Authors Electric

Have you ever wondered how an audiobook is recorded? The processes involved? While I can’t give you a complete step by step guide I can share my own author experiences. Last month, I had the opportunity to record my memoir at a top-notch recording studio – Monkeynut Audiobook and Sound , in Hampshire. It’s not something you get to do every day, unless you work in the industry doing voiceover work. If publishing your words in book form is the icing on the cake, then recording them is the cherry on the top. After a soundcheck to gauge levels, speed and tone you quite simply you read your beautiful words with expression. But it’s not the same as reading aloud to an audience in front of you, occasionally gazing up into appreciative faces hanging on your every word. Or reading a bedtime story snuggled up close to a child. Although these experiences will undoubtedly have helped me develop my voice. You read from an iPad, to stop the sound of rustling pages and scroll at your own spee...

  Image by  Vinzent Weinbeer  from  Pixabay I’m a great fan of audio books. I’ve been a member of Audible since a month long stay in hospital at the end of 2018 and I’ve had a story on the go ever since. Listening to stories on long car journeys goes back even further. When the boys were small, we borrowed story cassettes from the local library for our trips up and down the A1 visiting family. We were particularly fond of the Diamond Brother books by Anthony Horowitz. Then progressed to his Alex Rider stories (at the same time as we made the technological leap from cassettes to CDs) which made the miles fly by. When my son was home from university at Christmas, we watched series 1 and 2 of the new TV adaptation. I only had a vague recollection of the storyline even though the general plot is the same one I heard years ago. “Can’t you remember that bit?” my now grown-up son asks almost indignantly. He has the advantage that he has also read the books. I am dis...

I mainly read books but split that between “proper” books and Kindle reading. I have a soft spot for audio books though.  My favourites are the Terry Pratchett Discworld series, which I think work well. (I go for the ones narrated by Sir Tony Robinson). When going on holiday to Scotland, a couple of those audio books will take my family and I from Hampshire to Sutherland, but we will have been entertained and had many a laugh on that trip. Then we have the joy of two more Pratchett audio books on the way home.   No matter how often I hear these, I always pick up on some new nuance I missed on previous hearings plus there is always the joy of re-hearing favourite lines.   Audio books are wonderful shared experiences too. Read a book, laugh out loud, and you’ll get some funny looks (or so I’ve been told, honest, guv).  Share an audio book and have two of you laugh out loud - not such a problem! Stories strong on dialogue work best for audio, I think. It is like e...

Ali Bacon out and about Time was when I regularly listened to audio books  that was when I had a part-time job involving a half-hour commute - perfect for picking up a story and letting go of home or work preoccupations. This was some time ago, of course and my audio books were on cassette - sets of tapes encased in big library boxes and taking several hours of listening. For some reason after I left that job,  and even though I still spent considerable periods driving, I somehow lost the habit of audio books. Possibly this was because I had started writing and spent most journeys worrying over my own characters. Remember these? I do remember the pleasure of those journeys and how the narrat out and aboutor was as important as the book. I discovered a penchant for a quiet American voice, perhaps because I also like quiet American books. and particularly remember losing myself in the cult hit of the time The Bridges of Madison County, to the extent of arriving at wor...

It’s been a long road, this process of converting a novel into an audiobook. So far, it’s taken me over two years to get to this point. Looking back on my AE posts, I started way back in June 2014 , when I met my first narrator. How does one meet a narrator? On ACX – one of the biggest sites/distributors (and yes – you’ve guessed it – part of Amazon. Isn’t everything these days?), it’s a bit like a dating agency. Authors upload samples of scripts and hope to get picked by narrators; narrators upload samples of their work and hope to get picked by authors. Each can search listings of the other, filtered by genre, book type, voice type, gender etc etc. People make approaches and get rejected. Eventually you meet somebody whose voice/story you like the sound/look of, they feel the same way about you and think you can work together. It really is like a dating agency … So way back in 2014, I met Cliff. He was a singer with a great voice and liked my novel, and we signed a contract...

My first ebook Around 2007 I began to take interest in ebooks and started reading the reports of booming ebook sales. Seeing sales were increasing month on month I decided to join this revolution. So in 2011 I published my first collection of short stories as an ebook. Based on my sales I followed this ebook with others. Then came the print on demand (POD) revolution, where authors like myself and the Author Electric team could publish a physical book without holding stock. So in 2014 I decided to combine my two Anansi ebooks and release as a POD book. At first sales were slow, then they started to match those of my ebooks. Now they outsell my ebooks. This made me wonder if it was just my ebooks or if ebook sales were down generally. So I did a little research. I discovered sales of ebooks have been falling for the last couple of years. Some of the large publishers have given figures in the region of a 12% fall from 2015 - 2016. I found several reasons being suggested for this...

I hate New Year resolutions. It always seems to me that you’re setting yourself up to fail. And why January? After the excesses of Christmas, it’s always kind of nice to clear everything away and start with a clean and uncluttered approach to life. So what am I going to do this year? For some reason, I seem to put a new book out roughly every 12 months and usually towards the end of the year. I then spend a month or so in a panic, wondering if the muse will ever return from her Christmas/New Year break, but she generally comes back in the spring, refreshed and ready to perch on my shoulder again. I hope. I’m already starting to twitch, but I have faith in her return, though what she will bring with her in the form of inspiration, I have no idea right now … This year I need to be more creative in other ways. I’m hopeful I’ve got my stalled audio projects up and running again, thanks to talented narrator Chris Barnes , although I don’t think he’s  read the book all the wa...

The Salt-Stained Book was my first published novel. When, in 2011,  I saw its words on a page, in type, I felt an unexpected rush of emotion. I'll be honest, I cried. The story itself had come easily -- with conviction and delight -- but it had been a long struggle to get it into print. I love books and once the words were there, fixed and ready to read, it felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. An electronic edition came later and was exciting but less profoundly moving. I'd got used to seeing the physical shape of the words away from my own screen. What I hadn't fully experienced was their sound. Yes, of course I'd read it aloud in my mind as I was working. For a brief couple of terms, many years ago, I had the poet, Charles Tomlinson, as my university tutor. He required every undergraduate essay, however nitpickingly abstruse (or, more likely, naively tendentious), to be read to him in his rather large room from the other side of a grand mahogany t...

For about twenty five years from the mid seventies to the turn of the new millennium, I wrote for radio. I have more than a hundred hours of produced radio drama to my name, including many original plays, series and serials as well as dramatizations of classics like Ben Hur, Kidnapped and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Because most producers want the playwright to be there for the duration of the production – studio time is always tight, so you’re expected to do rewrites on the hoof - I’ve spent weeks in radio studios. Kidnapped and Catriona in ten hour-long episodes involved so much time in a small, stuffy Edinburgh studio with no natural light, that the producer pinned up a quote from Kidnapped on the wall: day and night were alike in that ill-smelling cavern . We knew how poor David Balfour felt. Although the hot scones sent up by the canteen at tea time were excellent! I’ve worked with some wonderful producer/directors and equally good audio technicians. I’ve seen huge changes...

(Oh, and it's available as an e-book as well as audio and paper!)         Pin back your ears - there's more than one way to enjoy a book: they're not just for reading, they're for listening to as well.         I used to get an audio book out of the library to listen to if I had a long car journey planned, but as far as listening to books was concerned, that was about it.         Then my mum started to lose her sight. She managed with large print books for some years until even that became too dificult. The doctor signed her off as officially blind, she got a blue disabled parking card - and the library informed her that she could now get audio books out for free.          As I helped her select her weekly audio books, I came across one or two which I thought I might like to listen to myself, so got them out. Now I'm hooked. I love hav...