Saturday, February 08, 2014

Audiobook Adventures: Chapter 35

Well, it has come time to decide whether I want to do more of the Dumarest books or not.  And I can't decide.

A few months back, I spoke to someone who heard from another audiobook producer that they were doing books in this series, and I felt disappointed and a bit betrayed.  But then, the end of 2013 came, and it was really, really hard for me to get the last two books done.  And there were a ton of questionable revisions that came due in the fourth book, which further put me off.*

I missed my deadline on "Kalin" by a week or so, and my deadline on "The Jester At Scar" by three weeks.  Within a couple of days, I got a message regarding the next five books in the series.  I haven't responded yet.

I took on a couple of other projects at the start of the new year.  One of them is a sequel to a book I did when I first started this whole thing, and the author was kind enough to suggest ACX pay me a stipend for this one.  I am excited to start on that one, and I'm sure I can do a better job with Book Two than I did with Book One.**

Before that, though, I have to finish a project I took on, for pay, but with only two weeks before the deadline.  I had very little trouble recording the book (though I was surprised by how long it was, despite the word count), but the editing is slow going.  I know I say it a lot, but wow, the editing on these things is a bear.  I have edited hundreds of Dunesteefs and That Gets My Goats, and almost without exception, those are a pleasure to work on.  But audiobooks are different, and require a higher level of concentration, and another mindset from podcast editing.  It may be that it uses another part of my brain, but it always takes so unaccountably long to do, and almost always puts me to sleep. 

It still beats digging ditches, don't get me wrong.

I think, for my next post, I'll talk a bit about the paid project I just mentioned . . . erotica.

Rish Outfield, Audioboy

*Did I mention that in an earlier post?  There are sometimes typos or word-substitutions in these paperbacks, and I tend to try to fix them if I find them.  But then I was actually asked (only in Book Four) to change them back to the incorrect texts.  Ultimately, I emailed the publisher and asked her advice, and ended up only changing the things that were legitimate mistakes on my part.

**This is simply from doing this for a while, figuring out the best way to record and edit, and the fact that I have a microphone set up that sounds better than the one I did the first book on.  Hopefully, it'll be easier to edit than the last one too . . . since I know there's a paycheck involved.

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