Monday Meandering - 10.09.2017

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! You may know it as Columbus Day, but here in wacky, weird Austin it is officially, per the City Council, Indigenous Peoples Day. I get the day off, regardless. Oh, wait...

I will get the day off from the Studio, so I can work at home on my audio book. What? You don't know about my audio book? Maybe that's because it has happened rather suddenly.

I mentioned that Learning Ally is moving to a totally "virtual volunteer" environment; all readers and checkers will work from home studios, so in preparation, I have been setting up my recording studio here at the house. However, the Austin Studio will remain open until some time in March, so I'll continue going to the studio on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, I have this nifty studio set-up here, and I'm anxious to try it out, so I started looking around for someone who needs something recorded. Turns out Audible.com (the Amazon Company) needs a lot of recording and they have a pretty elaborate setup to bring together "Rights Holders" (people who write books) and "Producers" (people who record books).

There's a lot of hoops to jump through, but basically after you get your Producer profile set up, you upload some samples of your reading so Rights Holders can listen to them and beg you to read their book.  Or more likely, you look through the catalog of books (almost all are already on Amazon as print books or Kindle books) and send an "audition" to the Holder, begging to read his/her book.

In my case, I uploaded my samples on Thursday. On Friday morning, I had a message that a "Bestselling Historical Fiction Author Seeking Narrator for my Historical Novel with Magical Realism was impressed with my reading samples, and would I send her an audition (read a few pages of the actual book)? I figured this was probably a mass message to everyone who matched the profile of parameters I checked off (great voice, wonderful intonation, works cheap), but hey?

So Friday afternoon, I recorded and edited about 15 minutes of audition material from the book. I uploaded it Friday night and Saturday afternoon I had a message that I had an offer to produce the book! I'm in the process of reading it now to find out what "Magical Realism" is.

Reality check. This is not a John Grissom or Sue Grafton book. And based on the estimated length of the finished product and how long it took me to produce the 15 minute audition, I'll earn about $2 an hour for my work, but at least I know what ya'll are getting for Christmas this year!