s time consuming. But if you can write a novel, if you can sit there and figure out how to edit a novel, if you can do all your basic things and use a laptop computer, you can do it. You can narrate it if you can talk and people could understand what you say. You can make an audio book, it’s just there is a learning curve. You do need to spend some time practicing because it does take some time. And you get better as you go on if you listen to my first audiobook compared to my latest one you probably hear a difference. So I missed the first podcast to the latest podcast. There’s always a difference you get better as you practice.

Sacha Black
Exactly. Yeah.

Renee Conoulty
With your ability to do a podcast there’s you could absolutely do it audio book.

Sacha Black
Yeah. Well so the funny thing is I did record and I got all the way I think I had one more recording session on my first nonfiction book. And unfortunately, the person that I was working with had their equipment stolen, and so I lost everything, which is very unfortunate and made me very sad. But it sort of made me even more determined to do it myself and myself only. Because then I it’s just augmenting my control freak nature. If we’re being honest that’s really what it’s about.

Renee Conoulty
I self-teach everything. It’s like, well, I want to know how to do that. So most people would outsource it. I’m like, well, I’ll just do it myself.

Sacha Black
Yeah, yeah,

Renee Conoulty
I’m at the point where I have more time than money. If it gets to the point where I have more money than time, then I’ll possibly outsource more things as long as people do them the way I want them to do them.

Sacha Black
The very second and nanosecond of silence Yeah. So okay, so you have said that it’s time consuming. How long does it really take?

Renee Conoulty
When when you talk about audio books, people talk per finished hour. So that means when you’re listening to an audio book, it might be say five hours long. So that’s, that’s the finished hours, the amount of time that goes into making that five hours of audio is definitely more than five hours. So if you’re looking at one finished hour of audio, that’s usually around nine to 10,000 words of text to get the hour, so You would spend probably two hours recording that because you’ll say everything, you’ll make a mistake, you’ll take a break, you’ll go and you’ll repeat yourself, you’ll have interruptions, the dog will bark, at the postman. Guaranteed something is going to happen like that. Or the other day the dog would bark at the neighbor’s cat, you’ll open the front door to chase the neighbor’s cat away, the dog will decide to attempt to chase the neighbor’s cat as well. But since the screen door was shut, we’ll go the other direction and try to go through the front window. And then you’ll have to pack your audio equipment up and get the Glazier around to replace your front window.

Sacha Black
Oh my Goodness me. And that’s obviously just completely made up on the spot.

Renee Conoulty
Oh, no. Yeah, that’s imaginary. That’s not on my front window that I forgot to take off. But yeah, things happen. So you have to allow for that. But usually you look at say about two hours in the recording. And then when you go back to edit that you’ll have at least the two hours because you have to actually play back everything you recorded. Plus you’ll have another hour or two where you’re cutting and deleting sections out, and then re listening to make sure it flows through those sorts of things. So that the most time consuming part is the editing. The most people are scared of is the mastering. And that’s where you get all the sound levels, right. That is definitely the most technical part. But it’s the quickest. That really comes down to a couple of clicks. And it’s done in a couple of minutes. If you know what you’re doing.

Sacha Black
Yeah, that’s definitely definitely true of me as well. So, I having just done a few podcasts already. I have to clip audio. And I suppose I am a little bit scared because I know that when I was recording the audio book the first time I had to speak a lot slower because naturally I speak quite fast. But the thing that scares me is you know, when you do make a mistake and and it’s not the clipping the technical clipping, it’s making sure that the words and sentences still sound like they’re flowing and like there wasn’t a mistake that you’ve just cut out there. But I suppose that’s just about being slow enough that you leave enough space between your words instead of rabbiting on like I normally do.

Renee Conoulty
totally relate to that one.

Sacha Black
Yeah just shut up sacha.

Renee Conoulty
If you do make a mistake, go back and repeat the whole sentence.

Sacha Black
Yeah, yeah,

Renee Conoulty
Don’t try to sort of pick up halfway through a sentence because you will find the words will flow together. And then as you’ve seen when you’ve done the editing, you’ve got the sound waves. And they will blend together if you’re speaking your words together. So it’s much easier to cut a section if you pause at the end of the sentence where you’ve got your full stop. Yeah, yeah, actually take a break. So go back if you if you notice you’ve made a mistake. Go back and repeat the whole sentence. And then it’s much easier to clip out the one you don’t want.

Sacha Black
Yeah, and the interesting thing is, as well, after staring at audio for long enough, you can actually recognize sounds in waves. So I know when I’ve taken a breath in when I’m looking at the podcast audio, I know when I’ve taken a breath because I can see it and it’s, it’s almost like I breathe exactly the same every time, which I probably do. But it’s sounds ridiculous. Because I’m like, what surely sometimes I take a big breath or whatver. But yeah the sound waves, are the same.

Renee Conoulty
I can recognize the P sound. Interesting. Yeah, because if it gets a bit too plosive, if you’ve blown into the microphone too much, it gets really big. And what you can do with that as you highlight that little P section and then you can amplify it with a negative number. So the amplifier still there. You can just make it a bit quieter if it’s if it’s popping in your ears too much. There’s little tricks and things like that. I don’t think I’ve actually put that one in the book because I’ve come up with that little tip since I wrote the book. Writing nonfiction books, something always changes after you publish it.

Sacha Black
Oh I know.

Renee Conoulty
But I do have a link to a resources page at the end of the book which I can pass on to you and you can pop that in the show notes if people want to have a look straight through to their and any little extra bits that I come up with. I pop it into that website.

Sacha Black
Perfect. I will put that in the show notes. I suspect people will probably have just heard pen scribbling because I was definitely writing that down. Now one of my favorite tips, or actually I preferred it in the audio for obvious reasons was… what do you do when you make a mistake, please do demonstrate.

Renee Conoulty
Well, I play back everything. So when I’m listening for flow and things like that. So I hear all my mistakes. But a lot of people, if especially if you’re doing a big lot of a audiobook will make a sound or something to show where the mistake is so that you don’t have to play back the entire thing, you can just sort of skip through to the spots where the mistakes are. So you could make a click noise and that will give you a straight up spike, or you can go make a loud noise. It doesn’t a high spike, you can click with your tongue. I started doing that and then I sort of ended up blowing raspberries *raspberries sound blown*

Sacha Black
*giggle*

Renee Conoulty
And that’s also a sound that you can identify as you’re scrolling through. And I do find when I’m listening I often have to edit out swear words and hysterical laughter because I’ve repeated the same sentence about four times and I still haven’t said it correctly.

Sacha Black
Yes, I’m laughing because I recall when I was recording it the first time and having to re-say certain things about 100 times. However, I know that Joanna Penn when she is recording her audiobooks will go back and edit ebooks and paperbacks in order to make them.

Renee Conoulty
I’ve done that too. Yes,

Sacha Black
yeah, yeah. And I think I might end up having to do that as well. I recalled one particularly tricky sentence that I was like I can fucking change it, you know. And that is the wonderful thing about being an indie author, you can. Okay, so this will, I guess, probably only be correct at the time of recording. But what basic kit and equipment will an author need to record an audio book?

Renee Conoulty
A laptop, which most of us would have if we’re in an indie author. The thing that I had to spend money on was the microphone. So you do need a good microphone. You do need an appropriate type of microphone. I go into bit more detail in the book about that. The microphone I ended up buying is called a road NT USB microphone. It costs me about $150 Australian dollars from the shop in town. Other microphones people talk about or a Blue Yeti. What microphone do you use?

Sacha Black
And I was just looking I had a feeling you’d ask me that. I have the AT 2020, which I know is another common one that lots of people use.

Renee Conoulty
Yeah, that’s another one. I think I’ve linked on the resource page. So all those microphones, the thing they have in common is that I don’t pick up sound from everywhere you’ve got. Some microphones are designed to being on stage and picking up singers in a band and they and they’re going to pick up all the sound. You don’t want a microphone that picks up all the sounds you don’t want, like a lapel mic that’s going to pick up too much stuff. You need a microphone that you can put in front of your face and it picks up the sounds from you and your phone dinging in the background if you leave it on like I just did. So it’s it’s more directional, it will get this down from you or the other style I talk about his cardoid. Which is a weird name that made me think it was some horrible technical thing. All cardio it means is that it’s the sound pattern that it picks up, which is scoops around in front of you and it doesn’t pick up the sound from beside. So that’s just some things after reading lots of audio blogs and watching YouTube videos and I understood what we’re talking about. And that’s what I’ve got. That’s what you’ve got. That’s what most people who are podcasting would have a microphone like that. Anyhow, if you’re going to look at doing dictation, a lot of people are doing that as they’re writing as a different style of writing. It’s the same kind of microphone that would make that really useful too. So investing in a microphone can be useful for other things apart from audiobook narration.

Sacha Black
And so I’m guessing well, software, but you can get free software, can’t you? I know I use free software.

Renee Conoulty
I’m using audacity, yeah, right? That’s open source software. So there’s a lot of information and help on how to use that and little plugins to download that you can add in there that give you extra technical things you can do. So I’ve got a plugin I use, that’s called ACX check. And it’s designed that you click that button and it checks your audio to see if you’re within the ranges that ACX requires. Just for handy.

Sacha Black
Yes, I’ve also written that down.

Renee Conoulty
A look in the book, I’ve actually linked to the page that you can download that in the resources section. So okay, I’ll make sure it’s in the resource on the resources page when I send you the link.

Sacha Black
Amazing. Now that so there’s only there’s two other things that one segues but the other thing that I use for podcasting is an arm and it would depend entirely on where people are going to record but I have my mic attached to my desk because the amount of conference calls and podcast interviews I do I do not want to be packing my microphone away. So I have Yeah, I think they’re called a mic arm or mic swing arm is or something like that. Yeah. So if you if you are intending on recording a lot of audiobooks and or even going into podcasting, then I would also recommend one of those. Now the only other thing segues into the next question, which is blankets and or anything to muffle the sound So, yes, the thing this is the only other thing that terrifies me is getting the setup of the room correct. Now… How? Because I know that lots of people…

Renee Conoulty
Everybody talks about the wardrobe.

Sacha Black
Yeah.

Renee Conoulty
The wardrobe issue I had when I started I was living in a in a another house, a defense house on the other side of town. And I had this lovely walk through wardrobe and you’d have the hanging clothes on both sides. You’d have a door on either side you went through to the bathroom, so I shut the door. I got a couple of broomsticks and put them across the little shelves at the back and hung blankets down I had this great little room for recording. And then we bought a house on the other side of town that didn’t have that. So I was a bit stuck. I’m like, right what do I do now? So I ended up in the master bedroom I had the the wardrobe doors open beside the bed and I dragged in a clothes rack and I hung some blankets over that and I grabbed a pile of pillows and stick them up on the bed and I totally built a pillow fort and climbed inside that I did discover though that it’s not a good idea to use beanbags as the base for the pillows on the bed because things tend to tumble over and squish you. So use sturdy pillows as a base to build a pillow forward. Since then my husband’s a carpenter. So I sent him to work and he said, what do you want for your birthday? I said, I want a recording booth, can you please build me one. But because as a military spouse, we, our family moves around every three years or so we’re due to move after Christmas this year. So I couldn’t build anything permanent. I need to have something that I could pack up and put away especially because we’re in a small house. So I designed something and got hobby to build it. So it’s basically it looks like a room divider, if you can imagine like two pit panels hinge together and it sort of fold them out. That makes the corner and I’ve gotten two sets of those so I can just fold them out and put them together to make a big square. And then I can just fold them up, put them up against the wall. They’ve got packing blankets stapled to them. They’re timber frames with just moving blankets stapled to them for now. When I have some more money and can afford some acoustic blankets because they’re a little more expensive. I’ll upgrade my blankets. So for now, yeah, I’ve built a little movable room.

Sacha Black
So does somebody have to have a small compact space or could they for example use their office and if they, if they have an office how… do they need to staple blankets to the walls or? I have a bookcse behind me should I drape blankets over that? I mean, like how how blanket do we need to go here?

Renee Conoulty
Well, what the blankets do what the idea of all these things is to cut down the echo and cut down the external sound. I did try with my little folding things that my husband made me I did try setting them up in the little shed in the back garden or we’ve got a little garden office shed we’ve renovated and put insulation in the walls and everything. But it’s still a tin shed and every time a bird flew past I could hear the birds wings flapping little line the squawks it was making. It wasn’t going to cut that sound out. Whereas being inside the brick house with the big roof that cuts a lot of that external sound out. So you want to be able to cut some of the like the road noise from traffic outside and cut some of that external noise so you need to be inside of a room. You can’t do recording outside and all the blankets and things we use all those to cut the echo because sound works in in sound waves and as you speak, the sound goes out in front of you and it bounces off any hard surfaces and comes back and that’s how you get an echo in the microphone. So you want to cut that echo. You can hear it yourself. If you go and stand in your bathroom and you talk you can hear the echo come back off the tiles. You can hear the sound is different compared to if you go into probably your bedroom and you speak you might still have lots of exposed walls but a lot of that sound gets soaked up by all the soft things like the mattress and the pillows and the clothes. So what you need is something in that room, you can use a larger room but you need something in that room that’s going to absorb the excess sound waves and not bounce them back. If you’re recording in your office if you just need lots of soft things in there, so particularly in front of your face, like behind your microphone, you want something so things are going to bounce off that wall. So even if you popping up some pillows or some foam or blankets or whatever you’ve got, it’s not like softer, thicker things are going to soak up more sound than just a thin blanket. So even just throwing a few cushions on the floor in the other side of the room is going to help soak some things up. But it’s mostly the sound from in front of you in the sound from behind you that you want to stop

Sacha Black
So also then I’m guessing you shouldn’t have your laptop in front of you.

Renee Conoulty
I don’t have my laptop in front of me because my laptop has a little fan inside. That goes to BUZZZZZ. And the microphone will pick that up. So I’m actually sit my microphone on the table I’ve got like a three meter cable that comes with my microphone. So I set myself up a bit further away. So I get to edit out all the little running backwards and forwards from the microphone to the laptops as I’m pausing. But plenty of people do you have the microphone in there if you’ve got you have the laptop in with you, I know Joanna Penn has it in with her in her little area, because if you’ve got the mic set up in the right direction, you’re not going to hear the fan too much. I just get paranoid about things like that.

Sacha Black
Okay,

Renee Conoulty
But another thing you can do is buy them online or you can create something that’s just more like a like just a small, foam lined cardboard box I’ve seen people do to sit up behind the microphone so that as they’re speaking the excess sound goes into something smaller so you don’t necessarily have to get inside something that’s going to make you feel claustrophobic. You just need to arrange things to absorb the sound from the directions that you’re speaking.

Sacha Black
Yeah, yeah.

Renee Conoulty
And the best bet is to set it up, record a few things then do the little sound check to check what the background noise is and that sort of thing.

Sacha Black
Amazing

Renee Conoulty
They’re little steps that I’ve broken down in the book if you want to know exactly how to check those things,

Sacha Black
I have written down about 4000 notes already. So what mistakes did you make in the in the process that other authors could easily avoid?

Renee Conoulty
Forgot to put the dog outside. But those background noises it’s much easier if you can eliminate them to begin with. So make sure you put the dog outside or in another room. Or wait untill your husband goes to work so he’s not trying to watch the telly or those kinds of things. Making sure that you’ve got some quiet moments where you’re not going to get interrupted. Put your phone on silent.

Sacha Black
Yeah!

Renee Conoulty
I read from my phone. I mean, I don’t like turning pages I don’t like the page turning down. So I put the e pub or the word doc or whatever I’m reading from on my phone and I’ll scroll through there that way I’ve got a backlit screen because it’s often a bit dark by the time you buried yourself under a whole pile of blankets, so at least you can see what you’re doing. Another thing is to try to slow down I speak too fast. But that’s my natural speaking voice. It just means that you’re not going to have to speed my audio books up which I do when I’m listening to everybody else.

Sacha Black
I listen on to speed on 2x speed as well and I know that I have listened to

Renee Conoulty
You don’t need to chipmunk me

Sacha Black
No I’m already sufficiently chipmunked. I have got to listen to only tiny snippets of this podcast just because once I’ve edited it, I’ve heard enough of myself anyway. But I do sound like I’m on crack so it’s ridiculous.

Renee Conoulty
Yeah, that takes a bit of practice to slow yourself down. Yeah. Especially when you get interested in caught up in your own story, which is a good sign as far as I’m concerned if I’ve gotten so caught up in my own story that I’m getting excited about telling it. It can’t be that bad. Don’t speed me up and you’ll be all right.

Sacha Black
Yes. And also, I think we know where the intonation and when the expression comes. So I think it becomes quite, you know, I know certainly when I was recording the nonfiction book, I did get very excited because I’m quite sarcastic and I make up swear words. So I was getting to say all of my swear words in the voice I wanted to say. Right, so obviously, I’m a huge fan of your book. I have recommended it already on this podcast, and I have recommended it again today. But do you have any other recommendations, you know, resources generally that other authors might find useful.

Renee Conoulty
As well, as well as the April paperback and audio book, I do have an online course. So if you prefer to have that visual instruction and watch somebody actually doing the things if that’s something that appeals to you, I do have an online course version,

Sacha Black
which we will link to in the show notes.

Renee Conoulty
Yes, because I’ve already sent you that link obviously, If not I’ll do it now. I’m a fan just scrolling through YouTube. And and listening to people speaking with one of the books I want to do. I’ve very sensibly written in a character who has an accent that’s not Australian. Which I’m never doing ever again. That’s another tip just don’t write accents into books. So I’m currently scrolling YouTube, listening to people who have that accent to try to get a little bit of a handle of how I can give that flavor. Because with audio, if you don’t, if you’re not a voice actor, you don’t want to sound like you taking the piss, you know? So yeah, you need to give a flavor of something without overacting.

Sacha Black
Yeah.

Renee Conoulty
If you’ve written somebody with an accent, or a speech impediment or something, you don’t have to go over the top with it because you will just annoy listeners, or at least me. So you need to find that balance where you can get that flavor whether you have that come through in just a few words or something like that. So yeah, practicing with that one. But you mentioned Joanna Penn. She is a fabulous resource because she’s totally all over this at the moment as well, which is where I’ve got a lot of the inspiration to get out and how to go and do it. So Joanna Penn’s got a podcast as well, The Creative Penn. And she’s had quite a few interviews lately with people in regards to audio book, production and that sort of thing. So you can have a scroll through hers. I know she’s got a book coming out soon. She’s been talking about around all the audio stuff.

Sacha Black
I think that’s a course.

Renee Conoulty
She was talking about a course, and I think she’s… on her last podcast, she was saying it was supposed to be a course but she had sore shoulders and then something else happened and something else happened and probably going to be a book now. But it’ll probably turn into a course as well. That’s what I would do anyway. We’ll make it everything.

Sacha Black
Yeah. We’ll just assume.

Renee Conoulty
Just We’ll see. I know she’s got a few resources there. Anyhow, she’s got some blogs. Post as well. And I was very excited to see my book mentioned at the bottom of one of her blog posts.

Sacha Black
That’s fantastic.

Renee Conoulty
My other claim to fame is David Goldberg mentioned me in my in his one of his emails.

Sacha Black
No way. That’s fantastic.

Renee Conoulty
Yeah, I was totally fan going over that one. So yeah, there’s there’s some other people that are talking audio at the moment to keep an eye on. Yeah, there’s an audio book that Joanna mentioned that I went and had listened to that’s called Storyteller How to be an Audiobook Narrator. That book is only available as audio. And the women who produced that audio book, do a lot of demonstrations of how to use your voice. So it doesn’t really work as an ebook so well. So that’s a great one to listen to, if you want some tips on how to use your voice, because you can pick up a lot of the other tips from reading. But those sort of things you really need to hear them. So I found that one way useful to hear those sorts of things.

Sacha Black
Absolutely. Because there are different techniques for, you know, reading quotes or for internal thought even changing your tone of voice for things like that, versus, you know, air quotes or whatever else. We ignorant writers don’t consider when we are penning our fiction forgetting where they’re going to be audio. Perfect. So this is my favorite question always but this is The Rebel Author Podcast. So tell me about a time you unleash your inner rebel

Renee Conoulty
Okay, this was the scariest question for me because I’ve always been like that rule following the straight-laced do everything the right way kind of person.

Sacha Black
Lies. You did your own audiobook.

Renee Conoulty
This is this is me. This is me who said I’m not creative even after I’d written and published a novel I still didn’t see myself as creative. It took a bit of slapping around the face to say you are creative. Look at all these other things that you’ve done as well. I used to make up my own patterns and crochet things and do all kinds of stuff. But I didn’t think I was creative until probably last year, I realized.

Sacha Black
You are so creative. Oh my goodness.

Renee Conoulty
I know but we can’t see it. Anyway, I go, I’m not a rebel. I was like, I remember when I was 14, in in class at school, when the entire classroom broke into applause because I’d had my name written on the blackboard for talking and I was gonna have to stay in at lunchtime. They literally clapped because I’d never been in trouble before and they thought it was hilarious. I then proceeded to get my name rubbed off the board and didn’t have to stay in lunch because I was good for the rest of the class. But this is me, I’m not a rebel. And then I looked in the mirror this morning and went well. I do have an asymmetrical haircut, six tattoos and a body piercing that I can’t tell you about. So a lots happened since I was fourteen. Maybe I might have become a little more rebellious.

Sacha Black
I love it what tattoos do you have?

Renee Conoulty
I have an iris on my back. A great big pink, sweet pea on my thighs and a daisy behind my ear. So I’ve got three flowers. I’ve got a little koi fish down on my ankle. And on my forearms. I’ve got the words forever and a day, which is lyrics from the song that my husband and I danced to at our wedding. Which was like, a traditional Thai Buddhist waiting in Thailand we had a destination wedding. Which is also a little rebellious

Sacha Black
Girl, you’re in so much denial. I’m not creative. I’m not a rebel. You are both of those things.

Renee Conoulty
Yeah, and the other tattoo is a couple… like a swing dancing cartoon couple on my right fore arm. I want a book tattoo. I need something that book related but I haven’t come up with a design I like yet. Once I think of something I’ll have another one.

Sacha Black
Yeh I am a rebel. That’s what you should have tattooed. I am creative. I promised myself I would get a tattoo when I quit my job and worked for myself and I still want to have the tattoo I do have one. However, I let me caveat this by saying I am not afraid of needles. However, I have a very bad habit of fainting every single time I’m injected. It’s horrendous. If I’m in the dentist, they give me the anesthetic stuff but it has adrenaline in it and most people are unaffected by that, but it speeds up my heart I have a very sensitive heart and I tend to get a bit fainty and every time I’ve had a piercing I have had a number of piercings. Every fucking time I will faint. Every single god damn time.

Renee Conoulty
When I got my ears pierced and like that was my first time that I was like actually deciding to be a rebel because I’d grown up very strict Christian upbringings and it was very frowned upon to wear jewelry and so getting an earpiece was like, that was terrible you don’t do that. So I was in my early 20s just broken up with a guy and had sort of started stuff not going to church anymore and I thought… I’m going. The next day I had had half a day off work I didn’t have to start till after lunch and thought right I’m going to get my ears pierced because that’s what we do when we break up with someone we go and dye our hair or chop it off or get a piercing or something ridiculous. So I went right that’s it, I’m going to get my ears pierced and I rang up all the pharmacies around the place that could do it and nobody could do it that morning. Everybody had somebody coming in the afternoon or the next day or something like that. So I got in the car, and I drove up the road to the local body piercing tattooing place. And when in there and thought rightio, I will just get my ears pierced. So I got it done with the needle in the and I was fine getting it done set back in the chair and like it pinched a bit. But I was okay, I felt fine. And I got up after probably 15 minutes and I’m standing at the counter I just paid for it and I was asking the woman about the self care what do I need to do? And my hands felt a bit tingling. I thought nothing of it because I’d never fainted before. But I’m standing there and I’m sort of rubbing my hands on my pants. So I feel a bit tingling and I put my purse on the counter. And next minute I’m sound asleep in my bed. And I’m lying in my bed and I’ve woken up and I see this woman like two inches from my face. And if you can imagine a woman who works in a body piercing tattooing place, has very many piercings on her face. So I’ve come to to this strange woman who’s covered in body piercings. Two inches from my face and the thoughts run through my head is who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing in my bedroom? It took me another minute or two to realize that lying on the floor in this tattooing place.

Sacha Black
Oh my god I love it

Renee Conoulty
I waasn’t actually at home in bed. Yeah, so I then took the rest of the day off work but it took me another half an hour to pull myself together enough to drive home called in sick to work and geez I copped shit for calling in sick. They didn’t let me hear the end of that for a while.

Sacha Black
In my defense I have incredibly low blood pressure which I which inherited from my mother. So I am actually prone to fainting anyway. But yeah, I’ve had many… Well, I won’t tell you all of the things that I’ve pierced. But I’ve had a lot of things pierced. The worst one was when I had my tongue pierced and I collapsed on the stairs, walking down the stairs, which was actually pretty dangerous, but I survived. So that’s

Renee Conoulty
I survived the other one. But I did pass out the first time I got acupuncture. So I had had needles put in the back of my neck, but I was having a lot of sinus issues. So they sat me in a chair, but these things in the back of my neck, put a heat lamp on me. And of course, I ended up passing out in the chair. Okay, perhaps that’s not a good idea. The guy said, come back, we’ll do acupuncture again, but you need to do it long down. So I had to do it lying down on the bed. He said it was something to do with the energy flowing up and down your body that makes you pass out and if you do it lying down, then you’re alright. Because it’s the energy is flowing horizontally, not up and down.

Sacha Black
Hmm, very interesting.

Renee Conoulty
I found that interesting. That seemed to work alright for me. He said it works for the big biker guys like the big strong tough guys that come in and reckon that they’re find and they’re always the ones that passed out with acupuncture.

Sacha Black
And, okay, so tell everyone where they can find out more about you. Your books and your audio books.

Renee Conoulty
Okay, my website is heysaidrenee.blogspot.com. I figured that was easier to spell them Conoulty. If you can spell conoulty, which is CONOULTY, Google that need to find me pretty much everywhere. There are no other Conoulty authors out there at the moment. So if you punch Conoulty into Amazon or Kobo or wherever you get your books, you’ll find all my books that way quite easily. I also have a podcast starting in November.

Sacha Black
Do you?

Renee Conoulty
I do. If you want to have a listen to my stories without pain, boredom. You can have listened to Fun Science Fiction. I’ve called it so all the episodes about five minutes there’s one little short flash fiction story that’ll be coming out weekly starting in November. So have a listen to them. And if you do like them, there is an option that you can make a donation buy one of them. So, yeah, social media on pretty much Facebook is where are most active or Instagram. So I’ll put the links to those in the show notes too.

Sacha Black
Perfect. And so as part of this podcast, you going to run a giveaway, aren’t you?

Renee Conoulty
I am, I’d love to give away an ebook copy and an audiobook copy of my nonfiction book called Narrated by the Author. So if you’re interested in learning how to narrate your own audio book, you can enter the giveaway and have a chance at winning one of those. And if you’re lucky, you can go and buy one.

Sacha Black
And all of the information on how to enter that will also be in the show notes. So thank you, I think we are just about out of time. So thank you very much for talking to me today. Thank you to all of the patrons supporting the show if you would like to get early access to any of the episodes, you can do that by going to www.patreon.com/sachablack and that is Sacha with a C. Thank you to everybody listening. I am Sacha Black, you’re listening to Renee Conoulty. And this was The Rebel Author Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like these:

004 – How To Self-Edit With Kristina Stanley

002 – Co-writing for Indie Authors with Dan Willcocks

The post 006 How to DIY an Audiobook with Renee Conoulty appeared first on Sacha Black.

PUT YOUR HANDS DOWN. Heathens.

Alright, I’ll let you off. I was skeptical about audiobooks at first too. I couldn’t bear to listen to fiction stories. I just couldn’t get a grip of the plot. When I read it feels tangible; it’s not just the pages I can grip, but the words too. It has substance, it’s alive. But listening to audio books made the words feel like grains of sand slipping through my fingers.

But then I reflected on the fact I listen (and love) podcasts. What was the difference? For me it was non-fiction. Maybe podcasts have trained me. But I absolutely love listening to non-fiction on audible. I’ve got a couple of book recommendations for you too. But I thought I’d share a discount Audible are doing for Black Friday. They’re giving away 50% off audible subscriptions for just £3.99 per month*. Just click the image below to find out more.

I’ve got two Audible recommendations to share with you today. I’m sure there will be dozens more in the future, but I’m still just getting to grips with the world of audio, so bear with me while I chomp through a few.

First up, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

Here’s the book blurb:

“In The Success Principles, the cocreator of the phenomenal bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul series, helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, teaching you how to increase your confidence, tackle daily challenges, live with passion and purpose, and realize all your ambitions. Filled with memorable and inspiring stories of CEO’s, world-class athletes, celebrities, and everyday people, it spells out the 64 timeless principles used by successful men and women throughout history—proven principles and strategies that can be adapted for your own life, whether you want to be the best salesperson in your company, become a leading architect, score top grades in school, lose weight, buy your dream home, make millions, or just get back in the job market.

Taken together and practiced every day, these principles will change your life beyond your wildest dreams.”

My god, this book gave me about a gazillion epiphanys. If you know me, you’ll know I like to joke that I’m dead on the inside. But the thing is, this book made me cry. ME. Miss dead on the inside all watery eyed and blinky over the success stories.

One of the other reasons I loved this audiobook so much is that it provided hundreds of practical tips and tactics you can easily put into place. Craft and advice books are swell when they’re all philosophical and thought-provoking, but come on guys, we need the good shit. That’s what this book delivers.

One of my favorite tips was the concept of ‘Pay Yourself First’. Doesn’t matter whether that’s in money or otherwise. What it made me realise is that I need to pay myself first with time. I hate Mondays because I have to get through 8 grueling hours before I can write. But says who? I started getting up at 5 to write so that I go to work having achieved the thing that’s most important to me. It’s had a radical impact on my mindset and my productivity.

Whether you listen to the audiobook or buy and read the actual book, this is one every author should read.

***

Thanks to BlondeWriteMore for this recommendation:

How To Be A Bawse by Lilly Singh 

I absolutely loved this audiobook. It was a no punches pulled guide to being a Bawse. Lilly details how to own your life and build success. She’s clear, there’s no shortcut, no panacea, it’s hard graft and sweat that got her to the top. But she also gives lots of tips and tricks.

“Lilly Singh isn’t just a superstar. She’s Superwoman—which is also the name of her wildly popular YouTube channel. Funny, smart, and insightful, the actress and comedian covers topics ranging from relationships to career choices to everyday annoyances. It’s no wonder she’s garnered more than a billion views. But Lilly didn’t get to the top by being lucky—she had to work for it. Hard.”

I won’t tell you everything, but two of my favorite tricks were:

1. Affirmation Passwords – when you next update your passwords, put an affirmation as your password. You type your passwords multiple times a day. What better way of practicing your affirmations than having them as your password.
2. Problem list – when you have a shitty day and loads of tiny little things build up, your lips are dry, your phone battery dies, you don’t have parking change. Write those problems down and systematically solve them. Sounds stupid, right? But how many people actively go out and try and solve their issues? Lilly bought a charger for her car, office, living room, bedroom and bathroom. She did the same for lip balms, and putting reminders in your phone to get a bag of change from the bank means you won’t forget.

I highly recommend this book. Lilly is hilarious and her book is a real feel good audiobook.

*For transparency, I will earn a small commission on the audible subscription, but hey, an authors got to eat!

If you want awesome writing tips, you can grab a copy of my book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and tap the logo of your reading device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet by joining my mailing list just click here.

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